Salamis is set in 306 BC. As the story notes, this sea battle was by the Salamis in eastern Cyprus, not by the one near Athens. It was the second sea-fight off the Cypriot city, the earlier one having taken place almost fifty years before. All the people of Rhodes could do in this year was nervously watch the thunderous war on land and sea between Antigonos and Demetrios on the one hand and Ptolemaios on the other.
Menedemos is (just barely) a historical figure, though everyone else in his family is fictitious. Other historical figures who appear in Salamis are Demetrios, Ptolemaios, and Ptolemaios’ henchmen Argaios and Kallikrates. Historical figures who are mentioned but have no direct role include Demetrios’ father Antigonos; Demetrios’ late brother Philippos; Demetrios’ admiral Antisthenes; Ptolemaios’ brother Menelaos; the rival warlords Seleukos, Kassandros, and Lysimakhos; and Demetrios of Phaleron, who had ruled Athens for Kassandros till Demetrios Antigonos’ son ousted him the year before our story takes place.
In one way, doing the research for this book showed me how much things have changed in the past twenty years. If, at the end of the twentieth century, I wanted to see pictures of amphorai from different places around the Greek world, I would have had to drive down to the UCLA research library and dig until I found the particular book (more likely, books) I needed … if no one else had checked out the critical one. In this modern world, I went to Google Images on my tablet, typed in “amphora” and whatever place names I needed, and had lots of color images at my disposal. Beats working.
In another way, things haven’t changed at all. Menedemos could very well have used the method he did to work out how many Akahaians went to Troy to fight. I used that method myself when I was writing an undergrad paper for a course on the history of ancient Greece in 1969. After I’d added up all the ships mentioned in Book II of the Iliad, I went to an encyclopedia (print, of course—no Wikipedia in those dark days) to make sure I’d done it right. The encyclopedia said something like “Agamemnon took 1,186 ships and approximately 100,000 men to Troy.” I stared at that, realizing that whoever had written the article I was checking had done exactly the same thing I had: taken the average of the two figures for men per ship Homer gives and multiplied it by the number of ships (which I had right, by the way). It was the very first time I ever actually felt like a historian.
I’ve transliterated most Greek personal and place names straight into English, with no detour through Latin. In Salamis, you’ll see Demetrios, not Demetrius; Platon, not Plato; and Kition, not Citium. I’ve made exceptions where places have a very familiar name in English, such as Athens, Crete, and Cyprus. I’ve also left the names of Alexander the Great and his father, Philip of Macedon, in their conventional forms. The other Alexandros and Philippos who appear in the story do so under names that would have been more familiar to their contemporaries. Transliteration never makes anyone perfectly happy. All writers can do is their best.
Salamis copyright © 2020 Harry Turtledove. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise without written permission except short excerpts in a review, critical analysis, or academic work.
This is a work of fiction.
Cover art by Christina P. Myrvold; artstation.com/christinapm
ISBN: 978-1-64710-008-7 EBook Production: November 2020
An imprint of Arc Manor LLC
