I moved all 500+ posts from the old blog to their new home. As you might expect, this worked for about 95% of the posts. So now let's talk about the 5%.
Some images didn't carry across perfectly with their formatting. I'm no too fussed about that on the older posts.
All links from inside the blog to the outside world work perfectly.
All links to individual blog posts are hideously broken. So a link inside one post to another post will go into hyperspace.
Sorry about that. I looked at doing a script to update them, but there aren't that many, so it might be easier to fix them manually as they crop up.
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.
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.
