Metics, slaves and citizens...the population

If you lived in Athens you had to be one of three things: a slave, a metic, or a citizen.

At the bottom of the heap were the slaves. A citizen was considered poor if he could only afford two slaves. There was an active slave market in Piraeus, the nearby port of Athens. There seems to have been a clear distinction between house slaves and work slaves. House slaves were ruled by the lady of the house. Work slaves by the master. If you were bought by the master to maintain the olive trees on the farm, then no one would order you to sweep the bedroom floors. That was left to a house slave who was probably female and under the control of the master's wife. It's reminiscent of the division of labor among the servants of, say, a Victorian stately manor.

The state itself owned quite a few slaves—like public servants but without the pension plan—and if you were one of those then you were either very lucky, or hugely unlucky. The lucky ones had cushy jobs as clerks. The unlucky ones were sent to the silver mines, where life was terrible and brief. Being a slave in the mines was the worst thing that could happen to you.

But this didn't mean the lives of all slaves were terrible, not by a long shot. There was very wide disparity, and it was possible for a slave to be better off than a poor citizen. If you were the head slave of Callias, the richest man in Athens, then your life would have been one of virtual luxury.

The metics were resident aliens, with permission to live and work in Athens, but with none of the sovereign or legal rights of citizens. If you think of someone with a green card in the US, you'd be pretty close. Metics had to register with their local deme (suburb) and have an Athenian sponsor.

There'd always been some metics in Athens, but as the city came more and more to dominate Greece, people began to flood in from the poor cities, looking for work and a better way of life. Sound familiar? It's known from funeral stele (monument stones) that the metics came from at least 60 other cities.

Metics formed much of the merchant class of Athens. With its strong agrarian tradition it was somewhat frowned upon for citizens to indulge in trade (which didn't stop the smart, successful ones) but the metics were all for making money from as much trade as possible. The metics may well have owned a lot of the merchant fleet. The Athenians certainly understood how much the wealth of the city depended on the success of the metics. One of the three top archons—the Polemarch—was assigned to do nothing but make sure the metics were looked after. It was possible for a metic to gain mind-boggling amounts of wealth. Pasion, the world's first bank CEO, started as a slave, made a mega-fortune as a free metic, and only after he had enough money to basically buy Athens was he offered citizenship—a rare honor.

Citizenship was a tightly controlled club, and during classical times it only got tighter. A law was passed that to be a citizen you had to be born of a citizen father and a citizen mother. Which strongly discouraged the men from picking up wives from out of town, because to a true Athenian, death was preferable to being a non-citizen. (Quite literally in fact...there were citizens who chose death over exile. Socrates was one of them.) Citizens ranged from the desperately poor to the very wealthy, but they all had exactly the same vote in the ecclesia.

How many of all the people were there? No one knows for sure. Calculations are usually based on estimating the number of citizens and extrapolating the rest on ratios. Herodotus in a roundabout way says there were 30,000 effectives in the Athenian army in 480BC. Which isn't necessarily true, but it's all we've got for the beginning of classical times. People have used all sorts of weird and wonderful systems to extrapolate from there, such as burials and marriage records, and averaging the number of children for those few families which are mentioned in history. Keep in mind too that infant mortality was in the 50% range. None of this is accurate!

Let's multiply the 30,000 by 4, which means 1 wife and 2 surviving children per male citizen. The mild justification is that sixty years after Herodotus said 30,000 men, Aristophanes in a comedy also said there were 30,000. Hence the citizen population was more or less static. So that's 120,000 citizens.

There appear to have been about as many slaves as citizens. That's not a total half-assed guess because there are some documents to support the one to one ratio.

There's a magic moment in 431BC when Thucydides gives the relative number of citizen versus metic soldiers in the army (5,500 metics), from which we get perhaps 25,000 metics total. Maybe as many as 30,000 metics.

So that's a total population of maybe 270,000.

But don't trust me on this. I have to see any two papers on the subject which actually agree.

What interests me intensely is that this tiny place—smaller than many modern towns—changed the world forever.

Why does Gary write historical mysteries?

I'm glad you asked...you can find the answer in the Secret Archives of the Alliterati, where I have a guest post today!

An interview with Meghan

Meghan Sullivan is interested in all things Ancient Greek. Meghan runs the blog Ancient Musings, where she discusses ancient history, games, and interviews authors who write in the period.

You can read the dark secrets I revealed in my fun interview with Meghan on her blog.

The archons of Athens

The archons were the city executives.

Athenians had a clear understanding of the difference between sovereign power and executive government, and were careful to keep the two separate. More careful than all modern democracies in fact. The US President not only heads the executive but has influence on what laws are passed. In the Westminster system the Prime Minister is the leader of whichever party holds the most seats. In both cases the sovereign power and executive duties are mixed. An Athenian would have called that sloppy.

By classical times there were nine archons: the Eponymous Archon, the Polemarch, the Basileus, and six others who served as magistrates.

The archons were elected for a year and after serving, could never serve again. If you're wondering how Pericles managed to stay influential for so long, it's because he was at no time an archon! Seriously. He got himself elected year after year to the part of executive government for which there was no limitation: Pericles was an almost perpetual strategos - a military commander - equivalent to being a member of the modern Joint Chiefs of Staff.

There were only three archons originally in archaic times: the three with the über-cool titles. The six magistrates were added as the population grew and the workload became too much.

The Eponymous Archon was in charge of the affairs of citizens. He was something like a city mayor. The Eponymous Archon was the one after whom the year was named. The Pericles Commission takes place in the Year of Conon.

The Polemarch was in charge of the affairs of the many resident aliens, called metics. In archaic times the Polemarch had been the war archon. The word Polemarch is conjoined of war and leader. Military command later became too big for one man and passed to the strategoi. The Polemarch then became in effect the equivalent of the Eponymous Archon for the metics.

The Basileus was the archon in charge of religious and artistic festivals. Basileus means King.

It's obvious if you look at their combined duties that the three main archons were a replacement for the ancient king of Athens. The Eponymous Archon managed civil affairs, The Polemarch led the Athenians at war, and the Basileus led them in worship. No one's too sure when or how it happened, but at some point the kingship was replaced with this triumvirate.

There were a few years in which social upheaval prevented the election of archons. Those years were considered ones of an-archy, literally no-archon. Our word anarchy comes to us direct from ancient Athenian politics.

Grammar check is bad for you, and spell check is not much better

I think I ran spell check on my first book four times. The first time before I sent the manuscript to my beta reader friends. The second immediately before I queried agents. The third when I finished agency-requested edits, right before Janet sent the manuscript to St Martin's Press. The fourth was when I finished edits in response to the St Martin's editorial letter.

I never run the grammar checker at all. In fact, the first thing I do when I install Word is turn off grammar checking. Then I turn off the option to check spelling as I type.

To me they're irritants that get in the way of writing. Every time one of those green spell check lines appears, it stops me in mid-flow and makes me go back to fix the misspelling. Yes, I know I don't have to go back, but if you're not going to stop and fix, then why ask to see the green line in the first place? So I turn it off. That way I actually write story, instead of a lot of correctly spelled words.

The grammar checker on the other hand is actively bad. The grammar checker thinks it can write better than me. It's wrong. The grammar checker has no idea of voice or style. And don't get me started on those style evaluation systems. If you took any great story of the past and ran it through grammar check, do you think it would pass?

When the option to check spelling as I type first appeared, I used it all the time. I noticed a strange thing. My spelling became much worse. Okay, my spelling was never great, but that made the slide all the more noticeable. And I became slower at writing, because I was always conscious of not wanting to provoke a nasty green line.

It probably does help that I use autocorrect all the time. But that works because autocorrect doesn't make me stop and redo.

So what I do now is, I write the story, and then I make the story right.

Happy Eostre or Happy Ostara or Happy Easter

I hope everyone's had a great Easter!

Easter is derived directly from a Germanic pagan fertility Goddess called Eostre, if you speak Old English, or Ostara, if you speak Old High German. Spelling is highly variable on this because, back in those days, most people couldn't.

Interestingly, Eostre is mentioned in writing in only one place, the work of the Venerable Bede, a mediaeval monk and early self-publisher. He said in De Ratione Temporum - which was a bestseller in its day - that Eostre's Month (= April = Spring) was once celebrated with feasts in honor of the Goddess. De Ratione Temporum means On Calculating Time and a lot of the book is about how to calculate when Easter is on.

It's interesting that Eostre appears nowhere in Norse lore. Her only mention is in that early Christian book by Bede.

So if you ever wondered what bunnies and eggs had to do with Jesus, now you know: nothing at all. They are both carryover fertility symbols associated with the Goddess of Spring. And a good thing too, or we wouldn't get all that chocolate.

I hope the Easter Bunny was good to you!

(This is a modified version of a post I did last Easter, but I think the origin of Easter is rather cool so I'm repeating.)

Sacred sex and temple prostitution

I was planning to write about this myself some time, but Mary Harrsch has done such a great job that you should read her excellent summary on whether sacred sex was practiced in ancient times.

Sacred sex is the idea that some temples - invariably dedicated to Aphrodite or the local equivalent - had in-house prostitutes whose service was considered part of the worship. Whether it ever actually happened is very controversial.

I have no choice but to form a definite opinion because I must describe these temples in my books! Particularly the Artemision at Ephesus which appears in the second book, and for which there's a claim of temple prostitution. (And my view is there wasn't.)

Most mention of this subject comes with the sound of ideological axes grinding in the background. Which makes Mary's article so valuable, because it's actually even handed.

We have a book cover

It is with joy that I present to you...


...my first book cover! (It's a bit clearer if you click on it.)

I have it printed and hanging above my desk, where it distracts me day and night.

The characters on the cover are our heroes of course, Nicolaos and Diotima. The building in the background is the Painted Stoa, which was under construction at the time of the story. The art director, David Rotstein (thank you!), has pulled the background from the third scene, in which the Painted Stoa makes an appearance:

This was the site of the new Stoa Poikile: the Painted Porch. The Stoa was a long portico with columns on the side facing the Agora, and a flat wall at the back. Two painters were using charcoal to sketch on the wall, far apart from each other, ignoring the chatter of the excited crowd about them. One had enough detail in that I could see he was about to paint a battle between the Hellenes and the Amazons; the other had barely begun.

“What’s it to be?” I asked the second man.

“The Fall of Troy,” he said, not turning. His eyes stayed on his work and his arm didn’t stop moving.

His lines were simple and direct, no fancy touches, not much detail, I marveled as the strong walls of Troy suddenly appeared beneath his confident hand. Without a pause he left the walls and began on a figure, a woman who I guessed to be Helen.

I said, “Well, don’t put me in it.”

That stopped him. He gnashed his teeth and said, “Gaah! Why must onlookers always say that?”

He threw a dirty rag at me, which I dodged, and skipped out of the porch.

Nicolaos was talking to a famous artist called Polygnotus, who really did paint a Fall of Troy on the Painted Stoa.

I have restyled the blog to match the book. I haven't done my actual web site yet, but this blog is where the action is and as soon as I had it remodelled I put it online. It'll be a small miracle if it works perfectly so please let me know if you have any problems.

You'll notice there is now a series name at the top of the blog. Welcome to The Hellene Mysteries. The jacket line on the cover however is A Mystery of Ancient Greece. You would not believe how much time went into considering those combined 8 words! A Mystery of Ancient Greece is instantly recognisable by anyone. That and the visual clues makes it instantly obvious to the casual browser what the book and the series is about. The Hellene Mysteries is something I can easily write in sentences and makes sense to you, the people who know history.

To add to my happiness, another milestone has also been reached as of last night. If you hop onto Amazon and search for my name or the title, you'll find The Pericles Commission is now up there. The Amazon page is missing a few things, such as a cover image and the blurb, but they'll come soon, and the book is there, and available for pre-order. Yay!

The book will appear on B&N, Borders, Books-a-Million, Book Depository.com and others from this point on as each store does its updates. I've therefore put a Buy the Book section at the top of the sidebar, and as stores come online with the book I'll add links to each of their pages.

The cover and the first bookstore page have made it all seem very much more real. It's like waking from a pleasant dream to discover that, actually, it's not a dream.

Yay!

Loose women of ancient Athens

There were three kinds:

Street girls and girls working the brothels;
Flute girls who attended parties; and,
at the top their profession, the courtesans.

The girls at the bottom level had a very hard life. They walked the streets, just as such women do today, and for the same reason, for which they were known as walkers.

In Ancient Greek, the word walker is pornê. The plural is pornoi. Yes, our modern word pornography is derived from the word for a common hooker in Ancient Athens.

It was forbidden for the pornoi to speak with a man in public. Instead they wore sandals with FOLLOW ME carved backwards into the soles. The words would be imprinted into the dust as they walked, and a man could then walk behind the pornê without speaking to her. When she picked up a follower the pornê would lead her customer directly back to the brothel in which she worked.

The pornoi charged not by time, but by sexual position! Some positions were considered better than others and rates varied accordingly.

The flute girls by comparison were effectively paid party goers. Athenian men frequently held parties called symposia. The wives didn't get an invite, but the flute girls did. The order of events was: eat, drink a lot, and then party. Everyone together in the same room. These days we'd call it an orgy. Flute girls were actually accomplished entertainers on top of any other duties which might...er...arise. Flute girls were paid per event, and they were paid a whole lot more than the pornoi.

Yes, this is where we get the modern word symposium. If you're an academic reading this, next time you attend a symposium, you can keep in mind that you're just not doing it right.

The most famous flute girl ever is probably the one mentioned in Plato's Symposium. In that book, the men, fresh from an exhilirating day of watching tragedy at the theatre, decide they want to discuss the meaning of Love. So they toss out the one and only flute girl present because her music is disturbing their philosophic discussion. I'll bet it's the only time in history that ever happened. I've written a short story about what happened to her afterwards, which needs a little bit more work before I can send it somewhere.

I confess loose women tend to make regular appearances in my stories, because...er...let me see if I can think of a decent reason...er...because they had much more social freedom than respectable women. Yeah, that's it.

Which in fact they did. It was unheard of for a respectable married woman to wander about the way the working girls could.

At the top were the courtesans. They were much like the salon hostesses of the 17th and 18th centuries: highly educated, able to discuss any subject, quote poetry, play music, and in addition they were really good in bed. A courtesan was called a hetaera. In plural, hetaerae. Powerful men clamoured for an invite to their parties. Only the wealthy could afford them.

The most famous hetaera ever was Phryne, of whom I've written in the past.

The top hetaerae had celebrity status. The women who reached such dizzy heights adopted what were known as hetaera-names, much as a celebrity today might adopt a stage name to enhance their image. Often these were taken from the Muses or were fine sounding phrases. One common hetaera name for example was Euterpe, who not only was one of the Muses, but whose name means delightfully pleasing.

Here's an excerpt from The Pericles Commission. Nicolaos, our hero and a young man, has turned up to interview Euterpe the Hetaera...

The house slave sniffed at me when I knocked, as if I were too verminous to cross her threshold. The name Ephialtes got me as far as the public receiving room, where I had been left to linger long enough to have inspected every art piece in the room, and there were a lot of them. I had never before been in the salon of a hetaera. The murals were short on Homeric battle scenes but gratifyingly long on sporting nymphs, satyrs and priapic Gods. I peered at them closely, my nose almost pressed to the wall.

“Educational, aren’t they?”

I turned, startled, and crashed my knee against a nearby table. Trying not to swear, and clutching my knee, I saw framed in the doorway the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on.

Euterpe had reddish brown hair that flowed down her lovely neck and over her shoulder to her breasts. She was wearing a dress that, even if it were not made of fabric I could see through, would have been considered scandalously immodest. As it was, she had my body’s full and immediate attention. The dress was tied in some way so that the material flowed with her skin. My mind ceased functioning since it was not required for the moment.

“Oh! Are you hurt?”

She knelt before me and touched my knee where I’d banged it. Waves of pleasure coursed up me.

Euterpe looked a little higher, and smiled. She stood, swayed to a couch and reclined, arching her back so that her nipples pressed out against the material and her legs were exposed.

“So, what may I do for you, young man?”

I collapsed back against the nearest couch, unable to speak and agonizingly aware how I must look to her.

Euterpe let me recover. She clapped her hands. A young woman appeared, whom I barely noticed.

“Would you bring me wine? And a carafe of cool water for our guest.”

The young woman reappeared with an exquisite thin pottery water cooler. I took it and thankfully let it rest in my lap, where it did me a lot of good...

What's your story about?

I had an interesting discussion the other night about the difference between a plot summary, and what a story's about. Being able to say what a story's about is the more important of the two, because anyone can repeat a plot, but it takes ability to understand what drives 90,000 words. It means not knowing what happens, but why it happens.

Often when people ask what a story's about, they hear in reply a blow-by-blow account of the plot; because plot is easy, but plot is the wrong answer.

To say what the story's about, describe what happens, but mention not more than one line of plot.

My only hints for doing it are to write a blurb that would fit on the back cover. Then think really hard about what's the core of the blurb. The one line of plot you're allowed is the crucial event, whatever it might be. I make no claims for expertise on this by the way, except that I've had to do it a few times. Eleven times, actually, only a few weeks ago.

Here's an example for Macbeth.

What happens:

Well, there are these three witches, and they meet a guy called Macbeth, and...Macbeth and his wife murder the King, and then...bubble bubble boil and trouble...and then there's a killing spree...then a ghost turns up at dinner...then they get attacked by walking trees...


Here's what the story is about:

A respected power couple of the Scottish nobility are so consumed by ambition, that they throw away their ethics to murder their King and sieze the throne. Their crime creates an imbalance in the world which drags themselves and all of Scotland into tragedy.

Feel free to disagree with my about, but even if you do it's clear this is not plot, or if it is, it's the very core with the emphasis on motivation and consequence.

My dear agent has threatened to manually strangle me if I ever dare give anyone advice on how to get published because, you know, I am famous for my skills at querying. However I will risk almost certain harm by pointing out that in a query it's probably better to say what your story's about, and not try to summarise the entire plot.

Dear Ms Reid,

The Cawdor Crisis is a paranormal political thriller set in mediaeval Scotland [yeah, like that's ever going to sell]. A respected power couple of the Scottish nobility are so consumed by ambition, that they throw away their ethics to murder their King and sieze the throne. Their crime creates an imbalance in the world which drags themselves and all of Scotland into tragedy.

...then carry on with the mechanical bits of the query...

Here's an exercise to try. Feel free to use the comments. If you're writing one, tell us what your book is about.