Those Ancient Greeks follow me everywhere!

Reproduction in the Royal Ontario Museum
of Phidias' statue of Athena,
finished 438 BC for inside the Parthenon in Athens.

Not long ago, I was in Toronto, Canada, spending holiday time with family. They had asked me to stop thinking about writing for a few days, as we don't see each other very often. 'No problem,' I said. 'No writing.'

We decided to go to the Royal Ontario Museum as a worth-while afternoon occupation during a snowy weekend. Once there, I walked round a corner into the Greek gallery, and look who I found!

I have seen photographs of this reproduction of Phidias' statue of Athena in the Parthenon again and again. In my ignorance, I thought it was in New York or somewhere, and 12 metres tall like the original (and the reproduction in Nashville). But it's in a small alcove protected from people who would like to touch (like me) by a sheet of glass. Athena is only about two and a half feet (70cms) tall. 

According to Plutarch, Phidias* had a lot of trouble with that statue of Athena, culminating in two court cases. Apart from his obviously supreme talents, Phidias was a close friend of the powerful politician Perikles, and so he was a target for the jealousy of lesser mortals. 

One court case accused him of stealing some of the gold Athena was covered in. That fact became part of the plot of my novel The Boy with Two Heads. In my story Phidias and Themis' father had had to invest their own gold when they discovered that indeed some gold and jewels were missing from the Athena. They had never got their money back, but the oracle had told them, 'When the boy with two heads ... wins without a fight, Athena will pay her dues.' 

You can see why Phidias and statues of Athena are quite important to me as I research the sequel to The Boy.

left to right: Amazon, ?Perikles, ?Phidias, ?Greek soldier
from the reproduction shield of Athena
in the Royal Ontario Museum.

And evidence for Phidias' other court case is there in the Royal Ontario Museum, too. They have made a reproduction of the shield of this Athena, where Phidias is supposed to have incorporated a self portrait (and one of Perikles) among the fighters in the battle between Greeks and Amazons depicted there. These portraits constituted a punishable offence in the Athens of the 430s BC, and led to a court case that saw Phidias supposedly imprisoned.

Athena Lemnias
Roman copy of bronze
by Phidias in circa 450 BC

Zeus
Roman copy of bronze
by circle of Phidias

However, he then went on to make the huge statue of Zeus that features so strongly in The Boy with Two Heads, which became one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. He made many statues, and, in the museum hall adjacent, there are two marble heads, alleged copies of bronzes also by Phidias or his circle. Again I had seen pictures of them. but never expected to find them unprotected and at eye level. 

For me this was an afternoon of treasure trove. 

As for my companions, they just rolled their eyes and went off to see the bat cave and the dinosaur fossils. Much more fun, they said! 


*Phidias in Greek is spelled Pheidias, but he is pronounced simply Phidias, so I use this spelling.


All photos ©Julia M Newsome. Please credit me if you borrow them. 

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

Ancient Greek six-packs

I am learning a whole new series of skills as Connie and I take The Boy with Two Heads to schools and libraries as part of our constant market research and promotional activities. And I thought writing just involved writing!

artist's impression by Sian Frances

But we have been enjoying meeting my readers, and this week we met some Year 6 students at Egremont Library who impressed us a lot. Their teacher had already taken them through the first four chapters of the book, so we read a passage to them from further on which features Phidias' gold and ivory statue of Zeus. As I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, the statue survived 800 years but was taken to Constantinople and destroyed in a great fire there. 

The students had also prepared some questions to ask me. I tried to answer these truthfully, but questions like 'where do you get your inspiration?' always stump me. I've thought about this since, and just want to say that I write because I enjoy it. I like going where it takes me in my head, getting to know my characters, and finding out what happens to them. It's a bit like reading, except that it takes longer, and I control the final outcome. 

One unusual question we got this time was, 'Why did all the men have six-packs?' (This after looking at pictures of vase paintings and statues of naked men, as you do if you are discussing Ancient Greek athletes.) My answer was that the man's body was their best weapon in war, and they were always at war. They went into the army at 18 and were always eligible to be called up if necessary, which was just about every summer! So they spent a lot of time keeping fit. 

the Dioscouros
Roman copy of a Greek original

For many of them the Marathon would have been a short run. Professional messengers were expected to run at least 100 kilometres in 24 hours. There's a modern race called the Spartathlon which covers 246 kilometres (153 miles) in less than 36 hours, as reportedly run by Pheidippides in 490 BC. I refer to it in my posting on March 8th.

And as Connie noted, another factor was their diet - lots of unprocessed cereals, fruit, vegetables, cheese and olives, with the occasional fish, duck or hare, and beef only on feast days. 

the quintessential six-pack:
Apollo from the Temple of Zeus 
at Ancient Olympia

modern statue of
King Leonidas of Sparta

However, it is probably true that the statues were idealised. So maybe not all Ancient Greek men had six-packs. They must have been pretty common, though, because the body-armour seems to have allowed for them, as you can see on this modern statue in Sparta.







Lastly, I would like to correct something else that came up. Connie mentioned that the word for a publisher's logo is colophon (her company's colophon is a trefoil, or clover leaf). My suggestion was that colophon derives from the Greek words kollos for bottom (which is in fact modern slang), and phoni, meaning voice (as in telephone). This led to a certain amount of hilarity ... and is of course nonsense! 
According to Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon and Wikipedia, kolophon is an Ancient Greek word (though still in use) which means ‘the summit, peak, or finishing touch’. Comparatively boring, but true, nonetheless. My apologies to anyone I may have misled.

And my thanks to our audience at Egremont. You had done a lot of preparation for our meeting, and that made it extra special.

Olympic colossi

The Orbit from inside the Olympic Park

As you probably know by now, I enjoy drawing comparisons between the Modern and the Ancient Olympic Games.
The other day we drove past the Olympic Park on the A12, and I noticed that  more of the Orbit sculpture is visible from the road now. 

Building the Orbit, from Anish Kapoor's website 

I followed progress with interest last year while they built it, as I was writing about building a different kind of Olympic colossus at the time. I never quite believed that something as odd as the Orbit would be identified with the excitement of the Games, but I was always in awe of those huge cranes ...

The sculptor of the Orbit, Anish Kapoor, always takes me by surprise with his creations - sometimes pleasantly, sometimes not.

Sian Frances' magnificent impression of the statue

In Ancient Olympia it seems there were many amazing sculptures, more and more as the years wore on. The most famous sadly no longer exists. I've tried to describe the building of it in The Boy with Two Heads. As you probably know, it was made by Phidias, the famous Athenian sculptor who was responsible for much of the decoration and design of the Parthenon on the Athens Akropolis. According to Pausanias, this statue was a wooden structure overlaid with gold and ivory (see § 5.11.1). It stood (or sat!) 14 metres high, and was one of the Seven Wonders of the World for hundreds of years. It represented Zeus in his Temple in the sacred precinct of the Altis at Olympia. The Olympic Games were held in his honour. I had to guess about how the statue was built as I could not find any descriptions of the process, but I enjoyed imagining it. 

You may remember the scene in The Boy with Two Heads where the hero, Themis, helps install the face, one of the last components to be put in place:

   Themis lay along the beam and watched as a huge parcel, crated and wrapped, was brought to the door [of the Temple] by a team of ten men. He could hear the stamping of the oxen at the Temple ramp. The hubbub inside suddenly stilled.

   Phidias strode into the Temple and stopped in the middle of the floor, in front of the cloth-covered statue. He turned towards the doors.

   ‘Master Harpist!’ he called, and a musician stepped out from behind a column. ‘You and your musicians should be up in the gallery. When I make this signal with my hand you will play in the rhythm we agreed.’

   ‘Certainly, Master Phidias,’ said the harpist with a nod, and he and his two colleagues ran up the stairs to appear opposite Panainos.

   The great bundle was carried into the open space beside Phidias. The slatted casing fell away and a sling of ropes was tied round the wrapped disc inside.

   At the signal from Phidias, the musicians began to play. Themis and the men in the roof all shuffled into their places. Men on the floor pulled on their ropes. Curtains of dust drifted down as the wrapped disc rose towards the ceiling, swaying in time to the music. When it was almost touching the beams there, Themis and his team began work. They pulled and stopped as directed by the music. The disc moved towards the gaping front of the head. Men wriggled along beams, moved pulleys and re-laid ropes. 

So Phidias and Anish Kapoor both created world-famous colossal Olympian sculptures, although for very different reasons. And of course, their building methods were a bit different, too.