GREEK VERSE
I never intended to write Amber and Clay in verse. My first drafts were all in prose, and they were bleak and stiff. One day, in an effort to shake the cobwebs from my brain, I tried writing a piece in blank verse. It was Hermes’s first speech, and it came out fluently — neither bleak nor stiff.
I next tried using verse to tell Rhaskos’s story. Verse, even blank verse, can do things that prose can’t, and the narrative gained momentum and vitality. At that time, I was steeping myself in Greek literature. I found myself intrigued by a technique used in Greek plays called strophe-antistrophe. I decided to use the English words turn-counterturn for this technique.
Strophe means “turn,” and Greek plays featured a chorus of dancers and singers who circled the stage, singing their point of view about what was taking place. This turn, or strophe, was followed by the counterturn, or antistrophe — a repeat of the same tune with the chorus circling in the opposite direction, often voicing a contrasting opinion. There might also be an epode, which I renamed stance. As the chorus sang the epode, they stood still in the middle of the stage.
Because the strophe and antistrophe were sung to the same tune, the verses had to mirror each other. When I wrote my turn-counterturn pieces, I tried to achieve this effect with syllabics: for example, if character number one speaks twelve syllables in line 14, line 14 for character number two will also be twelve syllables long. The syllabic lines made the turn-counterturn pieces finicky to write, but also fascinating. Because the lines mirrored each other, the two characters tend to reach dramatic peaks at the same time.
Homer’s two great epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were written in dactylic hexameter. The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was inspired by Homer when he wrote his long poem Evangeline. His dactylic hexameter sounds like this:
THIS is the FOR-est pri-ME-val the MUR-mur-ing PINES and the HEM-LOCKS
ONE two three, ONE two three, ONE two three, ONE two three, ONE two three, ONE TWO
It’s an interesting rhythm, but very chanty in English. If you listen to someone reciting Homer in Greek, it’s sonorous rather than chanty. All the same, I wanted to use a little dactylic hexameter, even in faulty English. So there are lines of dactylic hexameter inserted here and there, especially in places where the reader’s view opens to a panorama, or the action quickens.
I used elegiac couplets (dactylic hexameter followed by dactylic pentameter) for the transformation of Thratta into a dolphin. I also used elegiac couplets when Athena narrates part of Sokrates’s trial. Unlike Rhaskos and the gods, Melisto resisted being put into verse, and so her story is told in prose. She does, however, speak in hendecasyllables when she complains about being a ghost (eleven syllables to the line and a strict pattern of strong and weak beats. For some reason, the rhythm seemed appropriate for a ghost).
HISTORY: REAL PEOPLE
Amber and Clay is a historical novel: that is, a combination of story and history. Whenever I read a historical novel, I’m often curious about what is historic and what was made up.
The smallest seed of Amber and Clay was planted when I read a brief play, or dialogue, called the Meno, which was written by Sokrates’s pupil Plato. The Meno features the characters Menon, Sokrates, and an enslaved boy, whom I named Rhaskos.
Sokrates was a real person. Though he was one of the most famous thinkers who ever lived, he never wrote anything down. All the same, we know what he thought because three people who knew him well wrote about him. First and foremost was the philosopher and poet known as Plato. The Greek general Xenophon also wrote Socratic dialogues, and the playwright Aristophanes mocked Sokrates in his play The Clouds. (It is said that when Sokrates saw himself ridiculed on stage, he stood up in the audience and took a bow.) Though the three accounts of him differ, they fit together to show one man: a person who was endlessly curious, talkative, and eccentric. Sokrates had a playful mind, but he was deeply serious about his search for truth. I tried to make Sokrates’s imaginary dialogues with Rhaskos a showcase for his ideas.
The enslaved boy in the Meno is never named. He may not have been a child at all, because in ancient Greece, enslaved men were called boy as long as they lived.
On the other hand, he could have been a child. Sokrates was trying to prove a point about learning and memory, and he chose to question someone who had never been taught geometry. A child might have suited his dramatic purpose better than an adult. Whoever he was, he comes off well in the dialogue. He was honest about what he didn’t know and intelligent enough to solve the problem.
Other real people in Amber and Clay are Alkibiades, Anytus, and Menon himself. (Sokrates’s friend Xenophon knew Menon well. He detested him.) Sokrates had a wife named Xanthippe and three sons, one of whom appears near the end of the book. I gave Plato a cameo appearance on page 266, but I used his real name, Aristokles. In the Menon household, Alexidemus and Thucydides (not the Greek historian) were real people. Galene, Tycho, Timaeus, Lykos, and all the enslaved household members except for Rhaskos are imaginary.
The characters Melisto (and her entire household) and Phaistus (and his whole household) are made up. Simon the cobbler, however, was real, and archeologists have found the site of his shop.
HISTORY: THE DEATH OF SOKRATES
I worry that a reader of Amber and Clay may feel cheated and confused, because the death of Sokrates doesn’t seem to make sense. Why was he put to
