Interesting ways to execute people in classical Athens

The death of Socrates might give you the impression that classical executions consisted of downing a cup of hemlock, and then drifting off painlessly during an erudite discussion on the finer points of philosophy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hemlock was the execution method for the upper class. Common criminals could expect somewhat harsher treatment.

The laws of Draco specified death for virtually every crime from murder, to shortchanging a customer in the agora. By classical times the Draconian laws had been repealed, but from the number of times they get referenced in court cases it's a fair guess people still had regard to them.

If you were an average convicted crim, you could forget about hemlock. More likely you faced a complex stock which trapped your wrists and ankles. A metal collar was then placed around your neck, and this was progressively tightened until you strangled, or your vertebrae snapped. This is very similar to an execution method popular in Spain up to Napoleonic times. The Spanish too used a metal collar that used a screw to tighten it to either strangle or break the neck, depending on how quickly the executioner worked.

I've read a mild suggestion that there was an execution ground outside the city, on the right hand side of the northern road to Piraeus. I think it certain that such executions must have been carried out outside city bounds, but I know of no archaeological evidence for a location.

It's possible there were stonings for some particularly heinous crimes. If so, then killing your father would have been one of them. There are known rituals in which stonings were acted out. Certainly other cities had stoned their citizens.

The Greeks were much more spear people than sword people. But spears make rotten weapons for executions. There are documented military executions done using swords. Since Greek swords were rather short, this would have been up close and personal. Probably the victim kneeled and was either struck in the back of the neck, as per a mediaeval execution, or else the sword was thrust from above into the heart. Think something like the early scene in Gladiator where Maximus is taken into the woods to be executed (and promptly kills his captors).

The Athenians had one very interesting attitude totally different from other civilizations: they were just as happy if a condemned prisoner simply went away. If someone wanted to run, thus exiling himself forever rather than face death, then that was just fine. In fact they seem to have almost gone out of their way to leave the prison doors ajar. Clearly the Athenians were not a particularly vindictive people, and equally clearly they considered that to no longer be a citizen of Athens was a fate every bit as bad as death, which tells us a lot about how much they valued their citizenship. The number of men who chose to remain and die rather than lose their city is quite amazing.

Recovering old fingerprints

And in other news...researchers at the University of Technology Sydney have found a way to lift previously unrecoverable fingerprints.  Lovely news for crime fighters, not so good for crime writers.  I suspect it's getting harder and harder to write a contemporary mystery in which the traditional puzzle predominates.  It does however underline one of the basic rules of real crime: if you want to murder someone, it's very important to deny the police a crime scene.

How to destroy your brand

I follow Formula 1 racing, mostly because the high technology fascinates me -- these things are basically upside down aeroplanes -- which has nothing to do with either history or writing, but I mention it today for an interesting reason.

F1 has a set of standard races they do throughout the year, each held in various exotic locales. And that's where the fun begins, because one of those locales is Bahrain. Bahrain is ruled by a monarchy that's been somewhat prominent in the news recently for slaughtering its citizens who are demanding a democracy. As crackdowns go, the rulers have been remarkably efficient. In fact just today the BBC reports that the hospital staff who treated the injured have been charged with taking part in illegal protests for criminal ends; also for, hard as this may be to believe, inciting hatred against the ruling system.

The Bahrain F1 race was officially postponed when the violence began. Everyone assumed this was a polite way of saying "cancelled". But no! A few days ago the officials in charge of the racing decided it was all right to go ahead now, because everything's calmer. (It is indeed calmer, because anyone who raises his head gets it beaten.)

Needless to say, every human rights group and pro-democracy movement on the planet has come out snarling about the F1 decision. Even the UK government got itself interested. A number of petitions instantly sprang up. The one that got a lot of traction was by an organization called avaaz.org. (Traction for an anti-race petition...yes, that was a deliberate pun...by Gad I'm witty.)

This petition targets the Red Bull team, which is the most vulnerable to bad publicity because they're leading the competition and they're only in the game to sell their drink products. Those are the red bull drinks which, if this race goes ahead, are about to become as popular as cucumbers.

So far avaaz has just short of 440,000 signatures. Wow, that's an awful lot of people. Since this decision was taken only 3 days ago, I estimate the petition must have gained on average about one signature every 2 seconds, non-stop, for 3 days. And all because some guys thought it was okay to hold a race to collect the management fees.

The Bahraini government is treating it as a propaganda victory, but with almost half a million people annoyed enough to sign a petition, you'd have to assume the team sponsors are seriously displeased. They pay enormous sums to the race teams out of their marketing budgets, for the brand name exposure. So if this race goes ahead, then some of the world's biggest brands are going to have their names pasted all over cars that are racing around inside one of the world's most repressive regimes. The marketing directors must be overjoyed.

Naughty words

The always fascinating Stephanie Thornton sent me a link to this brilliant article on ancient swearing.

I'm not a fan of lots of naughty words in books.  My usual reaction when I see a lot of fucks and cunts in a story is that it's probably badly written.  Unless there's good evidence to the contrary, I assume the author either didn't take the trouble, or didn't have the ability, to find something better.  I can freak you out using only words that are perfectly acceptable in any kindergarten.  In fact, in some ways, that's more powerful.  Some characters must swear a lot, because that's their character, but I doubt that accounts for more than about 5% of the naughty words in books, and like I said, it just dulls the writing.

Across my first three novels, there is precisely one use of the word fuck.  Its appearance is all the stronger for that, and it's used as a verb in its correct Anglo-Saxon sense.  (Yes, I know books 2 & 3 aren't released yet.  I'm sort of cheating by mentioning them, but the thing is, they're already written and I know what's there.)

I find that to write ancient swearing is a surprisingly tough problem.  They really did swear by the Olympian Gods, but that can come across as sort of fake to a modern reader.  "It's a dead body, by Zeus!"  Also, it can look rather contrived if you replace Zeus with another valid deity.  "It's a dead body, by Hephaestus!"

Conversely, since I am translating into modern English what was spoken in Attic Greek, you'd think I could get away with inserting a modern equivalent, but that instantly destroys the ancient atmosphere.  "It's a dead body, by God!"

So what I do, mostly, is make up something that sounds ancient but isn't, but which sounds right to a modern ear.  "Dear Gods, it's a dead body!"

I'm rather fond of "Dear Gods".  The plural Gods instantly takes you back in time, it's not particularly offensive, and it gets across the idea without becoming a speed hump for the reader.  I do use the occasional "by Zeus", but it's almost always for subsidiary characters in contexts where it makes sense.  I don't tend to use other deities  for Greek characters swearing because it might pause the reader if they hit a name in a figure of speech with which they're not totally familiar.  The same rules do not apply to barbarians, such as Persians and Egyptians.  They can be as exotic as they like because they're unfamiliar to Nico too, and it's fine for him to take special notice of all the odd sounding gods.

I'd be interested to know, what do you think might make good swear phrases for a novel in the ancient world?

Attack of the cupcakes

Proving yet again that British Intelligence have the coolest spies in the world, the Daily Telegraph in London reports that MI6 and GCHQ have hacked into an al-Qaeda web site, and replaced instructions on how to build a bomb with a recipe for cupcakes.

If I put something like that in a book, people would tell me to take it out because it was too unbelievable. The truth is, reality is frequently stranger than fiction, but the sad fact is that fiction has to be believable, whereas reality operates under no such restriction.

Top marks for the cutest cyber attack in history.