With elections coming up for our friends in the US, here's a quick description of how you'd be voting if we were all back in ancient Athens.
Every election was a combination of vote and lottery. The Athenians fiddled with the voting system constantly. They'd only just invented democracy after all, and they weren't afraid to experiment to see what worked best. But the system always had the same basic elements. It went something like this:
Each of the ten tribes took it in turn to supply candidates. (So that each tribe supplied officials once every ten years.)
The tribe whose turn it was selected candidates for all the elected positions. The candidates were selected by lottery from across the tribe.
All the citizens of Athens then voted from among the randomly-selected candidates for who they thought would do the best job.
Note the lottery system. It guaranteed that, unlike modern systems, everyone had an equal chance of one day holding office, and that serial power-seekers hadn't a hope.
If you'd asked an ancient Athenian, they would have told you, in all seriousness, that the lottery system was an essential part of any democracy, and that any state that didn't have a luck element wasn't a true democracy. Plato's quite famous for saying that anyone who wants power, shouldn't have it. But that was actually the default Athenian view.
Purely for fun, I thought I'd talk about something that's long interested me. Who would you pick for the best military leaders of all time?
There are a lot of factors you can use to quibble with here. Someone might have been technically brilliant, and yet circumstances drew them a raw deal, so that they never got a chance to shine. You could argue some other guys lucked out; they were in the right place at the right time, so that they looked better than they were.
So to give it some context, here are the parameters: if Earth was being attacked by aliens and you could go back in time to pick out one leader to save us, who would be on your list of candidates?
I'll start with the no-brainers, in their chronological order.
1. Alexander the Great
2. Julius Caesar
3. Genghis Khan
4. Napoleon
You could make an argument that Caesar was a brilliant politician who happened to be an above average general, so that technically he doesn't belong. But the man was in the habit of winning, and that's what we're looking for; there've been periods in history when the best leader was the one with the organisational skills.
Onwards with the best of the rest:
5. Khurush the Great
Who? You probably know him as Cyrus the Great, but his real name was Khurush. He founded the Persian Empire by starting with a small client state and then conquering everyone in sight. He built the largest empire the world had yet seen. Alexander was fascinated by Khurush and studied him intensely. In turn, Caesar was fascinated by Alexander, and Napoleon by Caesar.
6. Charlemagne
You know it's tough company when the founder of the Holy Roman Empire can only get slot #6. Charlemagne often gets dropped off lists of great leaders, and I don't know why, because it's not like unifying Europe is easy. Maybe it's because he lived at a time when military technology had reduced the craft to a level of "see-enemy-hit-enemy".
7. Scipio Africanus
After the battle of Cannae, at which Hannibal's army slaughtered 50,000 Romans, including most of the leadership team, a junior officer named Scipio was given command, at the age of 25. At that time, Rome's control had been reduced to her city walls.
Scipio reconquered Italy. Then he reconquered Southern France. Then he reconquered Spain. Then he took back the Mediterranean. Then he invaded North Africa. Then he conquered Carthage.
Scipio never lost a battle, and he did it against Hannibal, widely considered the greatest commander since Alexander. There wouldn't be another such match of titans until Napoleon faced Wellington.
I can't resist coming back to the subject of reliability of ancient documents, given all the interest at the moment about an ancient scrap of papyrus that mentions Jesus having a better half. The story goes that Harvard has translated a genuine fragment of 4th century Coptic that says, amongst other things, "Jesus said to them, 'My wife...she will be able to be my disciple...'"
The excitement is something of a media beat up, because that scrap was first translated by a German scholar about thirty years ago. Nobody got too upset back then. In fact, he was totally ignored. I guess Harvard has a better PR department. Be that as it may, I thought it might be fun to look at this as if it were a bit of book research for one of my ancient murder mysteries...could I use this in an historically accurate novel?
First off, just because something was written a long time ago, it doesn't mean it's true! A lot of people assume that ancient writings are inherently credible.
The ancient world was as well stocked for crazies as the modern. If you were to collect random scraps of paper from our modern age, and accepted all of them as true, you would certainly come to the conclusion that people in the 21st century were regularly kidnapped by space aliens, that men never walked on the moon, and that 911 was a CIA plot. Imagine if someone in the future discovered a scientology text. How embarrassing would that be? So one possibility is we're looking at the 4th century equivalent of scientologists.
The provenance is unknown. The papyrus might be from a coffin (they often used old papers to build cheap sarcophagi), or maybe a rubbish tip. The papyrus appears to be a copy of an older text. The original could have been written any time in the previous three hundred years. How close the original dates to 30AD is rather important. (I once wrote an article about the degree to which I trust historical sources.) On the evidence, we just don't know. But the closer it is to the real event, the happier I'd be.
So the next question is, is there any cross-reference to corroborate? (I use this test all the time for book research.) The answer is no, not really. Plenty of speculation about that Magdalene girl, but nothing concrete.
How about archaeological evidence? No, zero.
Does the information look credible? Sure it does. The fact that it's written in Coptic gives it street cred. There were a lot of Bibles being written in Egypt at at that time in Coptic. We might be looking at something that got chopped in final revisions. You know how editors can be. Also, the original Bible was compiled in Koine Greek by scholars in Egypt who were probably the great great grand dads of the guys doing the Coptic versions.
The ultimate test for any historical novel is, does the idea break history? This idea doesn't, so it's fair game.
You probably haven't heard of Empedocles, but I can guarantee you've heard of his most famous theory.
Empedocles was the guy who came up with the idea that everything is made from earth, air, fire and water. The four classical elements.
It's sort of ironic that Empedocles lived at the same time as the guy who first realized everything was made of tiny little particles. The two theories competed for centuries, and in fact the particle theory had the edge well into Roman times. It was after the fall of the Roman Empire that Christian monks decided the particle idea was obviously rubbish and went with the much more sensible earth/air/fire/water system, thus dooming western civilisation to a few extra centuries of chemical ignorance.
The four elements remain popular to this day in astrology and alchemy and fantasy stories. Not to mention modern music. The band Earth, Wind and Fire is named for them.
Empedocles was into distinctive clothing. He walked about wearing a purple robe and wore sandals made of bronze. That must have been incredibly uncomfortable, but these sacrifices must be made if one is to be the special anointed of the Gods, which Empedocles firmly believed himself to be. I'm afraid it was the sandals that contributed to his greatest debacle.
You see, Empedocles considered his genius to be so great that he deserved to spend the rest of eternity in the company of the Gods on Mt Olympus.
The tricky point was to convince people that this had actually occurred, after he died. Being Empedocles, he came up with a brilliant scheme. One night, in his old age, he crept away from his friends -- so that they'd think he'd mysteriously disappeared -- and threw himself into the nearby volcano, Mt Etna.
This crafty plan went horribly wrong a few days later when the volcano had a minor eruption. One of the bronze sandals was disgorged. His friends found it on the slope and had no trouble guessing where Empedocles had gone. I confess I'm somewhat reminded of the grand schemes of Wile E. Coyote.
Empedocles is about thirty years old when Nico and Diotima begin their career as investigators. Yes, this means that at some point, Nico and Diotima (and Socrates) are going to meet him.
Ancient Greece had only four musical instruments that got much air play: the aulos, which was a V-shaped double flute, pan pipes, the kithara and the lyre. MP3 players were thin on the ground back then, and music notation was primitive and not much written, so we have almost no idea what the music sounded like. (Though there've been attempts to reconstruct based on the few surviving lines of notation).
But weirdly, we have a very precise knowledge of how the instruments were tuned.
That's because one day, a lad by the name of Pythagoras noticed a few things about how the kithara and lyre players tuned their strings. This is the same Pythagoras who came up with the theorem you learned in school about triangles, so it will come as no surprise that he did a minute analysis.
What Pythagoras noticed was firstly, that a string twice as long as another produced the same note but one octave down. Ditto that a string exactly half the length was precisely one octave up. This is a piece of pure physics that anyone could spot.
The second thing he noticed, and this was hugely important, was that musicians consistently went for a note in between the octave ends that divided the string in the ratio 3:2.
Musicians will be nodding their heads knowingly, because these days we'd call that ratio a perfect fifth. Ancient Greek music was based entirely on perfect fifth intervals. What's more, the interval from the perfect fifth to the next octave up is what we'd call a fourth. We almost have enough to play the blues.
With no electronic tuners and no way to delicately adjust string tension, probably the best they could manage was to get every string to the same tension and vary the lengths.
So here's how they tuned: start with a note X, with a string that I'll call a length of 1. (X has some arbitrary frequency that the musician's picked by ear.)
Now the next octave up is a string of length 2:1 compared to the first string.
The perfect fifth between those octave notes is at 3:2. That's the first perfect fifth.
Remember in this system, we get each successive note in the scale by going up a perfect fifth from the last. So to get the perfect fifth up from one at 3/2, we have to multiply the length again by 3/2. That gives us 9/4. The only problem is, 9/4 is more than 2:1. We've fallen off the end of the scale!
Not to worry, just drop that note down an octave. Which we do by halving the string. That note becomes 9:8.
Our scale now has notes at: 1, 9:8, 3:2, and 2:1
We now go up a perfect fifth from the 9:8 note. Which we do by multiplying it once again by 3/2. That gives us a note at 27:16. Our scale now has notes: 1, 9:8, 3:2, 27:16, 2:1
I won't leave you in suspense. Here's the final Pythagorean Scale:
1:1 9:8 81:64 4:3 3:2 27:16 243:128 2:1
It's doubtful that Pythagoras invented this. It's much more likely that he formalized a system that was already in place. But I'd be willing to bet anything he was the first to work out the ratios. Musicians were probably tuning up perfect fifths by ear.
You could, in theory, continue adding notes forever, but Pythagoras stopped at 8, presumably because of the practical difficulty of adding more strings.
Pythagorean Tuning was unbelievably successful. The Greeks used it. The Romans used it. It survived to be used in mediaeval times. In fact it survived until another genius by the name of Johann Sebastian Bach finally killed it off when he wrote a work called The Well Tempered Klavier in the 1700s.
Believe it or not, there are still a few instruments that use Pythagorean Tuning. This isn't ancient Greek music, but it's using their scale:
I am relieved to announce that I have scored 10 out of 10 in a trivia quiz about my own book. Asmah on Goodreads has put up a trivia quiz for The Ionia Sanction.
Here's a recipe for schizophrenia: be an Australian author, who for preference writes in UK English, but who is published mostly in the US. I'm well on the way to becoming a walking encyclopaedia of English dialect differences. So let me share some of the madness with practise vs practice.
Practice with a C and practise with an S are two different parts of exactly the same word.
Practice is a noun. In every English speaking country in the world, with one exception, practice is only ever a noun. In that one other country, practice is also a verb.
Everywhere else, practise is always the verb. Hence:
The doctor practises medicine at his practice.
The US lost the S word. So in the US, the doctor practices medicine at his practice. Which to my eye looks horribly wrong.
Just to make it more fun, practise also used to mean to play a trick on someone.
The English practice originates from the Old French practiser, so that the 's' version is the original, and in medical Latin is spelt with a 'z'. It also appears in Greek as praktike. (It's also in Esperanto as praktike!) Since it's in both Latin and Greek, that makes it a very old Indo-European word.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives practice as interchangeable these days, thanks to the US practice of spelling practise as practice. (Confused yet?)
I checked Merriam-Webster's, and it says, to my astonishment, that practise remains acceptable usage in some parts of the US. It doesn't say where, but I guess they mean New England. It also gives practise as meaning to play a joke, in US usage!
