It's my birthday and so I'm pounding Tanqueray and reading Pretty Alright historical fiction. I first read the Hellenic Traders series at 14, to my shame after discovering it on TV Tropes during a computer class I ignored, and while I'm still a fan it suffers from a sin ubiquitous to historical fiction that John Bayley described best in his retrospective of The Ionian Mission:

Most historical novels suffer from the fatal twin defects of emphasizing the pastness of the past too much while at the same time seeking to be over-familiar with it ('Have some more of this Chian,' drawled Alcibiades)

This is certainly a problem with Turtledove - Turtletaub when he's feeling Hellenic, for whatever reason. They rarely drink wine other than Chian, and when they do it's immediately compared. Worse than that, however, is his complete inability to keep track of the wages the rowers of the Aphrodite are paid. From the beginning he makes it clear that a rower is paid either one drakhma per day or one and a half, experience depending, and that there are forty rowers. Assuming every rower is paid the maximum rate, that comes out to 3/5s of a mina, a mina being 100 drakhmai, per day. This works in the beginning when he says that the crew costs 2 minai every 3 days, assuming that they still had to pay some extra to the keleustes, the toikharkos (I'm not gonna spell this right, it's Greek for purser so far as I can tell), and the captain. Not two chapters later, however, the wages are raised:

They didn't come close to making the mina and a half their crew cost them every day.

So now we're up to 3 minai every 2 days, hell of a pay raise considering we weren't even hitting 2 for every 3 with each rower's pay rate maxed out! And then, three chapters after that, the fucker comes out with:

If he waited half a month, he'd go through half a talent of silver

A talent being 60 minai, that would bring us to 2 minai every day! Hell, I wish Turtledove was my union rep, best we ever got in the UFCW was 1 month of hazard pay during COVID and wages have been stagnant ever since. I'd kill to pull an oar across the Aegean at that rate, brother.

Anyway, 3/5 book, L. Sprague de Camp is still the king of Hellenic era historical fiction.

The gryphon's skull

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The gryphon's skull (2002)

The gryphon's skull (2002)

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