Author's Note

1. While on this journey through Greece, I took forty rolls of slide film with an Olympus OM-1 SLR. I have scanned these slides and presented them, segregated by location, at the following web address:

www.oedipusonapalehorse.com

2. Word spellings in Greek are not as standardized as are English words. Compounding the problem is that we have no recognized standard for transliterating Greek letters into English equivalents. Also, traditionally Greek words were Latinized before being Anglicized, which changed the spelling once again, or perhaps introduced a new word altogether, e.g., Herakles became Hercules. This practice is generally no longer followed; therefore, I have stayed with all things Greek as much as possible. Thus, you will see Zeus and not Jupiter, Hera and not Juno, Athena and not Minerva, etc. With all the spelling variations from guide books, scholarly works, and archaeological publications, it is difficult to standardize it for a work for the general reader. I have tried to maintain some consistency in the narrative but have, of course, left quotations as presented in the original documents.

3. This book is based on actual events; however, I have changed and rearranged some of it for rhetorical purposes. In particular, I have inserted archaeological and mythical material in places where I might not have had the thought in the actual setting. But I can assure you that all my interactions with people, both flashbacks and current events, are real, that my family history is as factual as I can make it, and that my journey through Greece, and the revelations concerning my life, are factual. To give you and idea of the magnitude of my effort on the road, I wrote 120,000 words during my ten weeks in Greece. I used this as a baseline for rewriting the material several times, and in doing so, I attained a truer reflection of my actual experience than I would have ever imagined possible.

© 2009 David Sheppard. Site created by Artstudios.