And the herms go on...

photo from customize.org

As suspected, searching for info on the mutilation of the Herms is another complete course on research skills. I'm no expert on ancient Greek history, believe me, though it helps to live with a scholar who's been cruising through Thucydides for eons. I'd been scouring the web (google, google books, google scholar, university library websites, Jstor journals, etc, etc, etc...) and reading everything I could find about late 5th century BC Athens when himself casually asked, "Why don't you go to primary sources?"

Duh. I knew they weren't on Proquest, and, as far as I knew, the Athens Tattler isn't archived anywhere, so I went at it slant. I gotta tell you, I'm really jazzed about the scriptoholics in Athens who wrote down anything and everything that interested them. Trial transcripts (juicy fare for the uninitiated...), financial account books (not as juicy), histories, gossip, poems, yadayadayada- seem to reinforce my original hunch that the era (late 5th century) mirrors darkly our own. And the herms tale, though not exactly as originally whispered to me over an early evening dinner by a feminist scholar, is filled with liars, cheats and scoundrels.. Not unlike today's crowd of monsters and freaks in power.

There's no way I can read everything about the era before I start to write the chapter, but at least the light begins to dawn over the wine-dark sea....

More as things develop...