The ecclesia, the boule and the prytaneis

I thought I'd have a go at describing the power structure of classical Athens.  Thinking caps on...this is complex.

Sovereign power was held by the ecclesia, and only by the ecclesia.  It was a parliament consisting of every single voting member of the state.  This is what makes Athens the world's first democracy.  Athens was a direct democracy; you didn't elect someone to represent you; instead you turned up to vote for yourself.  Ecclesia remains a word in English to this day and means a collection of churchmen. The church term comes directly from the original Athenian parliament.

There were maybe 25,000 eligible voters.  Obviously they didn't all turn up for every session.  The quorum for a valid vote was 6,000.  On days when there wasn't much happening, they struggled to get enough voters to turn up, so the Scythian Guard would sweep through the agora with a long rope covered in wet paint, to herd the voters to parliament.  Since the Scythian Guard was all slaves, this meant slaves were going around forcing their owners to run the city.

That was the simple bit.

25,000, or even the minimum 6,000 makes for a very large meeting.  To keep things moving, they had a parliamentary management committee called the boule.  Boule means council.  They met at the bouleterion.  Just about every city in Greece had a building by this name.  Even the site for the Olympic Games had a bouleterion.

Everyone in Athens had to belong to one of the ten tribes, which by classical times were purely administrative units.  Every year, 50 men were elected from each tribe to be members of the boule.  That makes a management committee of 500 people.  Clearly the Athenians liked to do things big.  Since the boule set the agenda for the ecclesia, the members of the boule should have been very powerful.  Their large membership and only holding the office for a year kept them in check.

Since boule membership only lasted a year, you could cycle through the entire voting population in 50 years.  Obviously not everyone got a go on that scheme, but the great majority would have.

Because 500 was still too large, they had a management committee for their management committee.  They selected 5 men from each of the ten tribes represented in the boule to form a subgroup called the prytaneis.  So that made 50 men in the prytaneis.  They rotated membership of the prytaneis each tenth of a year.  So if you were elected to the boule, you'd spend 36 days as a prytaneis.

The good news for the prytaneis was, they ate for free -- at public expense -- because they were required to spend their 36 days living in a building in the agora called the Tholos.  The Tholos gets a mention in The Pericles Commission because they were building it at the very moment the book begins.  Most unusually for Athenian architecture, it was designed as a perfect circle.  Members of the prytaneis could call a meeting of the ecclesia -- the entire citizenry of Athens -- at any time.  In effect, the prytaneis could press the emergency alert button.  Which in a few crisis situations they did.

So:  Athens was ruled by the ecclesia of about 25,000 voting citizens.  The ecclesia was managed by the boule of 500 citizens.  The boule was managed by 50 of their number called the prytaneis.

Athens had a very clear distinction between sovereign and executive power.  Much clearer than in modern times, when we tend to mix them up.  Executive power was wielded by the archons for civil matters and the strategoi for military.  Neither had any say (in theory) on what the people decided.  I'll save those for another day or this post will get way too long.

I'm an obvious classical Greek tragic

Apparently I'm an an obvious classical Greek tragic, which I thought was a very funny way of putting it.  I've a feeling my wife will be quoting that for some time to come.  The quote's from a review of The Ionia Sanction, that appeared in The Telegraph in Sydney on the weekend.  The page scan kept on coming out blurry, so here's the text:

WHO reckons ancient history is boring?  Certainly not Australian author Gary Corby, who weaves a gripping whodunit set in classical Greece, 2500 years ago.  

The second of his Hellenic Mystery series, The Ionia Sanction follows on from the first, The Pericles Commission, with clever young Athenian Nicolaos given the job of uncovering a murderer. 

With his tongue set firmly in his cheek, Corby combines real-life and fictional characters in this fun romp, which journeys from Athens to Ionia in the Persian Empire. 

When an Athenian official is murdered, rising statesman Pericles reluctantly gives Nico the job of finding the killer. Nico — who only has a couple of years to prove to his father that he can succeed in his chosen profession before going back to the family's sculpture business — is pragmatic and has no time for philosophers. That's a problem — he has a philosophical 12-year-old brother called Socrates.  

The trail leads from Athens to Ephesus in the Persian Empire, where he finds his girlfriend, the priestess Diotima, an amateur detective whose case is linked to Nico's.  With polite but murderous brigands chasing him and a haughty slave girl, Nico finds himself in the court of the military genius Themistocles, who was once the hero of Athens but now lives in exile and in the pay of Persians.  

While Corby is an obvious classical Greek tragic, he also has a sense of fun and The Ionia Sanction is a real page-turner.  

Chris Herde

A blast from the past

With all the kerfuffle at the moment about new laws to protect artists' copyright, I thought this might be of interest.  

We have about 6,000 books in our house.  One of them is The Second Saint Omnibus, by Leslie Charteris, published in 1952.  The Saint was one of the great adventure heroes of last century, and Charteris one of the great writers.  Even people who've not read the books know The Saint from the TV series starring Roger Moore.  In 1952 -- note that date -- Leslie Charteris had this to say in the preface of his book.  

I read a few books every year.  Not so many as I should, I guess; but as many as I have time for...and when I read, I am just as callous about hungry writers as you are.  I, too, rent books from the library.  Or borrow them from friends, if I can.

In spite of these reprehensible economies, quite a few writers have succeeded in making a fair living; and you have been kind enough to let me be one of them.

What the public never seems to have cared about is that, no matter how well he sells, a writer is stuck with one of the most under-privileged professions of modern times; and I am in a mood to take this opportunity of putting my gripe on record.

Let a man build up any other kind of business, and any stock, any goodwill, or any other interest pertaining to it that he does not sell, hypothecate, or give away, is his personal property...and since the idea of personal property was first conceived, this has always seemed an obviously right and just arrangement, except to Communists.

But let a man devote his life to the production of literature, and the laws of copyright give him no such lasting protection...universally it appears to be thought entirely right that after a limited time the fruit of a writer's brain should be taken from him...and thrown into a thing called the "public domain" -- an almost Communistic concept in itself...

For this fantastic discrimination I have to hold you, the public, responsible.  Writers, themselves, will never be a sufficiently large class to attract the benevolent interest of a politician.  And this politician, whom you elect, knows very well that he will never lose any of your votes for continuing to ignore such a well established injustice against an insignificant minority of rogues and vagabonds, which everybody knows writers are, anyway.

Buy 1, get the other free

Borders Australia is doing a promotion.  If you buy The Ionia Sanction, they'll send you The Pericles Commission to go with it.  Here's the promo, from their latest mailout:

I've linked the image to their promo page, if anyone's interested (you then have to click on the tab that says "A Hellenic Mystery").  By my rough calculation, that deal comes to ¹/₁₀₀ th of a cent per word.  I'll be a millionaire in no time.

I found out about this when my sister forwarded the email to me!  Something that non-writers normal people don't necessarily realize is the degree to which the author loses sight of a book once it reaches the stores.  It's a bit like not knowing if the light goes out when you shut the fridge door.  Things like this are a lovely reminder that there really is a machine in place getting books to people!

How to get divorced in ancient Athens

I and the family are on holidays in a lovely town called Coff's Harbour, about 6 hours north of Sydney.  I'm writing this on a netbook tethered to an iPhone, so only the net.gods know how it's going to look when I'm finished.  Anyway, here goes...

People who've been reading this blog for some time know that much of it is research overflow from my books. You can't put everything you know into a story.  So as not to waste anything, I put the leftovers here.  Given the title of this post you might therefore presume that in some future book, someone's going to get divorced.

In classical Athens, if a man wanted to divorce his wife, he needed only to say so.   The wife was then required to leave the marriage home.  She would have to go 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.  This was totally enforceable by law.

The Greek dowry system, you see, was like the ancient version of a trust fund in the lady's name, to be administered by her husband for her benefit.  Obviously in the normal course of a happy married life it's all in the family, and when the wife dies her dowry would be inherited by her sons.  But in the event of divorce the dowry does not belong to the husband.  It's 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.

Women too could declare a divorce, but the process for them was slightly different.  An unhappy wife had to leave her home, walk to the agora, which in addition to being the marketplace was also where all the government offices were, find an archon (that's a city official), and tell him she wanted to divorce.  Quite what happened during the conversation is unclear -- there's not a single surviving text to tell us -- I presume that at the least the archon would satisfy himself that the lady had a male relative to go to.  But the archon would then agree, and at that instant the divorce was complete.  She then left the home, with her dowry.

The divorce rate was much, much smaller than 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, whose wife Hipparete despaired of him  because he constantly consorted with prostitutes.  Unable to take it any more, she began the walk to the agora.  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' actions were far from the norm, so much so that people were still talking about it hundreds of years after it happened.

Now here's the converse:  there's actually a case where a couple were sued in an ancient Athenian court to prove that their divorce was a sham.  It seemed the husband was due to pay a large sum.  But unfortunately for his debtors, almost all his property had come as his wife's dowry, and it just so happened that she had divorced him moments before the debt fell due.  The debtors promptly sued, asking what archon had heard the wife's divorce (it turned out not a single archon had a record of talking to her), and pointing out that they were still living together.  This scam is absolutely identical to the modern version, where a man about to go bankrupt, or be sued, transfers all his property into his wife's name to quarantine it from being taken.  It seems like such a modern scam, but it was invented  in classical Athens.

The Ionia Sanction releases in Australia

It's the start of a new year. Happy 2012 to everyone!

 That also means The Ionia Sanction has finally released in my native homeland. Yay!

It's quite bizarre to poke your nose inside a store and see your own work on the shelves. Also fun.  I'm afraid it's reached the point where my children automatically say, "Don't look, daddy!" every time we approach any store that displays books. Oh well. So much for impressing the kids.

I want to say a huge, vast, enormous thank you to Belinda Byrne, who in addition to being a really nice person, took a chance on the crazy idea of a detective series in ancient Athens. If it weren't for her, there wouldn't be that lovely cover with the blue background and the lion's head coin that you see on the right. 

Thanks too to my wife Helen, an entirely apposite name under the circumstances, and to our daughters. The dedication on The Ionia Sanction says this:

For Helen, Catriona and Megan

The good, the bad, and the really good

After that post where I talked about levels of trust in histories, I've given some thought to a few modern examples that illustrate the point.  After a lot of thought, I'd like to list three modern books that are unambiguously one way or the other.

Athenian Homicide Law is a brilliant history book written only a few years ago, on how ancient Athenians managed trials for murder.  It's really well written, it quotes original sources, it states clearly not only what's known, but also what's not known, and best of all, it does not impose a single modern view on how they did things back then.   Highly recommended.

The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens, by Eva C. Keuls.  I'm afraid this goes into the bad basket.  Ms Keuls doesn't like Athenian men.  From her tone, I strongly suspect she doesn't like men of any sort, from any time, from any place, for any reason.  She clearly knows her Greek pottery, which she uses to make her point, while avoiding any evidence that might contradict her apparent position that all men are slime.  Of course, she'd probably argue that I'm only saying that because I'm a man.  Oh well.  I bought this book two years ago at the Getty Villa, so it's getting some airplay in reputable surroundings.  

Both of these are modern histories by professionals, talking about the past.  Are there any real equivalents to Herodotus and Thucydides?  Men on the ground who knew, to the best of their ability, what was going on?  In fact there are quite a few, of varying levels of self-serving motive.  The one that to me stands head and shoulders above the rest is:

The Rommel Papers, by none other than Erwin Rommel, edited by the British military strategist Liddell Hart.  Rommel, as you surely know, was forced to take poison after he was implicated in a plot against Hitler.  What is less well know is that Rommel was an established author.  After WW1, in which he served as a junior officer, he wrote a textbook on infantry tactics called Infanterie greift an (Infantry in Attack).  He planned to do a similar book after WW2, but of course didn't live to write it.  He did however keep copious notes for his book even as he fought the war, plus he wrote to his wife, virtually every day throughout, sometimes twice a day, including piles of war details that really shouldn't have got past the censor.  His family hid his notes from the Gestapo and years later they asked Hart to turn the notes into a book.  Hart did it by touching the material as little as possible, presenting letters as letters and notes as notes, so that you get a perfect feel for what was happening.  There's a mind-blowing amount of information in that book, from what German high command was thinking about strategy, down to minute details about actions and people.  It was all written by someone in an astoundingly good position to know the facts, but written with no axe to grind.  (If you don't count his utter contempt for Italian organization, the Luftwaffe, and a few of his fellow Generals.  But that's part of the fascination).   Xenophon and Rommel would have made terrific co-authors.

The festive season, classical style

I've a guest post over at Buried Under Books, in which I talk about how Christmas was celebrated before there was a Christmas.  Yes, there's been a big holiday at this time of year since time immemorial.  Hop on over to Buried Under Books to find out.

How much can we believe ancient history?

Actually the title should be, "How much does Gary trust the ancient histories?"  Because opinions vary quite a lot, and I can only give you my view.  This is one the questions Alun raised in his review, when he said I tended to trust the writings of ancient people.

Which in fact, I do.  At least, I trust them more than the alternatives.

The author John Maddox Roberts likes to reply with a question of his own, when he's asked about historical accuracy in his Roman mysteries.  He asks back, how much do we really know about the Kennedy assassination?  And that was a major event that happened only 50 years ago.

He's right, of course.  Pick any newsworthy event that's happened in the last three months, and I guarantee you'll find at least two, and probably four or more, strongly differing views about what really happened.

If you go to the library and check the books on ancient Greece, you'll see they fall into three simple groups:

1. Stuff that was written at the time;
2. Stuff that Roman period people wrote about the Greeks; and
3. Stuff that was written in the last 100 years.

Category 1 is Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Artistotle et al.

Category 2 is Plutarch, who wrote biographies, and Pausanias, who wrote the world's first Hitchhiker's Guide to Greece.  They're both Greek, but they're writing hundreds of years after the fact.

Category 3 is piles and piles of books, some by academics, some popular.  The more popular they are, the better written, but the less accurate and comprehensive.  

My level of trust in these books is precisely the order 1,2,3.  The only thing that will modify that order is archaeological evidence and common sense. 

When you read an ancient text, you're reading one man's view, but at least it's the view of someone on the ground as it happened, or as close as we can get.  It's like reading the news these days: you read the article, and then you factor in the likely political bias of the person who's writing the news.  Though come to that, Herodotus and Thucydides strike me as noticeably more balanced and unbiased than quite a few modern historians I've come across, and certainly far more unbiased than every journalist.

The guys writing in the Roman period often worked off older books that have since been lost.  Pausanias personally visited just about everywhere he wrote of.  And described it in detail.  Unbelievably. Minute.  Detail.    This makes them, frankly, more trustworthy than most modern books.

This is going to get me into trouble with my academic friends, but I honestly believe it's true, that modern academic texts have an unfortunate tendency to be infected with left-wing ideology.  So I don't see them as any less biased than ancient texts, but biased in a different way.

It's easy to cherry-pick examples one way or the other, so let me choose one that suits me.  Believe it or not, there are ancient historians who are still fighting the Peloponnesian War.  I swear I could guess modern people's voting patterns by whether they support Sparta or Athens.  And the funny thing is, I've a feeling that 80% of the pro-Spartans are of a left wing disposition, and 80% of the pro-Athenians are right-wing.   Not that I can prove it, but it's the distinct impression I get.  Of course there are purely dispassionate modern articles, and when they are, they spend a lot of time quoting the ancient sources and doing logical analysis.  Which ultimately takes me back to the primary sources anyway.  And I must say, by far the biggest use for modern articles is pointers to ancient sources or quotes that I wasn't aware of.

If someone wrote about the Kennedy assassination, 2,500 years from now, how accurate is it likely to be?

So what it comes down to is, I trust the guys on the ground, writing within 50 years of the event, over people writing 2,500 years out.  

Two reviews from interesting sources

Two new reader reviews:

Review number 1 is for The Pericles Commission.

What makes this interesting is that it's reviewed by Alun Salt, who's a for-real archaeoastronomer, which has to be one of the cooler job titles around.  Alun helped me out with some dates for the third book, because the ancient Olympics was scheduled to run according to various phases of the moon around the summer solstice.  So he was able to give me information on how much light there would have been to see by at the time of the murder.

Alun's done some very interesting research on the placement of Greek Temples relative to the sun, which I blogged about some time ago.

So Alun looked at my first book very much from the viewpoint of someone who knows the period in minute detail as a professional.  Here's his review.

He raises quite a few points that I haven't seen elsewhere.  I won't clutter this post with detailed talk about them.  Only insane authors argue with reviews, and in any case there's nothing to argue with, but I'll definitely be back to discuss some of the things he mentions in a later post.


Review number 2 is for The Ionia Sanction.  But not the book; it's for the audio version.

Dreamscape is an audio book producer in the US.  They hired an American actor to read the book end to end.  I hope he liked it, because he had to read every word very clearly!

The audio version of The Ionia Sanction is now for sale, and thanks very much to Dreamscape for doing it.

The audio review was written by Bernadette at Fair Dinkum Crime, who very clearly is not American, and I was interested to see how that affected the listening.