Quiz Number One answers:

Match these Greek gods with their Roman counterparts:

Zeus = Jove/Jupiter

Hera = Juno

Poseidon = Neptune

Aphrodite = Venus

Hades = Pluto

Hermes = Mercury

Dionysus = Bacchus

Many Greek mythological names appear in modern life:

1. Nike

2. Odyssey

3. Atlas

4. Apollo

5. Trojan horse

 

Quiz Number Two

Here are the answers to the quiz questions about Murder at Mykenai on Catherine Mayo’s Free Stuff page, where you can test your wits, your memory and the internet against the quiz master’s skill. Not all the answers can be found in Murder at Mykenai – be warned!

1. Three.
   At the start of Murder at Mykenai, Menelaos has a brother, Agamemnon, who we meet in Ch 10, and a sister who is mentioned in Ch 3 but not named. Her name was, in fact, Anaxibia and I can imagine her being called Ana for short. Later in the book, we hear that Menelaos’s step-mother has given birth to a son. His name isn’t mentioned in Murder at Mykenai but it was Aegisthos. Many years later he committed a terrible crime against Agamemnon. Can you find out what it was?
2. The ostrich has been brought all the way from Egypt and would have been captured by the Egyptians in the Nubian desert. Several ostrich shells have been found in the ruins of Mykenai, and this is where they came from too. First of all, the ostrich will have been barged down the Nile inside a crate, then put, still in its crate, on a big ship for the voyage to Mykenai. When the ship landed, the ostrich and its crate could have been put on an ox cart, but it’s much more likely that it walked from the coast to Mykenai. That’s quite a long way, but ostriches are very good walkers – probably better than we are.
3. Odysseus tells the other boys he needs to find out how daggers and swords are made, so he can supervise his father’s bronze smiths one day. But I think he’s just so curious about how things are made, he wants to do it anyway.
4. Unlike the chariots in Ben Hur, Bronze Age chariots were really light. Even war chariots were made of woven wickerwork panels secured to a slim wooden frame. There was no suspension and the roads they travelled on would have been pretty bumpy, so the driver and his passenger stood on a flexible floor made of woven leather strips. Even so, you’d need really good balance. It’s quite possible for a very strong man to have picked one up and carried it over his head.
5. It’s hair oil. The Bronze Age Greeks wore their hair long, especially in peacetime, and because they didn’t have shampoo, olive oil would have been used to help keep it clean as well as tidy. And rich people could afford expensive perfumed oil, scented with rose petals or sage. The Greeks of the time exported a lot of perfumed oil, and the beautifully painted pots it was packaged in ended up all over the Mediterranean.