Gary Corby: Death Ex Machina

On the sacred isle of Delos there is a marble statue of a huge phallus, raised by a proud man to commemorate his victory in the Great Dionysia.

Polemarch

The archonin charge of everything to do with metics.

Protagonist

The lead actor in a play. Our word protagonist comes directly from ancient Greek.

Orchestra

The stage! This one’s confusing. To us the orchestra is the people who play the music. The original orchestra was the place where the chorus stood. In other words, the stage. The orchestra was a semicircular space that was the lowest point of the theater. The seats rose up so everyone could look down to see the action.

Rhamnus

A minor city in the top right hand corner of Attica. The ruins of Rhamnus remain to this day.

Sabazios

The Phrygian god of the harvest and of beer. His opposite number in the Greek pantheon is Dionysos. It’s known for sure that there were a small number of followers of Sabazios in Athens.

Scythian Guard

The peacekeeping force of classical Athens. Don’t mess with these guys. They might be slaves, but they’re slaves with permission to beat you senseless if you’re a troublemaker. Classical Athens had a reputation for relatively little street crime. The Scythians are the reason why.

Skene

In ancient Greek it means tent. Early plays used a regular army tent for a background. The actor ducked into the tent for his quick changes. Later the tent became a back wall, but they still called it a skene.

Sophocles

Second of the three great tragic playwrights. Of the three he’s probably the best known to modern readers, because Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex.

Thanatos

The god of death. His brother Hypnos is the god of sleep.

Theologeion

A balcony at the back of the stage. Gods and goddesses play their parts while standing on the theologeion, so that deities stand above ordinary mortals. This means the stage crew who control the god machine need to be pretty accurate about where they deposit their actor.

Thespis

The world’s first professional actor. We call actors thespians in his honor. Many of the decisions that Thespis made about how to run a play remain with us to this day. Thespis lived right on the cusp between history and prehistory, which is a pity because he was obviously an amazing man, yet we know so little about him.

Tragedy

Goat Song. No, I’m not making this up. Tragos is goat, ode is song. Tragode is goat song: a song about goats, which totally gives away the farm life origins of our plays. This is the tradition that 2,000 years later would lead to Hamlet. It’s amazing what a few talented writers and actors can do with such an inauspicious beginning.

Trierarch

The commander of a naval vessel. Every year, wealthy men volunteered to pay the upkeep of a trireme. In return they got to call themselves trierarch for the year. Men like Kordax loved it so much that they made it their career. They and their opposite numbers among the Phoenicians were probably the first professional naval officers.

Trireme

The standard navy ship of the Greek world. Triremes are long, low, sleek, incredibly fast machines with a battering ram at the front. Triremes are the first ships in the world designed to sink other ships. In modern terms they would be classed as destroyers. Athens had overwhelmingly the largest fleet around, with 300 triremes. Naval technology has improved a lot in two 2,500 years, but it’s worth noting that Athens had as many ships of the line as the modern US Navy.

Tritagonist

The third actor in a play. The other two are the protagonistand the deuteragonist.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THANKS OVERWHELMINGLY TO my family. My daughters, Megan and Catriona, were five and eight when I started writing these books. Now they’re thirteen and sixteen. They’ve grown up with Nico and Diotima. (And they know far more ancient history than your average teenager.)

My wife, Helen, is not only my first and best reader, but also your first line of defense against my errors. These books are as much hers as mine.

You’re reading this book because the lovely people at Soho Press made it. It’s incredibly hard to name names without doing injustice to some poor soul, but I want to thank my editor and Soho’s Associate Publisher Juliet Grames; Director of Marketing and beer guru Paul Oliver; publicist Abby Koski who does a terrific job; managing editor Rachel Kowal; art director Janine Agro; Meredith Barnes, who read the manuscript when she was working for my agent, and then read it again when she was working for my publisher; and Bronwen Hruska for leading such a great company.

Janet Reid is the world’s best literary agent. I suspected as much when I signed with her as a new writer, eight years ago, and now I know it for sure.