Sunflowers and snowdrops

Further to my post just before Christmas, The Girl in Two Worlds - Time travel to Ancient Athens, came out on March 1st, 2022, 10 years to the day from the publication date of The Boy with Two Heads, as it was then titled, on February 29th, 2012. 

However, there was no fanfare, partly because the print version still seems to be unavailable from the usual outlets (it will probably take another week or two) and also because the e-book is not ready. But it was one step in my slow progress towards having both print and revised e-books on sale. I've made a start on the necessary text 'translations' of The Boy and The Girl into ePub files for the ebooks and yet another revision of Book 3 is in train.

The covers have been refined, though the Book 3 cover is still a draft. My thanks to Kate (design) and Fliss (art) for creating such gorgeous results!

     

My present blurb for the whole trilogy is this:

"The precarious connection between Themistokles, son of Kallistos of ancient Athens and Suzanne Short of Penrith in modern Cumbria UK, was the result of freak accidents. It seemed to begin and end in 432 BCE / 2010 CE when Suzanne experienced so much of Themistocles' visit to Olympia. But now, in 418 BCE / 2017 CE, the connection is back. Athens is threatened by Sparta from without and traitors from within. Suzanne, now a student and athlete at Lancaster University, is a fascinated by helpless witness as Themistokles tries to save his city and his family."

But now our own world of 2022 CE has convulsed again - far more violently in the last few weeks than it did with the first Covid-19 lockdown two years ago. Covid isolation was what brought me back to this project, but now I often find it impossible to concentrate on what seems to have become an inconsequential hobby. The horrors of Putin's invasion of non-aggressive Ukraine, and the uncertainty of where the resulting world-wide turmoil will lead, claim my (and most others', it seems) attention as often as I let them.

At present, of course, here in the UK, my life is not directly threatened. In 1944 my father's was, though. He was in southern China with his Red Cross unit, 'walking out' ahead of the Japanese invasion. He wrote in his journal of the need to keep to the usual routines and standards wherever possible, however chaotic things get. So that's what I'm trying to do, whether The Connection Trilogy turns out to be inconsequential or not. 

At least Spring has now arrived with energy and hope. The courage and determination of Ukraine's extraordinary president, Volodymyr Zalenskyy, and his kick-ass compatriots is infectious. They are our buffer against unthinkable destruction and casualties, and their resolve seems to be bringing together other previously, and possibly dangerously, divided nations. Thank you, Ukraine.

All photographs © Julia M Newsome unless otherwise credited

Ancient Greeks with Tom Holland, by the Lake

Landing stages at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, March 2014

As mentioned in my last, Words by the Water (a festival of Words and Ideas, staged by Ways with Words) (#WBTW14) finished today at Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, Cumbria.

The second speaker I chaired was Tom Holland. His new translation of the Histories of Herodotus came out in September last year, and he was talking about this on March 11th. 

Tom has a vivid sense of fun and is interested in a wide variety of subjects, from owls, to cricket, to fossils, to - oh, just about everything! And so was Herodotus. He tells us about flying snakes, sheep with tails so long and heavy they had to be supported by little trailers, methods of building pyramids, love matches, dismemberments, stonings, soldiers who lasso-ed their opponents to pull them onto their daggers, family feuds, the Egyptian version of what happened to Helen of Troy, and - after many fascinating travels and stories - finally the wars between the Persians and the Greeks. 

So listening to such things re-told by Tom gave the audience lots to laugh at and think about. Tom's translation, as I said in my introduction of him, is in an easy-to-read, colourful style (as are his other books). An example is:

Older translation:  “The Phoenicians took them on to their ship and sailed away for Egypt.”   

Tom's translation: “Into the hold went the captives, up came the anchor, and off sailed the ship to Egypt.”

Tom told us, upon questioning, that Herodotus is the longest Ancient Greek text surviving. It took him six years - translating a paragraph a day, every day (sometimes two pages, sometimes a couple of lines) - to complete. He was asked to do this by an editor at Penguin Classics who saw him presenting his own take on the Persian Wars in Persian Fire some years ago, at - of course - Words by the Water! 

I dip into Herodotus often. In The Boy with Two Heads, I use one of his stories. It is about Arion, who was saved from drowning by dolphins (my chapter 18). Herodotus himself appears for a second in chapter 45, sitting on a box under a tree in Olympia, reading his own histories from a scroll to the milling crowds that have come to witness the Olympic Games. Perhaps he sold copies of short extracts.

Herodotus underpins so much of what we know about Ancient Greece. Scholars think his writings must have been preserved because they are so interesting, conversational and, at times, funny. As he says himself, he can only be sure of what he has seen with his own eyes. As for what he has been told, all he can do is write it down. He cannot vouch for its truth.

That's all any of us can do, isn't it?



All photographs © Julia M Newsome.

Who were the Greeks?

It's a while since I posted anything here because I've been travelling. I had a varied and fascinating time and will try and share some of my impressions with you in the next few weeks.

But first I want to highlight Who Were The Greeks?, which I caught on BBC 2 last night. 

The presenter is Michael Scott, a classicist at the University of Warwick. "Ancient Greece," in his words, "seems full of ... contradictions. A place that invented democracy but also ran on slave labour, that idolised youth but left children to die through exposure. The key question for me in Who Were The Greeks? ... was how to make sense of those contradictions, how to understand what made ancient Greece tick."

That is an attitude I can accept and learn from, I thought. My own research and experience confirm such contradictions in both ancient and modern Greeks!

And then one of the first places Dr Scott stood to address the camera, was on the plain of Marathon. I spent a week staying in a friend's flat on the hills there last month! So I was hooked.

Plain and swamp of Marathon on a misty May evening, showing the 2004 Olympic
rowing lake and radio mast. The area is now a protected wetland and forest sanctuary.

Painting of Phidias' statue of Zeus at
Olympia in the museum

Later he described helmets in a case in the museum at Olympia. And I was there last month, too. In the programme, this painting of the statue of Zeus was in the background as Dr Scott walked away from the camera. If you've read The Boy with Two Heads, you'll know what an important focus that statue is in my story, as it also was in the minds of many people in those times. As Dr Scott says, the gods were inextricably woven into every facet of life.

The ancient theatre at Sparta with Mount Taygetos
in the background** (June 2012)

And of course he visited Sparta's woods and tried that 'black soup' made from pork, blood and vinegar, that the Spartan army* marched on ...

The Parthenon from the east on the
Athenian Acropolis

... and Athens to talk about democracy, slavery, and sexual mores, among other things.

Plan of the Athenian Agora

One thing he mentioned that I hadn't heard about before, was the well in the Athenian Agora full of babies' and dogs' skeletons. Most of us are no longer under any illusion that the Ancient Greeks lived and thought as we do now, but this did surprise me. I had heard of exposing imperfectly formed or ill babies in the countryside, but had never thought about how they were disposed of in the city. Distasteful to us now, but, as Dr Scott says, a necessary facet of survival in that insecure world of warring city-states. The dogs seem to have been sacrificed, probably in connection with the deaths of the babies. 

I did get a little tired of the close-ups of his face fading in from the faces of statues (perhaps the editor wants to point out his similar good looks?), but his enthusiasm and curiosity are infectious. If you are interested and have iPlayer, you have 13 days left to watch Part One here. Part Two (there are just two parts) will be on BBC 2 next Thursday evening at 9pm. 

Some of the comments on-line about this programme have prompted me to clarify my own attitude to what we know of the Ancient Greeks. The ancients of all races lived before the spread of religions that advocate (but often have not supported!) peace and harmony. In those days, an idea not linked to survival could not last long. 

The humans living in the area we now call Greece had to deal with natural dangers (earthquakes, diseases, and wild animals, for instance) which most modern people cannot even imagine, as well as vying for resources and territory with neighbouring groups of humans. We should not be judging them at all, let alone on terms we see as acceptable today. Learning about - and from - them is enough. 



*The Spartans were, it seems, in many respects the exception to much of what we learn about the Ancient Greeks in general. Paul Cartledge's The Spartans is a very readable account. If I remember rightly, it even mentions the soup!
** The photograph heading this blog is of the same Mount Taygetos from the other side.

Moveable feasts - ancient and modern

Derwent Water and snowy Skiddaw

A further week of revisions began on March 11th, and then I was quite ill for a couple of weeks. I feel a bit like Suzanne in The Boy with Two Heads who, by Easter, was coming out of her coma and asking whether the hospital was real. I wasn't as ill as Suzanne, but I am suddenly aware that it is both April Fools' Day and Easter Monday today. (It is also extremely cold, in spite of wall to wall sunshine in Cumbria - minus three degrees Centigrade at night!) So an immovable feast and a moveable feast fall on the same day.

I am gently amused by the fact that in 2013 I am not the only one still confused over why our Easter is when it is. In the UK and most of the western Christian world it was yesterday. But in Christian Orthodox countries like Russia and Greece it will be on May 5th. It seems that we still haven't been able to agree on this point in spite of more than 2,500 years' deliberation as to when the lengthening of the days and the hope of new beginnings should be marked each year.

Niko Lang's diagram from Wikipedia

In the ancient Hellenic world, by 500 or so BC, some astronomers had already understood that the Earth was a sphere. They believed, however, that the sun, moon, planets and stars revolved around it. This is called the geocentric (Earth centred) system as opposed to the heliocentric (sun centred) system that we now know to be the case. They made careful observations and fairly accurate predictions of the sun’s equinoxes and solstices, as well as the normal phases of the moon and planets, and even some eclipses (“Herodotus, … who lived in the 5th century BC, cited that Thales (ca. 624-547 BCE), the Greek philosopher, predicted the solar eclipse of 28 May 585 BCE …”).

In Ancient Athens, as in most city states, the timing of religious festivals varied from year to year (see my page called Measuring time in Ancient Athens), and were arranged to take into account these differing movements of the sun and moon.

Stonehenge, June 21st 2005 (Wikipedia)

But even then, the equinoxes and solstices provided an incontrovertible structure upon which to hang the more moveable feasts.*

Strangely, we can be more fickle today.

In present-day western Christian churches (Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, and many others), Easter is set according to a formula based on the Gregorian calendar, as the Time and Date website states:

“In 325CE, the Council of Nicaea established that Easter would be held on the first Sunday after the first full moon occurring on or after the vernal equinox. From that point forward, the Easter date depended on the ecclesiastical approximation of March 21 for the vernal equinox. Easter is delayed by one week if the full moon is on a Sunday.”

This year the full moon after the equinox was on Wednesday, March 27th. The first Sunday after that was yesterday, March 31st, Easter Sunday in 'the west'. 

However, Greek and most other Orthodox Christian Churches use the older and less accurate Julian calendar to set the date of Easter (though not always, confusingly, of Christmas). The Julian Calendar decrees that the vernal equinox falls 13 days later than it really does, on April 3^rd. Through some calculation I am unable to verify, this results in Greek Orthodox Easter falling on May 5^th this year, 2013.

So a large part of our modern Christian world manages to be less accurate in the timing of a moveable feast that depends upon an equinox, than those pagan and 'unsophisticated' Ancients...

* In case, like me, you are not 100% clear about such things, the equinoxes are the days when the sun is above the horizon for 12 hours resulting in day and night having equal length (usually March 21st and September 21st). The solstices are the days that are either the longest (June 21st) or the shortest (December 21st) in the year. In the Southern Hemisphere the solstices are the other way round.

It all began 3 years ago today

Three years ago today, Suzanne Short (a Year 10 student from Cumbria) started out on a strange and wonderful adventure. You can read her story in my time-slip novel, The Boy with Two Heads. Her best friend is Bernadette, known as Bernie. This is an extract from Bernie's blog:

From Bernie’s Blog. Feb 15th 2010, Monday 

School trip to Greece, Day 4 

Athens. Hotel Artemis.

THIS HAS BEEN THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE!!!!!!!! 

Where do I start? 

Poor poor Suzanne. Will she be OK? Why did this happen? And in a country where I don’t understand anything! 

So… Concentrate! Start at the beginning … 

This morning we all got our backpacks together with packed lunches from the hotel, and water bottles, and questionnaires, and all the usual tourist stuff. And Suzanne seemed a bit quiet. Yesterday she was leaping around and like ‘We’re gonna see where it all began.’ Meaning the Olympics, of course. She’s obviously still obsessed, even though she gave up the idea of competing because of bloody Ian. 

But today she was really quiet. Then she told me that Ian had dumped her. Up at the top of the Stadium! By text! Right in the place she’d been so excited to see. ‘Where it all began’. 

And now, maybe where it all ends.
OMG!
Pause for tears. Oh help … 

Right. Trying to get it together now. 

We were all crossing the road along the open end of the stadium. We’d all got across except Suzanne. She missed the light so she could take a last photo. I was just teasing Gina about there being no cake in the packed lunch, when I heard a screaming noise from an engine and a load of shouting. I turned round and saw that Suzanne was lying on the tarmac near the pedestrian crossing. The traffic was stopped dead. A motorbike was on its side in the middle of the road and Mr Green had his arm round a man’s neck. ...

Panathenaic Stadium pedestrian crossing

And this is where Suzanne's story began, on the pedestrian crossing by the Panatheniac Stadium in Athens. (As you can see, crazy motorcyclists are not a common occurrence.)

Ancient Greece: modern school syllabi

Last week, Connie (my publisher) and I presented The Boy with Two Heads to two school groups. We enjoyed our time with them, and came away with some useful feedback. Part of which was that, in some schools this autumn (2012), Year 6 is covering aspects of Ancient Greece.

So this is a message to teachers of Year 6 History in England - and others in Classics departments everywhere: 

Please take a look at my time-slip novel, The Boy with Two Heads! 

I think you will find it relevant. 

In my story, a modern girl 'slips' back in time to live the life of a teenage boy in Ancient Athens and Olympia during the Games of 432 BC. It's a bit spooky because he has borrowed her consciousness while she lies in a coma in 2010 ... Later in the story, he is described in an oracular prophesy as having 'two heads', hence the title.

There is a detailed and helpful review of the story by Carla Nayland here.

I wanted my readers to feel as if they had really been to Ancient Greece. I lived in Athens for more than twenty years and so had plenty of opportunity to research and find help so as to get things as correct as possible. People who have read my book say they learned a lot painlessly! (Amazon reviews here.)

As for relevance to the works of Homer that some schools are focusing on this year, much of life in 5th century BC Greece was similar to how it was for Homer's heroes in The Iliad hundreds of years before. The gods still intervened in every facet of human lives; men still trained hard to be soldiers and served in the army; the Olympic and other Games were still held in honour of the gods with events based on that training; war was still the norm rather than the exception. 

And Homer himself is mentioned in my story. He held an important position in the culture of the time. 

For instance, during a sea-voyage, the passengers keep each other entertained by telling stories. Molon, a rather annoying young man, is one of them.

From Everyday Things in Ancient Greece
by M and C H B Quennel

The captain spent the day on the top deck, controlling the rudder. Molon lay near him, reciting Homer out loud. He told with relish of how Circe turned Odysseus’ men into pigs and made them eat acorns and chestnuts. After a while the captain asked Molon to shut up. Molon went down to the lower deck and carried on under his breath.

People who really existed also appear in the story. One is Panainos, an artist who painted huge official murals depicting the history of Athens. Themis (the fictional Boy of the title) is his apprentice and in this extract is depressed. Frog (also fictional) is Themis' body servant.

   ‘You need to get up,' laughed Frog. 'Panainos wants to talk to you about something important. And the food is duck and mushroom stew.’    

  Themis groaned and rolled out of bed.
    

  He ate in silence while Panainos chatted on about some battle in Homer that he was going to paint when he got back to Athens.
   

Artist's reconstruction of Ancient Olympia, about 100 BCE.
The Altis is the area with the large temple in the middle.

  ‘You need a walk, my boy,’ said Panainos at last, as he stood up. ‘Come with me.’
     

  Themis followed meekly, his mind dull and empty.
 

  They walked towards the entrance to the Altis. It was early evening and there had been rain, so everything sparkled with drops in the slanting rays of the sun. But Themis was watching his feet as he walked on the paving stones. His sandals were getting too small.

I very much enjoyed writing this book, which took more than two years. But I hope it isn't too obvious that I was once a teacher myself! I thank Carla for her unsolicited review and thoughts, and I invite you to comment below ...