This second posting, by the continuing content review of Bardot Books’ two e-Books, addresses a few more major introductions by way of thematic overview of them. I begin with what the New Greek Mythology has evolved for me, as best delivery to lay persons who hope to study the oldest Antiquity as the earliest Greeks of the Late Aegean Bronze Age. For NGM is by way of an lifetime immersion in Latin, followed by a less retentive immersion in Ancient Greek and finally late lifetime study of the core prehistory which envelops by serialization of five books about Cephalos. Long before I addressed him in particular, there had been my constant unlearning of certain core tenets attendant to the Ancient Greeks myriad errors and faults at prehistory of their forbears. Too, their histories by recasting erroneous findings upon what the Ancient Greeks had no competence to perform, has taught me anew why the true Masters of Writ, who lived long after the LABA, have often been my most intellectually honest teachers. Of them, I cite in particular Ovid out of Roman Classical Mythology as rendered to authentic Ancient Greek History of his own lifetime immersions in oldest mythography that survived to his times of the Roman Late Repbublic.
The Saronic Gulf Rim Powers exclusive from the Isthmus of Ephyrea. Argive Troezen was a principality over the small Bay of Kelauria, further offshore from which was Aegina’s strategic refuge upon Oinope Island, later named after her. ——>
The unlearning that all novices to the study of Greek and its robust lore of Antiquity must undertake begins once they’ve ingested a premise too often overlooked: That all of Early(-iest) Greek Mythology was recitative, anything by earliest writ barely literary, within a famous period of most avid audiences who were acutely retentive, totally autogenic by gifts of mind. That’s to say of their attuned “ears for language” and their retentive minds to the GOT, an immensely copious Great Oral Tradition. Its dissemination of mythic lore spanned from 1625 to 1225 BC, but the greatest oral works originated within 1450 to 1220, during the Late Helladic a/o Late Minoan Periods of the Late Aegean Bronze Age. Greatest original myths such astonishing memories became of hearing a single recital alone, !, each of them composed from the rhapsodists of the Submycenaean Age (now 1190-950 BC) and Iron Age (950-825). They vocalized biographies about enduring mythic personages, and by doing so alluded their everlasting lives to robust contexts within the confined geography of Greece’s Central and South Peninsula and all off shore Archipelagoes. Much later mythographers, the famous mythologists-of-writ, greatly revised or tampered with those legacy recitals during the Greek Lyric and Classical Ages. They became finally the creations of the Greek alphabet, thus wrought immediately off the writ of Phoenicians, whose Levantine forbears were often closest collaborators amidst “writing colonies.” Located on both coasts of the Aegean Sea where much of maritime fluidity, whatever was written afterwards of 875 BC, unfortunately, increasingly attested to gross revision, deliberate expunctions, even whole tract subjected to refutations and mangling of what the rhapsodists had delivered so articulately to posterity before a Greek Dark Age, 1200,ff. to 800 BC as a defined entirety. A short century of renaissance passed most of the 8th century BC before the career of the epic master Homer could provide his deep pasts and robust pasts of illustrious Greeks. His own honest retention of metrical vocalizations was due to he being also wholly autogenic — not likely literate — in reprise of the great oral masters, the rhapsodists.
It has taken most of my second lifetime as a classicist to finally cast off as dispensible what I was so wrongly told during my 60 years of academic classical studies. Homer, I was taught in college, was still supposed in the 1960s to have been the first ever Master of Greek Literature. He was postured as born during the Trojan War Era’s Aftermath, two decades of immensely memorized metrical exposition, the first epics. He lived a long life from 1210 to 1130, and proved a rarest adept for retentive vocalizations of Oldest Greek. That likely had scribes most welcoming of his recitals, which were reductions of some eight lengthy epics by the Aftermath now best dubbed the Era of Helen’s (Abduction and Recovery). Homer especially well-attested as well earliest conversions of Bronze Age syllabic writing (Linear B Minoan a/o Linear B Oldest Greek) to a dialectical vernacular which he readily preserved for the metrical recitals. A reliable recitative Greek had evolved fully from formal, likely courtly settings of royal and ennobled personages. His attendance upon them must have been invited, for the sheer entertainment by his special gifts of most retentive elocution.
The mapping of the Aegean Sea, at left, which I’ve anchronized (pretended) as though from much later times and regions, was not yet inclusive of Northern Greece as depicted in green and purple hues. The colored detailing, nonetheless, depicts sufficiently the geographic Era of Helen. Her abduction lured into major sustained warfare the highest advanced populations of Central Greece and the Peloponnesus, off of whom was composed Helen’s Order of War Coalition and Expeditionary Force. The expeditions crossed to Anatolia’s Hellenic Speaking west coast, the northwest whole corner in particular. Attica, Crete and upper Thessaly, I caution, played little more than naval or logistical tasks in their behalves.
I depart the conventional consensus of Academia about the Trojan War Era, whose epics ended the GOT. Helen made it much more than a fabrication of many small wars fought many places throughout Anatolia. I hold Helen, in hard fact, a primus casus bellae which motivated a sixteen year long endeavor that re-nationalized her primacy as a First Woman of Greece. But as such she became bi-cultural. For paramount were the years passed as her captivity and isolation within Asia as a Queen of the Westlands. She earned enormous influence upon the Hittite imperial rulers of Great Kingdom over satellite high kingdoms; they “wrapped” Anatolia from the modern Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles westwards, where the Kingdom of Ilion under the House of Tros of the [Troi(an)ians] of Troias. Hittite possessions made a bulwark of southern Anatolia as both a Greek and Levantine speaking maritime Corridor. Accordingly, Helen while captive lived upon Amarru (Syria); Kizzuwanda the south coastal realm of the Hatti Empress Padukepa; Hattusas, where the Imperial Court of the Hattia; Masa, the realm of Hekabe, the mother of her abductor Alexander of Wilusas; and Troias, where Priam’s City Troy encircling Fortress Ilion and the Pergamon.
<— Map of the Hittite Empire at its greatest extent under Suppiluliuma I(c. 1350–1322 BCE) and Mursili II (c. 1321–1295 BCE). Because many of the place names have been taken from Hittite sources and compared to classical place names, they may not all be correct; for there is still considerable scholarly disagreement about particulars (as. say, between Lukka as Lycia and Karkija as Karia)
Simply said, but difficult for novices of Antiquity to grasp, Homer was also supposed in the 1960s almost as old as last survivors who witnessed the Trojan War. Such elders rhapsodized about that first great war of western literature, even though it did not become a subject of literature until the 7th century BC. Most likely he’d been precocious, thus a regarded genius as an autogenic youth, such as Mozart and Beetoven were by much later modern times as imbued with finest musical performance. Homer supposedly wrote his two epics by appropriation of still living masters at rhapsodic recitation, after a long life at knowing precisely the eight longest length epics extant at varying recitations about that Trojan War. He masterfully redacted all of them, then recited condensed epics which achieved a foremost masterpiece standing for only two of them, both recomposed for all future time in the 8th century BC. My professors still reckoned those two lengthy epics at popular performance before royal courts and ennobled assemblies from as early as 1180 BC. Unwittingly, they put first recitations at the onset of the Greek Dark Age, 1190 to 950 BC, so that our High Professoriats could wrongly teach to have been an actual duration literary recession from 1200 to 800 BC. By inclusion, moreover, of an Iron Age, Hesiod’s career as a later mythographer than Homer created two metrical blank prose works in hindsight upon Homer, whereby his wholly conjured, never existent Heroic Age was introduced to the future as wrongly authoritative about the Olympian Pantheon of the strictly Ancient Greeks. I was supposed to believe that the six gods, six goddesses and two crone deities had been fully developed and understood after the Trojan War ended in 1185 BC. Hesiod, by the way, was also taught as having lived at the end of the Submycenaean Age, circa 1160 BC, barely beyond which his career of short recitative masterpieces which that suffered oblivion circa 1080 BC. That last date I cite as the beginning of an intellectual recession, which failed new and original Greek mythic recitals owing to its malaise, wherein attendant lost abilities of literacy in particular to the Greek Peninsula.
After reading a lot of Latin and Greek literature anew, during my fifteen years lapse from any continuing practice at translating Masters of Greek Literature, I recall well a modern epoch of fashionable scholarship during which old guard Academia must suddenly pontificate anew of Greek historical times and ages. They must have been admixed racially as so populated, with black and other deep-dusky skin persons represented considerably. No longer were the Greeks of ancient times solely Caucasian. I baulked, of course: Certainly such populace originated in Abyssinia below the Nile River Delta, but hardly along the Horn of Africa and Mediterranean Sea, where any dark skinned racial denizens mostly originated from Semites at diffusion from the oldest Near East. Nonetheless, there was a peeve induced within Academia, to distract us domineering white guys away from any notion that darky races had been nonexistent. They had to be imagined instead, then documented. Thereby arose the whole fracas of an urgent new consensus established by the Most Learned, to wit, that most all literary Ancient Greeks were living much later centuries BC than those which hosted the Era of Helen. Thus any Greeks supposed of the Submycenaean Age must be assumed dullards at all arts of writ awhile its greater dark age of recession endured. Furthermore, there couldn’t have been known the Trojan War of any literary posterity by an immediate Aftermath of the war itself. So, philologists attuned Homer to the Attic and Aeolic Greek dialects in order to profess Homer and Hesiod at living their creative careers within much shorter and later span of duration as, say, from 750 to 680BC. Thereby, The Iliad, 720, and The Odyssey, 680, must have been composed by two different epic poets: Homer at first recitings of the Trojan War at epic length could only do so within his Anatolian coastal homeland. Another poet alike him, perhaps an Ionian Sea Islander of far western Greece, composed The Odyssey at fifty years after Homer’s The Iliad.
Besides all that sudden make beleive stuff, moreover, major dating shifts began to be asserted, each caused by the relative dating methods of bossy Egyptologists, the High Professoriat that had begun in the 1800s when Lord Admiral Nelson sought to annex Egypt and most of the Near East to France. First they revised the first greatest land forces’ battle of history ever brought to writ, i.e., the famous Battle of Kadesh a/o Qadesh upon the River Orontes of the Bronze Age Levant ; its dating had dropped further down from the Napoleonic Era’s dating of 1296/95 to 1286/85 of our modern 1940s, and then, again over serious objections of the colleges, to 1275/74 BC by the 2010s. The effect of such major step downs of dating proved to continue an ageless pigheadedness of very bossy scholarship. New rules became newly strict prohibitions about applying any dates whatsoever to the Late Aegean Bronze Age! The Got had to have long preceded the Ancient Times of any Greeks mostly literate practitioners at the alphabets of Phoenicia and Greece. So, those Ancient Greeks had no dates ever known about the Trojan War or the later Battle of the Orontes. So, then a confusing orthodoxy was observed until very late in the 20th century BC, but now it’s fully put past, and replaced by Womens Studies, an ilk who began to harangue prehistorians for their unconscionably heartless expunction of any matriarchy ever known during the LABA, because it suddenly must become as though long and well known that the matriarchy of deepest Antiquity was already believed eternal. Only bossy Egyptologist and other vicious patriarchs disappeared matriarchy away for unknown causes before 700 BC had dawned a new century. Accordingly, all dating prior must not be trusted, and best that any dating whatsoever should embed classical scholarship.
I gave up on Ancient Greeks as adequate prehistorians of matriarchy, because I must wonder instead why our late 20th century High Professoriats couldn’t cope with the many insinuations of humanistic female brilliance, even high literary genius, by the sex at long before the Age of Pericles of Classical Age Athens introduced Aspasia. For the oldest facts of matriarchy had always been defined its allegories of hideous monsters of female sex such as serpent coiffured Medusa, or by wicked witch hag crones, not to forget demonized immortals incarnate as the sorceress Medeia/Medea. The Trojan War after an age of female monsters became depleted of their ilks, to prove instead how replete with famously sexy heroines to whom the Trojans were married as readily attainable from real historical origins throughout the once imperial Anatolia of Karians, Lycians and Hittites. For despite another odd conclusion that suddenly showed up in the modern study of Antiquity, all such females became enslaved upon their warrior patriarchs’ deaths, or else they were immolated by the full firing of Fortress Ilion’s ramparts, or absconded away with, perhaps into various oblivions such as were conjured by our High Professoriats at riddance of any aftermath legacy off the Era of Helen, despite all the enormous continuing lore about her possible contributions to Anatolia. That, alas, was when the New Greek Mythology began to tidy up all the wrong pasts that had ever been taught before, in order to arrests the demise of Classics Departments within our universities and colleges. They had to be expunged under the eternal allegation that Antiquity was irrelevant and useless because it was always changing its mind about prehistoric matters.
No now I’m induced to revolutionize that departments to get them back into a decent relevance for smartest peoples on modern campuses.
The First Book about Cephalos has been amply provisional of dates, or of accurate relative dating, even to remarks upon previously supposed hallmarks dating by Ancient Greeks which long have been concluded erroneous. Under the dastardly Pre-Classical Tradition of Oxbridge Fabianism and other stupid prohibitions, we can finally learn how not to write the prehistory of the Bronze Age Greeks, with numeric dates no longer to applicable, or the actual belief systems of earliest Greeks that cannot be cited as anything else withal a greatly premature Olympian Pantheon. For such new canons of the old 20th century stricture have long become absurd, indeed so absurd that I cannot honestly cite any authors of historical fiction who have dared hazard any alternative belief system without a strictest adherence to the Olympian Pantheon.
Accordingly, Book One Prelude, as I call it, is a real breath of fresh air for this centuries’ buffs of Antiquity. The Book also originates several myths of prehistoric importance that earn the label of mythic saga. Such beginnings within the 1380s BC are…………….
(1)The late life ascendancy of the repressed High King Labdakos over Kadmeis, by overcoming two oligarcies, successive to each other and oppressive squelches of his dynasty, the House of Kadmos & Harmonia. Labdakos had to serve as High Prince, which he did so with powerful efficacy as a warlord capable of muster the intrusive Minyan incursions of the middle to late 15th Century BC.
(2) At departure from the tragedian Sophocles, the book offers how Oedipus was a known bastard of his father Laios son-of-Labdakos conceived through a priestess at want of fulfillment of her maternal aspirations. Alas, Laios was served prophecy that his son would kill him, which led to his relegating his child bride Iokaste to enforced seclusion alike a seraglio. Attendant to that rude determination of a wife who exceeded him as native and royal over the Kadmeians, the innocent priestess removed herself and the unwanted child to the custody of High Chief and Governor Polybos and his wife, the High Sister of Sikyon Sanctuary that borders upon the Lower Isthmus of Ephyrea. Oedipus deemed well within his rights that he contest at the trials-of-bridal attendant to the remarriage of the widow Iokaste, he ably did so with great courtly panache. He won the Queen of the Kadmeians by solving a riddle, after undertaking other severe tests imposed by her brother. Up against him, that would-be oligarch was most jealous of any successor that would revert him to the much lower royal standing of chief minister (he the Kreon by that title and its meaning). He’d thought himself released from such humble service by the late Laios, husband of his high royal sister. Oedipus as the triumphant consort by the trials effectively retired him from high aspiration while also promptly earning the affections of his stepmother so near to him of age. The Oedipid Saga that ensued from such plotted convolutions of myths ultimately harmonized into Classical Greek Drama’s Oedipus Rex, Antigone and Oedipus at Kolonos.
(3) Aiakos (spelled Aeacus in Graeco-Roman orthography) at age fifteen undertook the careful war preparations of his refugee mother Aegina, formerly of Aionia, a broad and oldest native low country over which disperses the valley seepage of the Asopos River at reticulated descents of rills through Kadmeis to the Strait of Abantis. Her royal following of matriarchal Aionians, alike herself, had produced sons off anonymous sires for her. They were capable of the mature generalship which Aiakos needed to reconquer all of their lost lands to the Minyans, the most recent of which was the re-seizure of the Aionia’s petty royal matriarchal holdings by repossession of them from the late warlord Labdakos. Aegina enabled Aiakos the services of Cephalos’ father Deion, who led all triumphant vanguards as smartly attendant upon four campaign years of reconquest and another of Aiakos’ brilliance at consolidation of retaken territories. Thus, the Great Kingdom of Aeoleis and Minya began as a slow restoration of royal dignity to the losing and displaced matriarchs over many heritage lands retaken. Aiakos was eight years older than Cephalos, and their mothers most congenial allies of a Gulf Sacral League, even though their friendship was mostly at arms-length and mutually maternal by their concerns for their sons..
(4) Aigeus took pilgrimage to the Oracle of Parnassos (future Delphi) in order to earn prophecy pronouncing to his good Fates his potency to sire his much needed heir. Twice a widower by wives who could not procreate, the petition of prophecy was also in order to become King of the Atticans instead of what he was, a regent custodian over a young union three small realms by attachment of two matriarchal governances of the north mainland to Aktika, as Attica’s entire low peninsula was first known, as royal chieftainate under a usurped dynasty of the Aglaurids. Cephalos would eventually marry Prokris the last princess heiress by the House of Aglauros.
(5) On the way back from his pilgrimage, Aigeus’ itinerary was blocked by a ravaging storm which led first to the shelter he obtained from Medeia the the young Supreme Sister over the AcroKorinth of Ephyrea, with whom he fell in love; and then secondly again owing to tumultuous sea to Aigeus’ several days stranded a desert island from which the Troezens rescued him. His host was Pittheus, another widower albeit also the father of a ripe daughter caught in need of a savior from a secret pregnancy. She made of Aigeus her savior by trysting him most energetically, whereby she was able exact promises from him as to the manner and method of disposition of any child born into the House of Pittheus, Such, then, is the beginning of the Theseid Saga of many myths of that promised child born, Theseus, throughout his later coming-of-age and heroic personage beyond the purview of my serialization.
(6) Originally intended as a novella, I have composed my own mythic saga by taking off from the only Classical Greek Myth about Cephalos’ youth as a swain espied by the sidereal Titanness Eos the Dawn. She supposedly found him easily the handsomest man at his own time of mortality among humankind, and so she snatched him awayin her chariot at carriage of the Great Urn of Dew and,or Frost which she ladled out as her daily chore while also aglow as Homer’s “rosy fingered” twilight before the sunrises of her evewr dutiful brother Helios the Sun.
Background to the Second Book begins with the new Bardot Blog posting…………..
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