The translation went quickly, so quickly that Gallo was at a loss to determine how Kenner had convinced Tyndareus that he needed her to do it. A first year student could have done the work in a few days with nothing more than a dictionary and a copy of the Iliad for reference. Like the works officially attributed to Homer, the Heracleia was a non-linear narrative in dactylic hexameter, a classical poetry scheme that measured out the syllables of each line. The method served not only an aesthetic purpose but also a practical one, facilitating the memorization of long epic poems that were primarily handed down orally. Gallo did most of the work in her head, consulting external translation resources only to verify her interpretation of a few tricky passages.
Kenner sat beside her the whole time. Rohn kept his vigil from a distance, but neither man interrupted her. She was provided with a light meal and as much coffee as she could drink, and she was assured that Fiona would be taken care of, as well. After three hours of perusing scans of the old papyrus pages, she completed her first pass.
“This is more or less what you thought it was,” she told Kenner. “The life story of Herakles.” Part of it anyway, she thought, but did not say aloud. “There’s no mention of ‘Labors’—that was probably something added later. But it does recount his battles against the children of Typhon—the chthonic monsters. After killing several of them, he embarked on a ten-year-long voyage to find Echidna, the mother of the monsters, in Erebus. The darkness, which was another name for the Underworld. I suspect that very round figure might be a slight exaggeration. Poetic license. But it certainly took a very long time for him to reach his destination. The gates of the Underworld, where he captured the three-headed hellhound.” She paused a beat and then added, “Cerberus.”
Kenner did not react to the name, but his curiosity was piqued. “Does it say where the entrance to the Underworld is?”
“Not precisely. ‘In a burning land, with poisonous air, at the center of a lake of fire.’” That was a rough but mostly literal translation. “He learned the location from the Amazons and then continued on from there.”
“That’s our starting point.”
“We are confronted with the same problem,” Gallo said. “To reach the land of the Amazons, he had to ‘brave Poseidon’s wrath’ and ‘endure a month while Eurus slept’—presumably those are references to a long sea voyage—before arriving at ‘the land where Tethys resides,’ and where the Amazons made their home.
“The mention of Poseidon’s wrath could indicate a long sea voyage lasting at least a month. Tethys was an aquatic goddess, the wife of Oceanus and the mother of several river deities. We can assume that means the Amazons lived on a river. Knowing what we now do about the possible range of his travels, that could be anywhere.”
“Not anywhere,” Kenner countered. “I believe we can rule out a few of the traditionally accepted locations. Libya, for example. An ancient trireme could easily cover fifty miles a day, under oar power alone. At a bare minimum, we’re looking at a distance of no less than 1,500 miles, and probably much further than that. It would not have taken Herakles months to reach a destination on the other side of the Mediterranean.”
“You’re assuming a direct line of travel,” Gallo said. “Ancient sailors never ventured far from a visible shoreline.”
“To make that map, the Amazons clearly overcame that limitation.”
Gallo had no rebuttal for that, but the comment made her reconsider her own biases. She’d made the same mistake as the ancient historians who had tried to shoehorn the epic voyages of Odysseus, Jason and Herakles into their map of the known world and the limitations of their belief system. As Kenner had pointed out, the map on Queen Hippolyte’s girdle suggested the Amazons, in addition to being unbeatable on the battlefield, were exceptional mariners.
The realization nagged at Gallo. What else had she glossed over because of her prejudices? She patiently scrolled through the pages. The scattershot narrative was structured like the memories of an old war veteran, but she soon located the section describing Herakles’s arrival at the Amazon city. As she read the passage with fresh eyes, she became aware of a serious omission. “They weren’t all women.”
“What’s that?”
“This account describes a fortress city ruled by the Amazon Hippolyte, but it doesn’t say that everyone who lived there was an Amazon. In fact, it explicitly describes the city’s inhabitants as both Amazon women and ‘men who fought as fiercely as Spartans.’”
Kenner frowned. “I’m not sure how that matters.”