text: Author's note to The Thief \n\nNothing in The Thief is historically accurate, but I have taken bits and pieces out of the history of Greece and fitted them into my story. The landscape that Gen travels through is very much like that of ancient Greece and like some parts of modern Greece as well. The gods he meets were never the gods of the Greek Pantheon. There was a god of fire, Hephestus, who became the Roman god Vulcan and gave his name to Volcanoes. I changed the name to Hephestia and used it for my ruling goddess, and called the volcanoes the Hephestial Mountains, but my goddess and the Greek god really don't have much in common. He was the jealous husband of Aphrodite and was always low in the hierarchy of the gods. \n\nWhether Moira was a Greek god is a fuzzier question. Her name means "Fate" and she was sometimes personified as the messenger of the three fates who were spinning and weaving the fate of the world. Sometimes she was one of the fates, but she was never described as she is in The Thief. Asklepios, to whom the palace physician swore an oath to use his powers for healing, is another mythic figure. He was supposed to have been the son of Apollo and a mortal princess. He was educated by the centaur Cheiron and was skillful enough to resuscitate the dead. Hades and Zeus were anxious to keep the power of the gods for the gods alone and Zeus sent a thunderbolt to strike Asklepios and kill him. Nonetheless, he became the god of medicine and was pictured carrying a staff with a magic serpent wrapped around it, and this is now a symbol for doctors all over the world. \n\nArchimedes was real. He was a mathematician, mechanic, and physicist in the third century b.c His work survives to this day. One of his theories was that a constant amount of water must pass each point in a river in a fixed amount of time. Therefore the water in a river runs fastest at its narrowest point. Gen had this in mind when he and the magus and Athonis crossed the rapids of the Seperchia. \n\nAncient Greece had many more trees and better soil than modern Greece has. Thousands of years ago the forests were logged and the soil eroded, leaving much of Greece rocky, but even in the poor soil, olive trees thrive. Between the shore of the Corinthian Gulf and the ancient site of the Oracle at Delphi there are eleven miles of olive groves, called the sea of olives. There isn't, as far as I know, anything like the dystopia. \n\nIn the city of Sounis that I described there were once walls that defended the road between the city and its harbor. The city of Athens in Greece had walls like these. Stones from these walls were used to build various parts of the city, but there are still signs of them today, something like two thousand years after they were built. There is a lion gate like the one in Sounis, in the ruins of the city of Mycenae which was real. Meneleus was king of Mycenae. Helen of Troy was abducted from there. Its ruins are on the eastern most peninsula of the Peloponnese, that little hand-shaped piece of land attached to the mainland of Greece. The gate is just as described by the thief. Carved into a solid stone lintel, most of the detail has worn away and it is impossible to tell if the figures are really lions. They may have been griffins like those I mentioned on either side of the Eddissian throne. Those griffins are like the ones painted on the walls beside the throne in the palace of Knossos on the island Crete. The walls of Knossos were also decorated with paintings of swallows and lilies and a mural called the Great Procession. The civilization that built that palace was older than the one at Mycenae. It was obliterated, some people think by a volcano erupting in the Mediterranean around fourteen fifty b.c. The ruins of its many many rooms may have been the source of the myth of the Minotaur and the maze. \n\nThe megaron at Mycenae was nowhere near as elaborate as Knossos. It was just a single room with stone 