About Mentor

About Mentör, by the Bardot Group

Our contemporary Master of Bardot Books was born upon Mount Erymanthos. It was central to where the western Arkadian and Aigialian Brotherhoods of Highlanders lived. It is part of the Pholöë Mountains, by triangulation with others above  the south alpine Amykai Mountain Range of the Peloponnesus. The Sisters dated his lifetime from 1285 to 1208 BC., for his lifetime paralleled that of Odysseus, 1286 to 1211. He became the Bardot Sisters’ period contemporary, the oldest of all Greek Masters of Writ, whereby they created a primeval narrator in their own image, so that they could live and immerse themselves into his own prehistoric lifetime. He composed biography, or autobiography by colloquy of illustrious Greeks. His personages, their homelands of birthplace and/or marriage places state the developments whereby they became protagonists of myth. By their originally spoken phonology, the subjects of Early Greek Myths were taken down in dictation by Mentör. What he etched upon floppy, moist and handsized clay tablets engendered his paramountcy as a first master of Greek writ.

Greek Myths by Mentör as Narrator

Mentör in his own prehistoric times was a person of good family, and an elite subject under the illustrious Helen. He served her as a faithful plenipotentiary from the year of her sacral and royal ascension to Queen Holy Matriarch over the Wilderness Wilds. He began before then, at her age of 15, when she was still a princess fostered by the Lakonian House of Oebalos. As Wanassa of the Wilderness Wilds therein the “nation” or native race of the Highlanders. They had afforded her matrilineage that dynastic title, as the successor to her natural mother Nemesis.

As characterized for Bardot Books, Mentör is the sleuth of all that can presently be known about the 14th and 13th centuries BC. At his age 12, his father Alkimos passed his care and further tutelage to the sovereign grace that Laërtes, the father of Odysseus, who generously disposed it out his youthful friendship as lads together. No irony that their sons became best friends, often together as comrades over their long and real lifetimes. Mentör enhanced Laertes’ capacities to teach him, a precocious lad, his own ministerial governance, his commerce diplomacy, and the ins and outs of bureaucratic regime. At all of them he was a well-considered master, and his ward and charge absorbed all of his talents except that of numeracy. At the last Laërtes must be deemed exemplary, especially at naval administration and the logistics of maritime commerce and support of heavily manned navies.

Thereby, indeed, the almost perfect on-the-job training of the young Highlander: First, it made Mentör thoroughly literate. His story at the learning of writ by syllabary is our story within all our stories. They reflect how the Bardot Group tells about composition by an oldest form of capturing Greek spoken expression with easy facility. Thereby, too, a small lad became the able ward of the House of Cephalos, a dynasty which was named upon the formal accession of Odysseus, the third direct successor by Cephalos’ patrilineage. He was verily the founder of House, although Homer infers that honor to Arceisius, Odysseus’ grandfather. The co-regent titles of Wanax and Sea Wanax became hereditary as father to son, whereby Odysseus passed his sovereignty on to Telemachus, a sole scion by his illustrious mother Penelopë. By Mentör, we also learn, all dynastic royal successions, including Odysseus’, had required service to a co-regency of father as senior over son, by vouchsafing Odysseus the junior titles of Fleet Master and then, finally, Sea Wanax of the Ithacan League of Near and Far Fleets. Before Odysseus, the titles high chieftains a/o medoi and wanakes, including the founder Cephalos himself of the former title, earned their autocratic war powers and tutelary majesty by appointment of female elders, women of “Sacral and First Estate.” Thereby, their appointed men took the dub of Home (or Consort) Lord Protectors over a matriarchate of many insular and small mainland dominions. Their invested lands were held inalienable or indivisible, either secular vast plantations or sacred conservancies that amassed the usufruct of common order tenants as tenured to the “First Estate” of highest womanhood. Those subjects of a respected, even inviolable social contract composed the offshore islanders of the Echinades isles (“the Pricklies”), as did their mainlander counterparts along the north and south shorelines by the two major divisions of the western Greek Peninsula.

Mentör, a Real Personage of Literature by Syllabary, 1285 – 1202 B.C.

Based upon feedback to this website as it was built over its first years, we have chosen to redact away or put aside the biography of Mentör’s adolescence and any later long life study. Our books reveal him episodically instead.

We examine him continuously for his literary utility to the Bardot Group from the late 1920s to the early 1960s; and also thereafter, for how he has shaped Bardot Books and myself, a publisher of several serializations, all proto-histories, as academic expository fiction. For Mentör is himself, by our compiled characterizations, an academic fiction as the Bardot Group’s contemporary narrator of the Early Greek Myths. He’s at the origination of the most famous myths and sagas, even as his constructs of the family of Odysseus make him the family biographer. Upon the family members and their closest intimates we’ve affixed events to period settings, even to dating most of them through the LABA Tabulated. The best lifetime years of such key persons synthesize the dated prehistory which ranged from the end of the 15th Century BC to the  late 13th Century BC.

It’s important to mention here, as well, that the Bardot Group has mostly passed on, whereas its in-house publications, cumulative by symposia, are all that’s left to the publisher of Bardot Books. That we lack a formal bibliography to pass onward from one High Professoriat to the next may greatly upset scholars who deem themselves “masters of historical science.”  We can’t feel as upset as they are over our historiography, which boldly advances robustness despite a lacking of rigorously argued events and developments. The earliest scholars of the Bardot Group were not literary in any case: they were forensic scientists, inventors and sometimes investors in the tools and technologies which have objectified the science of ancient history.

We remain highly respectful of the most conservative practice of academics, especially their tenet that Ancient Greek history begins with whatever it has of any materially retained history – whether written or by alternative media. What begun with an epic recital by Homer, followed by expository recitation of Hesiod, passed to the maintenance of the Lyric Age through versification to which we adhere fastidiously. We replant as though seeds the wisdoms of the best ever exemplars from Academia, so that Classical Studies may always be mostly about substantive efforts which synthesize off several, or many bold analyses. From those disciplinary tracts, even those without attribution, we can and have contrived an entire synthesis of the Late Aegean Bronze Age from 1425 to 1230 BC. About the Eastern Mediterranean, in a broadest sense of its fostered Anatolian and Levantine civilizations, we have render appositely, but not allegiently, to the Minoan and Mycenaean Ages’ doctrines invented by Academia. We’re unabashedly much more robust at recreating a modern academic consensus about facts of Antiquity. Our composed fiction, even as guided or misguided by the modern pillars of the forensic sciences, is an entertainment about the vagaries of time, without our having to recreate them rigorously.

Through Mentör’s recitations to writ, we now can know with confidence about just who lived where and for how long they lived there or other places of their choosing. We know whoever were persons composite of several lifetimes, such as Herakles, Sisyphus and Theseus. We can define how all the personages of myth became a single and symbiotic ethnicity of many large, variously confederated regions. They can be dubbed correctly, even if not yet incompletely, as “earliest Greek.” Mentör speaks for all his contemporaries as a Greek himself, if not yet a fullest forged lowlander by his own composite ethnicities. The ruthless Dorians and Achaeans of the Iron Age would come soon before his lifetime’s end, and afterward, too, as the full onset of the Greek Dark Age. He’s also the personification of Earliest Greek Mythology, for how it can be known from the Great Oral Tradition’s at its zenith from 1450 BC to the Trojan War Era. Most Classical Studies buffs can agree there began, after that era, a depletion of orally transmitted prehistory. The Iron Age began, therefore, with a regression of literacy and cessation of a rhapsodic recitative tradition; both became evocations of scribes and archivists who found refugees barely subsisting along the west coast of Anatolia or near offshore. They lived at out-stations of a recessionary port commerce, or upon the offshore islands of the Anatol. There, they perpetuated their own masteries through apprenticing student copyists, whereby the meager, barely surviving replication of what we’ve deemed lost writ by any fired entablature.

After Mentör’s Lifetime…..

That which was not forever lost passed through occasional rewriting or perfectly audiogenic memorization into and past the early violence and dissolutions of the Greek Dark Age. Greeks abandoned the Greek Peninsula to become colonists entertained by what could still be recited throughout west coastal Anatolia.  Just barely retained until the invention of alphabetic writ in the Eighth century BC, scribes gifted of minds to reiterate the last remaining literate legacies copied the recitative art of their forbears into honest compositions brought through the oldest conventions of writing from syllabaries and cuneiform writ to their own new orthography of words by alphabetic scripture.

Mentör, therefore, is the personification of a mastery to write the dialect of his homeland Arkadia. He had brought to Cyprus Island of the Eastern Mediterranean its phonetics of enunciation dictated to writ from just before the Trojan War. There were some differences of spoken inflection that deviated from the Linear B entablature that Michael Ventris decoded in 1954, or which John Chadwick able proofed out to a coherent philology by 1957. The Bardot Group can insist, nonetheless, that Oldest Greek as euphonized through syllabaries became a basis, a standardized language dialect  brought through the Greek Dark Age  by scriveners. A brief Greek Renaissance before the Lyric Age of Hellas consolidated what they’d ably retained until the fundaments of alphabetic writ.

Further to that assertion, it’s still supposed academically that Homer could not read any scripted syllabaries. He was blind and the content to uninteresting. Still, he could hear the recitals with the aid of the composing rhapsodists before and overlapping his lifetime. What he heard, moreover, was copious, inspirational, and marvelously preservative of recitations that we now conclude to have been his own robust source recitals, each as further induced by a brief renaissance within the 8th century BC. At the very end of that century, according to most recent dating analysis, there emerged the epic masterpieces of Homer. His entertainment as a bard competing at religious festival recitals invigorated a wholly new oral tradition. In the early part of a still mostly illiterate new millennium, by masterful redaction of all prior recitals known to Homer as he had ever heard them in live performance, the robust memories of Greek bards and their scribes became so precise that talented employers of the new alphabet could commit spoken words to manuscripts. Surviving copies date only as far back as the 6th century BC. The aetiological compositions of Hesiod, we’re still sure, came after Homer’s epic recitals. They may have been by source writ of alphabetical composition, or perhaps by his own hand. If not so immediately composed, the content of Hesiod’s writ became scripture once a finally composed to a meld of two Greek dialects, the Ionic and Aeolic. Standardized for comprehension by Ancient Greek commoners, learned priests and scribes sought together to bring the unifying beliefs and shared religious experiences of oldest culture, using Homer’s masterpieces and those by his following of scribes, to an orthodox exposition of the inherent polytheism. That transition and trend presaged the Ancient Greeks who recorded the opera.

While this brief history of the transition from syllabaric to alphabetic writ invites considerable expanded disquisition, allow here, at last, some simplification. By the time scribes later than Mentör brought the GOT to the renewed general literacy of the Phoenicians and Ancient Greeks, most scholars have to count five full centuries of any barely pervasive illiteracy. That has to stand as a firm span mostly inexplicable, although we know of other language written of syllabaries that have yet to be decoded.

Mentör, therefore, is another personification, of a last and greatest literacy by the Bronze Age Greeks. What he most emphatically was not, but his few disciples became instead, was any personification of a literate Iron Age Greek. Very likely he would have found those much later Greeks repulsive to his own acculturation as brought gradually eastward under the  gloam of an incipient Dark Age. The culture  of his literacy might have passed down to Philistia of the Levant. As a proponent of highly civilized matriarchy, however, Mentör would have abhorred what a much later patriarchal civilization defined to become by later Ancient Greeks within the mid-millennium of the First BC.  For we have found that much of his rendered past was abhorred by those much later Ancient Greeks. That, too, is part of many recreations of true Bronze Age Greeks which the New Greek Mythology had brought to fresh understandings —even if repudiated as the loathsome precursors to their own ethnos of Ionic Greeks.

Mentör’s Father Alkimos as a Literary Characterization

Alkimos, the highland father of Mentör and another real person out of Greek prehistory, earned over his lifetime the appellation of Herakles. It’s akin to a Roman agnomen, wholly honorary as an appellation. That’s not to mean Alkimos was the Herakles, the paragon of the Greek Heroic Age subsumed within the Lyric Age. That Herakles, the superhero whom Roman Classical Mythology has Hercules, Mentör cites as the entirely mortal Great Prince Alkeios, son of Amphitryon and Alkmenë by the House of Perseus & Andromeda. It’s our working-hypothesis that by each generation passing, greatest men ever to have lived as benefactors to the Highlanders deserved hallowed adoptions into their nation race (genos or ethnos). Sometimes, as we find of Alkeios, therefore, the honorific was granted to persons indisputably foreign. We can say so of all persons recipient of the honorific Herakles, by grant of stature as demi-gods by the veneration of later Highlanders. Herakles means “glorious by Hera” but from long before her Olympian grandeur; her name had generic meaning as the Highlanders Great Mother, by a trinity of crone, matron and maiden, all invoked as Hera. Such outsiders as were brought amidst the wilderness wilds of the alpine interior Greek Peninsula, proved to have been important protagonists to the prehistory of the Late Helladic Period, sub parte the LABA entire.

Alkimos concluded his life as a distinguished Ephor over the Highlanders Brotherhood. By that unique position he enthused over the integration during his youth of the oldest indigenous pre-Hellenes with the many littoral and lowland kingdoms whom Academia deems to have been the only earliest Greeks formed from pre-Hellenes. Not so: The most part of Alkimos’ and Mentör ‘s nation race (genos) had been subjugated to patriarchal and dynastic incursions since 1625 BCE. The Highlanders were originally lowlanders but became Highlanders as displaced persons from foreign incursions. Much else about the Master’s father is too obscure to know well, especially about his prime years of manhood. Nonetheless, Mentör’s Second Royal Chronicle has Alkimos in exceptionally close alliance with both Nestör, the newly acceded Wanax over the Messenes, and with Laërtes, the young Second Wanax over the Cephallenes.

The Highlanders of the Alpine Central Massif of the Greek Peninsula

The impetus of an obscure, far western Greek tripartite alliance stands to the credit of Alkimos in a twofold sense of a distinct Greek alpine culture. It began for readers of Bardot Books with a single year’s campaign to eradicate squatters and brigand raiders from the west slope of the Pholoë Mountains. There was forged, where the northwest shoulder of the Peloponnesus, the informal alliance of Highlanders and elite lowlanders to face down the infamous Brothers Molionë, the sons of Actor, whose followings’ atrocities Alkimos put himself foremost to thwart for all the Highlanders of the south mainland Greek Peninsula. That campaign ended by means of divine agency – or so seeming – when a tutelary goddess helped the brothers escape execution as brigand rogues of high births. Ably abetted by Messenes and Cephallenes once again, a next year, a second campaign ended early with a treated trial-by-combat between Nestör and Ereuthalion, an appointed champion for a bully and domineering Epeian Tribe of Westlands’ Elaea. Treated thereby was a dispute of a buffer land longstanding for exemplar peaceful relations of the oldest native tribe of Triphylians over the sacred Olympian Plain.

Even if wrongly asserted, claims of sole territorial possession could only assure endless hostilities between four separate adversaries. Nestör won the cathartic trial of champions for his Messenes and Laërtes’ mainland feudatory Buprasion.  That welcomed result ended the campaign in so far as Alkimos asserted for the Highlanders’ utmost veneration of Olympia’s pan-tribal sacred conservancy. For even Pelops had afforded Triphylia his tutelary powers to overcome the fractious Epeans. Triphylia, sometimes since known as Tripylia), embraced the fertile and hallowed Olympia Plain, the future site of the Ancient Olympiads.

Following the triumph, Mentör was served opportunity of observing the famous scribes at the Wanaktora (“Palace of the Wanax”) of Nestör, at modern Chora of Messenia. There, at sojourn subsequent to the ended campaign, he learned their writ by syllabary for the first time. He must have had a great knack for it, too: The three principals to the successful coalition decided, ad hoc, that Nestör should spend his next winter at accommodating the instruction of the 13-year-old Mentör. That elementary education was followed and supplemented by 6 years of practicing tutelage under Laërtes upon Ithaca Isle. There his great friendship begun over two years of campaigns with Odysseus burgeoned, whereas the generous affections of the Wanassa Anticleia supplemented the most satisfactory tutelage by her husband Laërtes. They ended up virtually adopting Mentör as a ward-of-house – with, of course, the active encouragement of his selfless father Alkimos.

Mentör would go on to create a greatest-ever syllabary for his practiced compositions off dictated declamation by famous friend and allies of the two western wanakes. By that task of a lifetime evolved a most effective replication of Greek’s oldest deemed dialect of formal speech, by the then so-called “High Court Mycenaean.” It would evolve into Arcado-Cypriot (refer to the accompanying illustration for the solely inland range of the original Arkadian Dialect). The Bardot Group holds as that underlying dialect of Oldest Greek to be the Middle Eastern counterpart to first-ever alphabetic renditions of Greek throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. The evolution was incubated from his syllabary and passed by diffusion during the Trojan War and afterwards to the Cypriotes of Alashiya Island (a precursor name to Cyprus). Once the alphabet was established off the orthography of the earliest Phoenicians, its usage swept back and upon the Greek Peninsula and Archipelago, to become the precursor language of writ which became Homeric Greek. After his late-life tutelage of Telemachus, son of Odysseus, had long passed matriculation, Mentör’s best royal student is quoted to have said about his tutor as follows:

“A Life ill-destined for renown has said about famous lives – now known so well until deemed immortalized in these our own times – that would, without it, die whatever the hereafter.”