1. Homer, Iliad 1.528
2. Aristophanes, Knights passim
3. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 6.31
4. This is why there will be no trireme shipwrecks for future archaeologists to study.
5. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 5.89, following Dutton trans. 1910
6. The shape of the latter will give later eras the word ‘crater’.
7. Philosophumena of Hippolytus 4.35
8. ‘Dismissal of Spirits’, Papyri Graecae Magicae 4.915
9. Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.12
10. Diogenes Laërtius, Plato 3.7
11. Even today, this is called a ‘Hippocrates bandage’.
12. Homer, Odyssey 19, 138
13. This isn’t in fact a quote, but a five-word summary of a notably longer piece of text. Euphiletos, who has murdered Eratosthenes, is trying to justify his actions to the jury. Euphiletos claims that Eratosthenes was having an affair with his wife, that he caught them in the act, before killing Eratosthenes as the law permits. Eratosthenes’ family claim that this is a lie to cover up a premeditated murder. Euphiletos has a vested interest in attempting to portray adultery as worse than rape because ‘I was punishing an adulterer’ is his defence.
14. The oldest source for this variant is Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, written 408-6 BC. The addition of this element would not be out of place for Euripides, who we know made other significant contributions to myth.
15. The incident with the cloak is from a lost text called the Historical Commentaries of Hieronymus of Rhodes, quoted in Athenaeus, complete with Sophocles’ indignant little poem in Deipnosophists 13.82.
16. Thrasyllos, the mad boat-spotter, was a real character. His condition was related by the writer Heraclides in a text called On Pleasure and quoted in Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 12.81.
17. What we would call a dark red wine, the Greeks called ‘black’ because that’s how it looks in a clay mug by lamplight. This is why Homer can refer to the ‘wine-dark sea’ in his poetry.
18. Here, I have put Aristotle’s arguments against Hippodamus into the mouth of Socrates, as that’s probably whence they originally came.
19. Xenophon, Hellenica 2.4.11
20. In fact, this crack was made by the courtesan Gnathaena to the playwright Diphilius, quoted in Athenaeus Deipnosophists 13.43.
21. All this advice is extracted from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans.
22. Alciphron, Letters 34
23. Quoted mainly from ‘Petale to Simaleon’, Alciphron, Letters 57.
24. This idea of the origin of the Venus symbol is from the nineteenth century. The folk idea behind the Mars symbol is much older, but equally dubious. The more commonly accepted idea is that the symbols developed from the letters phi (for female) and theta (for male) based on the fact that theta is the first letter of the Greek name for the planet Mars, and phi the first letter of the Greek name for the planet Venus.
25. Aristophanes, Archanians l530