When archaeology and art collide

Okay, how's this for weird...the erudite and always interesting RogueClassicist has just posted on his blog that archaeologists this month have made a new discovery at the sanctuary at Vravrona.  They've uncovered -- at an unexpected spot -- wooden votive statues, a pair of fine sandals, and other bibs and bobs.

Not such a big deal, you might think.

 But Vravrona is the modern name for ancient Brauron. And the sanctuary at Brauron is the setting for my fourth book.

These guys are digging up my murder scene.

OMG. If they find anything that destroys my plot, I'll have to insist they bury it again.

Ionia Sanction giveaway on GoodReads.com!

St Martin's Press is running a giveaway of The Ionia Sanction on GoodReads.com.

 There are 9 copies to be won.  Hop on over to the entry page, by clicking this link, and try your luck!

Entries close October 20, so you have two days to get there, as of the time I post.

Good luck!


Quick addition: This is a US only offer, I'm afraid. The books are being supplied by my US publisher, who's interested in selling to the US. Which isn't entirely unreasonable given that it's their promotion. Penguin Australia very kindly offered books last year for an Australian giveaway, when The Pericles Commission released, and it was hugely successful. I hope to do the same again this year . So please hang in there!

School daze

School in classical Athens wasn't compulsory, but a father who didn't send his boys to school had about the same status as a leper, so effectively every boy got an education.  Girls were educated at home; which might annoy the ladies reading this, but in fact by the time I'm finished you might think the girls were the ones better off.

The first thing all kids were taught was how to read and write.  Literacy levels were high.  Very high.  And that applies to both women and men.  They might have had the highest general literacy until our modern age; and even then there are a few modern nations with literacy levels probably below that of classical Athens.  A common insult of the time was to say of someone, "He can't swim and he can't read."  Meaning, "This guy is a total idiot."    In a civilization of islands that relied on trade, swimming was a basic survival skill.  By implication, so too was reading.  

Every play, every history, every document of the time takes it for granted that the women could read as well as the men.  Also, plenty of pottery shows women playing musical instruments.  Literacy and music covers off two thirds of the male curriculum.

The boys learned these things: reading and writing, music, poetry, "wrestling" (sport), and the big one...reciting Homer.

A boy who didn't learn his Homer to a minimum standard could expect some beatings.  Homer was way too large for any normal person to remember it all, but there were core parts everyone had to know.  (Though having said that, Diotima can recite all of Homer end to end, and so too could a professional bard of the time).  If you read any dialogue from the period — the dialogues in Plato are a good example — you'll see that educated Athenians threw in quotes from Homer in their conversation in much the same way that Victorian period Englishmen threw in Latin tags.  I don't do that in my stories because it would drive you insane, though I've popped in the occasional easily recognized tag.  In The Ionia Sanction, as an experiment I put a quote from Homer at the top of every chapter.  The one at the start of chapter one is, "Evil deeds do not prosper; the slow man catches up with the swift."

With every boy going to school, there were obviously a lot of schools.  Almost certainly every deme had its own school, and the more populous demes probably had several.  (A deme was like a suburb; in fact many ancient demes are suburbs in modern Athens.)

There are numerous texts from the time extolling the virtues of a good beating to instill moral fiber in the weak.  The same didn't apply to the girls. Dr Arnold of Rugby School would probably have approved.

The Athenians had to pass a law limiting the school day to from dawn to dusk.  I'm not kidding.  No doubt when it was passed, the teachers grumbled how kids had it too soft these days, but they seem to have stuck to the letter of the law.  So an Athenian boy rose before dawn, arrived at school as the sun peeked over the horizon, and returned home when it was dark.  And let me point this out...no weekends!  Religious festival days were the only respite for the boys.

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.