Dead at 60

One thing I've mentioned a few times in passing, is that the people of Ancient Greece were hungry. The population was constantly expanding, but growing food on the rocky ground was no easy matter. Personally, based on my reading, I don't think historians give this point enough emphasis. The necessity to put food in mouths drove some extraordinary customs which today we would consider very icky indeed.

Back in Archaic times, on the island of Keos, it was the custom for men when they turned 60 to kill themselves by drinking hemlock!

This appears to have been a novel means of population control. It was known as the Kean Law.

Here's a quote from Strabo:

It is reputed that there was once a law among the Keans, which appears to have ordered those who were over sixty years of age to drink hemlock, in order that the food might be sufficient for the rest. The law is mentioned by Menander, who wrote, “The law of the Keans is good, that he who is unable to live well should not live wretchedly.”

This comes from Strabo's Geography, section 10.5.6. I've quoted the Perseus edition, and reworked it a little to make it more readable.

Just how stressed and hungry does a population have to be, for something like this to become a custom?

This sort of ugliness inevitably devalues life in general. At some point which can't be dated, Athens invaded Keos. The locals were besieged and, not surprisingly, quickly ran out of food. Here's Strabo again on what happened next:

And it is said that once, when they were being besieged by the Athenians, the Keans voted, setting a definite age, that the oldest among them should be put to death, but the Athenians raised the siege.

The brilliant historical writer Mary Renault mentions this charming custom in The Praise Singer, which is about the life of the great poet Simonides. Simonides was born on Keos. Renault has the father of Simonides suffer a stroke. The father demands the cup of hemlock from his son.

The actual suicide appears to have been carried out at a community festival. The man to die would gird his head in flowers and, presumably, parade and say his farewells, before taking a cup of hemlock. (Hemlock grows naturally on Keos to this day.)

There's a fair chance that if this happened on Keos, then it occurred on other islands too. The law probably didn't need to apply to women, by the way, because the chances of a woman living to 60 were approximately zero. If somewhow a lady survived that long, I imagine the rule applied.

Things did improve. By Classical times compulsory suicide had disappeared everywhere. In fact in some places it came to be considered reprehensible. In Classical Athens a suicide was considered guilty of a crime against the state, because the dead man had deprived the state of a useful citizen. The dead citizen was "punished" by having his hand cut off and buried seperately. Plato has Socrates say at one point that a suicide is like a soldier deserting his post.

So, imagine you were a man on Keos, and 59 years old.

Why all the pushing and shoving?

Since I feel I don't have enough people hating on me, I thought I'd talk about something that Merry asked long ago: What's the origin of the conflict between the Greeks and their neighbours to the east?

This subject is really delicate, to put it mildly. So since I'm only talking about the origins, I'll stick to the ancient stuff and ignore all the modern incidents (of which there are enough to fill a book). This is also, quite obviously, Gary's interpretation of events.

It's not true, by the way, to say the conflict has been between only Turks and Greeks. The Greek world has been in conflict with almost every culture and people who've controlled the land which today we call Turkey. The west coast of Turkey, which is really the area of conflict, was known in those days as Asia Minor. I'm going to call it Asia Minor from now on.

The first record of conflict between the Greeks and people of Asia Minor is the Iliad, by a guy called Homer. Since that's the oldest book in the Western world, this has obviously been going on for some time.

The people of Troy have no genetic or cultural relationship to modern Turks, so whether the Trojan War counts as the origin of the current long-lasting conflict is doubtful. It would be hard to say Greeks and Turks hate each other today because Helen had it off with Paris 3,000 years ago. Also, after the Trojan War, things quietened down a lot. For a few hundred years there was nothing between the sides but the usual raids, pillaging, rape and murder which is the stuff of everyday life.

It didn't really get official again until a rather interesting incident in about 508BC. By this time the Persian Empire, which had its origin far to the east, had expanded until it controlled everything all the way to the coast of Asia Minor. In the same period the ever-growing Greek population had expanded and placed colony cities all up and down...you guessed it...the coast of Asia Minor.

The Greek cities of Asia Minor were therefore under Persian rule. Now, Greek culture is highly individualistic, but the Persians were simply stronger, the Greeks were nothing if not realists, and in any case Persian rule was relatively light. As long as the Persians didn't rip off too much in tribute, the situation was semi-stable.

Athens at this time had recently overthrown the last of the Tyrants, and there was a bitter power struggle between factions for control of the city, a struggle in which Sparta decided to lend a hand to put their own man in charge. The Spartans sent an army. No one had ever beaten the Spartans in battle.

When the Athenians heard a Spartan army was on the way, they at once sent an embassy to the Satrap at Sardis. A Satrap was the Persian term for the governor of a province, and the city of Sardis was at that time the effective capital of Asia Minor. The Satrap of Sardis was a guy called Artaphernes. A Satrap is a powerful man at the best of times, but this Artaphernes also happened to be the brother of the Great King.

The Athenians asked Artaphernes for protection against the Spartans. Artaphernes said that was fine, as long as the Athenians offered earth and water. To offer earth and water is Persian-Speak for submitting to the Great King, and thus become a client state of Persia.

The Athenian embassy said...yes. (!)

The desperate Athenians handed over earth and water on the spot. At that moment, Athens and all of Attica became a part of the Persian Empire.

The Athenian embassy returned to Athens, secure in the knowledge that Athens was safe from Sparta, only to discover the crisis with Sparta was over, and Athens no longer needed protection.

Woops.

The ambassadors got into huge trouble for offering earth and water. Whether or not this was fair is not clear. Greek sources claim the ambassadors acted without authority, but then, they would say that, wouldn't they?

The Athenians decided to...er..."forget" that embarrassing little incident had ever happened. The Persians had better memories.

The Persian leadership, which had not really noticed the Greeks before, suddenly realised they had some irritating people on their western flank. What's more, in Persian culture, to lie was a terrible thing. Persian boys were taught only three things: to ride the horse, to shoot the bow, and to abjure the lie. The Athenian embassay had, in effect, lied in the face of the brother of the Great King.

It was all downhill from here. The Greek cities in Asia Minor revolted against the Persians, and the Athenians heavily supported the revolt, which ended with the Greeks getting their asses whipped.

The Persians decided to fix the problem by putting one of the old Tyrants back in control of Athens. That caused the Battle of Marathon, which ended with the Persians getting their asses whipped.

Artaphernes later sent ambassadors to Sparta, demanding earth and water. The Spartans tossed the ambassadors down a well, saying they'd find plenty of earth and water down there. Diplomacy in those days did tend to be robust.

The next Great King decided to do the job properly, with the Persian Wars.

And so it has gone on. If you're looking for the start of the long term conflict, I think the Athenian embassy to Artaphernes is it. There've been odd moments when one empire or another has controlled both sides of the Aegean Sea, such as the Roman and Byzantine, and at those times it's been quiet. There've also been periods when one side of the other has been too poor to make much trouble. But for those moments, there's been pushing and shoving ever since 508BC.

The ultimate issue is who gets control of Asia Minor. The natural balance of force lies along the coastline, so that the Greeks get all the islands and whoever's on the other side gets the Asian land. From time to time during history, one side or the other has been able to push across, but it always ends with a return to the natural border, which is what we more or less have today.

Pronouncing Ancient Greek

It's much easier to pronounce Ancient Greek words than it looks at first. The funny alphabet is a bit off-putting, but really, once you've got the idea, it's straightforward.

The exact soundings as you would have heard them on the streets of Classical Athens have been lost. Greek is a living language which evolved! There are different theories about the ancient pronounciation and (surprise!) they don't entirely agree with each other. Fortunately, none of us are likely to fall through a time vortex into the ancient past, so if we stuff it up, no one who matters will ever know.

There were a zillion different dialects of Ancient Greek. If you lived back then, you could probably have spotted someone's city the moment they opened their mouths. We're going to ignore all the dialects but one: Attic -- the dialect of Athens. Attic Greek is the language of Pericles and Socrates and Nicolaos and Diotima and Plato and Euripides and Sophocles.

Attic Greek became the trading language of the Mediterranean. As it spread, it evolved rapidly, and became known as koine. The koine dialect is hugely important to this day, because it just happens to be the language in which the Bible was written. It's also the ancestor of Modern Greek.

The sound variations between dialects are real, but not big enough to worry someone who only wants to read Ancient Greek words in a book. So I'll ignore them all and give you a single sound system which works.

My Ancient Greek is very limited, by the way, and there are people reading this blog who are practically fluent. If you are one of those clever people I sincerely hope you'll correct any errors in comments. I'd like to learn something too! So with that caveat, here goes...

Α, α	a	father	alpha
Β, β	b	bob	beta
Γ, γ	g	got	gamma
Δ, δ	d	dad	delta
Ε, ε	e	get	epsilon
Ζ, ζ	z	adze	zeta
Η, η	ê	fête	eta
Θ, θ	th	thoth	theta
Ι, ι	i	hit or ski (take your choice)	iota
Κ, κ	k	kit kat	kappa
Λ, λ	l	let	lambda
Μ, μ	m	met	mu
Ν, ν	n	net	nu
Ξ, ξ	x	box	xi
Ο, ο	o	okay	omikron
Π, π	p	pop	pi
Ρ, ρ	r	rat	rho
Σ, σ, ς	s	sat	sigma
Τ, τ	t	sat	tau
Υ, υ	y	oops!	upsilon
Φ, φ	ph	phone	phi
Χ, χ	ch	khaki	chi
Ψ, ψ	ps	pssst!	psi
Ω, ω	ô	note or saw (take your choice)	omega

There were also these diphthongs (vowels which combined to form a single sound):

ai as in aisle
ei as in fate
oi as in oil (very important to me because it's used for plurals)
ay as in cow (recall the y transliteration makes an oo sound)
ey as in feud
oy as in soup

Notice there are two letters for the different o sounds, where we have one to handle both.

Also there are effectively three letters for our e & i sounds.

The ch of Greek is much like the ch of German. Which means try to say a k while clearing your throat. No sane English speaker wants to do this. You can get away with a kh.

The z, too, is like a German z, which is a tz or a dz sound. Take your pick.

There is no j sound at all. This means Janet is safe from me making her a character.

Loretta asked in the comments of a previous post how to pronounce Phaedo (the title of a book by Plato). That's a fantastic question, because it opens up a small can of worms. An awful lot of Greek stuff comes to us via the Romans. The Romans spoke Latin, obviously, but all educated Romans spoke Greek too. Koine, in fact. But they mangled Greek names just like the Greeks mangled Persian names. And many Greek texts come to us via Latin translations. Here is the name of Plato's book Phaedo, in Greek:

Φαίδων

Try your newly acquired transliteration skills on this word. Notice anything odd?

That's right, the Romans dropped the final n. The "correct" transliteration is Phaidon, and since the ai is a diphthong as per above, the "correct" pronounciation is

FIDE - OWN

The reality is, though, when you're reading a book you really should pronounce the funny words however you feel like. It's not like the historical Phaidon is going to sue you for mispronouncing his name, and it's far more important that you're comfortable. I put a character list at the start of my first book, in which I gave suggested pronounciations for the characters. I didn't even bother looking at my own transliteration chart when I wrote it; I just put in what I thought would be easiest for modern readers to say.

But! If you're looking for something that sounds "accurate". This chart will do the job.

Comment #1,000 has been made

The 1,000th reader comment has been made on this blog! That 1,000 does not include any of my own replies, only comments made by you, dear readers.

We've reached this milestone together - you, after all, wrote all the comments. To each and every one of you, friends and readers, thanks for being here.

I was quite sure comment #1,000 would come from one of the regular writers. In fact commenter 1,000 is first time visitor Judith Engracia, who recently began as an intern at certain literary agencies called FinePrint & Nancy Coffey. Welcome Judith!

It's all right (but not alright) to use a trailing apostrophe in the classical genetive

Carrying on from the previous post, the copyedit style guide did resolve two of the greatest mysteries of the universe.

I wrote a blog post a couple of months ago asking whether ancient Greek and Roman names should have 's or only the trailing apostrophe in the possessive. This turned out to be quite controversial. The definitive answer is in the style guide, which says:

ancient classical names ending in "s" are set with a single apostrophe to form the possessive.

i.e. the correct possessive form is: Pericles' scroll

There you are; St Martin's Press says it, so it must be true. So now everything's all right, but it's not alright.

My long term readers will be amused to hear Copyeditor meticulously replaced every alright with all right.

I'll have to admit defeat on that front. I promise to write only all right from now on. But I'm going to sob quietly as I do the global replace on books 2 and 3.