Errata for Henchmen of Ares

It will be two years this November since my PhD thesis was published by Karwansaray in revised form as Henchmen of Ares. Reviews have generally been very favourable and a Spanish edition is currently in the works, to be published by Desperta Ferro Ediciones. I am particularly honoured that Dr Fernando Echeverría Rey is handling the translation, as he is an excellent scholar of ancient Greek warfare.

As in any large project, errors may inadvertently creep in. Henchmen of Ares is no different in this regard. Translating the text, Fernando managed to catch a number of mistakes that had obviously eluded both the editor and proof reader of the book, as well as myself! I also received earlier comments from Cezary Kucewicz, who has written a review, and spotted one or two other mistakes myself.

These mistakes will all be corrected in the Spanish edition of Henchmen. Hopefully, I will also get the chance to correct them in a new English edition of the book, or perhaps when we release a digital version. For now, though, I wish to simply provide a list of the mistakes that are in the book so that you can correct the text using a pen or if like me you don’t like scribbling in books, you can print out the following list and fold it into the book. Here goes:

• Typo on p. 4: metis should of course be menis. It means ‘rage’ and is the first word of the Iliad. Funnily enough, metis is actually a proper Greek word, too, though its meaning, ‘wisdom’, is quite different from menis! 

• On p. 8, Tawagalawa is identified as the king of Ahhiyawa. This is not correct: he is the brother of the King of Ahhiyawa. The name of the King is never given in the letter.

• At the top of page 69, there is a minor mixup in the sequence of events in the first two sentences. It starts with ‘When Hector is killed by Achilles’ and ends with ‘mocking the fallen hero.’ This should be replaced by the following: ‘When Hector is killed by Achilles, the Greek hero strips him off his armour. The other Greeks then gather round to stab and poke the body in order to despoil it, mocking the fallen hero.’ The paragraph then continues as normal, with ‘Afterwards, Achilles in his anger…’

• Typo on p. 95, second paragraph: ‘Alcaus’ should be ‘Alcaeus’.

• The caption on page 107 is wrong. The original idea for the map was to focus on the campaign of 480–479 BC, but Carlos García and I ended up including almost everything, including the Ionian Revolt and the campaign of 490 BC, but I forgot to update the manuscript. The caption should read: ‘A map showing key sites and movements of troops during the Persian wars of the first quarter of the fifth century BC, including the Ionian Revolt.’

• On page 114 (text box), I write that Isagoras is a member of the Alcmeonidae. This isn’t correct: he is an aristocrat, but belonged to a noble house that Herodotus was unable to trace back very far, and was probably relatively new (see Hdt. 5.66.1). 

• Page 146, under 660 BC: remove ‘founding of Naucratis’, as this isn’t correct. Greeks did indeed settle at what we now call Naucratis, but it wasn’t founded at this date and the settlement of Greeks at Naucratis didn’t happen until the sixth century BC.

• Typo on p. 169, second paragraph: ‘under the reforms of Cleisthenes’ should be ‘until the reforms of Cleisthenes’.

If you spot any other mistakes, I would greatly appreciate it if you could let me know. Henchmen of Ares is the culmination of about a decade’s worth of research and, as the first book I ever had published, it is near and dear to my heart, and I would like to get it as close to perfection as possible. Thanks!