Laches, Plato names Lysimachus, the son of a famous statesman, as a close friend of Sophroniscus, in which regard he dines with the family in The Pericles Commission. The connection is surprising because Pericles and Xanthippus were wealthy landholders and Sophroniscus was, at best, a middle-class artisan.
The trial of Nicolaos descends into farce, but there is very little that happens at his trial that did not happen at one time or another. Athenian juries were huge: the minimum size was 101 jurors, and numbers as high as 501 were perfectly normal. The 1,001 jurors who hear Nico’s trial is high, but not surprising considering the importance of the case. For comparison, the number of jurors who heard the infamous trial of Socrates sixty years later is usually given as 501, but that’s because 501 was the average jury size for a case of heresy.
When Euterpe rips off her dress before the jurors, she is anticipating by more than a hundred years the trial of Phryne the hetaera. Phryne was the most sought-after courtesan of her day and a stunning beauty. Praxiteles, the greatest sculptor of ancient times, used Phryne as the model for his most famous work, the Aphrodite of Knidus. This got Phryne into trouble. By posing as Aphrodite she was claiming to be as beautiful as the Goddess of Love. Phryne was charged with impiety, the same charge that had got Socrates killed.
Needless to say, the best lawyer of the day was among her lovers. Hyperides struggled to save her, but he was failing because the complainants had her dead to rights; for a mortal to pretend to divine attributes was a crime. It looked like Phryne would be sent to her death. With nothing to lose, Hyperides walked over to Phryne, standing in the court, and in one movement ripped down her dress.
The entire (all male) court took a close look at Exhibit A.
The charges were dismissed.
Phryne thus became the only woman in history to be declared divinely beautiful, by order of court.
I stole this famous incident wholesale for Euterpe. Or an alternative explanation is Hyperides, who as a lawyer had a fine appreciation for precedent, recalled Euterpe’s dramatic gesture of a hundred years before and was inspired to try the same for his own client.
Pythax is my invention, but the Scythian Guard was very real. The Scythians were a barbarian people far to the north. The Scythian Guard of Athens was created after the Persian Wars when three hundred slaves, supposedly Scythians, were bought for the purposes of crowd control within the city. We know this from the works of two orators called Andocides and Aeschines. The trick of using a painted rope to quell the rioting mob outside the house of Xanthippus was standard operating procedure and apparently worked very well. The Scythians frequently used the same method to herd reluctant citizens to vote at the Ecclesia and is described in the comic play The Acharnians by Aristophanes.
The bow was the favored weapon of the Scythians and they carried it unstrung when on patrol, as a baton with which to beat, which they would happily do if faced with a disorderly drunk. By the time of Nicolaos it’s unlikely the Scythian Guard were in fact all Scythian. Their numbers would have been replenished with whatever suitable slaves came to hand. It may seem odd that the Athenians allowed slaves to push them around, but the reason Nicolaos gives in the book is correct: it was illegal for one citizen to lay hands on another, but it was legal for a slave under approved circumstances.
There was no police force as we know it. If a crime was committed, it was up to a private citizen to charge the criminal and prosecute him in court. It’s not even certain there was a jail at the time, because there was no such thing as a prison sentence. Criminals were killed, fined, or exiled. There were no other options. I created the holding cell because it makes sense there was one to hold the condemned.
Diotima was a real person, but what little we know of her comes from only one source: a famous book by Plato called Symposium. In it, Socrates credits “Diotima, a priestess of Mantinea,” as one of his early teachers of philosophy. The only other woman listed among Socrates’ teachers is Aspasia, the future wife of Pericles and a genius of rhetoric (which we know from Plato’s Menexenus). This was a world where women received no education. It took enormous natural talent for any woman to rise above such repression.
Diotima must have had a towering intellect for Socrates to speak proudly of being her pupil, and for Plato to have passed it on as simple fact. One wonders how a priestess from another city could have been teaching the young Socrates anything, but obviously it happened, and my answer to the question is as likely as any other.
The inheritance law that forces Diotima to marry Rizon was quite real. It was an absolute imperative of Athenian inheritance that property remain within the family. This, and the rule forbidding women to own property, combined on rare occasions to cause chaos. If there was a son to inherit then there was no problem, but if the only possible heirs were all female, then a search was made for the closest male relation of any sort. The heiress was then required to marry the distant relative, even if she had to divorce to do so, and the man was required to marry the heiress, even if he had to divorce.
Pericles himself was trapped by this rule. He was forced to marry a woman he disliked when an obscure relative, presumably the woman’s father, died, leaving her an heiress. She had to divorce her existing husband to marry Pericles. They suffered an unhappy marriage until Pericles met Aspasia and fell madly in love with her. At this point things got a bit complex, but he was able to divorce his wife with her agreement because she’d borne him an heir, and Pericles took up with Aspasia. They became one of the world’s first power couples, and the ex-wife married the son of Callias.
Callias, the richest man in Athens, made his money from a rent-a-slave business, supplying slaves (short- lived ones) to the state-run silver mines. He was a fervent democrat who fought in the line at Marathon, and also a diplomat par excellence. The most surprising thing about Callias, to me, is that despite his qualities and unlike most of his peers, he did not try to become leader of Athens. Callias was a friend and supporter of Pericles, and yet also the brother-in-law of the arch-conservative Cimon, Pericles’ greatest enemy. He probably exerted a stabilizing influence.
Conspicuously offstage in The Pericles Commission are two men of vast importance: Cimon and Themistocles. Both had been ostracized-which means exiled for a period of ten years-before the book opens. Themistocles was the deep strategist whose battle plan saved the Greeks during the Persian invasion, but who later was accused of treason. He departed about nine years before the book opens. Cimon was ostracized mere months before the rise of the democracy. It was his departure that made it possible for Ephialtes to make his move.
So Nicolaos has survived his first taste of investigation, and he’s foiled one plot, but Athens’ position in the world is very far from safe. The city is caught in a cold war with the vast super-state of the Persian Empire. The Persians may have been beaten twenty years ago, but they haven’t given up.
Athens has perhaps thirty thousand men to serve in the army. Their enemy is the largest empire the world has yet seen, covering all of what today we would call the Middle East, plus Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey, plus the Arabic Peninsula and Egypt. It’s not exactly even odds.
At the same time the league of Greek city-states that united against the Persians is collapsing. The cities bordering the Persian Empire desperately need Athens to remain strong; they know they’ll be swallowed up if Athens weakens. But on the other side of Greece the powerful city-states fear the astonishing and ever-growing influence of the democracy. Corinth is in a vicious trade war with Athens, which will lead to open fighting at any moment. Sparta, an insular, ruthlessly militaristic state in which every citizen is required to be a professional soldier, distrusts the clever Athenians and fears the democracy will spread across Hellas and incite rebellion.
In the coming years Athens will be on the knife edge of disaster, and if they fail now, our future goes with them. They need a breathing space. Fifty years will do. In that time they can invent almost everything that’s important to our civilization. But it can only happen if Athens doesn’t fall, and with the Persians to the east, and Sparta and Corinth to the west, the world’s first democracy is like a deer caught between two wolves.
Nico has his work cut out for him.
In the next book Nico will step inside the Persian Empire to meet Themistocles, who has defected to the enemy. A secret awaits him there, and he’d better be ready to deal with it, because he’ll be inside enemy territory with no one to help him. No one, that is, except a priestess from Mantinea.
