Phidias' workshop - using real places in fiction

Last year in the summer, I prepared part of this posting. I didn't finish it because I have been looking for a particular reference (see second to last paragraph). 
As you can see, I had a wonderful trip in 2013. 

It was a mixture of holiday ...

...  research ... 

... and socialising.

Part of the research was another visit to Ancient Olympia. I went to have another look at Phidias' Workshop. I took liberties with its design in The Boy with Two Heads and I wanted to see whether I had really changed it so much. This is how it appears in my story:

The main road was busy with traffic for the market and the precinct. Panainos and Themis paused on the forecourt, looking at the front of the Workshop. It was a huge, rectangular stone building with a high-walled yard behind. 

‘He really did it,’ said Panainos quietly. 

‘Did what?’ asked Themis, surprised at the plainness of what seemed to him to be just another warehouse.

‘He said to me he’d build the workshop the same size as the inner room of the temple, so that he could get the statue in the right proportion.’ 

‘Why wouldn’t he?’ replied Themis. ‘It’s a very good idea.’ 

‘Because it must have cost the Elians a lot more than they bargained for,’ laughed Panainos. ‘Phidias never lets mere price stop him when he plans a monument.’ 

No one seemed to be around, but the small, heavy door opened as they approached it. A guard in full armour with sword and spear stepped out and confronted them. With him was a scribe, tablet and stylus at the ready. 

‘Name and business?’ growled the guard. 

‘Panainos, son of Harmides, brother of Phidias,’ intoned Panainos, ‘and Themistokles, son of Kallistos, my apprentice.’ 

The scribe wrote this down. The guard bowed his head slightly and stood back. ... 

[Inside] They turned through an open doorway. 

‘Wow!’ breathed Themis as they stepped into a huge, bright space where dust motes hung sparkling in the air and soft music played. It was as high as a temple, with pillars painted on the walls. Cupboards and storerooms lined the left side, workbenches the right. Light streamed in from windows half way up the walls, and from panels in the ceiling. 

Panainos swept over to a long bench where four young men were bent over their work. Themis saw trays of labelled pebbles, rows of minute tools and the sparkle of cut gems as Panainos asked for Phidias. 

One gem-cutter gestured to the high back wall that was almost all door. They could see a sunny yard beyond. ‘Out there,’ he said ... 

Two more armed guards stood on either side of the doorway. They saluted Panainos as he and Themis stepped out into sunlight. Acrid smells of vinegar and burning bone caught in Themis’ throat. 

Phidias' workshop now

That was my fiction, but in reality there is no sign of the large door I gave the Workshop at the back, or of a yard. And the front door seems to have been quite large, not small as I made it. I had the columns inside painted on the walls when in fact it seems they were probably real and perhaps held up the roof. 


However, the building was turned into an early Christian basilica around AD440 and then destroyed in the earthquake of AD551, so perhaps my fictional view of it is not too impossible.

This is the west wall where I made the huge door into a yard behind ...



... and this is the south wall.










This is what it looks like inside now, with the early Byzantine church arrangements, now also ruined.

There is a story that, during the excavations, a cup was found with the ancient Greek for 'I belong to Phidias' scratched on its bottom. This appears in most of the guide books and articles about the Workshop. But I read somewhere that the man who found the cup confessed on his deathbed to scratching the inscription himself. However, from the descriptions in Pausanias and other sources and the archaeological finds of moulds and tools, it is quite clear that this building and its environs were where the statue was made and its golden, ivory, bejewelled and carved adornments prepared. 

And perhaps the story of the man on his deathbed is as fictional as my story. The cup might have been a tourist souvenir, as these were also sold in antiquity, according to the website 'Ancient Olympics'. But if anyone reading this can vouch for the deathbed story, I would be very grateful, as I have searched for it again and again since I got back from that trip, and failed to find it.

On the subject of using real places in historical fiction, I have come to the conclusion that we writers should use our common sense about what might have been, without making any glaring errors. Places readers can visit give an extra dimension to a story, as long as there is no disappointment involved. What do you think?



All photographs © Julia M Newsome, except the aerial view of Phidias' workshop, which was taken from a postcard with no credit given.

Who was The (real) Boy with Two Heads?

Someone asked me the other day where the main character in The Boy with Two Heads comes from, and whether I made him up. We were talking about a new review that has appeared on the Amazon page for The Boy, for which I am very grateful. It is short and to the point:

Good Plot in ancient greece
This was a very engaging read. Lovers of the Grecian era will find it interesting, and the blog is a good twist. Should appeal to teens.
(by Prudence, who gives it five stars)

   Thank you, Prudence! 
   I was very glad to see your last sentence. I specifically wrote The Boy with Two Heads for today's teenagers, because it seems to me that their only contact with Greek gods and heroes these days is through exciting fantasies like those about Percy Jackson by Rick Riordan in which the gods and heroes are active characters. 

    In museums all over the world, there are thousands of representations of Apollo and Hermes and Poseidon (and Herakles and Athena, and so on) on vases or sculpted in stone, wood, or other precious materials, as if they were real people who walked the streets with the ordinary populace. They may have been based on memories of real heroes or explanations for strange historical happenings, but from the literature we have from 700 BC onwards, we know it was generally accepted that you were unlikely to meet any of them in the flesh, though they influenced all aspects of life.

Apollo.
Olympia Museum.

 Hermes and baby Dionysos
Olympia Museum

Athena
 Metropolitan Museum
New York City, USA

Poseidon or Zeus
National Archaeological
Museum, Athens

Herakles and the Stymphalean Birds.
British Museum, London.

   I wanted to answer the question "What was it really like to live in Athens in the 5th century BC?" - partly because I spent more than 20 years of my own life there in the 20th century AD!  I wanted to write a story about a link between now and then. It was to involve only real people and could happen to you or me at any time. 

   For years I've been reading (in small doses, I must admit) what was actually written by the writers of those times. I've read about wars and theatres and laws and gods and myths, all translated from the ancient Greek texts. Repeatedly I come across the ancient Olympic Games. These are held up, among other things, as the ultimate way to worship Zeus the father of the gods, as motivation for young men to train hard, and as the framework for the calendar in some parts of Greece with their four-year cycle. They were very important.

   So, when I found the long description of Ancient Olympia, written in 160 AD (in Pausanias' Guide to Greece, translated by Peter Levi), I was entranced by the descriptions of the temples with their glorious and gaudy treasures and statues of gods and goddesses, even though they were written 500 years after the period I was researching. 

Altis of Olympia, in 2000
Temple of Zeus centre front, stadium top right.

   Pausanias also lists in detail the numerous altars outside the temples, among the trees in the holy precinct known as the Altis. And then he begins on the portrait statues dedicated by Olympic winners, also in the Altis. And there are nearly 50 pages of them! He describes and names each one, telling us what the athlete won and when, sometimes with extra details. Where possible, he attributes the statue to its sculptor, and even tells us of the sculptor's teacher. 

   However, after ten pages or so, I was beginning to feel grateful that, as he says, "not all Olympic winners have their statues standing at Olympia". One long paragraph about all-in wrestlers who won by bending their opponents' fingers until they broke (or the other man gave in), made me feel I had had enough for one sitting. 

   But my eye strayed to the beginning of the next paragraph. "For the sake of Pheidias and his genius as a sculptor, I must introduce here the boy tying a ribbon round his head, although we have no idea whose portrait Pheidias's statue is." 

   And there he was...
   I had a real hero, his story already half-made in my imagination.

   Thus, through Pausanias, I met a real person (not a hero or a god), sculpted by a real sculptor, but without a name or history. He had stood for 500 years in the precinct at Olympia until at least 160 AD, although now there is no sign of him.
   So I kidnapped him. I called him Themistokles, son of Kallistos of Diomea in Athens, and later in the story he became known as The Boy with Two Heads, (although only one was visible!) ...

The statue we used to represent Themis is described earlier in this blog: on February 5th 2012,
and on February 8th 2013.

The vase paintings above are from http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/M1

The picture of the statue of Poseidon or Zeus is from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemision_Bronze