Sharrukin's Palace

A good holiday to everyone, whichever holiday you may observe.

Personally, I’ve been enjoying a few days off from work: spending some time with my wife and children, flying starships around in Elite: Dangerous, experimenting with the new tabletop game SpaceCorp (there may be a theme here), and getting some writing done. Also, ignoring the outside world entirely. I think if I paid any real attention to the horde of rough beasts currently slouching their way toward Bethlehem, I would probably go mad.

Work on the new novel proceeds apace. It’s a little slow, especially because I keep having to stop and do some research every few lines. In the past week, I’ve had to read on:

• The layout of the Piraeus (the main port of Athens) in the late fifth century BCE
• How foreigners in Athens could register themselves as metics (legal immigrants) and what that would cost
• A list of people exiled at one time or another from Athens
• Athenian sanitation (not as bad as I thought it was, but nowhere close to a modern standard either)
• The bare minimum of houseware that two people living in Athens could get by with, and how much that would cost
• How Athenian households, especially poor ones, got (more or less) fresh water
• Also, the very vexing question of whether Athenian women carried their water-jars in their hands or on their heads

As for that last item, I found some very satisfying evidence:

Not to mention that the whole business of going to fetch water in a classical Greek city handed me a perfect little conflict scene. One of the story’s major ongoing themes has to do with how a woman is forced to deal with one of the most profoundly misogynistic cultures in history. The fountain house was apparently a nexus of feminine society in Athens, but it was also a venue where men frequently stalked, harassed, and assaulted women. A good place for Alexandra to decide that she has very much had enough.