Checking facts, with a little help from my friends

Here's something I did to check my facts in The Pericles Commission: I cold called a professor of classical archaeology, one who specializes in 5th century Greece and Persia!

The basic idea should work for anyone. For anything from theoretical physics to the sex life of the lesser spotted boll weevil, there's an expert out there, and if you're very lucky, they'll be as kind as Professor Margaret Miller was to me.

Margaret not only answered my questions with the greatest patience and attention to detail, but she very kindly offered to read the entire ms. Which was generous beyond measure since she had her own academic book to write at the same time.

As she read, I lived in daily fear of an email saying something like, "Gary, you idiot, character X was definitely dead in 461BC." Or, "That building didn't exist then." Or, "Didn't you read Obscure Reference Z which proves your entire premise is wrong?"

Incredibly, I survived her check. (mostly)

Margaret did point out a number of errors and improvements, almost all of which involved clothes and furniture. You have Margaret to thank for the characters wearing correct clothing, and the description of Pericles' home office.

Any errors which remain in The Pericles Commission are all my fault, and I wish you joy of finding them.

An odd postscript to this: months later I was doing research for the second book, on relations between Athens and Persia, when I came across an interesting reference. I started to read. The book I’d found was very useful stuff. Wow! Who wrote this? I checked the cover, and it said, Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC, by Margaret Miller.

Thank you Margaret!

Yay for Rebecca Cantrell and A Trace of Smoke

Back in December, I listed my book picks of 2009. Top of the list, as one of my two standouts was this:

A Trace Of Smoke, Rebecca Cantrell

I am delighted to report that the winner of the Bruce Alexander award for best historical mystery of 2009 has gone to...Rebecca, for A Trace of Smoke!

What impresses me most about this book is it takes on such a tough subject: 1931 Berlin, the Nazis are on the rise, the heroine is a woman reporter, and the victim is a transsexual working a gay bar. You'd think this premise would be the kiss of death, but Rebecca handles it beautifully by matching her writing to the setting.

The writing style is rather stark, which reflects the reality of life then, and I have a personal theory that the writing reflects German in some sense, so that when you read, it's as if you're reading it in the original language. (It might help that I speak a little German, so I can see how if you threw some verbs to the end of the sentences, it could have a Germanic feel.)

The effect is to totally take you to the time and place.

Yay for Rebecca!

The Curse of the Alcmaeonidae

It sounds like the title of a really bad horror movie, but it was a for-real curse that happened in 632BC.

There was at that time in Athens a famous Olympic victor called Cylon. Like many famous people to this day, Cylon assumed that fame in one field guaranteed success in another. He should have consulted with a career advisor, because unfortunately his chosen new life plan was to make himself the Tyrant of Athens.

In his defence, it must be said that Cylon was probably encouraged by his father-in-law, who happened to be the tyrant of a city called Megara, just up the road. Sometimes it can be really tough for a guy to impress the wife's family.

It all went horribly pear-shaped when Cylon gathered together his friends and attempted an armed takeover. He seems to have assumed the common people of Athens would flock to his leadership when they saw what was happening. But when the fighting began, the people of Athens were notable by their absence, and Cylon and his followers had to retreat to the temple of Athena atop the Acropolis. (Not the Parthenon. The Parthenon would not be built for another 200 years.)

Then Cylon managed to escape, leaving his hapless friends trapped inside the temple, to face the consequences of his ambition. By the end of the day, Cylon had set a new record for total leadership FAIL.

Now everyone had a problem. As long as the coup plotters stayed inside the temple, they were safe, because all Greek temples had sanctuary. Anyone who harmed a person under the protection of Athena was looking at some serious trouble. (Cylon's friends were neither the first nor last to rely on temple sanctuary for protection; it was perfectly normal for pursued criminals to make a beeline for the nearest altar.)

Negotiations began between the coup plotters and the archons (city officials). The archons convinced the men to come out, in return for a fair trial. I can't imagine what fair trial the plotters thought would result in them surviving, but presumably they planned to argue it was all Cylon's fault.

There are different stories about what happened next. The most dramatic says the plotters emerged, tied to a rope which they'd fastened at the other end to the cult statue of Athena within the temple, to maintain their connection with the Goddess.

Another version says the archons swore before Athena that the plotters would have sanctuary while the law took its course. Either way, everyone agrees the men were under the protection of the Goddess when they emerged to go to the place of trial, which certainly would have been the adjoining rock of the Areopagus.

Among the archons was a man called Megacles, from the genos (family) Alcmaeonidae (ALC-MAY-ON-ID-AY). When the friends of Cylon were out in the open, the archon Megacles and all the men of his family fell upon them and killed them.

No one cared about the dead plotters, but the men of the Alcmaeonidae had just broken the sacred sanctuary, and that was a big deal. A very big deal.

Megacles claimed (in the rope version) that they'd seen the rope break, meaning Athena had repudiated her protection. But that weak excuse didn't wash.

At once a curse fell upon the family - in Greek, a miasma - and not just upon the men who committed the crime, but upon every member of the family. And not just those living, but every man, woman and child to be born into the family forever after.

This crime was so bad that the Alcmaeonidae were, in fact, eternally cursed.

To expiate the sacrilege, and to avoid a furious Athena from destroying her own city, Megacles and the Alcmaeonidae were expelled from Athens.

Then they dug up the remains of dead members of the family and threw them out too.

That's the way things stayed for 40 years, until Solon the Wise allowed the family to return, because Solon was a weak-kneed, bleeding heart, soft-on-crime wimp. Or so the dissenting Athenians thought as the accursed family walked back in the gates. Nevertheless Athens failed to be destroyed by the Alcmaeonid presence, and things settled down.

Now the Alcmaeonidae were destined to become a driving force behind democracy. Note that the crime for which they'd been cursed was the ruthless slaughter of would-be tyrants.

Eighty years later, a tyrant did manage to take Athens, and the Alcmaeonidae had a very uneasy relationship with him. The family head at the time - another Megacles - married his daughter to the tyrant, which kept the peace for a while, but eventually the Alcmaeonidae were instrumental in removing this tyranny too. Supporting freedom was obviously a family tradition.

Then an Alcmaeonid called Cleisthenes introduced the democratic reforms which led to full democracy 50 years later under Ephialtes. When Ephialtes died, he was replaced by Pericles, who was...you guessed it...an Alcmaeonid on his mother's side.

But it didn't matter how successful the Alcmaeonidae became; whenever a member of the family was put in charge of anything, someone was bound to ask, "But what of the curse?" Even the Spartans raised it when they were dealing with Pericles, 200 years after the crime.

It must be pointed out that the curse on the family was eternal. Which means their descendants living today, of which there must surely be some, are in fact, cursed.

Search and replace in Microsoft Word for uppercase, lowercase, and formatting

Someone asked in the post on advanced search in Word, how you could search for "APLOMB" and change it to "aplomb" or "Aplomb".

The trick is to use the Match Case checkbox, like so:


If when you open search/replace you can't see these advanced options, then click the More button.

This example will match every instance of APLOMB in uppercase. (Notice it says Match Case in the line labelled Options). It will change to AplomB with a capital A and B, because that's what I wrote in the replace box.

This will work with any combination of upper and lower in the Find box. The replacement text will appear exactly as you write it in the replace box.

A much more useless but fun thing you can do is use search & replace to change the formatting of words. Here's an example.

Do the search/replace as before, but when you get to the replace dialogue, click the Format button and select Font (or anything else you like, but I'm using Font in the example).



This gives you the font formatting dialogue box. The example below searches for and replaces the word APLOMB, but not does not change the letters. It changes the font to 26 point, bold italic, comic sans in bright pink. Because, basically, I'm very weird.



The Effects section is very interesting. See all the effects options with filled in checkboxes? That means whatever the formatting currently is, leave it alone. That's the default and it does nothing.

If you click an effect checkbox once, it becomes a tick. That means change the formatting of whatever matches the search to include that effect. I've clicked Outline, so any word that matches will become an outline, as you can see in the preview.

If you click an effect checkbox a second time it completely blanks, which means turn off whatever the effect is. In the example I unchecked the Hidden effect, which means if any matching text had been hidden then it would have been revealed.

When you click OK on the font dialogue, and then click Replace All on the replace dialogue, it will turn every instance of APLOMB in your document into this large, pink, outlined abomination.

You can set virtually any formatting you like, if you can find it under the Format button.

I've never found a single practical use for this feature, but there you are, in case you can think of one.

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.