I am indebted to Thomas Scanlon, in his Eros and Greek Athletics, for pointing out the splayed fingers of the little girls running on the krateriskoi. Since the pots are so small, it took trouble to draw those tiny fingers: they must have been important. The splayed fingers suggested bear claws to Scanlon, and from this I decided that when the girls were running, they were impersonating bears. I am also indebted to Susan Guettel Cole’s Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space for pointing out that Brauron was the frontier of Athens, and that the rituals performed there might have been devised to guard the central city. Neither Ms. Cole nor Mr. Scanlon is to blame for the imaginative leaps I took after I encountered their ideas.
A historical novel, like a daimon, is a kind of mule: half history, half story. Every author has to make up her mind how to handle the two halves. I tried to be as accurate as I could with the history — I did not, for example, create a Sokrates who wanted to abolish slavery. But when the facts are unknown, I felt quite comfortable using my imagination. In the case of Brauron, the facts are few, and the chapters are almost entirely my invention.
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