Death Ex Machina (37 page)

The Greeks did, however, have a total belief in the psyche, which was the spiritual part of a person that survives death. We would call it a soul. Your psyche descends to Hades when you die, where it remains for eternity.

The important thing to a Greek was to make sure the spirits of the dead made it into Hades, after which they weren’t coming back. This was largely arranged via the funeral ritual, including the famous placing of a coin under the tongue.

If a burial hadn’t been performed properly, then it was possible for a psyche to hang around on earth where it would disturb the living. That’s their equivalent of our ghosts. Indeed this happens in several famous classical stories. But it was extremely rare because the Greeks had enormous respect for the dead, even of their enemies, and made sure everyone got a decent burial.

The story of Thespis as a ghost haunting the theater in
Athens is therefore obvious nonsense to Nico. Thespis received a proper burial. Therefore his psyche
must
be safely in Hades.

You might be surprised to learn though that the Ghost of Thespis remains a theatrical superstition to this day. It’s well known that actors never refer to
Macbeth
by name, nor will they whistle in a theater. Another of these quaint theater superstitions is that the Ghost of Thespis remains on earth to haunt theaters everywhere, so that whenever something odd happens, the ghost did it. This weird idea must have had its origin somewhere, so I decided it was at the Great Dionysia of 458
BC
.

THAT EURIPIDES’S MOTHER was a vegetable seller in the agora is the stuff of legend. The great genius of Athenian comedy, Aristophanes, used this little factoid in his plays to skewer Euripides mercilessly. Aristophanes clearly expected everyone in the audience to know all about Euripides’s mother, which probably means this formidable lady qualified for the title of Most Embarrassing Mother Ever.

I should add that Aristophanes makes Euripides the butt of many of his most cruel jokes. One assumes the two men were either the best of friends or the worst of enemies.

THE THEATER OF Dionysos that Nico describes is not the one you see when you visit Athens. The Theater was rebuilt in the fourth century, and I have no doubt it was refurbished many times in the Roman period. The Romans venerated Greek culture; they restored or added to many famous Greek sites, just as British, US and now EU funding has restored many Greek sites over the last couple of centuries.

The theater you see today is what survives of the deluxe Roman version. In Nico’s time the seating was almost certainly wooden benches. All Greek amphitheaters were placed on the sides of steep slopes, suitably sculpted, so that everyone in the audience could see the action. The amphitheater model
also provides superb acoustics as the sound bounces upward, a very important consideration in a world without PA systems. A good example of this is the ancient amphitheater at Ephesus, a vast construction that seats
twenty-five thousand people.
That amphitheater still exists and is in excellent condition. I have stood at the topmost row of seats at Ephesus and could hear with adequate clarity what was being spoken from the orchestra far below.

The Athenian theater was not nearly so grand. It seated at most fifteen thousand people, and that would have been very crowded.

The marble backing wall of later times was certainly a wooden wall when Nico and Diotima saw it. There’s a long history to that back stage wall.

When Thespis, the world’s first known professional actor, went on tour, he traveled from city to city, taking with him a cart to carry all his stuff. Chief amongst the stuff on the cart was a big tent. The tent wasn’t the theater, it was the change room.

Thespis played every role in his plays, while a chorus sang much of the action. Since Thespis was the only actor, he frequently had to duck into the tent to change masks and clothes, and emerge as a different character. The side of the tent thus formed the back wall of his stage.

In classical Greek, the word for tent is
skene.
When they started to build permanent theaters, the Greeks retained the name skene for the wall at the back of the stage. They knew perfectly well they were calling a back wall a tent. It’s a testimony to the massive impact Thespis had that they copied the names for everything he did, even when the word no longer applied.

It wasn’t until Thespis was long gone, and Aeschylus was the top man in theater, that anyone thought to paint the skene to match the action on stage. It was probably Aeschylus himself who thought of that.

The idea of painting the skene was such a huge success that people began to associate the word
skene
not with the wall (which used to be a tent), but with the images painted on it. Thus was born
scenery.
Later on, directors started to change the scenery as the play progressed, thus creating visible
scenes.

That is why in modern theaters we see actors in plays broken into scenes, in front of scenery. It’s all because 2,600 years ago, Thespis decided to use a tent to make his quick changes.

I WANT TO publicly thank the very excellent illustrator who has provided a cover for every book in Nico’s adventures, and long may he continue to do so.

His name is Stefano Vitale. He lives in Venice with his wife and two children, while I am in Sydney, Australia, and the amazing editor, Juliet Grames, is in New York. This has been a truly international effort.

It is no accident that the name of the painter who paints the skene in
Death ex Machina
is Stephanos of Vitale.

THE PAINTING METHOD that Stephanos uses is called encaustic. It’s an ancient Greek word that means “in heat” and really did involve pigments embedded in beeswax. The other major painting method for murals was egg tempura, for which you had to work even faster. But encaustic painting came first, and it’s almost certain encaustic murals were the standard in Nico’s time.

The most famous examples of encaustic painting are not Greek, but Egyptian. You might already know of the incredibly beautiful and poignant portrait paintings found on Egyptian mummies from the Hellenistic Period. The faces seem so fresh and realistic that you might think you’re looking at people who you saw only yesterday. Those amazing portraits are all encaustic.

The formula Stephanos gives to make white pigment is
accurate, and in fact it was the Greeks who first discovered how to make white. Their formula of lead, vinegar, and poo remained the standard almost into modern times.

There must have been a world’s first scene painter. We don’t know his name, but we do know he must have been alive in the time of Nico and Diotima, because it was Aeschylus who first thought to decorate the back wall.

PHRYGIA WAS, AND still is, a province of Anatolia.

Anatolia is the name the Greeks gave to what we now call Turkey. In classical Greek it means “the place where the sun rises,” which is rather accurate if you happen to be west of it.

SABAZIOS APPEARS TO have been the most hated god in Athens. This is quite remarkable, considering the Athenians were notably tolerant of other religions.

The followers of Sabazios may have done something to earn such enmity, but if so, it’s lost in the mists of time. I decided to supply a reason with the beer versus wine riot.

About a 130 years after the time of this story, one Athenian politician named Demosthenes decided to attack an opponent by claiming he had assisted his mother in the rites of Sabazios. The attack was clearly intended as slander, as if anyone who worships Sabazios is not fit to be a citizen. Demosthenes also implied without saying so that assisting one’s mother in the rites of Sabazios went somewhat beyond the normal bounds of filial duty. This is what Demosthenes had to say:

“On attaining manhood you abetted your mother in her initiations and the other rituals, and read aloud from the cultic writings … You rubbed the fat-cheeked snakes and swung them above your head, crying Euoi saboi and hues attes, attes hues.”

The comic playwright Aristophanes wrote a play, now lost, in which Sabazios and a bunch of other gods are thrown out of the city. Sabazios never was thrown out of Athens. There’s a surviving inscription written about 250 years after this story which lists fifty one devotees of Sabazios. It’s not many, but 36 of those are citizen names.

Aristophanes uses the term “the sleep of Sabazios” a couple of times to refer to guards who’ve been drinking on the job and fallen asleep. By implication they were drinking beer. When in my story the Scythians fall asleep while guarding the theater, I stole that wholesale from a play written 2,400 years ago. There’s a good chance that beer back then was stronger than the wine. Greeks always drank wine watered down, three parts water to one of wine. Without experience of beer, they probably drank it neat.

Things have obviously changed since classical times, because I’ve drunk enough modern Greek beer to know it’s excellent, but the classical Greeks absolutely loathed the stuff. Watered wine was their tipple of choice and nothing else would do.

Phrygians on the other hand loved their beer. There are plenty of surviving archaeological beer artifacts from Phrygia, mostly pottery beer jars, but also, interestingly, some of the straws through which they drank. The idea of drinking beer through straws from a communal vat may seem odd, but that’s how they did it. This seems to have been the standard system across the Middle East for hundreds of years. There are surviving reliefs from Mesopotamia that show the same thing: partygoers dancing in a circle as they drink from a large vat of beer, with everyone holding their own drinking straws.

The Greeks were aware of this odd party trick. There’s a fragment of a poem from the poet Archilochos that includes the line, “as a Thracian or a Phrygian sucks his barley beer through a tube …”

IN EVERY BOOK I include a character list at the front, with my suggestions on how to say those odd-looking Greek names. How I choose the sounding is really quite simple. I look for a similar Greek word that’s already been turned into common English, and then I follow the same conventions. Let me give as an example Euterpe, who is Nico’s mother-in-law.

At first glance Euterpe and Euripides look tricky to render into English. But in fact, they’re easy, because you’ve probably heard of a place called Europe. Europe is named for the Greek mythological character Europa. In the original, the EU would have been pronounced OY, as in oyster. Europa was probably pronounced OY-ROPE-AY. We moderns have turned it into YOU-RUP. So I follow the same line to render Euterpe as YOU-TERP-E.

THIS HAS BEEN Nico and Diotima’s first assignment since their marriage. Their last two jobs have been domestic commissions.

But international events have been continuing apace while our heroes tarried at home. There’s a war on far to the south, and political intrigue that demands their attention.

In the next book they are off overseas, to the land called Aegypt.

GLOSSARY