It's comical how arbitrarily thrown in that first part of the chapter is. It would be whatever if this came up at some point since it makes sense enough in such a setting, but the concept just got covered as an aspect of the main plot over the past dozen chapters. And he has it happen in the...
The use of Contemporary on Page 2 doesn't make any sense. They're discussing Ancient history. Contemporary refers to current events or relatively recent history since 1945, and Modern refers to the 16th century at the earliest. Modern is a bit questionable as well, since that would only be...