Читать книгу The Corn King and the Spring Queen - Naomi Mitchison - Страница 6

The things in this book happened between the years 228 bc and 187 bc. Some of the things really happened, and some of the oddest things are said to have happened by Plutarch and others who call themselves historians. The place called Marob is not historically real, but people on the shores of the Black Sea, and thereabouts, made very beautiful things, of the kind which Berris Der made. For the rest, I have tried to deduce a place, from a good deal of evidence of actual ideas and happenings in all sorts of other times and places. As between Marob and Sparta or Alexandria, it is very doubtful whether, at a distance of more than two thousand years, one can ever get near to the minds, or even to the detail of the actions, of the people one is writing about, although they are in a way nearer to one than one’s living friends; it is scarcely possible that Kleomenes of Sparta was really at all like the Kleomenes I have made, though I doubt whether, in the present state of knowledge, anyone else’s idea is inherently more probable—it is all a game of hide-and-seek in the dark and if, in the game, one touches a hand or face, it is all chance; so Marob is just as likely, or as unlikely, as the rest of the world.

At the beginning of this book there is a family tree of the Spartan royal family during the time I have written about it. There are no names recorded for the children of Kleomenes and Agiatis, but I have given them ancestral names which seemed to be likely.

I think this is all. Naomi Mitchison, 1925–30