Dedicating your toys to Artemis

I gave a talk at my daughters' school a few months ago, and much fun it was.  They were studying ancient Greece, so I was a fairly natural  addition to the curriculum.  I waffled on for an hour about things that I thought would interest the girls.  I talked about hairstyles, how children dressed (it was the previous post that reminded me of this), about schools and how kids took part in the festivals and how girls went to the sanctuary at Brauron.  Then I mentioned in passing that ancient Greek girls, before they married, were required to dedicate all their toys to the goddess Artemis.

Fifteen minutes later, I was still fielding questions as the girls desperately looked for ways around this evil rule.

They were shocked.

The dedication is obviously a coming-of-age ritual.  A maiden puts away her childish things before she becomes a wife.  Or more accurately, it worked like this:

When a girl was born she was a kore, which means maiden.  When she's betrothed she becomes a nymphe, and nymphe she remains until motherhood, when she became a gyne.

It's not quite the same as the maid, the mother, and the crone that's commonly found in neo-pagan beliefs.  But kore-nymphe-gyne was the true progression that the Greeks used, and the dividing lines are marriage and motherhood.  The dedication of the toys was part of the transformation.  The girl went to the temple, no doubt with her family, where in a ceremony she placed her toys somewhere within the temple, then she left without them; no longer a girl, but a young woman.

Based on the persistence of the girls I spoke to, I have no doubt there was more than one favourite doll that went missing at age 13, that magically reappeared at age 16.  There were probably some other brilliant schemes to save toys.  But in general the girls seem to have followed the rules.  There are a few surviving dedications which we can read today.  The clearest I know of is this one:

Timareta, the daughter of Timaretus, before her wedding, has dedicated to you, Artemis of the Lake, her tambourine and her pretty ball, and the net that kept up her hair, and her dolls too, and their dresses; a virgin's gift, as is fit, to a virgin goddess. 

Dress like a Greek

In every book I've written, I've included a few paragraphs of explanation about ancient Greek clothing. And in every book, I've taken those paragraphs out before it goes to the publisher, because explanation is exposition, and Exposition Is A Bad Thing™.

Herewith, so I can stop typing the same thing over and over, is how to Dress Like A Greek.  This should help next time you're going to a toga chiton party.

To make a basic chiton:

1. Stand and hold your arms outstretched to the sides.
2. Have a friend measure you from wrist to wrist, and shoulder to ankles.  
3. Cut two sheets of linen.  Bedsheets are a traditional source.
4. Dye the two sheets in bright colours.  You can go to town on this.  Greek clothing was as colourful as they could make it.  Typically there'd be a border and within that, some sort of symmetrical pattern.
5. Sew the sheets together down the right hand side, leaving a space for the arms. 
6. You're done with the manufacturing.  Wasn't that simple!
7. Put your right arm through the gap you left in the sewn side.  Use pins — fibulae — to attach the front and back at both shoulders.  Ancient Greek fibulae were ornate, silver affairs.  Large broaches are a decent modern equivalent.
8. Pin the left side.
9. Tie a belt rope around the waist.  This can afford to be tight because, as you're probably noticing by now, there is a lot of extra material.
10. The Greeks didn't have bras, I'm devastated to report.  Tie a rope beneath the relevant bits and then across the chest in a cross and over the shoulders where it can be tied at the back.  With all that extra material up top you can get a similar effect.  Greeks liked to thread colourful strands into the belt and chest ropes to make them pretty.

The woman on the right wears a chiton. The young lady on the left wears a chitoniskos.

To finish off, get hold of a long, wide scarf made of pure wool.  Drape this over your shoulders and down an arm.  This is your himation.

The chiton was the standard dress for all women and upper class men.  The chiton + himation combo was the ancient equivalent of a suit and tie.  It was probably about as practical too.

Diotima is a lady of perfect modesty.  She always wears a chiton.  She has a collection of silver earrings, necklaces and bracelets that display her exquisite taste.   When she has to shoot her bow, she pulls the right sleeve up to her shoulder and hooks it over one of the fibulae.  Her target is unlikely to live long enough to be offended by the fashion crime.

Note that there were no hems in any clothing.  Also, Greek clothing was never cut or tailored.  Two rectangles of fabric is what you have to work with.  I've driven illustrators and book production people to drink by telling them the elegantly tailored tunics that they've put on Nico and Diotima are lovely but wrong.

I should emphasize that, as with modern clothing, there appears to have been considerable variation in the designs.  I should also emphasize that there isn't a single surviving example of a real classical Greek chiton, so everyone's staring at the same vase pictures to guess how they were made.

A chitoniskos is a little chiton.  Boys often wore daddy's old, cast-off chiton, cut down to size.  Take the chiton you've just made, cut it so it ends above the knees. and cut the sides until it's slightly too large for the target child (these kids tend to grow).  Socrates wears a chitoniskos, whenever he can be forced to wear anything at all.


Artisans and middle class workers didn't wear chitons.  There's no way you could do practical labour wearing that thing.  Instead, they wore an exomis.  Chitons are unisex, but the exomis is men-only.  Here's how to make an exomis:

1. Do the stand-and-measure thing as before.  But stop at the elbows, or even less, according to taste.
2. Sew down the right, as before.
3. Now, when you put it on from the right, forget about pins.  Just tie the top left corners over the left shoulder.
4. You're done!

Everything reverses for left handed men.  Sew the left side rather than the right, and tie over the right shoulder.  You can actually tell if someone is left or right handed by which side they wear their exomis knot.

The exomis is obviously very loose, and anyone looking from the left side is going to get an eyeful, but the Greeks weren't exactly bashful and even walking around naked was perfectly acceptable.

Nico almost always wears an exomis.  That's partly because he comes from an artisan family where the exomis is standard daily work wear for his dad, but it's mostly because it's so much easier to battle bad guys with less material to deal with.  The one time he tried to knife fight in a chiton, he tripped over.

Adverbs considered harmful

There was a minor local news item recently which quoted a complaint made to the Australian advertisement review board.  The actual complaint was very silly, but the language used bears a look:

"This advertisement is categorically incontrovertibly irrefutably unambiguously unequivocally indisputably indubitably undeniably unassailably and impregnably in breach. of 2(a) and (c) of the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI) code."

This sentence scores points for vocabulary — perhaps I should say it certainly scores points — but I can't help feeling it tells us more about the person doing the whining than anything about the complaint.  Which is the problem with adverbs.  Though having said that I'm probably at the high end of adverb rates among published authors.

I'm still scratching my head about the impregnably.  Does this mean the rules breach can't be taken?  Or can't be made pregnant?

Horos stones

Ancient Greeks were not particularly good at public records.  In fact, to tell the truth, they sucked at it.

This wasn't as big a problem as you might think; it's only recently that modern people have taken the view that life is impossible unless every little detail gets written down.

There was one point, however, where the Greeks needed to do better, and that was recording who owned what land.  Believe it or not, there was no registry of land ownership.  This made for an interesting problem.

They solved the problem by putting boundary stones around everyone's property.  Horos means limit, or boundary.  A horos stone is a boundary marker with a legal enforceable meaning.  The stones were normally quite large, I suspect they were typically painted white to make them easy to see.  Most, but not all, had something written on them: a standard formula declaring the stone to be a legal boundary.

All land, to be legally owned, had to be enclosed by horos stones placed at regular intervals.  I think the usual interval was probably a stade, that being the length of the Olympic competition field, and the origin of our word stadium.

Here, from the excellent stoa.org, is one of the surviving horos stones for the agora in Athens.  There's an inscription on it that reads, "I am the boundary of the agora."  (Horos stones always spoke in first person.)

Needless to say, there were countless court cases where one farmer claimed his neighbour had moved the boundary stones.  In those cases it all hung on witnesses.  Since the stones were embedded in the ground, moving them would leave fairly obvious holes, even if the culprit filled them with fresh dirt.  Also everyone in the area would know everyone else's business and if the boundary shifted locals would probably spot it.  

If you wanted to sell land, then the law varied wildly from city to city.  In Athens — I'm on shaky ground here, but I think I have it right — both parties had to post the sale with one of the city magistrates for 60 days, after which it was a done deal as long as no one objected.  This rule was presumably to ensure no scammer sold someone else's property.   There was actually no other defense.  I can only assume a few con artists got away with it.  

A new member of the team: say hi to Hannah

The lovely smiling face in this photo is Hannah the Editorial Assistant.  She's a new recruit to Team Keith at St Martin's Press, which is probably why she's smiling. 

Hannah's holding the very first jacket to come from the printer for my next book.  This is the first time I've seen the entire jacket too.

I have a feeling this is Hannah's first foray into the wild and wacky world of publishing.  I wish her many long years of success, and hope she manages to keep her sanity more or less intact.  Welcome Hannah!