Gary in Greece, on Tripod Road

Book research has its advantages when you're the author of The Athenian Mysteries.  I and my family have been in Greece, and it's been a fun and very hectic time.  Here's the view from our hotel room. That's the Acropolis.  It was dusk when we arrived and the first thing we did was take a picture.

So now in the posts to come I will deliver some photos, descriptions, and random thoughts.  Let me begin with Tripod Road.

When I told my literary agent that we were in Athens she replied, "Walking in the steps of Nico and Diotima!"

I replied, "It's funny you should say that, because the hotel we're staying at is on Tripod Road."

In the books, my hero Nicolaos and the lovely Diotima have to walk up and down Tripod Road almost every day.  It's the main road from their house to the agora.

Tripod Road was lined with victory tripods, put up by the winners of the choral contests at the arts festival called the Great Dionysia.  Pericles himself had a victory tripod on Tripod Road, because he funded a winning play.

These days Tripod Road is called Nikodimou Street, but we know it was the original Tripod Road, because there's a single surviving tripod.  It's called the Lysikrates Monument, erected by a very happy fellow named Lysikrates to celebrate a victory at the Great Dionysia some time around 334BC, and it's known to have been built on the west side of Tripod Road.  Here it is, and it's about 100 meters down the road from where we're staying. 

Yes, I know it doesn't look remarkably like a tripod.  The victory monuments became very ornate over time.

So this means every time we walk down the road for the inevitable evening dessert of waffle and chocolate sauce, we are in fact walking in the footsteps of Nico and Diotima.

Classical Greek music

Music is a Greek word and comes directly from the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus who inspired men in the arts.  Mousike techne was the technique of music.  The particular Muse who inspired music was named Euterpe, a name that will be familiar to readers of my books since it's also the name of my heroine Diotima's mother.  

As it happens, we have some surviving notated ancient music.  Which means we can play it.

The ancient Greeks created a tuning system that was the direct ancestor of our major scale.  Their idea was to use a sequence of perfect fifths that wrap around at the octave boundary.  This idea was so successful that we still use it today, slightly modified.

If you check the sequence of major scale notes in our modern tuning system, you'll find that the sequence of root -> fifth -> second -> sixth -> third -> seventh -> fourth is indeed a sequence of fifths (7 semitones each jump), except for the fourth, which is only a 6 semitone jump so that the gap from fourth to the octave would be a perfect fifth and thus complete the cycle.  This was squeezing the ancient system onto a modern instrument with twelve equally spaced pitches, but it works well enough.


So the Greeks invented the white keys on the piano, but they had no idea that the black keys existed. The old tuning system is called Pythagorean, because the first person to write about it was Pythagoras. That's the same Pythagoras who did the theorem about triangle sides that you learned at school. Pythagoras's book is lost, but we know bits of it because Plato, Aristotle and a few others quoted Pythagoras in their own books.

Thus the major scale is at least 2,600 years old (and is probably much older). 

There's also a surviving gravestone on which was written a short piece of ancient music. It's called the Song of Seikilos.  That's it to the left.

The first section is a standard inscription.  It says something like:  I am a gravestone. Seikilos placed me here, an everlasting monument of deathless remembrance.

 Then the next section is a song!  This is hugely important because it's the oldest known complete song for which there is no doubt whatsoever what the notes are.  The lyrics are the engraved words (of course).  But just above the letters you'll see funny, smaller symbols.  That's the music notation.  The position of the symbol above the word shows when to play the note as you sing.  Since it has the lyrics and the melody, this is a lead sheet, in modern parlance.

This gravestone dates to zero AD, give or take a hundred years.  There are fragments of music that are very much older, but none complete, and everything older than the Song of Seikilos requires some educated guess work to reconstruct it.

The lyrics say this:

While you live, shine,
Have no grief at all.
Life exists only for a short while,
And time demands its toll.
There have been lots of renditions of the song.  Here's an instrumental only version that I suspect is very close to what you would have heard if you'd met Seikilos.  This is played by researcher Michael Levy, who built a period instrument.









Honey of Trebizond

I wouldn't recommend putting this on your morning toast, but here is how to make honey of Trebizond.
  1. Plant an entire field of deadly poisonous plants.  
  2. Introduce a bee nest.
  3. Let the bees collect the pollen.
  4. Collect the honeycomb.
The honeycomb and the honey will be toxic.  This really works.  How do we know that?  Because it happened in real life.

Back in ancient times, toward the end of the Roman Republic, the great General Pompey led an army into Asia Minor where he faced the rather competent local ruler Mithridates.  One of his detachments passed through Trebizond, or at least, they tried to.  The locals knew that the honey thereabouts was poisonous, due to the large number of toxic rhododendrons in the area.  But the Romans didn't know that.  They ate the honeycomb and became ill.  The locals immediately attacked and slaughtered the Romans.

Here's what it says in Strabo's Geography (from the Perseus version):
The Heptacomitae [those are the locals] cut down three maniples of Pompey's army when they were passing through the mountainous country; for they mixed bowls of the crazing honey which is yielded by the tree-twigs, and placed them in the roads, and then, when the soldiers drank the mixture and lost their senses, they attacked them and easily disposed of them.

Alas, if only they had paid attention to the classics.  Three hundred and fifty years earlier, the famous mercenary captain Xenophon had written about his men falling ill after eating honeycomb in the same area.

Here's what Xenophon had to say:
Now for the most part there was nothing here which they really found strange; but the swarms of bees in the neighbourhood were numerous, and the soldiers who ate of the honey all went off their heads, and suffered from vomiting and diarrhoea, and not one of them could stand up, but those who had eaten a little were like people exceedingly drunk, while those who had eaten a great deal seemed like crazy, or even, in some cases, dying men. So they lay there in great numbers as though the army had suffered a defeat, and great despondency prevailed. On the next day, however, no one had died, and at approximately the same hour as they had eaten the honey they began to come to their senses; and on the third or fourth day they got up, as if from a drugging.