Three trading houses round a mountain that none of them can see past, joined by a road on which no messenger can pass another.
Read this first, and any book set on the ring road can be read next, in any order. It describes the island, the houses, the road and what carries word, which every book here takes for granted.
A single limestone massif, Mount Phyle, fills the middle of Arche and leaves only a strip of coast round it. Three trading houses stand evenly spaced round that coast, each with a harbour town about it. The mountain is broad as well as high, so it stands between every pair of houses: no house can see another, and no line of sight crosses the island.
The houses pass goods and orders among themselves, and trade with the port towns about them. The books are set in the trading season, which on Arche is the season of low cloud. The cloud silences the sundials. Each counting room has a water-clock, filled by clerks who cannot see one another's, and the three keep no common hour. Nobody on the island knows what time it is anywhere but in his own room, and not truly there.
The houses are known by number: House 1, House 2 and House 3. They are alike. Each has a storehouse of goods, a counting room with a book in which every piece of its business is written in order, and clerks who keep the book. Nothing sets one house apart from the others except the part an example gives it: the house an order is sent to, the house that begins a count. Where the houses must be put in some order, the order is by number.
A house knows only what is in its own book and what has reached its gate. It cannot look into another house's book, and it learns of another house's business only when a slip about it arrives.
A coastal ring road joins the houses, cut into the cliffs, with a lane each way. The law of the road is old and nobody on Arche breaks it: nobody overtakes. A fast messenger caught behind a slow cart walks behind it until the cart turns in at a gate.
By the same law a slip always goes by the direct stretch between two houses, never the long way round past a third house's gate. Three stretches, each travelled both ways, make six tracks, one for each ordered pair of houses, and each carries only its own traffic.
Messengers carry written slips along these tracks, and carts and pack-trains carry goods on the same tracks behind and in front of them. A messenger may be fast or slow, and a cart may be held up behind a lame mule for hours, so nobody can say how long anything will take. But nothing is lost: no messenger or cart falls from the cliff. And nothing is passed: whatever a house sends down a track arrives at the other end in the order it was sent.
The road is the only way word goes between the houses, and the books depend on that.
The mountain. Mount Phyle is held by a siege, with bandits on its crown and mercenaries at its foot, and in the trading season its summit is lost in cloud. The houses light no beacon on it and send no word over it. A goatherd who knows the smugglers' tracks sometimes crosses, but he may take two hours or two days or never come down, and no house sends its business that way. When he does carry news, it is news the houses' account scrolls cannot see.
The sea. Reefs and tide-races off every headland stop small boats coasting from one cove to the next. Ships go out to sea, not round the island.
The camps. The mercenaries' tents at the foot of the mountain carry nothing from one house to another.
Every book set on the ring road starts from the same few facts, and states them again in its own words.
(1) Three houses, alike, each acting only on its own book and on what reaches its gate.
(2) Six one-way tracks, one for each ordered pair of houses. What goes down a track arrives,
in the order it was sent, after a time nobody can bound.
(3) No common hour. The sun cannot be read, and the water-clocks do not agree.
(4) Nothing else carries word.
Each book then asks one question of that island. How can the houses agree on what came first when they share no clock? What does it take for a record kept in several places to act as one? How can the goods of the whole island be counted while the carts keep moving? The island does not change from book to book; only the question does.
What each part of the place stands for, so that a reader coming to any book here knows the model before the first chapter begins.
What each part of this place has in common with the real Greek world, so that a reader can tell what is borrowed from what is made up. Close means the real thing is much like it; loose means it is borrowed and changed; invented means the setting made it up; anachronism means the real thing is of another age. A dagger (†) marks a citation given from memory and not checked against the text.
| In the setting | The real precedent | How close |
|---|---|---|
| Place. Arche, the island | The name is the Greek word archē, “beginning, first principle, rule”. For a round island with one great massif, the nearest real match is Samothrace, whose mountain Homer makes Poseidon's lookout over Troy (Iliad 13.12–14)†. The geometry itself is invented. | Loose |
| Place. the ring road, one lane each way, no overtaking | The real cliff road of the Greek coast is the Scironian road from Megara to Corinth. In classical times it was a ledge fit for walkers and pack animals; the emperor Hadrian widened it so that vehicles could pass one another in opposite directions (Pausanias 1.44.6). A lane each way is a Roman standard, so a Hellenistic cliff road would be single track. | Loose |
| Place. three harbour towns on terraces round a harbour | Hellenistic trading harbours such as Delos and Rhodes: terraced towns of courtyard houses, with warehouses and quays at the water†. | Close |
| Building. a house: one long range, lime-plastered rubble walls, a Doric portico along the road, a gabled tile roof | Plastered rubble walls (the “masonry style” of Delos) and a Doric colonnade facing a public way, as on the stoas of Athens and Pergamon†. The office, gate and storehouse under one roof is the setting's own arrangement. | Close |
| Building. a portico of plain Doric columns along the road | Greek Doric columns had no base: the shaft stands directly on the top step of the platform, the stylobate†. | Close |
| Building. a gabled tile roof of flat pan tiles under narrow cover tiles, with a decorated tile at each eave end | The Corinthian roof system: flat terracotta pan tiles, ridged cover tiles over the joints, and antefixes at the eave†. Sparta's Laconian roofs used curved tiles throughout†, so a curved tile is Greek too, but the flat and cover pair is the standard. The timbers beneath were hewn by adze and saw-pit, not milled†. | Close |
| Building. port-town houses facing inward, blank street walls, a door and a few small high windows | The courtyard houses of Olynthus and Delos present blank walls to the street and open onto a court†. | Close |
| Building. the board of requests at House 3's gate, numbered slots and a peg | The klērotērion, a stone slab with columns of slots into which citizens' bronze tokens were set, used in Athens to allot jurors and officials. It sorted by lot, not by arrival, so the board is a loose borrowing. | Loose |
| Building. the customs seat | Greek harbours levied a tax on goods landed; Athens took a fiftieth at the Piraeus†. | Close |
| Building. the shared storehouse cut into the rock beside the road | Greek rock-cut cisterns and store-rooms exist, but a store shared between rival trading houses is the setting's own device. | Invented |
| Character. the three houses, known by number | Hellenistic commerce ran through individual merchants and bankers rather than numbered firms; the nearest paper trail is the estate archive of Zenon, a Ptolemaic manager of the third century BC†. Numbering the houses is a series rule, so that none has a character of its own. | Loose |
| Character. the accountant and the clerks | Clerks kept dated accounts of receipts and shipments; the Zenon papyri show the work†. The accountant's Greek name follows the series practice of Hellenising the authors. | Close |
| Character. messengers on foot, bare-headed, in an ochre exōmis and strapped sandals, a hide pouch | The hemerodromoi, “day-runners”, such as Pheidippides (Herodotus 6.105)†. The exōmis is one woven rectangle, belted, with one shoulder bare†; sandals were simple strapped soles†; a traveller's bag was a soft hide pēra†. The traveller's hat, the petasos, is Hermes' emblem, but the setting leaves it off: on a runner it reads as a modern brimmed hat. A pinched-crown hat, a sleeved tailored shirt, a buckled sandal and a stitched flap bag are all of a later age. | Close |
| Character. loaders at the storehouse door | Dock and warehouse labour was done by slaves and hired men†. | Close |
| Character. the goatherd who crosses the mountain | A local who knew the hill path that no army could see: Ephialtes of Malis showed the Persians the Anopaia track round the pass of Thermopylae (Herodotus 7.213–218)†. | Close |
| Character. bandits who take carts on the road | Brigandage and piracy were constant in the Hellenistic world, and cargoes were lost as they would be to a sale. | Close |
| Prop. slips of papyrus | Papyrus was the ordinary Hellenistic writing material for letters and accounts. | Close |
| Prop. numbers written as Greek letters | The alphabetic numerals, Α for one, Β for two, were in use from the Hellenistic period†. | Close |
| Prop. water-clocks that disagree; a sundial dead under cloud | Athenian courts timed speeches with the klepsydra (Aristotle, Constitution of Athens 67), and the Tower of the Winds in Athens combined sundials with a water-clock. Greek hours also varied in length with the season†, so there really was no common hour. | Close |
| Prop. the red sash on the messenger who carries the marker | Heralds were sacrosanct under Hermes, and killing them was thought to bring a curse: the Spartans' killing of Persian heralds is the famous case (Herodotus 7.133–137)†. A red sash itself is the setting's own. | Loose |
| Prop. carts, mules, oil jars, merchant ships | The Kyrenia ship, a fourth-century BC merchantman found off Cyprus, carried wine jars, millstones and almonds†; mule and ox carts took goods on land. | Close |
| Prop. the houses' account scrolls | Hellenistic accounts were kept on papyrus rolls and sheets and on wax tablets; the Zenon papyri are the surviving archive of one such manager†. | Close |
| Prop. the tally kept in a counting room | Greek reckoning used pebbles on a counting board; the marble Salamis tablet is an example†. | Close |
| Practice. requests served in the sequence placed | Athens preferred the lot and the rota to a queue; first come, first served is the setting's own rule. | Invented |
| Practice. one house at a time in the shared storehouse | The president of the Athenian prytaneis, chosen by lot for a day and a night, kept the keys of the treasuries and the public seal (Aristotle, Constitution of Athens 44). A single key-holder is the real form of mutual exclusion. | Loose |
| Practice. counting the stock without stopping the trade | Temples and fleets were inventoried each year (the Delian temple accounts, the Athenian naval lists)†, but those were counted at rest. Counting a moving trade is the setting's problem. | Loose |
| Practice. trade in the cloudy season | Hesiod advises against sailing in winter (Works and Days 618–694)†, so the houses' trade is by road, which fits. | Close |
