[nescioquid]

I can vouch for this.

On my first trip to most antique Corinth, someone noticed the fine Casio timepiece from my last (Reagan-era -- ca. AUC 2750s, I think -- or do I reckon now from the founding of Christ?) trip. When the watch was seen to "move", I explained the function of the band by analogy to a water clock (a clay vessel with a small aperture near the bottom to let water drain) and compared the water to the (non-visible) battery inside the Casio. I even went into elaborate explanation about the special symbols for numbers which mark the hour and how they are distinct from the symbols for making sounds for speech (e.g. "sure, '1' is rather like 'alpha'...").

Sadly, it was a very clever Greek to whom I explained all this. Slightly irritating were the questions about why it was on my wrist in the first place -- something something WWI. But my heart sank during the debrief when I came to really understand the time-travel problems which were exploited to near extinction by ancient sci-fi authors.

Happily, those (extremely antique) courts found it so much more cost-effective to cut off an advocate when the water drained from a clay vessel than to invest the wealth of the city-state into the production of a -- dare I say 'Byzantine' -- contraption wrought of too much brass and requiring too many servants to operate?

I guess the real lesson here is that while everyone has been conditioned to be distrustful of the Greeks, my personal experience has been that they are pretty solid folk.