Glorious Exploits

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And so an idea is born: the men will put on Medea in the quarry. A proper performance to be sung of down the ages. Because after all, you can hate the Athenians for invading your territory, but still love their poetry.

Sure they are broke, their potential actors are despised, hated and dying, they have no theatre experience or scripts, but when the duo find an actual actor and realise that thanks to him, they can put on not just Medea but also Euripedes new play The Trojan Women, a work not yet seen or heard in Syracuse, the dream takes on a life of its own. I know what you must think and I . . . stop it Captain, I’m sorry, he’s . . . I know what you must think of me. I’m . . . Captain!’ It's 412 BC, and Athens' invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected and hanging on by the slimmest of threads. I did not know anything about the Peloponnesian war or Euripides going into this, but I appreciated the glimpse into this place and time which felt well researched but accessible. This accessability is also helped by the MCs not being war heroes or gods like a lot of ancient/historic greek retellings. As a lover of Euripides and the classical playwrights, I thought this book was a fantastic modern tribute to them, highlighting the intersections between politics, war, ethics, and drama in the classical world.

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Having spent about seven years in Paris, Lennon now lives in Norwich with his family. He studied history and classics at University College Dublin, then graduated into the 2008 economic crash and taught English in Granada while making his first forays into writing. Later, he did an MA at UEA, taking Rebecca Stott’s “brilliant” historical fiction class alongside Imogen Hermes Gowar.

They would share their thoughts on the individual explorers, some hugely famous and others relatively unknown, and one day Bradley admitted to the group: “By the way, my favourite is this guy that no-one cares about, Graham Gore, he’s not in any books, he’s not really in the archives, but I love him.” But swift-footed Achilles it can never be! O Hellas, my father will never allow it. Achilles, what can—” The Ministry of Time is Sceptre’s superlead début for 2024, acquired in a 48-hour pre-empt. It has sold in 19 territories to date, and TV and film rights were optioned after a 21-way auction. The novel opens with the unnamed female civil servant narrator interviewing for a new job and learning that the British government has developed the means to travel through time. She will work as a “bridge”, a liaison and housemate, for an “expat” rescued from history: Commander Graham Gore (RN circa 1809-circa 1847). Four other expats (all fictional) are also brought into the 21st century.Whilst it is true that there is a lot of “Greek mythology retellings” around at the moment, I would not put Glorious Exploits in this category! Yes, it is a historical novel, and is set in classical Greece, but there are not the magical elements which feature in many of the recent myth retellings - other than as part of the character’s religious belief systems and within the plays mentioned. I mean, I’ve never not had a day job but I found it helpful to have that structure. One book does not a writing career make…so I think it’s very unwise to bank on this idea of becoming a career writer because that’s not something that is afforded to most writers.” The failed Sicilian Expedition of c.413BC was devastating for Athens and, due to the biased nature of our sources, we hear very little of the Syracusan side of the war. We do know that captured Athenians were held prisoner in Syracusan quarries, and were forced to recite snippets of plays (which were always performed in Athens). Ferdia Lennon has seized this remarkable anecdote, and created something truly astounding out of it. The voices of Lampo and Gelon are real. Their home, their lives, their feelings, are real. I want to pour over this book and read it again and again and again, because I haven’t come across anything quite like this in all the ancient historical fiction I have read. Lemon’s writing is empathetic and hilarious and absolutely devastating. Simply magnificent. The moment he wrote the first line in contemporary Irish vernacular, he had a character, a relationship, and the rest flowed. Lampo’s voice contains a metaphor, too: like Ireland, Sicily is an island, which had been colonised a few hundred years earlier, so it felt conceivable that, “like Hiberno-English, there would be a native dialect playing under the Greek”. Like his hero, Hilary Mantel, Lennon approaches an historical turning point—the Athenian invasion of Sicily during the Peloponnesian War—from an unexpected angle, writing about Athens and theatre from an illiterate Syracusan potter’s perspective.

Best friends Gelon and Lampo live in a rapidly growing and changing city, jobless after their factory closed, Lampo still living with his mother at thirty, Gelon grieving the loss of his family. Unemployed and with little money, life revolves around visiting the bar and dreaming, all too aware that they are have nots in a world of haves. So far so familiar, only our protagonists live in Syracuse nearly two and a half thousand years ago, a city that, against all odds, fought off the Athenians three years before the book starts - which is why there are several thousand Athenian men imprisoned in their quarries, dying slowly of disease and starvation. Men who are so grateful for few scraps of food they'll recite poetry in return for olives. And Gelon really adores Amazingly, the idea is rooted in historical record; Plutarch’s Lives references how some Athenian prisoners survived by quoting Euripides to the poetry-loving Sicilians. For Lennon, this discovery transformed a large-scale war of conquest into a personal story, and he set out to investigate the contradiction between the dehumanisation of the prisoners and the obsession with their drama, and to imagine how that empathy gap might have been bridged.This time two of the Spartans laugh, and all four salute. Ah, I feel so happy today. I can’t explain it, but it’s some feeling. Those are the best ones. The ones you can’t explain, and we haven’t even fed the Athenians. Best friends Gelon and Lampo live in a rapidly growing and changing city, jobless after their factory closed, Lampo still living with his mother at thirty, Gelon grieving the loss of his family. Unemployed and with little money, life revolves around visiting the bar and dreaming, all too aware that they are have nots in a world of haves. So far so familiar, only our protagonists live in Syracuse nearly two and a half thousand years ago, a city that, against all odds, fought off the Athenians three years before the book starts - which is why there are several thousand Athenian men imprisoned in their quarries, dying slowly of disease and starvation. Men who are so grateful for few scraps of food they'll recite poetry in return for olives. And Gelon really adores Athenian poetry, especially the work of Euripedes. Which is why he has a brainwave. Why don't they put on a play right here, in the quarry, a Greek Tragedy performed by actual Athenians? The festival is thrilled to bring Tessa Hadley to Ennis this year, she said, a novelist of great subtlety and power. Eavan Boland and her legacy will be celebrated in an event featuring Annemarie Ní Churreáin, John O’Donnell and Olivia O’Leary. Ennis will also host top crime fiction authors Jane Casey, Liz Nugent and Catherine Ryan Howard, in conversation with Declan Hughes. SO GELON SAYS to me, “Let’s go down and feed the Athenians. The weather’s perfect for feeding Athenians.” What an absolute blinder of a book! Glorious Exploits is a refreshingly unique take on the current trend for novels set in Ancient Greece. It chooses a bold historical setting: the aftermath of Athen’s most infamous disaster, the Sicilian expedition, where thousands of Athenians lost their lives and several thousand were imprisoned in stone quarries near Syracuse. And in this grim war-ravaged setting it creates a story both laugh-out-loud funny and brutal: we follow Syracusan Lampo as he and his pal Gelon attempt to stage two plays by Euripides (Medea and Trojan Women). The catch? Well, Lampo and Gelon are but lowly unemployed potters, fond of the drink. And they’ve decided the only proper way to stage Euripides is with an Athenian cast..