Death Ex Machina (36 page)

There was a problem with the way the classical playwrights used their divine characters. The Gods tended to appear suddenly right at the end, and close down the story before it could reach a climax. It’s like the writers included too much plot and when time ran out simply chopped the story off using divine intervention.

Euripides was a serial offender when it came to deus ex machina.

Ion
is a good example of his perfidy. In that story an orphan called Ion seeks his true identity. The plot becomes a trifle convoluted. There’s a false prophecy which totally confuses
everyone. Ion meets his mother, all unknown to them both. She tries to kill him a couple of times (these things happen). He takes a shot at her too. Then Athena turns up for the first time in the story, and in a single speech reconciles everyone and explains away the early false prophecy with a very dodgy throwaway line. Mother and son for some reason think it’s cool that they’re related, despite recent homicidal attacks, and everyone lives happily ever after. No natural resolution.

Many years ago my wife, Helen, and I saw
Ion
played by the excellent Royal Shakespearean Company. Even knowing what was coming, it was still a huge letdown when Athena stopped the play dead.

That experience was the inspiration for the climax of this book. You may have noticed that Athena appears right at the end, to accuse Theokritos and prove his crime. It is in fact a deus ex machina.

For Athena’s speech at the end I shamelessly ripped off Euripides. In fact I ripped off
Ion.
Then I modified the dialogue for Nico’s circumstances. I’m fairly sure Euripides would not be the forgiving sort, so it’s lucky he’s not around to sue me.

WHETHER THERE WERE professional actors in the sense we know them is a moot question. Certainly there were a hundred years later, because a rather interesting man named Thessalus is recorded as having been both a professional actor who won at the Great Dionysia, and also an agent who worked for Alexander the Great. The combination of spying and acting has a venerable history.

By the time of this story, professional bards had been traveling from town to town for centuries. I take it for granted that actors would have done the same from the moment Thespis invented the idea.

Because actors worked behind masks, very few of them are
known to us. The writers were the stars of the show. Hollywood, please take note.

Unfortunately the world of Nico and Diotima isn’t quite ready for Euterpe’s acting skills. Acting was an all-male affair, as it was in mediaeval times, through the Renaissance, and throughout the life of William Shakespeare, whose female roles were played by boys and men, exactly as was done in the Theater of Dionysos. The first serious actresses would not appear on stage until almost 2,200 years after the time of this story.

PROFESSIONAL MOURNING WAS a for-real occupation of the classical world. It might seem odd to outsource your grieving, but it was because extravagant displays were a status symbol.

This rapidly turned into something akin to an arms race, in which the women of competing families upped the ante with every funeral.

The displays reached such levels that something had to be done. The world’s first democratic constitution, written by Solon the Wise, includes an entire section limiting what was permitted during funerals. Women were specifically banned from extravagant displays, and the dead were permitted only three changes of clothing to go with them into the underworld.

Outside working hours, professional mourners must have been instantly recognizable by their shorn, ragged hair. Almost nothing is known about the men and women who mourned for a living. I take it for granted that it was a low status job. As Petros says, it was also a job that called for a great deal of histrionic talent. Possibly then it was something that out-of-work actors did.

WHEN NICO BRINGS in Captain Kordax and the crew of
Salaminia
to stage his spectacular climax, he is anticipating by two thousand years the system used by Shakespeare and his
fellows. In Elizabethan England, the stage crews were mostly sailors! If you want to move around heavy stuff with only ropes and pulleys to do it, then it makes sense to hire the experts; that means the men who sail wooden ships.

Salaminia
and her sister ship
Paralos
were the glory of the Athenian Navy. They were reserved for only the most sensitive diplomatic missions and for religious duties, such as shipping dedications and offerings to the sacred isle of Delos.
Salaminia
’s fittings really were made of gold. Both ships were forbidden to take part in naval actions unless circumstances absolutely required it. Which is hardly surprising since it would be kind of embarrassing to watch all that gold sink.

Captain Kordax is my invention, but of course there must have been a captain of
Salaminia.
Whoever he was, it’s very likely that the captain of
Salaminia
really was the fastest man on earth. It’s also likely that he kept his record well into mediaeval times, when the Viking longships would have given him a run for his money. (In passing, a longship versus trireme race would be one awesome spectacle.)

Salaminia
first appears in Nico’s earlier adventure,
The Ionia Sanction.

MY FICTITIOUS CHARACTER Lakon appears to have invented identity theft. In fact, he’s late to the party.

The first recorded identity theft that I know of occurred about sixty-five years before this story. When King Cambyses of Persia died, his younger brother Smerdis stepped forward to claim the throne. This came as a surprise because everyone thought Smerdis was long dead.

Which indeed he was. This Smerdis was an imposter. He ruled for a few months before the scheme went horribly wrong, with consequences you can imagine.

Mystery writers spend a lot of time thinking up interesting new ways to commit crimes. The more I thought about it,
the more I was convinced that Lakon’s identity theft from the grave was close to foolproof. Athenian record keeping was appalling. If anything, the Polemarch’s chaotic paper warehouse is being generous.

It’s known that a decade or two after this story, the Athenians cleansed their lists of anyone who was faking citizenship. So they must have known that they had some imposters among them.

But I very much suspect that anyone using Lakon’s scheme would have gotten away with it.

THANATOS GETS SLIGHTLY bad press in this book, but it’s not my fault. Thanatos was the god of gentle death. His brother was Hypnos, god of sleep. Their sisters were the Keres, evil spirits who supported death by violence and pestilence. You might think Zeus would send the Keres to collect irritating mortals, but it’s always Thanatos who gets the job.

The story about Thanatos being tricked into chaining himself really is part of the legend of Sisyphus, which I’m afraid makes the god of death look like a total idiot.

THE PREJUDICE AGAINST metics appears to have been generally held. Metics couldn’t own real estate, couldn’t vote, and were second class citizens in the eyes of the law. But in day-to-day life there was little or no discrimination. Metics in Athens were well situated compared to immigrants in many countries across many locales and times.

There is a documented case where a citizen of Athens wanted to prosecute the men who had murdered his aged nanny. The nanny was a metic and the known killers were citizens. The man was advised by the archons not to pursue the case, because there was no hope of success before a jury, and it would damage his reputation if he even tried. The man was clearly very honorable—to start with, he was looking after his
old nanny—but when the city’s senior judges told him there was no hope, he had to give up. This case is the inspiration for the difficulty Nico encounters in getting justice for Romanos.

Conversely, metics could do very well for themselves financially. Almost by definition, they were people prepared to go to great lengths to improve their lot in life.

It became something of a trope for wealthy metics to marry their daughters to the sons of citizens. The metic family guaranteed their descendants would be citizens of Athens; the citizen family saw a massive dowry arrive with the daughter, who came from a good and successful family.

Nico and Diotima’s marriage is just such a match. He’s a citizen. She was born a metic.

IT WAS POSSIBLE but not easy for a metic to become a citizen. Diotima’s stepfather is the example in the book, but he’s fictitious. It really happened eighty years later to a highly talented man named Pasion. He began his career as a slave, was freed to become a metic, made enormous amounts of money as a banker, and was declared a citizen.

The
only
way for a man to win citizenship was by act of parliament. Since the quorum was six thousand people, that meant there had to be at least three thousand citizens who thought you were worthy to join them. This is why Romanos desperately needs to be seen by the entire city to have done something of the highest merit. Whence his devious scheme.

THAT LAKON IS willing to go to his death rather than admit he’s not really a citizen of Athens might seem extreme, but in fact that’s how the people of Athens felt about it. In those days, to be a citizen of Athens was the highest honor to which any man could aspire. There are multiple instances of condemned men choosing to die in Athens rather than live in permanent exile outside the city. Not least among these is Socrates.

THE SCYTHIAN GUARD was a for-real force of three hundred slaves whose job was to keep the peace in the streets of Athens. They were so named because the original force was made up of slaves bought from Scythia, a barbarian land to the north of Greece.

It’s an odd fact that these slaves were allowed to beat up their owners. Misdemeanors that would get you fined these days were dealt with somewhat more directly in Athens. A drunk and disorderly citizen or a troublemaker could expect to be beaten on the spot by the Scythians, which would not only encourage the troublemaker not to do it again, but deliver a fairly clear, visible reminder to anyone passing by.

The system worked. Ancient writers remarked that Athens had one of the lowest rates of street crime in the world.

Nor did the Scythians themselves ever become a source of trouble. That’s a remarkable thing, when you consider that hundreds of years later their equivalent in Rome, the Praetorian Guard, was the source of much of Rome’s woes. It speaks well of the men who led the Scythians. Pythax is my invention, but there must certainly have been someone like him: a hard man who kept these guardian slaves in line, yet a man of impeccable morals who never sought to use the power of his position for himself. We don’t even know his name.

The standard weapon of the Scythians was a short bow. They unstrung this when on patrol to use as a cudgel.

The idea of using a long rope to herd unruly citizens is thoroughly well documented. Another of the jobs of the Scythians was to force the citizens to turn up to their own parliament. The
ecclesia
of Athens was the world’s first parliamentary democracy. Every citizen was automatically a member of the parliament, but on slow days not enough people turned up to vote, so the Scythian slaves would work their way through the agora using the ropes to force their owners to go to parliament to run the city.

THE IDEA OF halting the calendar looks too ridiculous to be true, a kind of ancient Groundhog Day. In fact it really happened on at least one occasion. In 271
BC
, almost two centuries after this story, everyone was running late for the Great Dionysia. It was a choice between holding the world’s greatest arts festival with everyone under-rehearsed, or else delaying the opening. But this was a sacred festival that
had
to start on the right sacred date. The archons solved the problem by adding four extra days between the 9th and 10th of Elaphebolion. That year the calendar went … 8th, 9th, 9th, 9th, 9th, 9th, 10th. At which point the show was ready, and everyone must have breathed a sigh of relief.

One can only imagine with what desperate pleas the city leaders must have urged the artists to get their act together, while they held the calendar in check. There are probably some modern editors in publishing who wish they could pull the same trick. Not that any modern author would be slow delivering his manuscript.

SORRY ABOUT THE month being called Elaphebolion. I know it looks weird, but that’s the real name of the month in which the Great Dionysia was held. For the record, the months in the classical calendar were: Hekatombaion, Metageitnion, Boedromion, Pyanepsion, Maimakterion, Poseideon, Gamelion, Anthesterion, Elaphebolion, Munychion, Thargelion, and Skirophorion.

No, I can’t remember them either. Every time I need a calendar date, I have to look them up all over again.

THE DESCRIPTION NICO gives of an ancient Greek wine cup that shows a man throwing up is all too accurate. The cup exists and can be found on display at the magnificent Getty Villa in Los Angeles. In fact the Getty Villa has an entire case of classical Greek cups and bowls decorated with themes that you are most unlikely to come across on modern partyware.

ALL RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES of even the slightest importance included a sacrifice. The goat that Theokritos sacrifices at the altar within the theater is a typical example. It was important to the Greeks that the animal seem to agree to the sacrifice. Hence when the goat is shown the knife and appears to nod its head, that’s very good news for the people present (though the goat might feel otherwise). Sacrificed meat was barbecued and eaten in almost every instance. It’s not much different to having a barbecue after a modern church service. The Greeks also used these events as a charity system to get some quality food to poor families.

I’VE USED THE word ghost to describe the haunting of the theater—the Ghost of Thespis—but that’s because ghost is the closest modern word. The Greeks didn’t believe in ghosts as we know them. I’d bet there are more people in the western world today per capita who believe in ghosts than there were in classical Athens.