Aristophanes

Hebe (Robin) is looking for alternatives to Herodotus for her Greek classics group. Anyone who blogs about coffee foam and quotes Socrates has to be a nice person, so I gave the question some thought.

I'm guessing the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War are all too obvious. The group probably did them to death before turning to Herodotus. So assuming they're ruled out, what's next?

Aristophanes!

Please read Aristophanes. He's hilarious.

Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, is one of the greatest comic playwrights of all time. My personal top three list is Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and Spike Milligan. In fact, Aristophanes's work and the Goon Shows bear a striking resemblance to each other.

Most of what he wrote is still very accessible today, though it's true that the more history you know, the more jokes you get. The two best of his plays for a modern reader are Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens go on a sex strike until the men make peace with the Spartans, and The Clouds, which made fun of the philosophers via the Thinking Shop, and starred Socrates as a character. When The Clouds was first played, Socrates stood up amongst the audience so everyone could see who the play was about.

Here's a passage from The Clouds in which a student is teaching Strepsiades about maps.

Student (pointing to a map): Over here we have a map of the entire world. You see there? That's Athens.

Strepsiades: Thats Athens? It can't be, I don't see even a single law court open.

Student: It's quite true, it really is Athens.

Strepsiades: Then where are my neighbors of Kikynna? [a suburb of Athens - Gary]

Student: Here they are, and you see this island squeezed along the coast? That's Euboia.

Strepsiades: Oh I know that! It was Pericles who squeezed it dry. But where's Sparta?

Student: Sparta? Right here.

Strepsiades: THAT'S MUCH TOO CLOSE! Move it further away.


Think about how much you just learnt about Athenian life from those few jokes. You can actually learn more about real life in Classical Greece from a single Aristophanes play than all the tragedies put together.

Despite the lampooning, Socrates and Aristophanes were friends. In the Symposium, Plato has Aristophanes and Socrates hanging out together. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is all these guys who we revere today as world-class geniuses all knew each other. Can you imagine being at a party with this bunch?

The Strange Case of the Missing Gary

In case you haven't heard the screams of joy emanating from my house, be it known the following message is up on Publishers Marketplace:

FICTION: MYSTERY/CRIME
Gary Corby's THE EPHIALTES AFFAIR, set in Periclean Athens, to Keith Kahla at Minotaur, with Kathleen Conn editing, in a nice deal, for publication in Fall 2010, by Janet Reid at FinePrint Literary Management (world).

Which means, come September/October next year, you'll be able to read the book!

Alright, it's not exactly like that on Publishers Marketplace. I colored in the names and the pub date. So far I have resisted printing it off, covering it in fairy sparkles, and hugging it in bed at night.

This almost didn't happen.

When I started querying agents in the US, I did my research like a good boy, and came across someone called Janet Reid.

Here was a successful, established literary agent in New York who loved mysteries. She sounded just wonderful for me, so clearly this was never going to fly. I didn't have that kind of luck.

To start with, a manuscript assessor I'd talked to had told me the chances of getting anywhere in the highly competitive New York market was indistinguishable from zero. Secondly, all the advice I'd read said new writers should look for new agents, still trying to build up their lists. So, a great agent with an established list in NY? Not a hope in Hades. Obviously. Nevertheless, if you don't try you certainly won't succeed, so Janet went on my query list. Out went the queries.

Then it occurred to me to move my web site (the one you're reading) from Sydney to the US, to save most of my readers that extra half second of pageload time. It was hardly important, but it was simple to do. I thought.

The web host tranferred the site, turning back on an old security certificate which I had turned off months before. I was now the only person on the planet who could see my web site, because I was the only one with that old certificate loaded. But I didn't know that, because the only computer I used to check the web site was my own. Because I am an idiot.

My email accounts hadn't been transferred with the server. But I didn't know that because I didn't check email after the transfer. Because I am an idiot.

Life went on. I hadn't received any email, but that was no surprise because I was only using that address for writing, I'd only sent the queries a week ago, and no agent was going to respond within a week.

Except Janet.

A week after sending the queries, close to midnight, my wife Helen was cleaning out an old online email account which we use as a spam catcher. Everyone has an account like that; the one you enter for web sites and business where you don't trust them not to spam you, or sell your address. Helen had her finger poised over the delete button to erase hundreds of spam, when she said, "There's an email here that looks real."

It was real. This is what it said:

you queried me.
I wanted to read more!
Your email bounced, your website is closed.

I resorted to posting on my blog and some folks found this email attached to your old website.

Get in touch if you'd still like me to read the pages!

Best,
Janet Reid

This was weird. I checked my web site, and it was up just fine. My wife checked it from her PC. It was inaccessible. Uh oh. After some fiddling I work out what's gone wrong.

But that's only the web site. Email should still be working, shouldn't it? I check the email accounts. They're kaput. Worse than kaput, they're non-existent.

I found Janet's blog, and there I read:

Gary Corby, where are you?

Your email bounced back.
Your website is gone.

I want to read pages.
You're making it hard to do so!

Last chance!The time required to move from normal body state to near heart attack is approximately two seconds, as I learned at that moment. Eight people have been trying to track me down. The comment from Travis Erwin is spot on: "Gary, I hope you are reading and realize this is definitely going above and beyond." Yep. Sha'el, Princess of Pixies found the old email account Janet had used to send me that email.

By 2 am I'd fixed the web site and had the email accounts back and working, and tested. Then I sent Janet a groveling apology. Then I hopped on to Janet's blog and thanked all those nice people looking for me, and there was much rejoicing and mirth at my discovery.

This is certainly a novel and interesting way to call attention to yourself. It's worked out brilliantly for me, but if you're thinking of doing the same thing to differentiate yourself, I wouldn't recommend it.

Pericles' Funeral Oration...or was it Aspasia's?

In 430B.C., at the end of the first year of the war against the Spartans, the Athenians gathered, according to their custom, for a commemoration service in honor of their fallen.

Pericles stepped forward, and proceeded to deliver possibly the greatest speech we have from the ancient world. There are speeches from Rome to compare, but none is as well known as Pericles' Funeral Oration.

Pericles not only praised the dead, but set forth everything that Athens was, and hoped to be, everything that made an Athenian proud of his city: the democracy, equality of all men under law, freedom of speech, and their open society. It all sounds remarkably modern. This is the speech in which Pericles called Athens, "the school of Greece," a phrase which reverberated through history so strongly that 1,900 years later during the Renaissance, Michaelangelo et al. were referred to as belonging to the school of Athens. It's also where Pericles said, "the whole earth is the tomb of heroes."

The only comparable speech in history would be the Gettysburg Address. The parallels are so strong, some people have speculated how much Pericles may have influenced Lincoln. Though Pericles's speech is much longer, the structure of the two is almost identical.

Except...it might not have been Pericles influencing Lincoln. It might have been his girlfriend, Aspasia.

Aspasia of Miletus was, to put it mildly, a remarkable woman. She probably arrived in Athens as a hetaera: a combination of high class prostitute and salon hostess. The rich and powerful of Athens clamoured to get invitations to the parties held by the best hetaerae. The hetaerae were the only women in Athens with access to a good education; they needed it, to be able to recite poetry, sing, play music, discuss the affairs of the day with the men running things, and keep those men amused. What set Aspasia apart from the others was that she was very, very smart, and her particular skill was rhetoric.

Pericles met Aspasia at some point in the 440s, presumably at one of those parties, and fell madly in love with her. It's not known whether they formally married, but Aspasia was very happy to put away her old profession and move in with him. They remained a close couple until the day he died. In fact, it was an open scandal that every morning, Pericles was seen to kiss Aspasia goodbye at the door to their house, before he set off for work. The scandal was not that Pericles had taken up with a hooker, but that we was pashing her in public; definitely not the done thing in those days.

Aspasia's brilliance shone through at once, to the point at which men like Socrates turned up at Pericles' house to talk with her, not him. Socrates credited Aspasia with being his teacher in rhetoric. Interestingly for anyone who's read my first book (not many yet, but we're working on it...), the only other woman Socrates credits among his teachers is a certain priestess from Mantinea, called Diotima.

After Pericles had delivered the Funeral Oration, the rumor went round that Aspasia, not Pericles, had written it.

We know the rumor because Plato passed it on in his book Menexenus, which relates the usual Socratic dialogue between Socrates and...you guessed it...Menexenus. Starting from section 235e, from the Perseus Digital Library, it says:

Menexenus
And do you think that you yourself would be able to make the speech, if required and if the Council were to select you?

Socrates
That I should be able to make the speech would be nothing wonderful, Menexenus; for she who is my instructor is by no means weak in the art of rhetoric; on the contrary, she has turned out many fine orators, and amongst them one who surpassed all other Greeks, Pericles, the son of Xanthippus.

Menexenus
Who is she? But you mean Aspasia, no doubt.

Socrates
I do and; also Connus the son of Metrobius; for these are my two instructors, the one in music, the other in rhetoric. So it is not surprising that a man who is trained like me should be clever at speaking. ...[snip]... but I was listening only yesterday to Aspasia going through a funeral speech for these very people. For she had heard the report you mention, that the Athenians are going to select the speaker; and thereupon she rehearsed to me the speech in the form it should take, extemporizing in part, while other parts of it she had previously prepared, as I imagine, at the time when she was composing the funeral oration which Pericles delivered; and from this she patched together sundry fragments.

Menexenus
Could you repeat from memory that speech of Aspasia?

Socrates
Yes, if I am not mistaken; for I learnt it, to be sure, from her as she went along.

Plato(!) has just said that Aspasia wrote the most important speech of the ancient world. Now Plato put many of his own words into Socrates' mouth, but he has no axe to grind here, the odds are fair he is reporting something Socrates actually said, and Socrates was in a position to know the truth of which of them wrote it. Furthermore, among Plato's readers were certainly men who had stood before Pericles when he delivered the speech. There's no way Plato could have got away with this claim unless it was a common belief.

It's easy to see how this could happen. Imagine you are Pericles; you have an important speech coming up, but you also have to run a city in a dire state of war. At home, your wife just happens to be the world's greatest living exponent of rhetoric. Why would you not, when you got home that night, say, "Honey, run me up a speech, will you?"

Though we can never know for certain, the evidence is strong that the speech which defined the legacy of Athens was written by a former high class hooker from Miletus.

The Voting Age in Athens

Brandi asked a question that made me think, in my post about The Long, Long Childhood of the Greeks. If you were a legal child, did that prevent you from voting?

The answer is no, you could vote even if your father was standing right next to you. (Which he may well have been to make sure you voted the way he wanted.)

But it raised the obvious next question: what was the voting age?

It took me a while to dig out the answer, but here it is. Men who were citizens got the vote from age 18. Aristotle's Athenian Politics, Chapter 42, Section 1, courtesy of the Perseus Digital Library, says in part:

The present form of the constitution is as follows. Citizenship belongs to persons of citizen parentage on both sides, and they are registered on the rolls of their demes at the age of eighteen...

A deme was like a combination of suburb and sub-tribe.

The rule that to be a citizen both your parents had to be citizens was introduced by Pericles himself, and he got hoist on his own petard by that one. Later on, he fell desperately in love with Aspasia of Miletus, and they had a son, also called Pericles, who of course could not be a citizen because his mother wasn't. Pericles had to go to the people and beg them to overlook his own law. He got nowhere until be broke down and sobbed before the entire populace, a major event since Pericles prided himself on his public composure. The people, having had their fun, duly enrolled Pericles the Younger as a citizen.

Only men had the vote. Women were losers, I'm afraid; so were slaves (no surprise there) and resident aliens (called metics) of whom there were lots. The good news is, the franchise extended over not merely the city, but all of Attica, the quite large region of southern Greece controlled by Athens. Of course you had to be physically present in the city to vote, there being a distinct lack of internet at this stage, but people did come in for important issues.

As a percentage of total population, the franchise wasn't huge, but the amazing thing is that there was a franchise at all. This was the world's first democracy and they fiddled with the basic laws constantly to fine tune the system, which was surprisingly complex when you look at it in detail.

Wikipedia incorrectly (as usual) says that men didn't get the vote until after they'd completed their army training, but I can forgive them the error just this once because the two came closely together. Every male citizen as soon as he reached adulthood, was required to serve two years as an Ephebe (trainee-recruit) in the army. So pretty much the moment you got enrolled to vote, you were whisked off for 2 years of no doubt hellish boot camp. No exceptions. Probably the first time lots of men got to vote was when they were released from the army at age 20.

There was a higher age restriction on holding public office. You had to be 30+ years old to be an archon (civil leader), or a strategos (military leader...you'll never guess where we get our word strategy from), or be a member of the council which managed the affairs of the general assembly.

Something people in our modern democracies don't entirely get about Athens, is that back then, people were voting all the time. There was none of this modern vote-once-every-4-years-and-then-let-someone-else-run-the-country rubbish. The entire voting populace formed the entire parliament. If you didn't like the way things were going, then there was no one to blame but yourself, because you and your neighbor voted for it.

So when I say at age 18 you were enrolled to vote, what I mean is at age 18 you became a legislator in the ruling government.

There were about 40 voting days in every year. Of course not everyone could attend every assembly, so they set a quorum of 6,000 people. Imagine if your own parliament had a minimum 6,000 members!

Confucius and Socrates

Your trivia for the day: By most sources, Confucious died in 479B.C., and Socrates was born in 469B.C. Only ten years apart!

It was theoretically possible for someone to have met them both. I'm 100% sure no one did, but the possibility is sort of cool.

Interesting too that philosophy and science exploded in China and Greece almost simultaneously, as if the world had reached a point where great advances became possible.