Over at Criminal Element I have a guest post today. I waffled a bit about how laws and courts worked back then, wandering from the laws of Draco (who's the guy we get the word draconian from), to the infamous incident that happened to Phryne when she was in court.
Criminal Element is a mystery fan site run by Macmillan. If you're interested, take a look.
3 comments:
Terrific article (as always).
It's probably a good thing for Nico that Draco won't show up anytime soon . . .
And would if be safe to assume that Euterpe and Phryne look somewhat alike? Just wondering.
Hi Sarah,
There's a definite similarity between the incident of Phryne in court, and a certain incident that occurs in the Pericles Commission, when Euterpe turns up in court. That's because I unashamably ripped off Phryne's courtroom experience and gave it to my character, though under slightly different circumstances of course.
Diotima inherited much of her mother's looks; I suspect she's a bit closer to Phryne than her Mum. I tend to think of Euterpe as more the voluptuous femme fatale type. Diotima's slimmer and in better condition, but with much the same curves. The face of Phryne is so well-known in marble, I deliberately made Diotima darker to give her some differentiation.
Phryne ("frog, "toad") was named so because she had yellowish skin. This means she had slight but lifelong jaundice. Since she was obviously healthy and beautiful, chances are she had one of the benign syndromes that elevate bilirubin slightly, without any other adverse health effects. These syndromes are Gilbert's syndrome, Crigler-Najjar syndrome etc.
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