The Marathon Conspiracy (39 page)

“That’s Pindar’s praise song,” Aeschylus said. “I’ve been rehearsing the children all day.”

I took Diotima’s hand and led her between the two columns
of Little Bears. The girls threw confetti over us as they sang our song. I led my wife to our room, then shut the door behind us.

Half of Athens waited outside our door. I knew for sure their every ear was bent, to hear what happened next.

Fortunately, the room was well soundproofed.

T
HIS AUTHOR NOTE
talks about the true history behind the story. All of the places and most of the people are real, and quite a few of the events really happened. That means this note is full of spoilers, so if you haven’t read the book yet, turn back to the front, and I’ll see you again in a little while.

T
HE
S
ANCTUARY OF
Artemis at Brauron was one of the world’s first schools for girls. The great poetess Sappho ran what amounted to a finishing school for young ladies in the century before. I know of no school for girls before those two.

The sanctuary itself was ancient. There’s been a settlement there since Neolithic times. Evidence of the worship of Artemis goes back to at least the eighth century
BC
.

The girls who attended the sanctuary really were called the Little Bears. In the play
Lysistrata
by Aristophanes, the heroine describes the high points of her childhood with these words:

Nothing is known about the staff who looked after the Little Bears. It’s possible, however, to make some educated
guesses. It’s inconceivable that an Athenian father would have entrusted his highly marriageable, nubile, upper-class, teenage daughter to the care of a strange man. The ethics of the time forbade it. In fact, modern ethics largely forbids it too. The teachers of the Little Bears must therefore have been an allfemale crew.

It was the nature of those times that, since virtually all women married, most of the carers were probably older widows, such as Doris and Sabina, with possibly a core of professional priestesses, like Thea and Gäis. Anyone who’s been involved with a girls’ school will realize there are certain challenges. I assume the priestesses at Brauron were not only religious figures, but also teachers, and probably dorm mothers driven to their wits’ end.

T
HE REMAINS OF
the sanctuary still exist. If you visit, you’ll find standing columns holding up impressive-looking stone crosspieces. They haven’t been upright for more than two millennia—that would be a remarkable achievement; they were restored by the first modern excavators, using the stone blocks that they found on the ground.

The stoa at the sanctuary is the site’s most impressive ruin. Its size places a limit on how many girls and staff could have lived there at any one time.

The bridge at the sanctuary is the
only
surviving example of a stone bridge from classical Greece. That this small temple complex had such an extravagance speaks entirely to the fact that this was a finishing school for well-born young ladies. Their doting fathers were the men who controlled the state budget. It would be reasonable to assume the sanctuary got the best of everything.

Though the bridge is still there, the small river it crossed is gone. The water was diverted long ago. Back then, the sanctuary
sat by the sea. These days it’s about four hundred paces inland. The intervening space has been filled by silt.

I made the Sacred Spring larger and deeper than the small surviving spring, purely to force Nico to dive into it. It does seem possible, however, that the spring was deeper and a lot larger in classical times than it is today. The treasure that Nico hauls out of the spring, and which Diotima throws back in on the orders of Thea, is entirely real. It’s been recovered by archaeologists and is now on display at the nearby museum. Among the recovered treasure are many rings, scarabs, vases, and other womanly adornments, including some well-preserved mirrors. At least some of it appears to have been tossed in to save it from being plundered by the Persians, while other items date to hundreds of years before the time of Nico and Diotima.

For the treasure to have survived more than 2,500 years, it must have been well hidden. Archaeologists generally assume that the spring was filled in at the time of the Persian invasion, because no dedicated items have been recovered from after that period, but it might equally be because the Greeks changed their practices at that time. In any case, I have the Sacred Spring open and functioning twenty years after the invasion.

Oddly, even as I wrote this book, archaeologists working at the site made a new discovery that was reported in the news. They found buried treasure at an unexpected location, and the treasure dated to about the same period as my story. This left me biting my nails, wondering if they were about to find something that would destroy my plot, and I sat with fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to alter my story in real time as news came to hand. Luckily, nothing went wrong (yet … but new discoveries are one of the occupational risks of writing historical fiction).

What the archaeologists found were more items like the ones Nico discovers at the bottom of the Sacred Spring. These new
items had been buried north of the spring, in an out-of-the-way place. In fact, Nico and Ophelia must have walked over that spot when they led the bear into battle.

It seems likely that the treasure had been buried to hide it from the incoming Persians. That it wasn’t recovered indicates that whoever buried it didn’t survive the sacking.

O
NE THING
I definitely did
not
make up is that girls were required to sacrifice their toys.

I once gave a talk at my daughters’ school about ancient Greece. I talked about hairstyles, how children dressed, about ancient schools and how children 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
.

It was instantly obvious to me that Diotima would have cheated the system.

The dedication of the toys is obviously a coming-of-age ritual. A maiden puts away her childish things before she becomes a wife. More accurately, it worked like this: When a girl was born she was a kore, which means maiden. When she was betrothed she became a nymphe, and nymphe she remained until motherhood, when she became a gyne. This is obviously the source of our modern word nymph, but the meaning has changed somewhat. The closest modern equivalent for the ancient nymphe would be the highly respectable debutante.

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 within the temple. Then she left without them, no longer a girl, but a young woman.

There are a few surviving dedications that we can read today. The clearest I know of is this one:

T
HESE DAYS WE
think of becoming an adult as a gradual process, but to the Greeks it was an instantaneous event. The adults in this book refer to the girls at the sanctuary as children. Which they are! But at the end of their time at the sanctuary the girls perform their dedication, and from that instant they are marriageable adults.

A proud father would commission a statue of his girl to commemorate the occasion. This was like the graduation photos that families take these days, only back in classical Athens they did them in solid marble. The great majority of statues of girls from the ancient world come from Brauron. The surviving statues are very beautiful and lifelike, so that we have an astonishingly good idea what the girl children of classical Athens looked like.

This instant graduation system might seem tough on the girls, but oddly the boys had the exact opposite problem. Men didn’t obtain their legal majority until their fathers had passed away. It was possible for a sixty-year-old man to still need his father’s permission to do anything (and indeed this happened to the unfortunate son of the playwright Sophocles). This is why in the book Nico, despite having served in the army, must ask his father for permission to leave the city. He will have to continue this practice for as long as Sophroniscus lives.

——

N
ICO AND
D
IOTIMA
have a slight problem when they inspect the bones of Hippias: forensics won’t be invented for centuries to come, and there isn’t a thing they can learn from a pile of musty old bones. I’m afraid
CSI: Athenai
is not a concept. The Greeks held the bodies of the dead in very great respect; even to touch the dead was considered ritually polluting, and human dissection was absolute anathema to them, as it was to virtually every culture until quite recently.

The Greeks believed that a person’s psyche continued after death. It was the psyche that descended to Hades. “Psyche” means breath—in this case the breath of life, in the sense of the soul—and, quite obviously, it is the source of our modern words psyche, psychology, psychiatry, etc. To release a psyche from its mortal remains required a proper burial and, famously, the coin under the tongue with which to pay Charon the ferryman to take you to the underworld. If the proper forms were not observed, the psyche was doomed to remain on earth. Nico and Diotima take it for granted that the psyche of Hippias is hanging around close by.

D
IVORCE LAW WORKED
exactly as the book describes. A man needed only to declare his intention. A woman needed only speak to an archon, one of the elected officials.

The wife was then required to leave the marital home. She would have to go and live with her closest male relative, who typically would be her father if he was still alive, or else a brother. But there was a kicker to this. Not only did the wife leave, but her dowry went with her. Every last drachma. Or if it was property, every last little bit of land. Athenian law was rock solid on this point.

The Greek dowry system was like the ancient version of a trust fund in the lady’s name, to be administered by her husband for her benefit. In the normal course of a happy married life, it
was all in the family, and when the wife died her dowry would be inherited by her sons. But in the event of divorce, the dowry did not belong to the husband. It was the woman’s retirement fund, supplied by her father. This meant that the larger the dowry, the less likely an unhappy marriage was to break down. There was more than one man dependent on his wife’s dowry property for most of his income.

Though divorce was much easier—or at least simpler—back then than it is today, the divorce rate was far lower than in modern times. Also, there was no such thing as gossip rags back then (we’ve definitely gone downhill on that one). Consequently, there are only a handful of documented divorce cases. The cases however make it clear that women could divorce simply by seeing an archon.

This rule led to the most bizarre divorce case in the city’s history.

There was a general and politician by the name of Alcibiades, fifty years after the time of this story, whose wife Hipparete despaired of him because he constantly consorted with prostitutes. Unable to take it any more, she began the walk to see an archon to declare divorce. Her husband, Alcibiades, got wind of this. He turned up just as she was crossing the agora, picked her up bodily, and carried her home. She never tried again.

Alcibiades’s actions were far from the norm—so much so that people were still talking about it hundreds of years after his outrageous behavior. This true story is the basis for my scene in which Aposila makes the same walk, also with a husband prepared to stop her. The difference is, Aposila has Nico and Diotima to protect her.

A
POSILA AND
M
ALIXA
, the mothers of Allike and Ophelia, strike up a friendship in the face of their common woes. Wives socialized by visiting one another’s homes, where no doubt they nibbled on snacks as they gossiped about their friends and complained about their husbands. This was the ancient world’s
equivalent of sitting around the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. The other very frequent activity was going to the agora together, no doubt with a few slaves to carry the purchases.

There were no cafés or clubs, but there were the temples, and it’s known that some religious festivals were women-only affairs. The men were probably intensely curious about what their wives got up to during those. Likewise, there are surviving decorations that show women partaking in athletic games.

It’s perfectly viable and easy for Aposila and Malixa to fib to their husbands about where they’re going when they consult Nico and Diotima. They need only say they’re going shopping, and their husbands grunt and ignore them.