Casting Sacred Games

Third in Marshal's book blogs is My Book, The Movie, in which authors have a go at casting actors for their characters (without the inconvenience of needing the actors to agree...).

It's surprising how difficult this can be!  Each time I have a go at it, I come up with a different answer.  It's not so much that the characters have changed, but that perception of the actors changes over even a few years.  Though looking back on it, I find I've cast Russell Crowe for Pythax in The Pericles Commission, and then used him for King Pleistarchus in Sacred Games.

For Diotima I had Rachel Weisz in The Pericles Commission, my wife Helen as Diotima in The Ionia Sanction, and now with Sacred Games I think I might have hit on the perfect Diotima.  I'm rather pleased with my idea for Nico too.

Writers Read

The second of Marshal Zeringue's book blogs is Writers Read, where he asks various writers what they're currently reading.  I confess I have fun reading the answers of other writers, since it amounts to recommendations from people who should, in theory, know something about books.

I've answered this question for him three times now, and looking back on my past answers, I'm struck by how totally inconsistent I am.  But I do appear to move in themes.

Right now, I seem to be having a retro period.

The Page 69 Test

In what's become something of a tradition, I've written an entry for Sacred Games at the Page 69 Test.

The idea is for an author to discuss page 69 of his book.  Is it representative?  How does it progress the story?   What, when you get down to it, is really the point of page 69?  Is it merely some halfway point between 68 and a better life on 70?

If you want to see what happens on my page 69, and why it matters (I hope), then click on through!

The Page 69 Test and two other book sites are run by Marshal  Zeringue, someone who cares very much about reading and goes out of his way to encourage the habit.  Thanks Marshal!

The Strange Case of the Unlaconic Laconians

Spartans didn't call themselves Spartans.  Their own name for their nation was Lacedaemon.  (Or Lakedaimon, spelling being variant in these matters.)  A Spartan was a Lacedaemonian.  There were also the short forms Laconia and Laconian.  That's why Spartan shields had the letter lambda (Λ) painted on them.

I prefer to write Spartan rather than Lacedaemonian in my books, and I'm pretty sure you prefer to read Spartan.  But there's an interesting consequence of them being Laconian.

The Laconians had a reputaion for being men of few words.  That's the origin of our word laconic.  When we call someone laconic today, we're saying that they're as short-spoken as a Spartan.

The most famous laconic statement of all occurred at the Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans held for 3 days against an army of 100,000.  (No, I'm not exaggerating the Persian side.)  The Spartans were warned that the enemy was so numerous that their arrows would blot out the sun, to which one soldier named Dienekes replied this was good, because, "Then we will fight in the shade."

A similar situation arose when Philip II of Macedon (the father of Alexander) sent a message to Sparta suggesting they submit to him, because, "If I win a war against you, I will enslave you all."  Sparta sent back a single word reply:  If  

Philip decided to give Sparta a miss.

The Spartan characters who appear in Sacred Games are not laconic.  There are several reasons for this, first being that a book in which half the characters speak in mono-syllables is not exactly a positive.

The second reason is that laconic Laconians must be the exception if they wanted to run any form of society, and then there's the natural variation of personality.  Not all Italians gesticulate when they speak!

Surviving examples of laconic speech aren't everyday speech; they're all pithy statements designed to hammer home a point.    And that, I suspect, is the origin of the laconic Laconian: when they wanted to make a point clearly known, it was just a cultural thing that they did it with a short, powerful statement.

I very much doubt they were as dour as the laconic reputation suggests for this reason too:  that among the Greeks they were known as "crickets" as a nickname, because the Spartans were always ready for a song and a community dance.  That doesn't say laconic to me.

350,000

Something odd happened last night.  As of a few hours ago, 350,000 different people have visited this web site.

That's 350K as measured by unique internet address.  My regular readers probably use several different addresses, but since we've crossed by a thousand or so it probably comes out in the wash.

I never guessed when I started that it would get so much attention.  I thought a few history nerds might drop in from time to time.  Who are you, and what are you doing here?  I offer these observations, based on the stats:

Not many of you comment.  Thanks so much to the lovely people who do leave a word or two.  There've been some absolutely stunning conversations that leave me amazed at your cleverness and knowledge.   In fact, when it comes to brainpower, you guys are scary.

A lot of you are doing homework.  (Hi kids!)  How do I know that?  From the search expressions that bring you here.  Speaking of which...

I am #1 on Google for the search term "ancient Greek toilet".  Says it all, really.

A surprising number of you want to know how to use autocorrect in Word.  Even more of you want to convert all your letters to uppercase.

The most popular posts overall are the ones about bizarre ways to die.  Though the people who visit those via search engines usually just read them and go.  Maybe it was something I said.

About 8,000 of you are in China, which is rather odd considering there's no Chinese edition.  Either that, or I've sold 8,000 English edition books in China that I'm not aware of.  Or maybe they have the world's largest ancient history class.  I suppose we must hope for the last.

Only a handful of you are Greek!

I'm still puzzling over why so much of the comment spam that I have to eliminate points to divorce lawyers in America.  Is there something about ancient history that causes divorce?