26. What cultural advance does the Phoenician trader keep trying to sell his Greek hosts on in "Olympiad", only to have them repeatedly refuse to believe it could be very useful?
From Quiz The Novels of Tom Holt
Answer:
literacy
"'Olympiad' is my two cents' worth for the Millennium; I got the idea when I realised that we only think it's going to be 2000 next year because the Christian church fixed the date of the birth of Christ in accordance with the Roman system of recording history by time elapsed since the (mythical) foundation of Rome by (two brothers who never actually existed, called) Romulus and Remus, which in turn was fixed by reference to the Greek system of recording history by time elapsed since the (legendary) foundation of the Olympic Games by (the entirely fictitious half-god half-human hero) Hercules in 776BC (except, of course, it wasn't 776BC then, it was the First Olympiad, only it wasn't, because there were no records at all in 776BC, since writing wasn't even invented till about fifty years later...); in other words, our entire concept of history is based on misunderstandings of some very old fairy-tales, which is what prompted me to make up some more untrue history, as if there wasn't enough already. Basically, it's a book about lies, legends and historical fact, and how there's really nothing to choose between them." -- Tom Holt.
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