We started this because we love the old stories. That is the whole of it, really — two people in Brisbane who never quite got over them.
You are already living in it
Thursday is Thor's day. Wednesday belonged to Odin. Two Norse gods sit in your calendar every week and nobody notices.
An hour has sixty minutes and a circle has three hundred and sixty degrees because scribes in Mesopotamia counted in sixties, four thousand years ago. You are using their arithmetic every time you look at a clock.
Algebra and algorithm come from the same ninth-century Persian mathematician — one from the title of his book, one from his name.
The word democracy is Greek, and so is the thing it names. A marathon is forty-two kilometres because that is roughly how far one man ran with news of a battle. Doctors still swear a version of an oath written down two and a half thousand years ago.
July and August are two Roman politicians who talked their way onto your calendar and never left.
None of that is decoration. It is an estate you did nothing to earn and are living in anyway.
Hereditas is the Latin word for exactly that — an inheritance. We landed on a Latin name because it said the thing plainly, not because the inheritance is Roman. It isn't Roman, or Greek, or anyone's in particular. That is rather the point of it.
Why these ones
We are not drawn to power. The ones who risk nothing are dull, whatever they are called.
We are drawn to the ones who were told the price beforehand and went anyway. Prometheus knew exactly what stealing fire would cost, and not being able to die is no mercy — it is why the eagle can come back tomorrow. Theseus walked into the labyrinth having watched fourteen others go in and none come out. Sisyphus is still pushing.
They are not winners. Some of them lose badly. What they have in common is that they went on — and that is not a Greek idea, it is a human one. The first three we drew happen to be Greek. The fourth is a Roman nobody bothered to name.
How we make them
Each one is drawn by hand in the manner of the old engravers — the dense line work you would find in a Victorian edition of the myths — then printed heavy in one colour, on heavyweight cloth in the shades that suit it.
We would rather a few we can defend than forty we cannot. Each one is made when you order it, so nothing is produced that nobody wanted.