The Marathon Conspiracy (40 page)

It’s likely that wives whose husbands were away on active service moved in with friends, if only for the company. They all had slaves to do the basic household chores. So when Aposila is about to divorce and stays with Malixa, Malixa’s husband probably doesn’t even notice.

If Antobius had divined Aposila’s location and turned up demanding her back, Polonikos would have handed her over in an instant. But Antobius doesn’t know where his wife’s gone. His only chance to stop his wife from divorcing him is to ring the agora with watchers and wait for her to turn up.

A
NTOBIUS, THE FATHER
of Allike, considered suing the sanctuary for damages after his daughter was killed.

Classical Athens was highly litigious. The comic playwright Aristophanes makes lots of jokes about it. It was almost impossible for any citizen to get through life without suing or being sued several times. Far from being a modern curse, vexatious litigation is as old as civilization.

I
T SUITED MY
story to make this the first year in which Pericles stood for election. Pericles was well and truly established as the foremost man in Athens by 460
BC
, which was the year
before. Historical sources usually give 458 as his first elected year, but it makes sense to me that he would have run for an official position as soon as possible.

These days we tend to think of Pericles as a wise statesman in a flowing white robe. The truth is, his day job was running the army. Pericles went on to win twenty-nine elections, all of which were free and fair. I believe that remains the world record for any leader of a democratic nation.

W
HEN
G
LAUCON WORKS
through his list of record tablets, he calls out some strange-looking names for the days. The Athenian calendar had lunar months. Every month began with the new moon and ended on the last day of the cycle. An Athenian need merely look up at the night sky to know what day of the month it was.

As you surely know, the moon waxes and wanes. The Athenians named the days of the month to match. The first day of each month was called Noumenia, which means “new moon.” After Noumenia, the next day was called 2nd Waxing, then 3rd Waxing, and so on to 10th Waxing. Then the system changes to 11th, 12th, 13th … 19th, and then Earlier 10th. The
earlier
is very important, because the following day was
later
10th. Yes, they had two 10ths in a row: earlier and later. After Later 10th it counted down: 9th Waning, 8th Waning, down to 2nd Waning, and ending with
Hena kai nea
, meaning “old and new.”

The definition of “day” was a bit odd. For the Greeks, the old day ended and the new one began at dusk. This makes perfect sense for people working to a lunar calendar. But it creates a terminology problem for me. Nicolaos could say at midday, “I’ll meet you early tomorrow,” and mean that night, leaving you, the reader, totally confused. I solved this problem by completely ignoring it. I stuck to modern convention.

T
HE VAST MAJORITY
of Greek priestesses were married and did their priestessing on a part-time basis. People tend to think of ancient priestesses as being like the Vestal Virgins, but the Vestals were purely Roman and had no Greek counterpart whatsoever.

There was no requirement for either chastity or virginity among the Greeks, except probably in a few special cases. One special case would surely be the Pythoness who uttered prophecy at Delphi. I assume another would be the Priestess of the Sacred Games.

Thus there’s nothing shocking or sacrilegious in the relationship between Zeke and Thea. It also means Diotima loses none of her priestessly character now that she’s a married woman.

Where I have traduced Zeke’s character is in making him a deserter from the Persian army. There were many real cases of Greeks going over to the Persian side, but I don’t know of a single instance where a Persian officer deserted to the Greeks. The Persians were men of remarkable integrity. Of course, Zeke did it for love, and his family assumes that he perished at Marathon, so his good name remains secure.

B
EARS DEFINITELY USED
to live in southern Greece, but as Nico points out they were hunted to extinction. There were still wild bears in northern Greece. One of the royal tombs in Macedonia shows a hunt scene in which a bear is part of the action.

The Greeks never practiced bear baiting, but they did have cockfights. They seem to have been popular among lower-class men. The great General Themistocles was once invited to a fight, and he was so horrified by what he saw that he tried to have the practice banned. He failed miserably.

T
HE
M
ARATHON
C
ONSPIRACY
is the fourth book in the series, and the first book in which characters from previous adventures appear in cameos. You may have noticed during the wedding that Nico mentions two people who otherwise play no part in the story: Asia and Timodemus. These two were
important to Nico and Diotima in the second and third books respectively (
The Ionia Sanction
and
Sacred Games
). Asia and Timo are both Athenians, and it would be strange indeed if they didn’t turn up for the wedding of their friends.

The Athenian marriage ceremony was much as I give it, with a lot of detail removed because otherwise the book would never end. There were a lot of rituals involved, and the party could go on for days.

Confetti is a very ancient tradition. It’s known that classical wedding guests threw it. The veil was also definitely worn. A white dress for the bride is much more recent. The silk for Diotima’s bridal gown was acquired on a previous adventure. Silk had reached Persia by this date but no further. When she appears at the door, Diotima becomes the first woman in Europe ever to wear a silk dress.

The epithalamium was a song written especially for a newly married couple. It was a standard part of every marriage ceremony, though it would have been a rare marriage song that was co-authored by Pindar and Aeschylus. When you’re an historical novelist you can get away with these things. Believe it or not, epithalamium remains a valid word in English to this day.

T
HE PLAY THAT
Aeschylus is writing during the story, for which Nico so helpfully offers plot ideas, is known today as
The Oresteia Trilogy
. Aeschylus will go on to win first prize with it at the next major contest. It will be one of the last things he writes. It’s said that he was killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head.

Aeschylus wrote his own epitaph:

Today we honor Aeschylus as the founder of modern drama, the genius inventor of tragedy, but in the epitaph that he wrote for himself, he spoke only of his ability to slaughter Persians. It never occurred to him to mention that he’d written a few plays.

T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
Marathon changed the course of history. It’s probably the most famous battle ever. Despite which, modern historians can’t even agree on which direction the opposing lines faced, let alone details like whether the Persian cavalry took the field.

I’m convinced that the version Aeschylus gives is the most likely approximation of the truth. But a lot of people have written a lot of books about Marathon, and if you want to learn more about this vastly important battle, I recommend reading Herodotus and one of the modern texts for comparison.

The story of the signal that flashed to the enemy from behind the Athenian lines can be found in Herodotus. The identity of the traitors caused a lot of wild speculation back then, and continues to do so to this day. The problem of light reflecting off a curved shield, which Socrates points out in the book, was in fact pointed out by a modern historian.

In describing the battle, Herodotus said this of the Athenians:

T
HE STORY OF
Harmodius, Aristogeiton, and Leana is as Callias gives it in the book. I find it interesting that the first people in history to give their lives for democratic freedom were two gay men and a woman.

The original statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton were taken by the Persians when they sacked Athens. The Athenians
made replacements when they retook their city. It’s the second version that Nico sees in the agora. Alexander the Great returned the originals to Athens after he conquered Persia, and the two pairs stood together for centuries. The Romans made copies of the second pair. Some of these copies survive—probably the best copy is at the museum in Naples—which means we have a fair idea of what Harmodius and Aristogeiton looked like. As Nico reports, they stand close together, pressing forward but turned so that they’re almost back to back, and in each hand they wield a sword.

Incredibly, Leana gets lost in modern retellings of their story. The bias isn’t ancient. All the ancient sources, including Herodotus, Plutarch, and Pausanias, are united and fulsome in their praise of her. It seems to be modern writers who’ve lost track of the female hero.

The social status of Leana is a bit of a mystery. She’s usually described as the mistress of Aristogeiton. I think this highly unlikely, because the one thing everyone agrees on is that Harmodius and Aristogeiton were as gay as can be. Also, given the praise heaped upon her, Leana must surely have been a citizen. I fudged it by making her the unmarried sister of Aristogeiton. This also helps me to explain the deep admiration Callias had for her.

Leana is the only mortal woman ever to be given a statue atop the Acropolis. In those days it was illegal to erect a statue in honor of a woman, but Callias insisted, and then paid for it himself.

Pausanias reports seeing the statue three hundred years later. I copied his description of Leana’s memorial: a dangerous lioness who roars without a tongue.

C
ALLIAS WAS THE
first culturally modern European, to my mind, even more so than Pericles or Socrates. Callias was instrumental in the second, successful plot to overthrow Hippias.

It’s my own idea, but I think as certain as such things can
be, that Callias was one of the original plotters recruited by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, one of those who had to flee when the conspiracy went wrong at the last moment. Callias must have been almost the same age as Harmodius. That he was at the forefront of the next plot shows he was of a like mind. That he went out of his way to honor Leana demonstrates a connection.

Callias went on to make himself the richest man in Greece through his business acumen, his management expertise, and his people skills. Athens had a number of good military men, but when it was peace they wanted, it was to Callias that the Athenians turned for the negotiations.

He eventually fell madly in love with Elpinice, the sister of Cimon, who happened to be the mortal enemy of Pericles. Elpinice and Callias had several sons and three daughters.

Callias asked each daughter as she came of age who she wanted for a husband. Each girl in turn checked out the local talent and then made her selection. Callias offered the father of the target young man a dowry so large that no sane father could refuse. This turnabout of the usual process was so talked about that it even made it into the ancient histories. It also showed the extent to which Callias valued his womenfolk.

In his final years, Callias pulled off his greatest coup. The nonaggression pact that finally ended the Persian Wars is called the Peace of Callias, because he engineered it.

Callias, then, was a man who, at enormous personal risk, was instrumental in the birth of democracy. He was a self-made millionaire who didn’t hesitate to fight in the ranks as a common soldier when his state needed him. He was the city’s premier diplomat. He had a gloriously happy home life and then, to top it off, he successfully negotiated peace in the Middle East.

T
HAT
H
IPPIAS KEEPS
a diary is something of an innovation. Paper was an expensive luxury item. However, it’s reasonable that Hippias had access to a lot of paper and might have written
because of an odd fact: the works of Homer were first recorded thanks to the father of Hippias, a man named Peisistratus, who was also a tyrant. Up until then the entire
Iliad
and
The Odyssey
had been passed down as oral tradition. Peisistratus feared the works would be garbled generation by generation, so he caused scribes to write down the whole thing.

It’s quite likely that Hippias had a hand in the recording of Homer’s works. He could have picked up the scribbling habit then.

N
OBODY KNOWS WHAT
happened to the sister of Harmodius, the girl whose public shaming led to the first plot against the tyranny. Since she had no remaining male protector after her brother died, there’s every chance that the real child filled an unmarked grave. In the story I give the much more pleasant possibility that friends helped her escape to the sanctuary, where she flowers to become the High Priestess.

This book is intertwined with a famous legend of Homeric revenge.

Hippias refers in his diary to the sister of Harmodius as a future Elektra. The tyrant would have been intimately familiar with the legend that when King Agamemnon returned from Troy, his wife took to him with an axe. Aeschylus mentions this unfortunate incident when he describes the play he’s writing about Orestes.