Ancient Greek insurance scams

The Greeks used to practise bottomry. No, it's not what you think it is. Bottomry is a form of maritime insurance.

It works like this: the captain of a boat borrows money from a lender. Then he sets sail. If the boat makes it to the next port, he has to pay back the lender what he borrowed plus interest. If the boat sinks on the way, the lender loses his money.

This is, in effect, insurance, but it probably began when merchant captains had an urgent need to repair their ships in foreign ports.

A captain might need money to repair his damaged ship, but have nothing on board to pay for repairs. As anyone who's ever run a small business knows, cash flow is the killer. So the captain borrows from a moneylender, using the only thing he has available as collateral: the ship itself. He repairs the boat, takes a cargo on board, and sails to the next port where he sells the cargo at a profit. Then he repays the lender, plus interest.

The Greeks realized that the risk-offset aspect of this arrangement was very valuable, regardless of whether the ship needed repairs. And so, insurance was born.

The practise became widespread. Merchants could cover the risk of losing their ship and cargo, while lenders (insurers) could make a profit of...wait for it...30%! How's that for a high premium? But we know the figure was 30% because that's what it is in surviving documents. Merchant vessels ran high risks in those days and 30% would have been a fair price considering how many boats foundered.

We know a lot about bottomry and ancient insurance scams via a legal eagle called Demosthenes. Demosthenes is famous for getting into serious doo-doo with King Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander, which he did by persuading the Athenians to rise up and fight against one of the world's greatest military geniuses. This resulted in a negative experience for the Athenians - they're lucky Alexander didn't raze Athens to the ground - and Demosthenes wisely suicided before he could be captured.

However before Demosthenes began his unfortunate career in politics he prosecuted countless cases of insurance disputes, four of which survive today in court speeches.

The Greeks, being the strong individualists that they were, invented the insurance scam approximately 10 seconds after they invented insurance. It was perfectly normal for the boat owner to claim the boat had sunk, when in fact it was hidden in some foreign port. This was so common that standard contracts required the owners to pay the insurer twice the premium rate if the boat was concealed and subsequently discovered still floating. If you're wondering why the owners weren't jailed for fraud...that's rather difficult if there's no police force to make an arrest, nor a jail to put offenders in. If you were an insurer who'd been diddled, your only recourse was a civil court case.

One of the most spectacular cases of fraud came about when two men, Hegestratos and Xenothemis, decided to pull a bottomry scam. They contracted with an insurer in Syracuse - a Greek city in what is now Sicily - for their shipload of corn, which they said would sail to Athens. In fact the ship left Syracuse with an empty hold. The men planned to sink their own boat three days out of port, make it back to shore on a raft, and since the boat had sunk, pocket the value of their boat (no doubt over-stated) plus the value of all that non-existent but very expensive corn.

Things went pear shaped when, three days later, the passengers and crew wondered what that banging was down in the hold. They discovered Hegestratos trying, and failing, to punch a hole in the boat. The passengers and crew were just a little bit upset that the owners were willing to drown everyone for mere profit. Hegestratos jumped overboard to escape their wrath and promptly drowned. Xenothemis carried on in the perfectly sound boat to Athens. History does not record what happened to him then, but we can be quite sure it was unpleasant.

The rosy-fingered dawn.

Here's your trivia question for the day.

The rosy-fingered dawn.

Does this beautiful phrase appear in Shakespeare or Homer? If Shakespeare, in which play? If Homer, is it from the Iliad or the Odyssey, or both?

The answer's at the end of this post.

I'm planning to open every chapter of my second book with a quote from the Iliad, for reasons that will be vaguely discernible when you read it. One of my twitter friends, the very clever Deb Vlock, offered "the rosy fingered dawn," as one of the quotes (I've had a number of excellent suggestions from friends!).

The question was, was it valid? Opinions varied. I thought it was from the Odyssey. But after searching the Perseus database of ancient texts I can now report...

...the rosy fingered dawn appears in both the Odyssey and the Iliad. The phrase does not appear in Shakespeare, but it sounds very Shakespearean, doesn't it? I don't know if that's because literary geniuses tend to sound alike, or because the translators were so steeped in Shakespeare it came out that way. Here's the phrase in context:

Now when the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, Nestor left his couch and took his seat on the benches of white and polished marble that stood in front of his house. [Odyssey]

But when the sun set and darkness came on, they lay down to rest by the stern cables of the ship, and as soon as early rosy-fingered Dawn appeared, then they set sail for the wide camp of the Achaeans. [Iliad]

So Deb got it right. I should never have doubted her. Homer often re-uses good phrases across both books. The wine dark sea is another famous phrase the recurs.

While I have your attention, I did these searches using the Perseus Digital Library, easily the best online source of ancient texts anywhere on this planet. Or any other planet, for that matter. The interface is, ummm, a trifle archaic for these googly days, but I highly recommend it for anyone who needs accurate, checked, versions of ancient texts, in both the original and translation.

On The Origin Of Apples

By popular demand, which is to say Julie Butcher-Feydnich, here is the origin of apples. I had to research apples when, in my second book, I foolishly decided to have my hero Nicolaos pick one up from a stall in the agora in Ephesus in 460BC. I was dead sure apples were there then, but this is the sort of detail that can trip you up, so I stopped writing for a "quick" ten minutes to confirm I was okay. A couple of hours later, I was still poking around. There is an amazing amount of misinformation out there on what you'd think would be a straightforward subject.

Let me ease the mounting tension at once by saying genetic analysis shows the origin of our domesticated eating apples is Central Asia, the main line appearing to come from Malus sieversii. There's obviously been a lot of species splits and cross-breeding too, because within the area between Asia Minor and Western China there are at least 25 known native species.

My first research stop was Wikipedia, that source of all that is inaccurate and untested. Alright, I'm sure my opinion of Wikipedia will one day rebound to hit me like a pie in the face, probably after I make an error more egregious than anything they've done, but I doubt this article will be it, because on origins Wikipedia says, "Alexander the Great is credited with finding dwarfed apples in Asia Minor in 300BCE; those he brought back to Macedonia might have been the progenitors of dwarfing rootstocks." Which would be remarkable because Alexander never returned to Macedonia after he set foot in Asia Minor. It's possible he may have sent back a sample to his buddy Aristotle, along with piles of other samples Alexander sent his old teacher, but somehow I doubt Aristotle decided this would be the perfect moment to give up his fruitless life of academia and turn to farming. (Fruitless life...did you get it?)

Here is how wildly divergent are the web statements on apples: Wikipedia states (I believe correctly for a change) that, "The apple tree was perhaps the earliest tree to be cultivated..." yet references another site which says, "Though some historians are in dispute over exactly who first cultivated the wild apple, many believe it was the Romans who discovered they could cultivate these wild apples into fleshy, sweet, and juicy fruits," despite the certain fact that people were eating apples many hundreds of years before Rome was founded, and the Persians were growing apples to eat in their paradises before 500BC.

So with that much confusion floating about I had to go digging for some reliable sources, and got a surprising result.

The earliest documented reference I could find, and I caution you I haven't been able to verify this, is a Chinese book circa 5,000BC (!!!) called The Precious Book of Enrichment that discusses apple growing and grafting. Rather puts paid to the Roman claim, doesn't it? But frankly, I'm not going to believe it until I've seen the book; it doesn't appear to be online and my online library searches produced nothing. This may be apocryphal.

The earliest totally solid references are all Hittite. So we're talking 1800BC - 1200BC. The university of Chicago's dictionary of Hittite contains a word for apple. Since you ask, it's warawaras. The Hittite Etymological Dictionary quotes a passage that said, "an apple tree stands over a well and it keeps bleeding [sap, I presume - Gary]; the sun-goddess of Arinna saw it and covered it over with her resplendant robe." Hittite law set a penalty of 3 shekels for allowing a fire to destroy an apple orchard. It seems beyond doubt, we have cultivated apples in Hittite times, though they're probably still contained to Asia and Asia Minor.

The summary is: origin in Central Asia, possibly cultivated as early as 5,000BC in China, definitely cultivated by time of Hittite Empire.

Now, when did they appear in Greece?

Apples figured in Greek mythology from an early stage. Gaia was said to have given Zeus and Hera the gift of an apple tree that produced golden apples as a wedding gift. I suspect this is why, when an Athenian girl was married, she was driven in a chariot from her father's home to her new husband's, and as she was carried she ate either a quince or an apple. Since this was the custom well before my story date, I'm on solid ground with the apples in the stall. Phew! That was a lot of work for one line. Nevertheless, apples were probably the less common choice, because when Xenophon returned from his Persian adventures in the 390s B.C., he was so impressed by the apples in the Persian paradises that he created his own.

Heracles' 11th labor was to steal the Golden Apples of Hesperides. (In the myths, the apples are always described as golden, never red or green. Why?)

Homer mentions an apple orchard in the Odyssey. Without wishing to get into the date Homer game, that puts apple cultivation in Greece by 700BC.

Most interestingly, an apple helped start the Trojan War. When a wedding was being held on Mount Olympus, the Gods deliberately didn't invite Eris, the Goddess of Discord. So Eris tossed a golden apple into the party, on which she had written kallisti, to the fairest. This instantly caused a fight between Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. For no obvious reason, Paris of Troy was chosen to adjudicate. The bribery began at once (Greek politics, you know...). Aphrodite won the bidding war when she offered Paris the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta, and the rest was history.

So for those of you who dislike fruit, now you can point out that apples must be bad for you because people started a war over one.

Who will pick up your dead dog in Aberdeen, Scotland? Not me.

We're talking epic fail here.

According to my site stats, somebody googled who will pick up my dead dog aberdeen scotland, and was sent to me.

Yes, of course, that makes perfect sense.

To start with, whoever you are, I'm about as far from your dead dog as it is possible to get and still be on the same planet. I intend to maintain that separation.

Secondly, I like to think that while the poor creature was alive, you had some feeling for him or her. Can't you manage a decent burial yourself? This is your pet we're talking about! He/she probably loved you.

I'm guessing Google sent the query my way because I once did a post on Disposing of the body: a guide for world travellers, to which my friend Bill Kirton contributed, and he does live in Aberdeen, Scotland. However, I've never noticed a tendency in Bill to collect dead dogs, so you're still out of luck, whoever you are. Bill's hero, DCI Jack Carston, works just outside Aberdeen and will not be amused to hear of this.

Of course, now that I've written about it, probably everyone else in Aberdeen wanting to dispose of their dead dog will be sent to me.

Meh.

Roast a writer, an agent, or a publisher!

Book Roast is the brainchild of the excellent Chris Eldin, and she's turned on the oven and set the grill for the 2009 season.

Book Roast serves up a variety of authors and books, lightly grilled and seasoned with humor. First dishes will be one hot publisher, two terrific agents, and six fabulous authors.

It's a great chance for readers to hop on and find out what writing and publishing is really like.

The launch line-up is:

Monday, Jan 12: Mystery Publisher
Tuesday, Jan 13: Eric Stone (my agent-sibling!)
Wednesday, Jan 14: Agent Lucienne Diver
Thursday, Jan 15: Barrie Summy
Saturday, Jan 17: Elysabeth Eldering

Monday, Jan 19: Mystery Publisher
Tuesday, Jan 20: Traci E Hall
Wednesday, Jan 21: Maggie Stiefvater
Thursday, Jan 22: Agent Nathan Bransford
Friday, Jan 23: Jennifer Macaire

The smouldering remains of interviewees past and present can be found at www.bookroast.blogspot.com.

I'll see you there!