The Ionia Sanction (39 page)
Our Magnesia, the one on the Maeander, was moved wholesale by the citizens to somewhere up the road in about 399 BC, which was more than sixty years after Themistocles died. That’s the third Magnesia.
Diodorus Siculus says, from the Loeb Library edition of his book:
“Thibron [a Spartan general with an army in 399 BC] … came to Magnesia.… And since the city was unwalled … he transferred it to a neighboring hill which men call Thorax.”
The third Magnesia has known ruins. The Magnesia of this book is a genuine Lost City, though with all the available clues to its whereabouts I don’t imagine it would stay lost for long if someone put their mind and money to finding it. The one point from Diodorus Siculus of importance to the book is the observation that our Magnesia didn’t have a defensive wall, unlike virtually every other city of its time. This is why Araxes and his gang were able to come and go unhindered.
* * *
Witch women like Mina were alive and well in Classical Greece. A Greek witch was called a
pharmakis,
from which we have the modern pharmacist and pharmacology. The familiar name tells you what their basic job was. The Classical Greek witch dealt in herbs, medicines, and poison. The odds are very good that a sick person might go see the local witch woman rather than an expensive doctor.
The poison which Mina sells to Nico is hydrogen cyanide. The method she describes to extract cyanide from peach kernels actually works. Don’t try this at home, kids, you’re likely to poison yourselves. There’s no record of the Greeks using cyanide, but the ancient Hittites used it as one of their many cruel methods of execution, and the Hittites once ruled the land of Ionia. It’s reasonable for Mina to know how to make it. I wondered whether it was a good idea to give a working formula in the book, then realized anyone these days with the help of easily accessible advice on the Internet could make much worse, using only the bottles stored under the kitchen sink. If someone did use peach kernel cyanide these days then the peach DNA in the poison would be spotted at once and the police would have little trouble searching out the distilling equipment.
* * *
Not much is known about the children of Themistocles after his death, although we do know his descendants were honored in Magnesia for generations to come.
Cleophantus went on to become a well-known gentleman in Athens, although he was looked down on with contempt by the philosophers. About eighty years after the events of this story, Plato in his book
Meno
causes Socrates to say, “Cleophantus, the famous horseman … he could stand upright on horseback and shoot javelins from there and do many other remarkable things.… But have you ever heard anyone, young or old, say that Cleophantus, the son of Themistocles, was clever or wise?”
Romantics will be pleased to hear that Nicomache got her man. History records that one of the first acts of the sons of Themistocles after his death was to betroth her to Phrasicles of Athens. Phrasicles arrived promptly in Magnesia to claim his bride.
Asia, the little rock who held back a great wave, was taken to Athens to be raised by Nicomache and her new husband. From there Asia disappears into the mists of history, and is never heard from again.
A NOTE ON NAMES
The Greeks had only a single name each, which we would think of as a first name. Greek names were usually two everyday words stuck together to form a meaning. A lot of the trick to saying them is to spot the word boundary, then say and think of them as two words.
Let me use as an example someone you’ve heard of: Cleopatra.
Cleopatra may have been Queen of Egypt, but her name was very typically Greek. If you can cope with Cleopatra, you can cope with any Greek name. Cleopatra is
CLEO
+
PATRA
. Cleo means
glory
, and patra means
of the father
. Glory of the father. The ending in –a makes it a feminine name.
With that in mind, here are a few of the major characters with interesting names:
Nicolaos
is
NICO
+
LAOS
. Nico is a variant of Nike, which means
victory
. Laos is
of the people
. Victory of the people. Nicolaos is a common name in Greece to this day, and is quite obviously the origin of the western Nicholas. There was a St. Nicolaos who is better known as Santa Claus. The Claus part comes from the –colaos of Nicolaos. Nico is our modern Nick.
Diotima
is
DIOS
+
TIMA
. The Greek
Dios
is the Latin
Deus
, which if you’ve ever heard a Latin prayer in church you will know means God.
Tima
means honored. Diotima is
honored by God
. A suitable name for any priestess.
Boy names end in –os, –us, –es, –is, or –on. Girl names end in –a, –ia, or –ache. You can switch the sex of any name by switching the ending.
Archeptolis
looks tough but is amazingly simple. Archeptolis is almost the same as
architect,
a very common English word. Say
architect
. Now take off the
tect
and add on a
tolis.
Done!
The
pt
in Greek always sounds like a plain old English
t.
Every modern child knows the flying reptile called a pterodactyl. It’s the same thing.
The Greek
ch
can always be said like an English
k
(as in architect). But if you want to go for slightly more authenticity, try saying it like the
ch
in Scottish or German, which is to say like a
k
while choking on a fish bone.
Themistocles
is
THEMISTOS
+
CLEO
. Themistos is
law
. The final
s
is removed to join the word to Cleo, which we already know means
glory
. The
o
of cleo is removed to make way for the male –
es
ending. Themistocles is
glory of the law
.
The –
cles
ending was very common, because glory was something every male aspired to. Parents naturally wanted their children to have positive, happy sounding names, and so frequently picked from the same small pool of image-reinforcing words. That’s also why so many Greek names begin
Aristo
-. Aristos means
best
. Hence the English word
aristocrat.
For the graduation exercise, let’s look at
Mnesiptolema
. I confess I wouldn’t have used this one except that Mnesiptolema was a real historical person, like about half of my characters. The word boundary is
MNESI
+
PTOLEMA.
Mn
makes a plain old English
N
sound, like the English word mnemonic. Indeed Mnesi and Mnem both come from
memory
. Ptolemaios means
warlike
or
aggressive
. So Mnesiptolema is
memory of war
. Say her name as Nessie + Tolema. Her friends call her Nessie.
ALSO BY GARY CORBY
The Pericles Commission
THE IONIA SANCTION. Copyright © 2011 by Gary Corby. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Corby, Gary.
The Ionia sanction / Gary Corby. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-59901-0
1. Private investigators—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Athens (Greece)—Fiction. 4. Greece—History—Athenian supremacy, 479-431 B.C.—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9619.4.C665I57 2011
823’.92—dc23
2011026221
First Edition: November 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-7915-3