Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [5]
Kylix – A boy, slave of Hipponax.
Miltiades – Tyrant of the Thracian Chersonese. His son, Cimon or Kimon, rose to be a great man in Athenian politics. Probably Miltiades was the author of the Athenian victory of Marathon, but Miltiades was a complex man, a pirate, a warlord, and a supporter of Athenian democracy.
Penelope – Daughter of Chalkeotechnes, sister of Arimnestos.
Sappho – A Greek poetess from the island of Lesbos, born sometime around 630 BC and died between 570 and 550 BC. Her father was probably Lord of Eressos. Widely considered the greatest lyric poet of Ancient Greece.
Simonalkes – Head of the collateral branch of the Plataean Corvaxae, cousin to Arimnestos.
Simonides – Another great lyric poet, he lived circa 556 BC – 468 BC, and his nephew, Bacchylides, was as famous as he. Perhaps best known for his epigrams, one of which is:
Ω ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτιτῇδε
κείμεθα, τοῖςκείνωνῥήμασι πειθόμενοι
Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
Thales – circa 624 BC – c. 546 BC The first philosopher of the Greek tradition, whose writings were still current in Arimnestos’s time. Thales used geometry to solve problems such as calculating the height of the pyramids in Aegypt and the distance of ships from the shore. He made at least one trip to Aegypt. He is widely accepted as the founder of western mathematics.
Theognis – Theognis of Megara was almost certainly not one man but a whole canon of aristocratic poetry under that name, much of it practical. There are maxims, many very wise, laments on the decline of man and the age, and the woes of old age and poverty, songs for symposia, etc. In later sections there are songs and poems about homosexual love and laments for failed romances. Despite widespread attributions, there was, at some point, a real Theognis who may have lived in the mid-6th century BC, or just before the events of Killer of Men. His poetry would have been central to the world of Arimnestos’s mother.
It may seem odd to you, thugater, who has only known me as an old man, and an aristocrat, that I was once young and poor. And indeed, when the singers rise to sing of our ancestors, and men say that we are descended from Heracles and Zeus, I always laugh in my gut, because when I was young the smell of sheep dung was more common in our house than the smell of incense, and my mother’s hands were red and hard, despite her high birth and constant complaints.
But you, who have soft hands and whose only work is the loom, should know that those days were happy days too. And that it is worth knowing that a man can live as happily on a farm in Boeotia as in a city in Asia. Life is not all rose water and porphyry.
Listen then. And may the Muses aid me – I am old, and my memory may lose the furrow where the plough should go. I pour this libation to Heracles, my ancestor, who endured the twelve labours, and to all the jealous gods, who gave me this good life, despite famine and peril, and a long war.
Part I
The Lovely Bloom of Youth
As long as some mortal has the lovely bloom of youth, he plans with a light heart many things that are never to be fulfilled.
Simonides, fr. 20
1
The thing that I remember best – and maybe it’s my first memory, too – is the forge. My father, the smith – aye, he farmed too, because every free man in Boeotia counted his wealth in farmland – but Pater was the bronze-smith, the best in our village, the best in Plataea, and women said that he had the touch of the god upon him, because he had a battle wound that made him lame in his left foot, and because his pots never leaked. We were simple folk in Boeotia, not fancy boys like Athenians or joyless killers like the men of Sparta – we valued a man who made a pot that didn’t leak. When Pater pounded out a seam, that seam held. And he liked to add more – he was always a man to give more than he got, so that a housewife who paid him ten hard-won drachmas and a bowl