About Robert Bacon Whitney

Book IV: High Prince of Attica: Opening review

Cephalos’ resignation of consortship to the Princess of Magnesia has to be regarded as a cold exercise of abandonment. Grant only at offsetting that their wedlock continued beyond the normal ending of such traditional brief wedlock as their was intended to be. Owing to his further formal diplomacy to serve her, his active presence amidst the Midlands was deemed essential, as well, to her uncle Erginos, King of Orchomenos, and her liege supreme sovereign Aiakos, Great King of Aeoleis & Minya, and Lord Protector of the Low Midlands. He was still the only lover who had cherished her for her generosity of soul to himself.  He’d exceeded all her expectations, and he’d prepared her for all her royal rights and considerations brought almost to ascension over the regent custodianship oh her majesty as Queen. Her high place within Aiakos’ new imperial hierarchy was assured as all the concordant allies in confiliation, each as  established and secure as far north as the North Plain hinterlands. To have done anymore for her, Cephalos would have had to contend with outstanding rival royal personages who could be easily attracted to court her life marriage and commitment to Magnesia. That Cephalos could not do because his absence from Attica was no longer a discrete exile, or sabbatical perforce. Rather, it had become an assertion of his won rewards from a colossal maritime acomplishment, the annual grain convoys and attendant transports regularities to the export of highest  bred horses by Minya. Not yet fully appreciated for the related implications, of highest naval standing amidst all established peerages under both Aeolian navarchy or under management by merchant magnates or resident Zebuls off the fortress harbor cities of the Levant. Suffice for now, therefore, that he had rendered the Strait of Abantis’ many landfalls and all necessary coastal amenities. As strong spine of long bends both Prince Commodore Phereklos and Merchant Magnate Cephalos held forth brightest prospects for deep caravan access westward by the reach of the Sperchios River and the Peneios’ many tributaries.

The way I think of his reputation and majesty back then holds high regard for his diplomatic and newest naval capacities. He would have forever “a home and popularity in the North,” as within so many petty kingdoms whom he’d conjoined together by their minimal seaports and then readied for new commerce high potential to searches and developments the many inroads of caravan treks from the Strait.

Nonetheless, he was glad to be going home to the small principality of his mother’s Eleusis. He looked forward to becoming hands on and active again within the East Bay Attica, and with his cousin Lykos the Vice-Regent who commanded its sacral commmonwealth high sisterhoods  by Brauron Basin & new surrounds. He used a chill back end of the 1370 winter to search for the most lovely person whom he’d last chanced to connect with most spiritually while upon his voyage up to Magnesia in the late summertime of 1373. The portrait that I’ve plagiarized from the modern oeuvres of Maxwell Parrish captures how that maiden postulant priestess had appeared, while utterly unconscious that an advanced war galley of very light configuration was sneeking up on her to capture her in disheveled appearance  of loosest work garments and mood by the young beyond the sunrise. She’d been vigorously sensate of some kind of agony of pestering frustration, also of some great challenge to her patience, and she was musing almost in prayer for a better revelation of some certain promise that had been made  to her.

An Ecstasy of Dream Remembrance

She had awakened from a long Living Dream which “her goddess” had enabled her to experience fully and thoroughly. Composed for perfect remembrance and recall, what the dream had enunciated was her due rewards forthcoming her brilliance at implementation. Most worthy of a divine promise made to her of a nighttime of practical observations. Great Boons enacted bore many caveats that were very discomforting, for the greatness endendered created appetites of yet greater complexities. Her abidance at foregoing rewards,  an indefinite time already disstressing her stalwart patience, all her core strength of youth and lean health of being must bear burdens of an abstinent chaste youth of unrequited maidenhood. And yet the Titaness promised Skia due requittal, admitting her own abstinence both selfish and pitiless. Cumulative days upon days of constant exercise and activity ahead for her could hardly afford a person well-justified at her selflessness, howsoever the wondrously stated awards to be long withheld from her for her lover Cephalos’ sake. He, too, had infinite undertakings before he lavish a love immeasurably her due.

For that promise of him per se, her Living Dream at full prospectus, withheld too obstinately Cephalos himself. At only seventeen years of age of first clear imagined, The Titaness was affording him a fine view of Skia’s profile at stance upon a precipice of a bluff. Even as the moments ticked by of her trance ecstasy at imagining him, his ship was outflanking her, eluding her, he wonderous of  her writhing form as though still a restless night bed to denied to herself at craving hiom. He had been afforded his her firm, spread stance upon a high poop deck, but only as the  whole length of his ship of bow at best aim strait through her a splendid skyscape behind her.

What he would remember with some agony that matched closely her own at that time of midmorning was how oblivious she’d remained as a  focus of 100-degrees of turning arc by the evasive outflanking. Only at the end of that large radius did he come under plain sight below her, he staring up with intention to sieze her attention. Or as he did over those many extended moments of turning his face up towards hers, she finally capturing his gaze so greatly coveted. They had enthralled each other. The vector of sighting to her eyes, and her gaze straight back down and upon him were dual fixations. So long lingering that they must  of course remember each other vividly, so too the deep intake of each other souls at their fullest aspiration to be possessed. For just so, too, that happened as well.

He was full of thought for her upon his homeward curse bearing of travel. Taking him on pass by Brauron Cove of East Bay Attica, he was able to discern easily the low rocky parapet upon which she’d been standing in turmoil of ecstasy. The time of midday was different, of course, but sunny bright of warm comfort and well-worthy of calm water transit and almost soundless progression of his ship’s hull under a Boreades breeze. He’d wanted to show it off to her Its launching began a maiden voyage to fetch him back home. His boon friend Prince Phaiax had brought the elegant Triakonter up to the entry of Pagasai where Cephalos stood waiting with baggage and eagerness to board and embark the long passage of the Strait southward.

What he did not remember, though. was the pain he was compelled to forget for never having seen her again. He’d had no goddess his own to pray to that she might somehow render the standing priestess to stand again in hopes her own of seeing him again. Also forgotten was afterwards, after he’d finally reached the shore of Eleusis Sound and reunion with Herse his mother. He wanted any excuse to travel past Mount Hymettos on direction to Rhapthe Lagoon near which she’d stood pert and unalert to his first gazes upon her. He had barely a fortnight to accomplish a brief quest. By the time he was on the Sacred Way at beginning his search he was already hopeless of attaining anything by trek, or by sea to capture a maiden lovely postulant at her toils and skills at planatation. For he’d been also told by his mother, and had affirmed anew, that Skia and he were hard fated apart to be virtually blind of each life’s progress they were expiring. He would not know her again until 1365 BC, a year about which Book Five is especially indulgent to treat of their respective captures of each other with fresh wantings. By then he’d been married again and become High Prince Consort within the extended royal family of the Erecththeids as his own branch royal dynasty of the Kekropids.

In Re Mortal Incarnations of Goddesses and Titanesses:
in Particular to Cephalos’ Saronic Gulf and East Bay Attica times of youth

     Eos the Titaness of the Dawn

Early Greek Mythology is copious for its farthest past recitals of deities who were sometimes so wanton to become mortalized. The titans and titanesses did so in order to satisfy their keen absorption of wholly human activities and  their invesntive accomplish-ments. Eos the Titaness of the Dawn leads the list for my own delectation, for having visited the Late Aegean Bronze Age of the Greeks at many immanent manifestations of herself in mortal disguises. I expand my mythography to recite rarest sources about her, all purely recitative of originations about her devotional undertakings of mortal body and mind as engrossed in humanity. She also leads the list of incarnated mortals by her own will for imaginative disguise and artful devisings, to insert herself for whole lifetimes at possession of the owners of her disguised  incarnations as mortal.

By one insinuation of a particular mortal soul, for her greatest convenience of some particular mortal time and location, we have for a leading exemplar Skia of Aphidnai, the only daughter of Eioneda and Tricorythos.  Born into earliest Greece, circa 1404 BC, Skia became revered as the Panantaxia (“Mistress of All Skills), and to have lived a long life as too long celibate in youth, but also for wholly adoring one man most lustily, whom Eos promised to her for her own self-indulgence of mutually insatiable libidoes (sic).  Cephalos was at first deemed a replication of another desired lover, his father Deion, any rapaciousness of whom was denied to her.  She also made the same strategic mistake anew by too long depriving her mortal incarnation Skia the carnal comforts of Cephalos, whom Eos was somewhat tardy to appreciate, until their first Big Bang together, as overly wanted by an increasingly higher hierarchy of maidens who could hijack him. He came under Skia’s come hither and allure of him only fortuitously, without divine control or abetting, only to have and to lose then and immediately his carnal indulgent bliss as  most especially ascendant person beloved of once matron form goddess Athena. Only then Eos discovered how overly adored he was, too, by a rival tutelar goddess over Cephalos’ naval genius and delightfully ambitious character.

So, too, no wonder that I must take great pains to have Cephalos rediscovered for constantly in an orbit of the Idyllic Age’s wondrous grandeur, for so many heroic personages, whom he matched or exceeded, who had providence by knowing him very well. Indeed, his mostly expunged person by the Ancient Greeks is recovered biography by my knowing them, far better than his lifetime particulars.

Eos, by forsaking the normal and incessant eternity that all the deities by Greece were inherently fated, was “a life” to know for long run carnally alive. And yet we arrive to only one genuine myth about her that has allowed scholars of the Humanities a single affirmation of Cephalos as both a mythic personage best-recited to have known her with intimacy. The Ancient Greeks believed that he came under her view, saw him, and immediately must possess him. The yield an oral literary subject adroitly well-storied and most enjoyable taught. But only at utmost brevity their singularity together,  because so much about him  that included her as herself  defied  was thoroughly expunged. The earliest Greeks doomed him to a very sad earliest youth by a most intense lifetime at brilliant application; by compensation, though, his fully attained manhood after his wedlock to the Princess of Magnesia was followed by a new, next and rapid ascendancy into a most glorious and illustrious second lifetime. Thereafter a few years until attained ascendancy at zenith, he begat a lineage of direct successors, each unchallenged by other great presences evocative of Western Literature. Odysseus makes a favorite successor as a great grandson. Over subsequent epochs of the 13th century BC, when different times and best fated places for him to abide or live in, he too was most sensationally forwarding of his fellow mankind heavily  populated with foremost heroes of a waning Age, a fulsome Era about Helen and a home realm full ready for his needed resuscitation. His lineage directly off Cephalos had him the third direct successor after the long lifetimes of grandfather Arceisius, a great war commodore, and Laertes, a greatest logistician at mercantile feats that coordinated all kinds of marine vessels. While Odysseus had to live as doomed by an early age prophecy to war exceedingly, he was nonetheless most blessed in both homeland Ithaca and for his wife, the pargagon Penelope. For she far exceeded all that was deemed most paramount, also very well-imagined about a greatest mortal woman of a far past. Especial for her faith in her beloved man, their marriage and its survival after many dooms nearing until nigh, emphasized his endurances of them.  None of them matched his removal perforce from  Penelope in 1366 BC, whereby twenty years or more allowed him intense carnal indulgences of many most ravish-able women, whose far separated exotic places his Fates brought his wanderings under witness as an utmost cad. Throughout, despite all the salacious distractions, he became obsessed to return to wife and barely known son who had done all they could to uphold him and triumph at their faith in his complete reliability to surpass greatest adversity.

Eos began those successions with a man whom she ravished only after her mortal incarnation had consistently been thwarted or bent by other preoccupations so that she could not know him until 1365 BC, at his age of thirty-six years old. And yet he too couched many women who wanted only him alone. He married into bigamy by a royal and sacral marriage, wedlock at twain consortships notwithstanding they were wholly near annulments perforce. Afterwards, however, there was a menage-a-trois at clear sailing, all sails fiully luffed and all winds steadily  abaft to a long age ending in an imprecise eightieth year of old age.

Penelope also lived two lives apart each other before she finally had Odysseus insolitary as her devoted husband, with whom to live out in constancy a  divinely assisted mortal existence, by the tutelar matron goddess Athena, who wished a special happiness that surmounted a long gamut of miseries visited upon woman of divine Artemisian chastity at no fault or wanting of her own. That meant also her bringing the Greeks through a forlorn and very long Dark Age incipient the Greek Peninsula’s under a failing Idyllic Age. By its failing years of mainlands invaded, all realms upon them falling calamitously,  her waiting of Odysseus nearly twenty years long an epochal absense, she might well have rued that she left homeland Lakonia solely to have Odysseus for husband and sire of her one child Telemachus. For she lost him to the forty year enduring Era of Helen, with which, as well, the twenty year Trojan War Advent, ten years of Hostilities and twenty years of Aftermath. Penelope by then had spent her twenty years bereft of him, a son by Odysseus her only comfort. To close an entire  Era of Helen, from which a long ending of 600 year Idyllic Age, so finally ended for both pre-Hellenes and earliest Hellenes what they had enjoyed despite many epochs of adversities since 1800 BC. Such was the Great Oral Period, thus the Great Oral Tradition that originated Early Greek Mythology.

My own advocacy is to revert all oral legacies thereby until purely recitative again about the famous Greeks who were their rhapsodists’ subjects. I would dismantle if necessary the mangled mythography that should not have been written about any of them. I forsake most of what the Ancient Greeks thought transformative of their famous forbears, the earliest Hellenes who had followed three formative nation races as distinctly pre-Hellenes. The task of such restorative and rectified writ whould be plain until we find in Classical Greek Mythology only slight echoes of an original writ that has been thought  mostly lost to us since the Renaissance Age of western civilization. And yet I hold Early Greek Mythology by vocalization far past just bearly enduring enough to realize fresh reinterpretations and best appreciated regains of so many major legacies that traced through 500 last years of the Second millennium BC.

In the Atlas of greatest times and places upon Earth, there were also the sidereal and meteoric deities who lived enduring if not perpetual existences either wholly material or wholly ethereal by some five great Creations of living and immortal things. I make this posting a digression of first best observances of their meaningful existences to earliest known denizens of the Greek Peninsula and Anatolia.

Who Eos was and what she meant in human terms:

Divine current and eternal knowledges which Greek Deities knew upon  the unfolding of their Earth Mother Gaia’s First to Fifth Creations can be tallied in accordance with perfect knowledge acquisition and perfect memory of living anthropomorphic progeny. For no doubt about it: While living, all living things had innately perfect memories be practice of perfected methods of recollection and rhapsody of them. I give us a list

~ Genuine Omniscience belonged to the Mother Muse Mnemosyne by her investment of living souls with perfect ears for recitations. Her gift was Autogeny, therefore. It operated without sight or vision.

~ The God who saw all and remembered all he saw was Helos Hyperion, a Son/Father meteoric composite of the Sun, who captured sight of all actions upon Earth, even those occluded by dense clouds or vaporous turbulence. He did not see anything on Earth at Night, of course because he was resting his capacities of illumination as dictated by Olympian Zeus,

~ Zeus was the most omniscient of the Olympian Pantheon of deities despite he was never called upon to attest such a capacity. And yet he knew what happened any given nighttime(s) because he could bid all deities by his powers to have revealed what he did not actually see of what they saw.

~ Eos the Titaness of the Dawns, and tripartite to Daughter Day with her sister Hemera the Midday and Hespera the Dusk, were omniscient at observation  of any and all human activities of strictly human invention and wrought industry. Only Eos had the tireless energy to be ready as “Rosy Fingered” before she dawned over the Earth still in nightime; by then she was finished with her afforded titanic consort, Astraios the Starry Firmament of the Night, a creature of Nyx [Neex]  the Night. She had little pleasure in any nighttime with him, despite that he sired the Four Winds off her lap. Instead, she sought for respite and enjoyment rare mortal incarnations to have enjoyment of nighttime with her best chosen mortal men. She then levitated out of her recumbent mortality with him daily in order to rise above the band width of the Edge of Daylight, the utter luminance projected by brother Helios Hyperion at lead of eight fiery stallions of globular fire and pure light. Eos was drawn aloft upon a chariot which served platform for an immense, mostly abstract Urn “of the Dew and the Frost,” which her powers enabled to sprinklings awhile fair seasons and safe sea voyaging months, and also to saturation of earthly vegetation awhile chill seasons. Of course. she was perpetually over the Edge of Daylight at fully conscious thought and observance, Accordingly, she was an Omni-Observant Titaness whom the Great Earth Mother Gaia had vouchsafed tireless curiosity, and,or curiosities, while watchful of human activity and inventiveness of all newly espied things going on beneath the course of her chariot drawen across the daytime sky by the steeds Lampos and Phaiton as synonymous Greek words for Illumination.

A Most Immanent of Deities:

Humanity vis a vis proved Trinity Daughter Day detached, transcendant and yet keenly observant of all toil, skilled labor endeavors and public works. Only the Titaness of  the Dawn Eos lavished her chosen forms of human immanence with her own closest attention, admiration for and participation in exciting communal projects, all the while, or withal her quiet insinuation into her chosen supervisors over amassed labor, what called corvees [Core-vays]. When it came to skilled labor as precise programs of fabrication and stepwise practices of stage constructions, her curiosity was especially peaked by brilliant supervisors who led the required works-in-process from bare beginnings to elaborate finishes. My own intuition of how she operated was first, her long observation of a unique and special project for how it was precisely accomplished, rendering her, that is, expertise at the implementation by stages or phases. She then instilled in her mortal incarnation the doggedness of supervision, until what she learned was passed with perfection into work forces capable of highly ambitious constructions. Until Cephalos engaged her curiosity to the utmost, the major earthwork projects that the various High Sisterhoods accomplished at Brauron from 1381 BC to 1372 were mass labor corvees applied by Skia her mortal incarnation to reform the agricultural layouts, pasturage of livestock husbandry and arboreal fruiting of orchards for maximum yields of produce.

Such comprehensive reform and project installations describe the endeavors and purposes of Commonwealth Agronomy, itself a governance of produce production for best managed yields to preservative storage, or for export of segregated surpluses, and always for generous allotments to workers and whole communities at tilth, livestock herding and tending, and garnering of a single year’s voluminous orchard yields. Brauron Basin’s many novices postulants and supervisory sisters, altogether residents composing novitiates of holy orders, coordinated their tenant work leaders (hegemons). They in turn brought their dedicated mass  labor allotments through hardest tasked regimens required within every agricultural year. Aside their were freemen populations who were everyday farmers, herders and orchard tenders who acted independantly upon the allotments vouchsafed to them by their plantation governesses over family demesnes or heirarchic family cooperatives. Intensive farming and herding  was composed from small populations of autonomous freemen at performing comparable tasks independantly, or, perhaps as often, by combining with sanctuary labor pools or corvees for especially demanding periodic mass labor turnouts. During good years for all framing regiments, such cobinations were usually briefly conducted over one or two fortnights, as exemplified by either mass springtime and late autumn seeding of plantation layouts, or by highest yield  harvesting from spring through summer solstices. Whole farming population turnouts likewise performed unusually heavy weeding requirements, and the beginning of any farming year was always demarcated by the pruning of orchards at excessive branching after heavy flowering. The end of year, of course, required the special garnering of orchard yields that dropped all at the same time through the entire extent of dedicated arboreal layouts.

Eos was by ways or means a deity revered or especially deemed as essential to agriculture, livestock husbandry and orchard management. She was essential, however, as a sidereal goddess as a sunrise manifest of wrought agronomic regimes under daily new reveal. The normal courses of agriculture had her pleasant sunshine happily well-appreciated. She came to the fore of all attentions when such new reveals were rainfall deluges, the ponding of huge land tracts whose containment of well-drained soils were swollen by those inundations of rainfall. Then orchards neatly terraced within rubble walls collapsed, hillside eroded into landslides and immature fruit yields were dashed to ground and rotted, furthering the flooding that ruined plotted layouts for small farm crop allotments. The measure of such agronomic calamities registered  as equally disastrous by many winters absent of seasonal rainfalls, because such prolonged parches had the same devastating effect upon agricultural. Accordingly, no wonder that myths of Eos solace to such calamitious results became of her intercession in the distressed infrastructure of Brauron as three years withered by crop failures wholly unpredicted. Skia coincided with that parch when her special visit to Brauron. She herself was astonished that none of the High Sisterhoods could reckon what had to be done to restore the sisterhoods of sanctuaries to the usual courses of reliably performed agronomy. More her wonder that ample solutions to a restoration she herself was prepared to satisfy, whereupon her ample divulgence and most precise teachings of intuited means to ends to resurgence, each and all precisely rendered in detail as her phenomenal grace by Eos the Titaness herself.

Her parent had helped her explain why such divulgences were preceded by other solutions prior learned and duly taught by herself for her mother’s home plantations of the vast pasturages, orchards and layout of tilth of her homeland Aphidnai. In stating them severally for examples, she attested her own learning of solutions were “by her goddess,” who visited her in “Living Dreams,” during which all said to her by her goddess were most precise and detailed instructions  she learned as a perfect teachings to herself.  As for what was meant be calling the goddess’ living dreams had became of her perfect memory of every meticulously taught lesson that they each composed. The High Sisters of Brauron could not help but conclude that perfectly recalled dreams  meant that they were organic to brain, thus as much of Skia’s own mind as they were by induced possession of her goddess’ wisdom and the mentality that had conceived them. Not only must they regard their tutelary Titaness Eos of a genius to implement  the taught solutions that resolution a three year drought must induce. For too plainly she had graced a grown girl not yet nubile at twelve years of age with her same mind and genius at implemented solutions. Skia could be alleged, therefore, a mantic Dreamer, for standing in evidence of a phenomenal mind at acquired learnings that “once taught were forever learned and known” as a divine mind could clarify and convince any worthy mankind receptive to her teaching as at once passed on and meticulously taught to underlings.

For Skia, from her age twelve to fourteen, was allowed a novitiate’s pledged allegiance to the holy orders so that she could demonstrate her gifts. She was afforded the best helpers who might abet her teachings,  usually the hegemons over the task forces of laborers employed at implementation. None of them proved to doubt what Skia taught them. Most remarkable besides, all her solutions were particular to  how Brauron must rebuild herself from the ruins of her parched and denuded landed commonwealth to a full readiness of all the plantation estates for an extraordinary bounty becoming both during, and then throughout two aftermath years of horrendous rainfall inundations. Finally, all her hegemons and attendant helpers swore to honesty that whatever was precisely imparted to them was duly installed  to the exactitudes of her goddess’ expressed teachings to her alone. Through the exactions of the living dreams results were accomplished to a perfection far beyond any of their expectancies.

Why Cephalos? How Chosen?

Those final testimonials I have found validated in the course of other examples of Skia paranormal mind. But they also compel some beliefs among the earliest Greeks that Skia’s grace by her Tutelary Titaness made her, too, both a titaness and a mortal being a single sharing of person and mind. A hallmark of Early Greek Mythology is that divine grace imparted to a mortal could truly be “taken for granted” without any meaning any inference of innate divine self. And yet Cephalos, from long before he was to learn about Skia or become imbued with her grace such as she could share of it, had to have been a demi-god. For regardless all that was expunged from the oral biography that composed him a mythic personage, there remains the following cardinal facts adduce him divine. First, his mother possessed without doubt the mind and  mentality and recitative feedback of the mnemonic adept. That meant she was natively gifted with a perfect memory of any recitative teaching by revered divine pronouncement. Furthermore, all was retained exactly as first time heard in accordance with the original dialect, original inflection of rendition both whole and without interruption. She was, therefore, as embodiment of such extensive oral renditions as by authorized and acknowledged creators. She need recite only as he remembered, and most often she spoke with retention of the original oral composer.

Secondly, the serialization of Cephalos Ward of Eleusis reveals in the Second Book the many competing recitals of lore about him wherein Herse was alleged to have been impregnated by the God Hermes. I have dismissed all such lore on the simple religious fact that the Olympian God Hermes was originally named for cairns, small piles of rocks which lay along pathways by way of articulating a marker of true way to destination. Furthermore, the most explicit myth of a single trysting of Herse attests she was consensual in any way beside the overpowering of her until she yielded perforce. Allow, therefore, that the trysting did not happen because the early Greeks had not adopted the Olympian Pantheon yet.

Thirdly, it’s accurately attested that Cephalos served his mother as an acolyte to enable spoken roles in voice of a boy or a teenager. The acceptance of his good rhapsodic voice and intonation was unanimous, and especially cited as inspirational by Eleusinian novitiates who grew up with him. He performed as well-attuned to how and what his mother taught him. Whenever he spoke didactically or pedagogically he evidenced best clarity and cogency of oral delivery so that his listeners retained well whatever they might have to pass on accurately to another audience.

Fourthly, his male successors by the dynastic House of Cephalos have seemed so beloved of the tutelary goddess Athena as expresssed by many mythic anecdotes which attest her immanence as a matron goddess. I believe that the Old and Ancient Beliefs of the Greeks, such as they were by the end of their Iron Age, had Athena falling out of a trinity of crone, matron and maiden. Themis was the crone goddess, Athena was the matron goddess and the maiden aspect held foremost the attribute of chastity but was otherwise especially feminine of appearance and allure. There  is good reason to be convinced that the maiden form goddess was nebulous, perhaps a borrowing of Eos the Dawn from the Trinity of Daughter Day. I have no earned right or deserving want be completely correct about how Athene impinged upon the House of Cephalos on account of its outstanding good fortune to have revered Athena as tutelary over them. I only hazard that matron form Athena was revered be them most especially because of her foremost provision of strategic mindedness.

I mainly object to the Ancient Greeks’ odd means of expressing  their inherent misogyny, that they were so afrighted by Athena’s powerful mentality as afforded gifts of grace to deserving minds. Their final belief in her nativity serves example; that she was born a brain tumor, a protuberance of Father Zeus’s head. She achieved her youthful attractiveness and very appealing physical allure by it, becoming fully manifest of her loveliness almost immediately thereafter. I believe that this version of her nativity is allegorical of Athena’s powerful temptations.  Too dangerous to accost, to mate her carnally was impossible because her form of deliverence was a male growth of mind. At her earliest she presented gigantically, her any mood for  assignation utterly inaccessible. Her clever, humorous and beguiling gifts for taking disguises were coquettish, manifest that she was a man’s woman even as an unassailable virgin. By her chastity, a commitment, she defied most all means of seducing her while also kindly condescending at warding off advances of revering mortal males.

Why Eos? Why her particular Mortal Incarnation at passing the 14th century BC as Skia of Aphidnai.

I make clear through a contemporary narrator, Mentor son-of-Alkimos, that Skia was under the thrall of Eos as late as her nineteenth year of age. The Titaness was using her selfishly until then by both curiosity for how she would exercise her empowerment to perform great civil works towards the restoration of Brauron from a devastating drought and over the soaking rainfalls that bode nearly to wash away Skia’s marvelous implementation of divinely managed earthworks. In the next serialization of two books, Skia is brought to a zenith of her omni-observant capacities to engineer and implement great practical public works. Eos does not begin to manifest charis or selflessness until Cephalos finally learns about Skia’s brilliance at vast work project realizations. Nonetheless, at beholding her chosen mortal lover Cephalos ‘ own brilliance at shipbuilding and developments of a powerful war navy, Eos become impressed by the exciting novelty behind what he causes his outstanding shipwrights to develop of whole warship design. Athena, we can suspect, has imparted her own inspiration to Cephalos’ fine arts of construction, whether by hos own hand or not. But even as she moves assist him alike to what Athena enables, there is never any divinity within Cephalos that ever manifest. That he might be a demi-god by either nativity or grant of grace can be asked but never affirmed. Because his brilliance is unique, his contributions those of new states of art of his own devising.

Again I repeat; his conduct is that to exercise brilliance as wholly his own to impart without any titaness or goddess to abet him.

For the purposes of these segmented reviews of of the three books composing an e-Book offering ,  I have so far emphasized the mythological purposes behind my reinterpretations of Early Greek Myths for their prehistorical validity. Do they enable a reconstruction of of an actual biography about a leading mythic personage? How valid is it at challenging and then overcoming alternative mythology by the much later Ancient Greeks, by open defiance of realities that they couldn’t even notionally address for lack of the pertinent knowledge available to them?

For instance, classical studies buffs among my audience have had to dismiss the Hellenistic Age mythography by Apollonios of Rhodes about Iolkos and his hero Jason son of Aison born there, at a time,l moreover, that he does not even try to date within centuries so much earlier than that he lived in. He postulates the skipper and large crew of the famous ship Argo as some kind of reckoning of when they might have congregated with each other. For if  they did, I have to understand that the Argonauts so-called lived the early Fourteenth century BC, or long afterwards the life time of Cephalos and his any sired progeny. Indeed, the crew was composed of members living heroically at the time their grandfathers or fathers were in their primes of manhood, while yet other crew members were boys, or lads, a few of them even babes in the arms of their mothers, even though Apollodoros does not contend with any issue of dates of lifetimes for any of them. He also write about Jason’s navigation of quest whose itinerary took the Argo to the far side of the Euxine Sea to an exotic landfall settled by a kingdom of worshippers of Helios Hyperion the earliest names for the Sun God of the pre-Hellenes. They embarked from Iolkos where was postured an active seaport offering strategic advantages to a location at the head of Pagasai Bay, where a harbor that had to have presented every inconvenience as settled away from active sea lanes that lead overseas or out to near western coastal shoreline of the Aegean Sea’s severally named waters as seas themselves. But most of all Jason and the Argonauts are under tutelary protections of the Olympian deities, different gods or goddesses respective to the crew members which making up, howsoever haphazardly, an impressive genealogy spanning several generations of the important mythic personages much younger than Jason who led them all as a youngster of an age incomparable to their own.

<——- The Relevant Geography of the e-Book trilogy of Books One through Three in Serialization.

Accordingly, for lack of so many relevant details about times and places within the atlas of antiquity I have had to reason that Cephalos was a budding seafarer at earliest prowesses practiced at building merchant or war navies for the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers. He left behind a small coast guard which he had commanded with three boon friends as co-equal naval commanders of oared warships, having persuaded in 1372 BC that that small naval force was worthy of commissioning 75 advanced war vessels that would clearly exceed in speed and seaworthiness the out dated warship aboard which he’s helped a Cretan Commander triumph at the last Imperial Sea Regatta’s long race between Amnissos of Crete and Ogygia of the Mid Sea Isles and archipelago. He was himself setting forth to Trials-of-Bridal with an ambitious portfolio of maritime objectives to earn Attica foremost accomplishments as potential naval to greatly outclass imperial Minoa, a fading sea power of thalassocracy.

After consummating his wedlock to young Phima, with mutual libidinous energies splurged between their laps, he began to essay the necessary diplomacy and developments of naval logistics  and coordinated infrastructure for Great King Aiakos (her liege sovereign)while she was preoccupied with the pregnancy of the one child wanted from the brief royal consortship between as high ranked wards of realm. By the time she delivered the baby boy many landfalls had been selected for excellent locations on each side of the whole length of the Strait of Abantis. In order to be as intimate with her as much as possible, meaning lots and lots of zesty carnal couplings even she’d become large with child, his boon friend Phereklos was constasntly at liaison at the imperial great court of Aiakos at Phthia of the Upper Strait, while addressing his partnership with Cephalos at undertakings along the Strait as far as the Narrow later to be called the Euripus Canal; that gave him naval hegemony over all coastline and newlt developing landfalla and.or havens of New Lokris, a burgeoning feudatory east of the Lake Midlands awhile the further resurgence of its displaced people as once downtrodden refugees from the Minyans who had rubbed out their ancestral realm above Phthiotis. Below the Euripus, Cephalos’ two remaining greatest friends, the princes of Attica Phaiax and Nausithoos, were undertaking all 75 new launched war galleys by manning them with commands and young ensigns for constant circumnavigation of Abantis Island and the Mid Sea Isles as regular circulatory patrols. They also served heraldically by keeping themselves greatly informative and acquisitive at all the poop and important lowdown far south that Cephalos was absent from while away “from home.” The four Attican princes, therefore, made up a cadre of rapidly developing  and enlarging veterans and able seamen for the future of fleet squadrons, whose own inceptions were in advents set for beyond the expired term of the royal consortship, which I shall shortly discuss with great particularity and enhanced robustness.

Both Phima and he had no duties whatsoever to perform by attendance upon the royal court of her father and guardian. She welcomed the tutelage of Cephalos, who was so easy at independance and used to it, thereby allowing himself to be readily summoned while he pursued his own active agenda. Her interests he pursued handily as well, but mostly in continuation of introducing her to her own people. Glad for the marvel of her popularity, her love deepened in to a great dependence upon him. She became his royal duty, and their independent activities beacem increasingly easy to coordinate. She mostly wanted to be with him, even after their boy together was weaned, another duty by itself upon which she was devotional. Haemonia, from whose lame and halt royal court they were shunned, was as petty as her father and selfish stepmother rendered it. They were utterly playful at their own hospitality by their marriage of outreachtogether, but just as he’d done assiduously at conditioning himself for the trial competitions, she and he both made energetic collaboration  to know and be known among far people of the Great Kingdom. Her uncle-Erginos had all the necessary proxy powers and plenipotentiary status by Great King Aiakos to assist  many demarches of trade expansion and markets acquisition. Delegations welcomed to Iolkos turned Pagasai Bay away from a backwater town to a budding entrepot of many naval outreaches most willing to cross the bay for their hospitality over fair bargainings outbound and inbound the Strait of Abantis. Representatives from deep interior petty realms, including still probational feudatories that constituted the Lake and Upper Midlands, came from westernmost Magnesia and the far piedmont beneath the Lower Pindus Mountain Range. His bon friends from Attica were properly admixed their own courtship of commerce and fair barter exchange of new offerings into markets overseas, it in reverse of arrived caravan itineraries. Evenings were spent at confabulations between so many visitors, which persons were curious and constantly solicitous of new cooperatives within the scope of the soon many enlarging enterprises.

Cephalos went too bed always a very busy young man, and yet his first priority always was to pleasure Phima. Ever famished to have him, he was met with all the alacrity that her frothing and buoyant youth commanded of him. And all that while she was earning the self-confidence and the required adroit comportments to go with her total absorption with Magnesia as suddenly a most promising equestrian culture wholly alternate to the militant regimes of the restless Minyans off the North Plains, as Magnesia became enveloped by her dependent denizens indigenous to the Magnesian Mountain Range. Indeed, the only thing that neither of them ever did was any practice of courtship upon the Great King at his capital high city of Phthia. Because, it became clear,  Aiakos himself became so moved and inspired by his Attican liaison Phereklos that  they were constantly overseeing his highest appointed ministers and underlings at their good shows of organizational and coordinate initiatives of commercial alliance.

Accordingly, the very small world within which all principals at capital initiatives were at play with each other was more than enough to consolidate everywhere the eastern north mainland. Howsoever well-earned or necessary the largess of Aiakos to intensify his imperial ascendancy, about it perse the Later Ancient Greeks proved utterly silent and indifferent. Of course, most of my academic sources had such Ancient Greeks assuming themselves correct at downplaying both Cephalos and Aiakos. They firmly decided that both great men, last patrtiarchs, deserved only dimishment if not expunction of the real lifetimes of renaissance from the Minyan blight beforetimes their active century. And yet the Second Great Era of Oared Vessels paraded forth, whether merchant Round-Hulls or elegant war galleys, steadily progressed through the initial small counts of ships to the many slipways upon spotted coastal landfalls that enabled nigh geometric growth of launches upon the sea ways plying north and south or eastward overseas. It all was magnificently covert as well; that seemed to be the manner of the two foundational principals. Imperial Minoa had not the wits or the constructive curiosities to temper their combined initiatives for the north mainland. She was not owed fealty to have known or reported to her anything shaping intelligibly about whatever underway, next conceived  or openly in prospect. The Minos Lykastos died early 13721 BC. Accordingly, the Sacred League of traditional small or insular loyal fealties, a sustained resurgence by Crete was over and done with, too.

Phima compelled herself to her motherhood in consequence of a consortship that had liberated her from her jealous stepmother and overly retired father from his majesty. Cephalos had to turn his mind back to affairs that he’d delegated away to his boon friends of Attica and the many new command echelons of navy and merchant marine which was part of the bargain for sending him away to a foreign and deliberately brief wedlock by consortship. The weaning of the baby had broad purpose to the arrangement, but his upbringing was soely for the Princess to undertake. Nobody outside of the court of Haemonia wanted him to shove off and make away homeward. A more permanent marriage would require her remarriage for  a term of 100 solar month, a duration that was termed a great year. It was standard for terms of exile, but also for remarriages that intended  husband and wife interlocked a whole lifetime if that term passed as abiding love and consent to a formal search.

Ranging afar for the most natural expansion of Magnesia:

That the New Greek Mythology need no longer countenance a grim fairy-tale myth of origination going forth from Iolkos leaves us to wonder how a fantasy quest for a Golden Fleece could have had any genuine meaning to the famous principals behind the Saga of the Heloides. Essentially begun as the marriage of Aietes and Idyia [Eed(ee)yah] that undertook quest for the great mineral wealth reputed by far western seafarers, the Ancient Greeks turned it in to a success story about unimaginable wealth, the finding or breeding of sheep of gilt fleece made the most important derivative treasure in part of its accumulated trove. The Saga’s second part was about Jason on mission to find that particular trove which had fallen under the guardianship of a lethal breathing dragon. The inclusion of that winged monster was an aberration of the allegorical meaning of dragons to earliest cultures of pre-Hellenes. For the dragon was regarded a particular blessing by protection of women under divine grace. A dragon could fly and thus it could defend by taking mission of flight abroad to intercept an enemy farfrom the bounds of the womanhood it was meant to safeguard. The fiery breath, which a dragon could “throw” over long distance to render any terrain of hostile valiant scorched and worthless meant  a dragon’s other defensive means was that of burnt earth, the Great Earth Mother entirely acquiesce with such force, and with the intense short distance blast of white fulminated flame upon a specific enemy.

But at lore and allegorical significance the Ancient Greeks lost over the five hundred years and more of Dark Age over Greece, from the 1190s decade onward that retired matriarchy as a once greatly venerated polity of meaningful female gorvernance. Medeia, the heiress to her mother Idyia was far ahead of her highest emposered sea in wishing to foresake her father and his progeny by the late Idyia. She wanted back to her mother’s homeland of the Lower Isthmus of Ephyrea. That was her matrimony in the original definitive sense of “personal commonwealth and wear-the-well” to very powerful governance. Jason appeared to Aietes upon a most dangerous quest for the Golden Fleece, by slaying the breeder ram regularly at cover of gilt fleeced ewes of sheep. Medeia, then a fifteen year old daughter of Aietes and gifted with study of sorcery by her aunt the Heloide Cirke [SEER-kay], the sister of Aietes, never fell instantly or deeply  in love with Jason; but she promised herself in wedlock to him if he and his famous crew of the Argo would return to his homeland with her aboard. Upon that return she would assure his accession over the powerful uncle who had sent him upon the quest of the Golden Fleece after putting down his brother the higher claimant of sovereignty, Aison. Forthwith, the Argo set forth upon its itinerary overseas the Black Sea, the ProPontis and the White Sea [the Aegean as first known by a Cretan name]. Aietes chased after her, but she had taken her much younger brother, a small boy as hostage. She cut him to small pieces and three them overboard into the retreating wake of the Argo. Aietes was a principled man required to collect the body of his slain son, relentlesslt at doing so, even to slowing his pursuit to do so. Jason cleared way to safety after passing down and beyond the ProPontis at leave of  the Black Sea.

At home and formally confronting his uncle. the king Pelias, who had never believed that Jason could  slay either the guardian dragon or the supposedly immortal ram of golden fleece, a major contretemps ensued that’s a varied story. Jason declared himself his father Aison’s heir and managed to have all the important subjects of the unspecified realm (definitely not Iolkos) agree to arbitrate his ascendancy, or not, to the kingship [to which Jason had been born under the patronymic of Diomedes]. Medeia spent her time both ingratiating and impressing the three daughters of Pelias with her powers at works of great magic. One of her marvelously inventive feats was transformation of age from exceeding old to very young again. She showed how by saving an old ram on his last legs, by first wrapping him in leather, then  putting him into a pot of potent herbs, and slowly bringing the partially insulated ram to suffer the boil. As instantly the writhing of the old ram, she dunked him majestically, then pulled out a spry new born kid out of the effluent of the sunken corpse of old ram. The daughters were amazed as two of the daughters then replicated the feat hand in hand with instructor Medeia. Only their sister, the third daughter named Alcestis, refused to even try to essay transformation of a living beast, whether from old age and end of life to new life or not. But by then, the two daughters of Pelias convinced their father, bringing him to a huge pithoi jar brought to boil by means of yet a third demonstration. It, too, convince Pelias to subject himself to the transformation of his own person. The two daughters took guidance of Medeia a last time and they altogether subjected a most willing Pelias to her magic. Jason and the crew of the Argo hastened to ready the ship for flight. Upon its launching, Medeia attuned the timing of embarkation after her ruin of Pelias. The king wrapped and insulated against the boil, Medeia had special magic otherwise by the refinement of the metal Magnesium to pure sheets of ingot. As the boil had begun, she told the two daughters to cast the ingot to the fire hearth over which the huge urn was nested with Pelias within it . With a subsequent motion of one hand to cast an anesthetic into Pelias grimacing face, and with another at handing the magnesium to the daughters, she sparked the calamity which followed……..

SCREAMS, BANG, FLASH AND CACOPHONY! A cloud of pure white power attested ignition of the volatile Magnesium, which obediently surrounded the pithoi urn with fiery white flame!. She slipped away instantly, climbed a stern ramp to board the Argo, just as the screams over the fainting of Pelias. Another instance of flash point  of magnesium, from solid state to explosive white vapor, one immense fulminating cloud maintained a dense gravity that kept it in place over the hearth. Jason was left with the choice to assert his royal claim to succeed Pelias instantly, all spectators at witness fully impressed with his emboldened powers to exercise so instant a usurpation. Jason immediately turned craven instead; and even would have deserted Medeia, except she wisely had leapt aboard the Argo before Jason could have a next bright thought of utter treachery. Medeia saved her own life and committed the ennobled crew of the Argo to protect her  until her suppliance to her motherland of Upper Ephyrea. A short voyage was quickly undertaken and accomplished by navigating the Asopos River through Aionia, where suffiecient depth of water at this most ancient time of the incidents now described. All had come together  incisively for Medeia to conclude the Second Part of the Mythic Saga about the Heloides [Heh-LOW-ee-thays].

Wherever this calamitous magic occurred, it was on the way to the AcroKorinth of the Isthmus of Ephyrea, the region that had future Corinth and Megara a bridge between the two mainland divisions of the Greek Peninsula. The Third and Last Part of the Saga divides audience attention one story line away about the family of Medeia’s sister Chalkiope, her husband Phrixos and his sister Helle [HAY-lay]. Aietes had remarried Ino, who proved a wicked stepmother with want to destroy Phrixos and Helle. The storyline that goes another way was about Medeia’s ascendancy over the cowardly Jason who had forsaken her restoration of him to his homeland kingdom. Medeia’s powerful pedigree had her soon to superior positions over the Ephyreans, allowing her to raise Jason to the appointed powers of the Phylax, or Keeper, of all souls Isthmian. Our Fourth Book about Cephalos tells that story, as does the First Book about Aigeus of Attica as how become well met of Medeia, and soon at compact to save her from deeds she could not hesitate to perform but would earn her safe exile from her motherland of Ephyrea. He promised to take her in suppliance to him after she had committed her deeds, lethal or otherwise most calamitous as was her was at all deeds.

So Cephalos makes up for the mostly lost story of Jason and Medea by the Ancient Greeks so that he can make with Phereklos the great accomplishment that Jason supposed affect, but did not, at bringing great fortune from the shores beyond the Bosporos, whose strong channel flow divides the continent of Eurasia into Europe and Asia! For once Princess Phima would not join the two men at adventure of commerce to the Black Sea beyond the Bosporos. She refused to inform her beloved consort that she was pregnant with child again, and she was too gracious to deny Cephalos his possible feat of great good fortune to Magnesia. For she had utmost trust that whatever he did, he shared any bounty by the doing with her and her realm of Magnesia. Forthwith Phereklos and Cephalos led a squadron of fifteen war galleys up the then called Dardanos Strait that also cleaved Europe from Asia as a waterway to the far east Euxine (Black) and Hyrkanian (Caspian) Seas. Upon arriving to a lee shore upon the Bosporos, they were greeted with alacrity by a large colony of merchant who were most impressed with the warships at debut put before them. Intense parlay ensued most amicably after the merchant colonists introduced their immense grain barges brought to the Bosporos from the great grainlands inland the north coast of the Euxine Sea. Explaining how the enormous harvest were cultivated and harvested in the vague hinterlands of Drepana (meaning “Scything Land” as idiomatically translated), they wished Cephalos and Phereklos to entertain springtime convoy duty of the Barges so that they could essay distribution of the barged grain harvests throughout “the White Sea of the Cretans unto their Cretan Sea.” Inspecting the barges carefully, Cephalos came to bold surmise somewhat different from Phereklos brilliant scheme alternatively. Cephalos would deply his Attican war galleys from the Saronic Gulf to the entrance of the Dardanos Strait, to await the barges at downstream flow of the Euxine Sea as overpouring out of Bosporos at exactly that time and season of the Straits steady flow. His Saronic Gulf escort fleet(s) ad divided would barter the grain away to the Archipelago of many island groups throughout their expanses. Exchanges would be realized by southward bearings which the seasonal Etesian [Ett-EES-see-yan] winds would so readily facilitate. Then, after all the grain was distributed, he would see to a well managed return of the barges to the Dardanos Strait, where to wait the season when it ran tidally, thus to say neytrally as between high tidal inflow to the Euxine Sea and ebb tidal flow down the strait ever westward. For the channel flow remained no longer constantly downstream as it was in high flooding season of springtime to impede any easy navigation of the empty barges up and back the Strait to the Bosporos.

Phereklos was of another mind, but one that great supplemented the propose itinerary of the empty grain barges. What he proposed was that barges’ interior storage capacities for grains be converted into platforms over all bilges to enable standing horses, such steeds intended for export from the Strait of Abantis by the extensive horse ranching along the North Rim Sea (in part to the White, or much later Aegean Sea). The conversion of all barge holding volume from grain transport to  conveyance of mares-in -foal, studding stallions and yearling colts bred for hauling chariots and carts. The holds would become stables for best bred horses thereby, whether they were exchanged for other horses of far foreign breeds, or from the horse ranches that the Coastal Trojan and Dardanians so superbly maintained by excellent reputations respective to each source grasslands. The merchant colonists upon the Bosporos would take the converted barges, or otherwise designed horse transports fro their wintertime preoccupations before the April, May and June harvesting that would fill them capaciously. Cleaning the barges befouled by the dung of horses would be easy by soaking them drowned in the three main debouches of rivers that flowed into the Euxine Sea during Europa’s snow melts into floods at highest levels of spate. Those rivers were the Ister (Danube), Bug and Dnieper. The parlay went to such large scale of forward thinking that all principals besides Cephalos and Phereklos became greatly excited. But that voyage of adventure must conclude with compacts elicited by Phereklos as led on tour by the merchant colonists to the sources of all springtime embarkations of grain loading to barges. Cephalos would return home as planned, there to arrangethrough the next winter the means for well-commanded and well-crewed escorts for the solstice season of full barges that would arrive that next springtime to the outflow of the Dardanos Strait’s last great bay and bayshore, which was the Scamander and Simois[SEE-moy-eess] Rivers of the Kingdom of Ilion (then pronounced Wilion). For its greater high kingdom of Troias was a center of horse breeding all by itself, by working various reciprocities with the back then higher equestrian cultures, such as the inland empire of the Hatti (Hittite) within Anatolia; and with settlers off the steppes adjacent to Armenia and Azerbaijan. Also most instrumental to serving as a winter season palatial entrepot was the capital kingdom of Ilion. Its prospects for Magnesia and Attica at interplays of horse trading and equine transport by regularized transport flows befitted the services of exporting Horse or to abetting the staging of grain convoys outside of its nearby passing Dardanos Strait, the later and famous Hellespont*.

The Quiescence of  Imperial Minoa throughout the Aegean Sea & Interior Flowing Seas

Book Three does not directly query for readers why the long standing hegemonies and ambits of imperial Minoa by Crete Island were disssolved or not. The academic consensus I was taught to believe with conviction attests firmly that Crete had lost such great sway in 1450 BC, when southwest Arzuwans of Anatolia and Argives by Tiryns of the Argolid Peninsula and  Inachus River Valley ( a greatly irrigated plain, in fact) invested Crete. They separately or together, either way equally credible, occupied the many agrarian palace metropols (befitting alternatives to any large composite towns and urbanized coastal cities). They then, by 1400, had  abandoned the metropols as too dense, too crowded and and unhygienic by settling suburbanly the superbly groomed planatations around the most famous of them {Knossos, Phaistos Mesara, Gortyna, Mallia, et al.]. All such dissolution was rendered as consequence to destruction of very large Minoan navies that were rubber out by the verifiably calamitous e eruption of the volcanic midsea Thera, now dated to 1505 BC.

I have delved carefully intoall new findings that have catalogued Crete’s new suburbia and coastal developments. The proper determination is a quiescence of the dominant invaders and occupiers, the bellicose Argives and Karians most exemplary, by pacifications of the native Cretan “high societies,” whose accultured womenhood both intermarried and smoothed subsequent Minoses, or great kings, pacified the mainland invaders off the Greek Peninsula and Anatolia. Over four successions, beginning from 1500 BC, Crete went through steady resurgence which rebuilt navies off the first era of great oared vessels while resuming the trading cartel shared between Crete, the Levantine fortress harbor cities and the Egyptians. Such resumed fixities, however, inferred a stale, mostly recumbent culture, even if efficacious to a comeback of Crete to her whole island status of a premier Great Kingdom and naval thalassocracy ruled from Knossos. The early part resurgence plotted numerous intermarriages of Mainland Tirynthians, the so-called Proitid Argives of the Argolid Peninsula, such as to hybridize a new nation race by 1400 BC as Creto-Mycenaean. I do not like that academic term-of-art, but I respect that the refreshed population mix engendered for Crete Island a realm that was a considerable high kingdom, even if still short of its greatness from before Thera’s eruption. I say that with care because the second to last Minos or entitles Great King, whom I name Lykastos, had married his son and heir the prince-Minotaur,( who became King Minos II of Classical Greek Mythology), to a native born  matriarch of especial sacral majesty, Pasiphaia, until both were attesting an especially effective imperial  co-regency over the first quarter of the Fourteenth century BC.

Lykastos resumed excellent relations with the ancestral matrarchy composing the Sacred League of isles and mainland petty queendoms of the Saronic Gulf, including Attican governesses over the MesoGaia ranging from lowest southwest Sikyon to  East Bay Attica (Aktaia). The tithing of such feudatories did not effect the Isthmus of Ephyrea except for its wintertime colonies of highest merchant magnates who built opulent pied-at-terres as seasonally resident colonists. The best exemplar of the Isthmian matron theocracy that newly evolved was the child maiden heiress Endeis, to whom Aiakos son-of-Aegina was betrothed while a boy. She was supposed to afford as bride an exalted status to her future husband whom she married at their ages 16 and 21, respectively, after his ascendancy and ascension to Great King after his reconquests throughout the north mainland.

Lykastos proved to great adoration of, and respect for,  Cephalos’ maternal grandmother Metiadusa and the Kekropid branch royal dynasty into which she married until her own old age. He had entered his dotage after an especially long reign as the Minos of Crete before 1390 BC, and so he never was as intimate with mother Herse or her taken consort, the entitled Kerkyon of Eleusis, as could have been fortunate. As a boy Cephalos grew up to hear much abuse of the bully Cretans whose imperial naval commands, the Sea Lords. lived a resident colony of the Pyrrhaios Strand upon Gulf Attica. Befriended of the coastal Lelegans, their mariner ethnicity of middle class township societies and communities of constructors taught the Ward of Eleusis to become very wary of the sea lords. They were a predatory ilk, especially after the prince-Minotaur of Crete began to allow their varying depredation at deep sea mains and convoy fareways along the Cretan Sea and the White Sea at just above it.

By the time of his brief consortship with Phima, which actually was extended into most of 1370 BC to enable the Great Grain Convoys effected by Cephalos and Phereklos with maritime colonists of the Bosporus, he was receiving news and formal report of much depredation within the Mid-Sea Isles (the Cyclades) of the Greek Archipelago. His excellent informers were princes of Attica Phaiax and Nausithoos, to whom Cephalos had delegated high command of an Attican coast guard and relegated sea duty to patrol with few but enlarging warship counts. They effectively made circuits of broad vigilance along the northern verge of the Mid-Sea Isles; they began from Brauron Cove of East Attica to roam outbound the Mid-Sea Isles and ranged northward exploratively until their returns via the Strait of Abantis. Always on the move as essential training exercises for onboard naval commands and crews, Cephalos concerted excellent hospitality of all returnees where the entrance of Pagasai Bay was passed by the upper Strait of Abantis. While those exercises of well-earned repasts and ends of circuit itineraries, the two princes and adjutant commanders of coast guard made layover of Iolkos for intensive briefings about wherever the Cretan sea lords were idling at depredation and outright piratical confiscations at deep sea of the White Sea within and around the Mid-Sea Isles themselves. We shall pick up on what all that information evolved to become over Books Four and Five of our next reviews of their e-Books. Suffice to say just here and ahead of them that the Cretan war navies were plotted geographically for their own insular haunts, places for ambushes to beset passing convoys and their logistical landfalls to receive resupply or return to Crete the booty of their deep sea depredation. Accordingly, Crete had become thoroughly corrupted at the highest naval command level of the prince-Minotaur  and his liege sea lords by just before the Minos of Crete died upon Crete during the winter of 1371/70 BC.

The consortship of Phima and Cephalos had them both upon a long voyage to the Bosporos and back before she began to show her second pregnancy, which she was assiduous to hide. She did so adequately with the great demonstration of her good health and spirits. The voyage outbound had Phereklos at an alternative itinerary to promote and affect the Great Grain Convoys by which, over future years, the united realms of Attica, the Great Kingdom of Aiakos and the Levantines of the Lelanton Plain (Abantis Island, furtue Euboea) accomplished the considerable capitalization of their maritime trades by the Late Aegean Bronze Age. Book Three makes and adventure of the voyage of the two happy lovers and partners at consortship. They returned by the Upper Scattered Isles that chain out ward from the north outlet to the Abantis Strait. Those isles became the modern Upper Sporades Isles, but in early 1370 BC they were ruled by a dynasty of mostly unknown prior ethnicity or race, under the entitlement of the Thetis. She was named Serena, and she was nearing her fortieth birthday when she received Cephalos and Phima as their hostess. I’ve made a story of how greatly affected she was by Cephalos, whom she instantly regarded as graced by divine tutelage, much as she was deemed by her islanders for the same quaities somehow manifest. She made known her want and impassioned feeling for him most discretely, but Phima was instantly shocked that she must accept the steady and mild flirtation, even seductive wiliness, of her hostess over layover. Queen Serena quashed her upset even if she could not help Phima abet her anxieties and felt jealousy for the sophisticated woman enacting as rival for her adored consort. For she knew Phima was at disadvantage of her unrevealed pregnancy, which Serena discovered purely by womanly intuition as between two naturally lusty females, Accordingly, she simply admitted to Phima her wants, and in particular said outright that Cephalos would make her a perfect consort for her own maternal wants and needs for most salacious companionship. Was he not clearly the most handsome man that she would ever meet? All the envy that she herself must conceal for graciousness sake was her own for Phima’s great fortune to both win and lose Cephalos by Fates that would have him inevitably acquitted of any consort arrangement and obligation.

That said, so anecdotally, the end of this review of Book Three. There is need for only one final review, which is to explain an important and yet intense discursus, episodes of which appears, disappear, then appear anew, until after subsequent iterations, it digressive narratives finally come to a proper denouement in Book Five of Cephalos Ward of Eleusis.

for the Bardot Group of Scholars of Antiquity.

 

  Bonus Plug to this Bardot Blog Posting:

Having mentioned that the Second Part of the Heloides Saga, by a first divergence of  paired mythic personages, it’s about Phrixos, the husband of Medeia’s sister Chalkiope, and Helle, his own sister, also born of Athamas, a petty king of the Low Midlands which preceded Boeotia by name of origins; the First Past divergence preceded the famous story above abbreviated about Medeia and Jason as their adventure of the ship The Argo.  Less I prove unworthy of my Bardot Blog rules for omission, I abbreviate aboit Phrixos and Helle as follows.

The story is far fetched from first lines enunciated, that the fraternal twins were demi-gods as progeny of a fantastical Nephele, Titaness of the Clouds, who incarnated herself purposively to tryst with Athamas, the supposed king of Boeotia. Subsequent to that birthing, Aietes, after he became the widower of Idyia, the mother of Medeia and her younger sister Chalkiope, married a grossly materialistic Ino. About that second wife we know naught else than how she became reasonably very jealous of Chalkiope from the git-go of her marriage to Phrixos. Because her father,  Aietes himself, was a demi-god by the siring of Helios Hyperion with an Oceanid nymph  born of Oceana dn Tethys. Become a widower, he had been most determined that his charming younger daughter marry a demi-god who was willing to marry into her homeland. Howsoever his dubious titanic genealogy, Phrixos was just so eligible, thuis readily be-groomed; and he fell in love with Chalkiope as soon as they met. Soon they conceived four sons together at very close ages by the birthing deliveries apart. [Note: Such was the mating and consequence of many marriages at the top line of demi-gods’ and -godddesses’ genealogies at their originations].

Ino their stepmother detested became aghast over the large divisions of inheritances that Chalkiope’s fecundity had accomplished for her father Aietes. Desperate to quash them, after much scheming, intrigue and marvelously wrought wicked calumny she managed to bring Phrixos and and the very likely fecund Helle to punitive statuses requiring their  executions. The saving of them from immolation by fire, by a flying golden ram, we must instantly despise as as a salvation plot motif. Allow, nonetheless, that Phrixos was goaded to flee and take Helle with him in rescue, even to the abandonment of his cherished Chalkiope. His mother Nephele, therefore, discloses properly as the means of deliverence. She carried them aloft upon a most buoyant cloud and brought it to an arc of flight bearing  easterly over the geographic cleavage of Europa from Asia. Alas, the ascent so steep until the arc leveled off at apogee had the light and weakling Helle fall off to her doom. Phrixos then slid off the slope of accent to be safely restored to Chalkiope and her fecund lap, Somehow Ino was destroyed by Aeetes, who sole ambitions switched from a grapacious wife to far foreseen maritime commerce objectives, which the Phrixids, as those boys grown to manhood became called became master mariners at secret but constant navigation along the Silent Shore of the Italian Peninsula.

 

Phrixus and Helle, twins of Athamas, king of Boeotia, and Nephele (a goddess of clouds),
attempt to flee their hate-filled stepmother Ino by crossing the sea between Europe and Asia
by flying as mounted upon a golden ram. Helle having fallen from the ram and her brother
Phrixos futilely attempting to save her, he fails to rescue her as she drowns where the later
Dardanelles, which were long  or alternatively named the Hellespont in commiseration.

The happy ending of both Part 2a and 2b of the Saga of the Oceanoides became of Medeia’s loathing of her husband Jason; and also her wishes to make generous amends to her father by nurturing the progeny of Phrixos and Chalkiope. Once she was married to Aigeus of Attica and forgiven for infanticides of her own children by Jason’s siring, she exercised most remote stewardship of the Nephews  paternal legacies, affording them her own inherited emporia by her mother Idyia, who considerable landedness had lain upon the Isthmus of Ephyrea. Cephalos was fated to closely befriend her and assist her at isthmian stewardship by best abetting her Phrixid Nephews, because, of course, the ever valiant and brilliant queen consort could not manage a vast maritime hegemony of the Oceanides as capitally seated the original high city of Athens, the Kekropia.

Cephalos’ ascendancy to his foremost royal capacities

Setting precedence as himself just as his successors a would follow upon him, Cephalos son-of-Deion, was an only son. They, like he, would accede to high princedoms by their nineteenth years of age, although his great great grandson. Telemachus son-of-Odysseus carried his title as though the heir apparent of a father deemed lost to the world and virtually dead. Such a record of ascendancies is as peculiar and it’s astonishing, and the acclaim each high prince must have attained had to have made each dynast in turn a most desirable ally to have, given the oppression of imperial Crete which began when Cephalos was eleven years old, and how long the span of Cephalids from 1368 BC to the well past the end of the Era of Helen, which closed out the 13th century BC as its aftermath to the Trojan War.

Hemera the Midday Titaness, daughter-of-Theia Blue Sky & Hyperion

Before The Third Book of the e-Book Trilogy at Offering.

The youngest of his royal generation of Kekropids, all of whom the Second Book has described at least adequately, he was to prove the most prodigious of all of them, including his uncle-Pandion a last High Chief to rule over the Atticans of the Saronic Gulf. He masterminded the Second Restoration of the Kekropids to avenge his own, a First Restoration by itself in retribution for the his Father Kekrops’ usurpation by three great uncles of the House of Erechtheus. To review briefly, accordingly, know that he raised his stepson by his beloved wife Pylia to Regent Custodian, while also establishing three vice-regents composed of the natural sons they had conceived together. While affording his sons such generous apportionments by the renewed House of Erechtheus, obliged all of them to the protection of his much younger sister Herse, rendering Sanctuary Eleusis and the very spacious Thriasian Plain of the inland MesoGaia an Attican protectorate.

The Third Book makes immediately very plain that due regard — and heed ! — was put paid to any son of Herse and to her valiant consort warrior Deion. Born in 1389 BC to Herse aged  sixteen years old, Cephalos was ranked a prince of Attica by his birth entitlement of much the same status, as the Ward of Eleusis. Anticipating that he would excel from his  ninth year of age onward, uncle Pandion supported his any opportunity to exceed his own sons except as a claimant upon the dynasty of the House of Erechtheus. While ruled by its branch royal family of Kekropids and exalted for living in the home realms of their wives, there was serious forbiddence of Cephalos at pursuit of highest royal ambition as an Attican. Pandion was judicious that he sought Cephalos for all the Saronic Gulf Rime powers, including his Upper isthmus where he lived within a north end precursor to Megaris, the Alkathoos of Pylia, a foremost governess. Mind you scholars all, that mother Herse was both a high priestess of Eleusis by a mother Metiadusa, whose pedigree had greatly exceeded her husband Kekrops’. Herse had Attican nativity herself as a princess born in Attica. She parlayed such exaltation as most influential of Aigeus her first cousin, and of Medeia later, when she became his mistress, wife and queen consort. Because Herse was blood royal by Kekrops “as born of the soil,” autochthonous, so was her brother Pandion for reigning over Attica when she was conceived by her parents.

Cephalos would never chafe  over any forbiddance of himself from a due succession to Attica. Instead he grew prodigiously via four distinct capacities, the earliest wrought as child Steward of Eleusis, overe the Thriasian Plain plantations; as Developer and Constructor of Ports and Harbors while still a boy; as Navarch over a war navy before he was twenty years old; Becoming a Freedom Fighter against imperial Minoa, he became High Prince Consort to his second wife Prokris, whose own royalty and sacral majesty came by her own hallowed rights and claims, as the sole living, and sadly the last, heiress to the Aglaurid Dynasty, by the House of Erechtheus’ retention of a venerable matriarchate. For it once ruled the Lower peninsula of Attica, the renown Aktika known for a legendary royal lineage. [ It was never a patriarchate as the Ancient Greeks would deem it.]

Cephalos had four first cousins, princes either regent or vice-regent, one of whom, Pallas sired many second cousins who were close to Cephalos in age as they grew altogether to princes of Attica. They did everything they could to exalt Cephalos properly as he attained his meritorious  capacities. There was no place for spite or envy in of those relations. Rather, they made themselves rich derivatively, awhile his rapid ascendancies also accomplished invaluable services to their brother King Atreus. By future books we’ll know how well he befriended and assisted Queen Consort Medeia and the royal son Prince Medeios (b. 1370 BC), over the three years subsequent to his return from Magnesia. The only umbrage ever expressed towards him was real enough, nonetheless, since he too greatly exceeded the senior ministers of royal court. By 1373, Cephalos’ services to Aigeus had resulted in their displacements or demotions, despite so many of them were boon friends of Aigeus. Such removals from highest royal offices, thouigh, could not be helped. Medeia was insistent that he become highest on merits, while his mother Herse sought to snuff any outrage felt by so many otherwise worthy men and their wives throughout Attica. The queen and the mother, however, could not overcome the constant grievances that so pestered cousin Aigeus, until even he no longer would tolerate so many whiners relishing  self-pity over their quite deserved falls of status. Herse had finally had to resort to an arranged humble sea service for Cephalos, by putting him aboard a Cretan warship as a Master-by-Warrent ( as best translatable from the earliest Greek). He served, and became greatly befriended of an excellent skipper over a popularly served war galley; the good fellow, moreover, was the brother of a highly ennobled and richly endowed priestess, his greatly beloved sister, a Cretan. She had taken holy orders under Herse by a lifetime sworn commitment to the tutelaries Demeter, the Goddess Measurer, and to the Corn Maiden, the Goddess of Tilth & husbandry whom would later be called, popularly instead, Persephone. By highest idiom drawn from the south mainland Argives, the name professed her their Goddess “the Destroyer of Winter Blights.”

Herse’s sly and insinuated attempt to efface Cephalos fron further popularity  did not work out. During the second of his two fair voyaging seasons aboard the Cretan war galley, he persuaded his Skjipper that their warship be allowed to compete in the 1373 Imperial Minoan Naval Games. Conducted by the greatly aged Minos Lykastos of Crete, his arranged competitions as first conducted were land games of athleticism, and reserved solely for the Cretans of highest command ranks at contests solely between themselves. The friendly Skipper proved himself a poor landsman athlete, alas, almost to shaming of his crew who were otherwise so delighted with his command. Cephalos had tuned the popular warship and its crew to overcome any exhausting ordeal of the Regatta, in particular the Long Race that must run from Ogygia (Delos) Isle) down to Amnissos Portside of Crete Island and therefore back up again to Ogygia. Especially calm weather of midsummer abetted all crews at rowing their ships demasted and by oars alone. Notwithstanding that all shared the hard ordeal of endurance, the test of the race was from below the Mid Sea Isles (The Ancient Greeks’ Cyclades Isles), whereupon an especially long leg of seaway down to Amnissos. It proved a race course under high rolling seas most mornings until midday, and under strong zephyrs (west winds) until late afternoons. Nighttimes became becalmed sea. Under such water and wind conditions, without or withal them, that is, Cephalos calm influence upon the crews of Oarage and those of Sailing Master, brought out their best conditioning throughout long days. Cephalos earned his Skipper umbrage from his fellow officers at commands of other fast warships, especially after his vessel gained long lead over all opposition except for ships of fellow feudatories to Crete. Some of them showed excellent competitiveness, much to the admiration  of the Minos Lykastos at oversseing the conduct of his regatta. Cephalos rotated his oar benches admirably, building team esprit, as they handled their sweep oars under varying great exertions. As they rounded the Long Turn offshore Amnissos to take on strong facing seas of long rolling swells, his Skipper Erigeron became the pride of the Minoan navies as so far to lead. But Cephalos lightened the warship considerable, and that drew attention to their war vessel as somehow very special, but also very offensive for wanting “to win too large and greatly.”. As the two men of high command regained the sea miles back and returning to Ogygia, their vessel showed every day to lose margin at lead at night, thereby resting the oarsmen and affording good sleep to able sailers. Accordingy, the vessel used all open daytime to persevere through high swells oncoming and headwinds to match. As winds abated throughout evening twilight, the warship had sprung far out to lead. Until a late afternoon showed the vessel all alone at approach to the Finish, no Minoan ship anywhere near until the dusk that descended over the spectators led by the Minos Lykastos. That won Skipper Erigeron an enemy, and Cephalos won a lifetime of implacable enmity from the prince-Minotaur of Crete, the future King Minos II of Classical Greek Mythology. His ships had trailed far behind, and he himself had had to cross the finish line as illuminated by floating firelights.

Herse became terrified over Cephalos’ notoriety. She hastened best plans to have Cephalos move out of sight of all his young following and supporters everywhere of the Saronic Gulf, His mother fetched up for Cephalos the opportunity to win himself a young consortship to a princess and young ward of the ignominious realm of Haemonia. He must hasten off north via the Abantis Strait to port Iolkos at the ehad of Pagasai Bay of Magnesia. Herse made sure that preparation would be made by that prospective bride’s foremost guardian, the young and recently acceded King of Orchomenos. the capital realm over the Lake Midlands which composed many petty royal, or cattle kingships laying east towards Mount Parnassos at overlook of Phokis. He agreed to afford Cephalos all the advantages he would need to compensate for his contending adversaries, who were supposed the best young warrors nurtured by the Minyan and Aeolian equestrian high peerages of Aiakos Great Kingdom.

Which readiness, of course, also readies us for the e-Book serialization’s finality as  its Third Book at offering…..

The North Mainland Recomposed but not yet at Peace within:

The 15th century BC had in most part of its decades belonged to the Minyans at incursions that had displaced many prominent ethnicities by century’s end. The equestrian conditioning of the  warrior people was to fearlessness and disrespect of any settled people who could not defy them. In particular, the low country interchangeable as coastal hilly overlooks upon the Strait of Abantis had become especially subjugated, despite that the petty royal matriarchates were capable of burgeoning prosperity and immense commentment instilled their tenanted low orders. They did not abide any peasantries, and their taken consorts soon learned to respect all underlings to their might less they have to do the husbandry and tilth cultivation themselves. For then they immediately fulfilled their in competence, as Aiakos was quick to suspect and taken advantage of through hs adeptness, always adroit, at consolidating his Strategoi’s strategic conquests.

That was his mastery supreme, to knit a manhood of warriors into agrarian zones where conquerors soon learned how to acquiesce to co-regent regimes of their subdued wives as soon at par with their might of assertion. The famous Joseph Alsop is credited with the scholarship that explains how conquered women soon subdued their aggressive husbands through various hard caveats that civilized all men at par with themselves. And yet Aiakos was never able to actually restore sovereign women to their prior places of comforting sovereignty and deft administration of heirarchic agronomies of many manorial plantation tenancies and village hamlet collectives. I think very personally that the women themselves knew themselves beaten and unlikely to prevail at lead of coordination of their subjects. Better that the men rank their warrior mettle by hard practice and best recruitment from premature manly and strongmen from the rustic socieities of farming compound sprawls and specialty hamlets employed for skills and proficiencies that were shared out. Women had always had leading tenants as hegemons, or drivers of the labors in accordance with their degrees of greatly applied bodily strength, while other work leaders of that designation mastered the supervision of skilled artisan collectives. Cephalos was immediately in his element as a hegemon  but he first had to get by the men proud in strength and ferocity to gain a whipping hand over them. By demonstration of which, moreover, the yeomanry of hamlets and the field superintendents over large and diverse scaled agronomy soon respected how a new peace could come among all on account of the supreme aegis that Great King Aiakos was naturally enabled to practice consummately well. For there was no peasantry per se; that term for abject lowliness and sparse liberty needed contexts of field layouts cultivated by large labor corvees, awhile broadspread pasturages of rotating livestock herd at grazing. Agriculture  and husband at grand scale  engendered peasantries, but the concomitant productivity remained very low attained while under bully oppression.

Or, that is, such as the Minyans practiced upon their conquered peoples through their toady “priests militant,” and other most bully classes of oppressors. Such ilks of appointed statures could not help become detested during the spans of any first generation conquests. Alternatively said, high sisterhoods of priestesses maintained the prior dignity by affording their conquered subjects their own, until they could convey to upstart consorts martial how highest secular mistresses must regain adequate upper hand before that first generation might breed a second. Just such demonstration  were ubiquitously ongoing  throughout the reconquests of Aiakos’ subjugated matriarchs.  But he his imperial reign was only in its first decade. The low country where mostly under female domination, of women of Aionia as aboriginally known to Cephalos. All denizens must be restored to their grace of popular self-dignity whether Kadmeians, eastern Atticans or pastoral Pelasgian herdlings.[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ from the Strait of Abantis’ southern approach of entry from the Bay of Myrtoa, all along its length of west shore shallows to  Iolkos deep inland accessibility into the High Plains of many north rivers and streams, they and the transhumant Lapiths ranched  lowland cattle drives or ranged highland sheep every summer a/o winter, insouciant while the grazing and facing down all bullies imposed upon them, mounted or not. Doing so soonest and fastest, they relieved their oppressions like the Atticans had undercut their hideous Metionid Regime after the usurpation of Pandion. Accordingly, Cephalos arrived the north strait’s Pagasai Bay and Iolkos knowledgeably, confidently plying oars to the head of becalmed waters enclosed by J-shaper jut. He and his boon friend Phereklos just behind him were entirely familiar with how Aiakos had worked his eastern coastline of docile ennobled matrons in order to pacify his coastal populaces of diverse ethnicities. High productivity by all restored agronomies, those young seamen knew, was the next challenge respective to their relocations northward and apart at their special geniuses. They were to create for Aiakos by paid dues to him by Aigeus a tracery of  landfalls out of small natural havens both sides of the Strait. They’d build them out inland for petty kings who would sponsor roadways and wagon traces unto far interior ethnicities of their realms. The once wholly displaced Lokrians upon the hilly west shore topography were the first to have such enables access to the sea without any undue mastery or harsh tithing by bully interlopers less seen the better.

This kind of sociological synthesis I have meticulously hypothesized into the recently restored Magnesia to where Cephalos and his ship arrived. Aiakos conquest of Magnesia was at  sufficient duration to permanently resettle matriarchal dominance of all meek and indigenous peoples. Companionable crones, matrons and maiden heiresses, ever revering of his hallowed mother Aegina, a former queen over Aionia, recomposed their next generation of matriarchates. However, he also married them off to the most stalwart consort home protectors that they would need to defy next incursions from the North Rim Aegean coastline demarcated by the Rhoidope Mountains of far future Thrakia (Thrace). Accordingly, Cephalos would have to cope with a new meld of downtrodden females once beaten down by Minyans and overly aggressive displaced Aeolians who had arisen anew above all hierarchies surviving the entire fifteenth century BC incursions. He also would have to cope with then in a hurry, while also taking time for his fittest conditioning to the trials-of-bridal.  A generous three months for hard training-at-arms bestowed to all consorts aspirant for the bride we’ll name Princess Phima, Cephalos knew himself novice at wields of specialty weapons, novice at mounted bareback horsemanship, and unfamiliar with battle bred mounts by the Minyan conditioning of entirely new and coordinated conformations.

[A pause here, however, to explain why Aiakos was so suddenly a Great King, and not as the Ancient Greeks postured him by Classical Greek Mythology. They sought to obfuscate the north mainland imperium even as they unabashedly respected their version of him as Aeacus (lat. grk.), founder and patriarch of the dynastic Peliades, who lived as Great Princes until a last Peleus who was the father of Lygeron, but most famously known as Achilles. Our Aiakos had his mother footed upon Oinope Isle of the Saronic Gulf, a governor posted upon Salamis Isle who became a dynasty known for King Telemon in the 14th century BC. He would earn high reputation for quashing the brash king-of-kings Theseus, the last of the Kekropids and a ruination of their dynasty by the House of Erechtheus on account of the premature death of Hippolytos in the late 1330s BC. Be assured, nevertheless the Ancient Greek contentions, that Aiakos dominated a north country that would compose anew to Boeotia, Phthiotis, Aeoleis and Minya before the Archaic Age of Greece ended in 500 BC. Moreover, that is the only reckoning of long ruling Aiakos, that he dominated without ever domineering so many Great Princes and highest appointed ministers in liege to him.]

Our Princess Phima is also a defiance of the supposed bride on offer, Klymene daughter-of-Minyas. The Ancient Greeks were loath to admit her unknown to themselves by any name else than “Illustriana,” which her Greek name means in English. Her father was utterly fictitious as the the eponym for the Minyans, who were mostly otherwise known, either as Ahhiyawans out of continental Europa which overlay Anatolia as the coastlines along the Propontis, the Bosporos and the Black Sea above Anatolia. Named after a love nest for the famously consummated consortship, Phima locates ashore Pagasai Bay where the Magnesians’ future queen bedded herself beneath Cephalos over picnics together.

Immediately, he found Iolkos a backwater port of no significance — (Jason did not originate from there) — but a place of a considerable and ready made hospitality extended to himself by the generosity of king Erigeron of Orchomenos, the foremost guardian of Phima while she was still in maiden captivity under her father Acastos and a wicked stepmother, Chryseus. Phereklos and he had already built seaside lodges for itinerant mariners off the Northern Sea and the Upper Strait of Abantis. It had stables for a loan of three champion horses of Minyan breed, by mounts of which he would ride up the High Pherai near Neolithic Age Sesklon, a capital seat of Magnesia at the lower edge of the High Kingdom of Minya. Iolkos had Mount Pelion lofting just inland of harbor landfalls, for its long skirt southward by a narrow ridge; it defined by enclosure Pagasai Bay by a somewhat jagged J-shaped coastline. Book Three describes Cephalos’ hard conditioning routines upon Mount Pelion and his daily exercises at varying skills of horsemanship preliminary to the dueling that would compose the trial-at-Horse. TheKing had kept his promises to Herse that her son would have every support of equipage and accouterment that might overcome his total lack of equestrian acculturation and the hard facts that he was the most foreign and by far the youngest of the consosrts aspirant to undergo the Trials-at-Bridal for the Princess.

It was a hospitality without any sociability. A greeting dinner was prepared for the constestants as the first audience that Phima must greet handsomely and copiously. Cephalos arrived late, just before her appearance, to find that no seat or place had been intended for him. While that  omission of social propieties was arrested just in time for Phima to parade in with her arm interlocked her uncle the King of Orchomenos, she was caused to become embarrassed when she passed Cephalos as finally seated among lowly equerries of the royal stables at nearby High Pherai. Brought to her attention, she embarrassed herself as seemingly shocked that “a boy” was one of her suitors at courtship and that he was so plainly attired despite his best dress as a merchant magnate of unknown foreign distinction. She had been rude; her uncle had to intercede an mollify the situation. But she had let loose at some abrasive quips and rude observations of his least manhood. Cephalos had held his ground well, however, and, besides he was announced in high audience as the only son of  Deion. Mosy every man who was a guest at the dining knew who his sire was — the forever famous martial-at-Light Foot that had led Aiakos’ forces of reconquest as far north as Lake Boebe of future Thessalia. At that location the Minyans had stood down in obeisance of surrender, an occasion of shame and humiliation that still smeared the faces of haughty Minyans who had witnessesd or participated the final campaign of reconquests.

While his training to both unfamiliar wields of weaponry and for dueling begun as mounted confrontation, Cephalos had to act all on his own, even by resort to enlistment of expertise. By befriending tactilely important and yet lowly  indigenes off the original inhabitants of Magnesia by the North Plains, the Peneios River Basin and the east flanking Magnesian Range he found abundant recourse; for they remained a totally humbled populace, even if glad to have a Princess who would grow to consolations by her majesty. They conditioned to balance and firmness of seat when mounted; they offered him practice and wield of weaponry; a suitor from Trachis became a boon friend; he learned how to run fast and silently after the practices set for him by Didimoi, a small people, who, howsoever diminutively, taught his utmost stamina of stride and apt adaptation to difficult terrains. It was not enough to make a champion-at-arms of him. He sought to draw out father Deion, and after delay and much frustration, he arrived to succor the son whose mother he’d been estranged from for lack of further paternity of children. To the last of the remaining training days, Deion was able to accomplish Cephalos as very fine student at dueling and at foremost wiled of many weapons besides Cephalos Levantine Axe. For that was his only expert wield, taught and practiced upon pirates and marauders under tutelage of Levantine master-at-arms who were among the denizen colonists of Salamis Island across Eleusis Sound.

I shall not dwell on Cephalos conduct at arms other than to say he proved savvy, modest when he had to be, and valiant and accomplished concomitant with other ordeals imposed upon him. The officialdom over the trials had been old men of minitries who were easily influenced to impose new rules while violating those supposed steadfast of enforcement. He generally did well, even at ordeals that brought to realization his greatly increased strength, which, until the trials, had been as yet unattained. His father taught him facilities of quick and smart moves against his clumsy opponents; again he did well. All aspects of contrived trials considered, he had been compelled to kill his Minyan opponents in the horse duels but what the Pony People the Didimoi had caused him to practice as reliable and yet utterly lethal defenses. He became exceedingly unpopular when exposed to Minyan audiences, even as they were competing among themselves for mostly hating each other. The progress of the trials led inevitable to a chariot race demanding least time to accomplish a long and twisting concourse of a single lane, while also achieving highest count of many targets hit by casts of spear and plucks of arrows trajecting against them. Whereas his opponents could enlist champions for the targeting while showing their own expertise at driving a chariot fast and smoothly on course, Cephalos lacked any driver to the handling of chariot reins in behalf of his challenge. The Didimoi Little people were denied to him as volunteers of insufficient caste. Royal equerries were frightened to volunteer at driving of cart less they become shunned by their fellowship of equestrian caste and militancy.

As Book Three amply describes of Phima, she was a youngest and most accomplished horse woman who practiced every day as assiduously as Cephalos had at the royal horse stables of High Pherai. During the trials attendant her courtship by thirteen rival consort aspirants she lad learned to hate Cephalos for what her own officialdom adjudged grossly unsportsmanlike conduct and vile offenses of good equestrian manners. Had she had to admit so, but never did, she had admired Cephalos for his good form and valiant appearances as set upon by adversaries at great odds in their favor to defeat him. But none of that could be surmised when Cephalos madea rare appearance at the royal court of Haemonia with request for an audience. As it happened that specific day, her stepmother Chryseis had shamed Phima for her utterly failed Trials-of-Bridal, especially to the fact that she could not win a decent suitor to court her. Every misconduct by the trials was smashed into her young face as the unworthiness. She consented to the audience as petitioned by her youngest suitor, but she was still crying her timid heart out over the insults of her stepmother. Worst of all to have to admit, her cherished uncle Erigeron had been denied to her for consolation, even as he had much and always good means to say how promising an ally of the Great Kingdom both he and his boon friend Phereklos promised to become on the basis of many evening spent at port together by missions of embassy to draw all of the Great Kingdom into compacts with the Atticans and the other Rim powers of the Saronic Gulf.

It all set up to gain newest great realizations of who was who had always had been so during the long sojourning of courtiers at adversarial daily accomplishment amopunting to five months of duration. The chariot concourse was the end of all that was planned and yet the beginning to what had to be revealed for best royal future of the future Princess of Magnesia. Cephalos cleverly plead his best case for her services to him as the driver of the chariot they’d share together. Affronted and already pained with insults of her insignificance, her suitor modestly professed his skills of chariotry nil without her to drive him through champion concourse for fast and smooth racing of carts. He told her the advantages of their consortship together by the mutual gain for both their realms and most promising futures, and yet he consoled her that should they not wed he would stand forth for her ultimate majesty as a mosty helpful ally who she never need meet every afterwards the Trials. Even more frightened to admit herself adequate, and yet solaced as finally addressed by an uncomplicated and totally honest suitor, she could not decline Cephalos as a champion of hopes for highest womanhood, he only the beginning of the many men to suit for her after the brief and lusty consortship as consummated together. Never forget, moreover, that many mythologists who forgot most of what Cephalos had ever been knew him reputed as by far the handsomest man of his generation of Hellenes.

They went out to the trial dressed well and practically for the feats demanded spearately of them both. He Uncle wepy openly for the daughter of his dearest sister passed, seeing in Phima all that she could be and her mother had been, respectively. She was lovely attired, all spectators warming to her readily despite the japing that even a princess did not qualify to drive a racing cart. But the horse on loan to Cephalos turned out to be her own possessions, even if brought to the finiest fitness for racing and dueling my many minds of expertise and single practice of a lone and greatly scorned suitor. The King of Orchomenos’s heart had fallen out of his chest once  he must greet afterwards the clocking of fastest time total trimphant at the racing by his niece; and all his his high spirits were brightened further by her utmost gladness so obvious, to have been elevated by both an only Uncle and most solitary personal champion to end a first day of many of great grandeur, all ultimately to consummation of her lustiness for a sporting man.

the acquittal of the brief consortship

Cephalos has always been a best man of royal court , where his liege sovereigns in presence had enabled him many assignations with older or most comely noblewomen whither and withal young and unified Attica. He had women early at adoration of him as novices and postulants of Eleusis Shrine. He was well practiced at knowing the best of  women had a right to insist that her any lover at assignation had to ready, able, portent at long upon the couch at pleasuring her. There could never be any shame that that any women might be pregnant on his account, for all Hellenes were of lusty temperaments to have children even if they were by accident or carelessness. Parents sent their daughters at very young ages to the royal court of Aigeus when he’d been a lonely regent custodian, but also too early a widower for loss of his frist most beloved wife and a widower against by as second exalted wife who had died too young as utterly barren to conceive a son and prince for him. Cephalos’ consortship with Phima had him far away and oblivious to the sudden marriage of Aigeus and Medeia that was going on so successfully without him over 1372, ’71 and ’70 BC. He had all that he could handle in the loving demands imposed upon him by a sporting lass fast becoming maiden then nymph-in-child by the mutual embracing of each other. The Third Book began with exposure of Phima as unwittingly an oversexed lass who shamed herself as a flirt and a tease and even a handler of young lads instruments of budding manhood. She ahd seemed doomed by her rampant hormones, at which her contemporaries had no mean to assuage except by brief exposures to festival sexual trysting or by what Herse had accommodated Phima’s uncle with. That was a handsome a virile young man who took his pleasures of females as soon as they wantred him, for much had been the errance of sworn celibacy by the young  postulants and fully initiated sisters of Eleusis Shrine and Sanctuary. The last despair of parents of headstrong lustu girls to early at practice of flirtations was to send them to Brauron Sanctuary upon East Bay Attica where also the protection of maiden heiresses from rude and wrongful unwanted marriages that might ruin forewver their lifetimes their healthy and yet too early dispositions for carnal requital(s).

As we’re going to be able to read and experience from a next posted review about the Third Book’s later contents, Cephalos was going to prove himself handily and bodily a Master Fixit for parents of daughters apt to wander along riversides wherefrom they returned home as maidens entranced by lust for being grabbed by rogue river gods on the prowl for victims wanton for gratuitous sex.

The Second Book

That Cephalos was naturally congenial and outgoing personality, while a rare boy brought up by adoring parents and a greater royal House’s leading branch royal dunasty of the Kekropids. Comfortable at mixing well with the oldest of his royal generation whose ages were considerably older than his own, no wonder the duration of his coming-of-age from 1380 to 1360 BC proved sufficient to an an odd and closely defined ascendancy.  It made of him a foremost intermediary to well-defined strata that layered over him, and yet held also rendered to him their stewardships in return for  his fealty. He was able to fraternize awhile his formative years the middle hierarchy of the next royal generation of Royal Erechtheids. By sharing peacetime legacies by however his father Deions’ maritime and overland commerce enrich ed them, and awhile his mother Herse’s  experienced followings of  high sisterhoods resident  Eleusis, so, too, for new senior ministries instrumental to first cousin Aigeus at his earliest kingship, when a regent custodial high chjief and not yet fully King over all Atticans. Because Cephalos was born within Eleusis Sanctuary upon the Saronic Gulf shoreline of Gulf Attica, he enjoyed the company of mostly female children by the high sisters resident and matriculate there, commingling wsith himself the young and grown girls exemplifying  student novitiates at ages just a few years older than his own. Their matriculations to postulants they shared with him companionably, although their mnemonic and related capacities — to assimilate vast recitative audiogenic gifts of their teachers to memorize metrical recitals of epical lengths. Elders over whom mother Herse was their most gifted exemplar together established grown girls and barely nubile maiden postulants  into their holy orders, until earliest dedicated to  a lifetime of their imbued talents as oldest source communicants of an intensely mnemonic culture. We know, nevertheless, that he also compensated his young male colleagues and earliest commonfolk followings with his boyhood curiosity and easy absorption of practical talents and bents taught to denizens living the shoreline landfalls of Eleuisis Shrine under the tutelage of brilliant shipwrights of the Lelegan nation race. His grandmother Metiadusa and both his parents hosted that race and directed their communal values as a greatly felt honor to earn their fealties. Their older generational  adults and followings of high peerage kept themselves intimate with his progresses until his age fifteen, upon which birth year, 1374, he began immersive engagements and practical close rapports with most all families of prominence by their lowly communal governances and daily hardworking artisanal industries. Conducted  along the entire coastal rim of landfalls upon the Saronic Gulf, the new era equaled or exceeded any parallel advancements of  a south mainland, or Mycenaean Age.

All here said so far and so generally serves precis of his boyhood and first wholly practical preoccupations of adolescence. Like all boys he was mostly diligent student, but what he learned was teachings to boys older and presumed more ready at assimilation and mature application. Cephalos instead proved a prodigious student, but also one especially fortunate for exemplar instructors. Also, most tasks at taught, or howsoever taught, were consolidated through practical application almost as soon as lessons and their learning.

We must admire him a prodigy on the way to demonstrable genius. At both livestock stewardship and ministerial agronomy, and because on another talent, he did not flaunt himself as most every occupation proved easy for him to apply or ably demonstrate. That was as much due to his access to superior exemplars from the rustic damoi, the artisans congregant dense communities of active landfall workplaces of the laoi (the town and hamlet lowly). The acceptance of him as participant in the coastal Lelegans’ preoccupations fulfilled all the myriad talents of shipwrights, building constructors and integrated work lodges bestrewing staggered landfalls spotting the gulf rim shoreline. In a time of least population of Greeks, whereby supposed limits to the synergy of human applied energies with productive outputs of all kinds, to exceed at heightened economic productivity required consummate organizational aptitudes from the available manpower and manual skills of whole community; bossy women, know-it-all crone elders and talented, usually prematurely mature daughters of both the damoi and the laoi worked their Gulf landfalls “to the max.” To the maximum meant adroit handling of assignments efficiently at no waste of time or energy.  The great challenge of sovereignty was to meet a foremost criterion at highest assessment of standard organization, whereby the sorting out of a growing populace increasingly diversifying to engage towards multiple advanced productivities, all needing supportive practical education to affect the efficiencies expected of all of them in concert.

The branch royal Kekropids instilled their elite with a keen sense of coordinate enterprise, whereby their most talented underlings worked under male or female supervisors. Cephalos must master their delegations until proved anew the self-directed exemplars over the successive and respective short-lived generations of small and lowly artisanal practitioners. Alas, I cannot explore all their practical attainments, but I can place Cephalos as a necessary and nigh perfect practitioner hegemon, a prodigy by all teachings performed on students of lesser aptitudes for any learning taught to him as well. As the youngest by far of his generation of Kekropids, moreover, he was specifically rewarding of his senior kinsmen and mature  work leaders many times and ways over the turnings of his youngest years. Somehow the Kekropids let loose their underlings upon the brilliant  reigns of grandfather Kekrops, uncle Pandion, and all first cousin vice regents upon their own establishments at par with Herse’s leadership. He could team up with all of them as a happiest subordinate, or become masterfully  companionable at sharing in the coordination of human arts and skills applied variously  throughout the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers. He was like a rabbit’s foot to the whole coastal and inland strings of them, by working all task groups until deemed a harbinger of the best luck attainable by accommodating his society to their specialist needs. Which is finally to say how uncharacteristic of any  other Mycenaean Age regions below and above the Isthmus of Ephyrea already bringing the narrow maritime pinch of the Greek Peninsula to burgeon of prosperity and eastern awaiting civilized developments. For the Upper Isthmus of the region Ephyrea in particular, and the sharp corner of Eleusis Sound’s at its far west end made such an epicenter. Cephalos was brought up to appreciate intensively Eleusis Sound’s greatest possibilities of overseas and overland ambits at distribution of imported trades from overseas. Withal his many advantages of birth, as both a sacral Ward of Shrine and royal prince Kekropid and Attican, most all opportunities of import redistribution fell into his lap to control and orchestrate. From all the adults upon the overland ways and circuits came goods whose destinations were in reverse, for him to eventually steer the to longshoremen to whom he was entrusted exports distributing overseas by outbound mains and fareways of long cruises.

Forthwith More Plainly Said

Our second book about Cephalos introduces his four major capacities as an intermediary born to his branch royal family of the House of Erechtheus. The still unifying Atticans were at meld of their two north mainland chieftainates with the Lower Peninsula named Aktika, a cor homeland. Further to the adroit intermediary that he baecam was a concordat between his mother Herse and the much older uncle-Pandion, her brother. It rendered Eleusis an autonomous principality by matrilineal descents through her mother Metiadusa to herself. He preserved to himself, as a resigned (abdicated)High Chief perforce, the rights to vet claimants to his sovereignty upon any restoration of the branch royal Kekropids. He had earned such statue as a most successful sovereign over Attica for twelve years, from 1395 to 1383 BC. Paramount of stipulations was the prohibition against any son of Herse making claim of succession to Attica. And yet he was a prince of Attica because Herse was both high sister and a princess as the daughter of the Queen Consort Metiadusa.

They realm that Pandion had composed, even as a dethroned Medo or High Chieftain, composed the Aktikan Peninsula as attached the two vast north mainland agronomic commonwealths, Akte and Aktea,  whose plantation demesenes occupied  the rural MesoGaia below the buffering Eleutherais Woodlands that separated Kadmeis from them as anorthern border. The branch royal House was named after the first King of the Atticans, Kekrops, from whose descent six grandsons and the single royal and sacral daughter Herse. They are, therefore, the Kekropids of the Second Book’s title. Owing to grandmother Metiadusa and the royal wives who were severally Medai, or governesses over plantation commonwealths, the Kekropids  proved distinctly superior than  royal branches in remainder that composed the dynastic House of Erechtheus. Besides Kekrops, moreover, the Kekropids also had the proud distinction of their supreme sovereignty within their genealogy by Cephalos’ uncle Pandion, a father over four sons by his wife Pylia, a Meda or High Matron who ruled as Queen Consort for twelve years over Attica as both apparent and resident the high city Kekropia of Athens. Otherwise, though, the much older  brother than Herse, lived in Alkathoos with wife Pylia when he was not twelve years regnant as High Chief over the Atticans by appointment of a large matriarchal hierarchy of rural secular governesses; and by a senior council of patron chieftains whose clans had composed from earliest ever Aktika, the progenitive peninsula ruled ab origine by patron clans and commonwealths of Cretans, Levantines and Egyptians (perhaps only as colonists).

Such an interwoven patriarchy of illustrious forbears had rendered unanimous the successive appointments of Kekrops and Pandion, who duly had laid down precedents during the late Fifteenth century BC. Kekrops  blocked patron electors for their propensity to posture themselves oligarchs, because a former matriarchy of Aktika had their last queens subjugated to husbands off the patron clans. Bullies all by their fraternal compacts with each other, they’d been loath to share powers with a matriarchal primordial establishment. Offsetting their propensity to create juntas (my term fro their royal assertions), they failed to elevate their standings above their governesses  of hierarchic rankings of their  large plantation demesnes. Kekrops’ three brothers led by Metion failed at that objective behind their usurpation of Kekrops in his dotage years. That Attica worked well as a House (an expansive family economy or Oikos) had basis in a popular unity of tenant commonfolk high standings as hegemons. Such smaller local governances had fully coordinated the precedents which had nursed a highly outgoing maritime commerce. And yet it was wholly dependent upon the reliably huge yields of crop harvested surpluses, livestock culls and agricultural forestry (as cultivated coppice tracts of underwood). These regularly segregated yields  had been brought under royal ministries of the Kekropia, who negotiated their exchange of vital foreign imports at barter parities that determined the entire wealth of the nation race of Atticans. But here I must caution by preponderance of evidence that the essential maritime transactional process had made the prior matriarchal House of Aglauros and the House of Erechtheus since Erichthonios a sole remaining feudatory of Crete and its House of Minos. For while a never admitted fact of prior polity by the Ancient Greeks as lasting until Theseus’ accession in1353/52 BC, most all of the Rim Powers abutting the Isthmus and its south mainland principalities such as Troezen had also been loyalists to imperial Minoa. Crete’s maritime imperium or thalassocracy was owing to a triumvirate cartel during the entire Idyllic Age shared with Egypt and the fortress harbor cities of the Levant. That Age’s inception seems to have been from 1800 BC, ff., although feadatories had been slipping away after 1600 BC.

Because of the adamant denials of Attica’s feudatory status and its related subjection to tithings of her land commerce and trades, readers of these Bardot Blogs must be cautioned that a famous cataclysm of volcanic eruption of Thera in 1538 [but now approximated circa 1505 BC of date by overruling Egyptologists). It had broken the original cartel into autonomous merchant marines. Crete remained the only imperial thalassocracy despite the drowning of so much war navy, until 1450 BC when Argives (mostly Tirynthians) off the south mainland Greek Peninsula and Arzawans/Ahhiyawans of southwest Anatolia conquered Crete and invested entirely their homeland populations through various manners of investiture. Of the many Late Palace Era populaces which inhabited “palace metropols,”  they were made riddance of by 1400 BC. The immigrant investors almost engendered an obliteration of the  Era by full palace abandonments, but four generations of strong and able Minoses sustained a resurgence of both war navies and palatial suburbs. Evidence of strong comebacks derived from the intermarriages of Cretans and Argives in particular. The several Minoses and their euryanassas (empresses) remained Cretans of pure blood lines, although they accepted the Argives of the Argolid Peninsula as high of pedigree of new Creto-Mycenaean land occupations. The fourth generation succession of the Minos Lykastos would prove the second to last thalassakrator. After his immense popularity of reign, his dynasty relapsed nonetheless, until the sacking of Knossos which accredited King Theseus in 1352 as a liberator of all the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers.

Thus Cephalos was born to understand that Eleusis remained a highest respected sanctuary and sacral principality (sic). Actually a Sacred League of oldest offshore and littoral realms maintained Eleusis and Aegina Island as protected by an amphictyony with other other matriarchal realms still extant while under the Minos Lykastos and his daughter-in-law Pasiphaia. He knew his grandmother and mother to revere their supremacies greatly, while still accepting graciously the very light tithes of feudatory assessments imposed. A relief long lasting by Lykastos in most personal sense of the highest regard for the league matriarchs or queen consorts born Creto-Mycenaean, that concession would vanish away in late 1371 when the Minos Lykastos died. The then ascension of a so-called Great Minos — actually he’s the famously classic King Minos II of Classical Greek Mythology — even father Deion respected, albeit at stiff arms length. For otherwise he was himself by strongest martial affiliation to the House of Kadmos as a defender of Eleusis and other memebrs of the Sacred League (Amphictyony).

Excuse me, herefore, that I’ve been overly didactic by this review of my serialiation.

Book Two also begins importantly with a contemporary circumstance ensuing the prosperous aftermath of the Second Restoration of the Kekropids. Upon the widower king Aigeus’ return from the Oracle of Parnassos, having been rendered there answers to his petitions, Cephalos had slipped away from Attica to make sojourn of Pagasai Bay and its Magnesian port of Iolkos. There he took up harborside lodging to condition himself into the trials-of-bridal that might win him brief consortship with the hereditary princess of Magnesia. He’d made a voyage around Point Sounion and cruised north along East Bay Attica until further passage of the Strait of Abantis. As he was cruising past Brauron Cove, moreover, he had drawn close to a parapet upon which stood a lovely maiden postulant by orders of the Sanctuary of the Dawn just inland. Radiantly aglow by the arisen sunrise, her awakening had her rapt a remembrance of dream by the might she’d just passed. He had not seen her stance ahead of his bow until she loomed quite suddenly as most imposing above him upon a parapet. Then the pleasure of her gaze above, as sudden as his joy to espy her, had rendered least distance between them.  Unbeknown to him, but an told epiphany to herself, he was the promise of her eventual great love to be attained, but not until the sufferance of many years of abstinence. For her tutelary goddess was the Titaness of the Dawn, Eos, who exacted the Maiden’s fullest preoccupation otherwise over the years that would elapse until the promise of Cephalos to her might become divinely realized. Unconsciously Cephalos easily intuited by their encounter of gazes that her sighting was profound for his own sake. We must understand, therefore, that he thought most pleasing her any compensation of his failure as a consort aspirant of the Princess of Magnesia.
    Accordingly, I’ve opened the Second Book with a continuing mythic saga begun at the very end of Book One Prelude. About Skia, the sentinel priestess postulant was best fated to become famous as herself otherwise. Born the Maiden Heiress and daughter-of-Eioneda, Meda over the  homeland Aphidnai Plantations of farthest East Attica, at her age twelve her parents had taken good counsel from Cephalos’ father Deion. He’d been convinced that Skia might be early manifest a graced child by a tutelary divinity. She herself  had exulted herself  so to her own father, citing the special form of immanence that the primordial titanesses of Greece’s Idyllic Age rarely chose for a  lifetime of mortal incarnation. Even if very rarely exploited, the Ancient Greeks held Baruron tutelary under the Titaness Eos, that she was the Cretan Goddess of the Dawn, conceived by Titaness Blue Sky and Titan Hyperion Helios — (the Sun was first revered and dually named in father-son fashion). And yet the Classical Greek mythogrpahers held ageless the silence of their disbelief in Skia as anyhow an immortal deity’s incarnation.  Their belief was a female rape of man story thrust: that Eos fell passionately in love with Cephalos, whereby she grabbed him perforce for herself and  a rare long life in retreat from which he just barely escaped. That Skia could perform for Eos with consummate mortal grace could never be accepted. In Book Five I have realized for Skia the promise of her Titaness, that her mortal lover would prove the son of Deion, the counselor of her parents by whom she’d been directed to alife of hallowed services to Brauron.

Book One had introduced Skia at twelve years old, but the Second Book has had her at Brauron at well past her fourteen years of age. Her fullest divine prospects, still in processes to become discovered beyond Book Three, has her achieved of first actualization(s). They had become astounding early, by her sixteenth year of life; she’ become a highest attained sister postulant of Brauron’s sanctuary colleges of high sisterhoods by the Second Book’s ending chapters. For we learn that Skia had arrived Brauron during a protracted extreme drought. Her first feats had mitigated the  drought and solved another considerable parch three years afterwards. In between, to everybody’s astonishment, there’d been two years of rainfall inundation. Skia having just barely mitigated the first drought, she had amply anticipated and implemented all deliverances from extreme flooding of Brauron’s fertile bottom land alluvia. Thereby, as well, full mitigation of any next drought which again would visit Brauron Basin as depicted above.  Upon such introductory outcomes for Skia, Book Two in main parts is about Cephalos as a consort aspirant for a Magnesian princess in great need of a prince charming to save her from wholly different plights from Skia’s.

Dissecting the Mythic Fragments about Cephalos:
Why their Expunction or their Remodification:

Book Two serves proofs against the Ancient Greeks’ creation of two separate mythic personages named Cephalos. Both lived the Late Aegean Bronze Age’s final centuries of an Idyllic Era. There lifetimes, however, were not coincident in time, a generation and a half, say 50 years, by birthdays apart. They were consciously born of two different Herses, two uncle-Pandions and they shared  grandfathers of the name Kekrops who were likewise of lives apart, the older generation Cephalos descended from a legendary dynast . Book Two render properly moot instead that the sole son of mother Herse was the daughter of a fabled Kekrops who had married into the matriarchal House of Aglauros to become a first king. A rare patriarchal dynasty effected a demise Aglaurids whose husbands spurned female dynastuc House. The matriarchal genealogy by the grandfather Kekrops was benign as a male-female co-regency, but the rest of the lineage had husbands of Aglaurids were intergenerationally contentious successions. The royal princesses were abused, disempowered or embarrassed. Daughter Herse was famously trysted against her will, as overpowered by the woo of the Olympian God Hermes, rendering  Cephalos a patriarchal demi-god by an Olympian aegis/blessing upon a coital union. That legendary boy duly grew up to become the husband of Klymene, a daughter of Minyas, the eponymous founder of mostly forgotten dynasty; located upon the High Plains as the vast Peinios River Basin of several carved tributaries by other names. Such was the watershed supplemented by Mount Parnassos and the Magnesian Coastal Range that the floor reticulated as an irrigated river system of many lakes, surface gullies and subsurface flowing aquifers. The Basin or High Plains ranged west to east as what I call the Low, Lake and Upper Midlands, withal a vast valley floor of well managed irrigation before the Great Kingdom was created by conquests of the 16th and 15th century BC Minyans.

By this myth of Cephalos’ legendary parentage, by the way, Herse had given him away to a princess Diomeda of Thessaly who married the powerful Deion son-of-Aeolus, to become one of Aiakos’ famous warlords called the Strategoi, or martials-at-field. Deion marshalled vanguard reconquests which liberated conquered Aeolians while repulsing Minyans who had invaded into the Midlands which later became Boeotia. Aiakos’ Great Kingdom of Aeoleis & Minya had him an excellent supremacy over rearguard reinforcement and consolidation of the regions that became Pththiotis and Thessalia(-y). The fallacy of this fabled Attican dynasty lay in its assertions that several Olympian Deities played aboriginal roles. That makes quite easy the conclusion that the Attican House of Aglauros retained its important sacral majesty even as the one Kekrops and one Pandion of Early Greek Mythology yielded Kerkopids who could only retard the eclipses of matriarchy from the early 14th centurey BC to the end of the Era of Helen at late in the 13th century BC.

Our Cephalos, by contrast, renders  just as  we’ve introduced him to be, a ward of his mother’s sanctuary of Eleusis, but under the protection of  his uncle-Pandion, his mother Herse his grandmother Metiadusa and grandfather Kekrops his status was that of a prince within the fold of the House of Erechtheus. He became explicit by them a prominent young suitor by his father as well, because a daunting martial-at-field in behalf of Aiakos born of Aegina. Guided as likely he was by deft arrangements of his prospective bride’s royal guardians, he brought his popularity along many landfalls of the west coast Aegean.  His branch royal relations added to his considerable esteem by land stewardships neighboring Eleusis’ Thriasian Plain, that even a highest assessments of the greater House of Erechtheus over all the Atticans unified by common agricultural demesne of the inland MesoGaia. Concerted efforts of high matron governesses abroad the Isthmua and Gulf Attica, his overseen prodigious gifts bolstered his consort aspirations even at age 15 years old attained of highest stewardsghips. All, therefore, about his worthiness to an heiress of a resurgent Kingdom, a maiden orphaned of her mother and repressed by a weakling father, a former consort king to a late queen over Magnesia.

Obscure as that prospective bride’s Magnesia was under Minyan regime, the princess’ possibilities of a grand nascence, from a state of oppressed subjugation, earned her the support and grants of the Great King Aiakos over successful reconquests which had recently restored her to her maternal legacies by a hierarchy of Matriarchates of indigenous Aeolians and restored Aeolidans after the surrenders of Minyans. The abrupt rub-out of prior Minyan conquests of realms, all besides Magnesia, was greatly owed to his father Deion’s Light Foot troops at nimble vanguard campaigning. Those mass deployments stood ahead of several companion warlords, the Strategoi or martials-at-field at battle sets which orchestrated heavy troops of former Midlanders . So, accordingly, resulted the many battle sets at four years of deepest penetrations northward, to finally clear the High Plains and the Rivers of the Peneios Basin of later Thessaly. Cephalos was too young to have any kind of native or indigenous affiliation with the confiliated restored realms by Aiakos’ reconquests. But he arrived as  virtually a spokesmen for all the great men who had stood valorous at warfare in partnership with Aegina and young Aiakos.

Accordingly, one plotted theme of Book Two is how the prehistory of that Great Kingdom of Aiakos was spearheaded by the Attican Kekropids, whereby Cephalos under best Fates bestowed him accomplished an exemplary restitution of Magnesia as a long prior Minyan conquests to the fallen matriarch Hebe, whereby most promising prospective rebuilding of realm for the Princess bride who he won from her trials-at-bridal inland of port Iolkos and the abroad the low High Plains ruled from Pherai.  By attribution the Kekropids nurtured but did not fight at resurgence of Aiakos’ mother Aegina, by leaving her appointed Strategoi to pounded out the heaviest warfare required of repulsing Minyans from their many vicious incursions. The mother of the bride, Hebe, had died of wedlock perforce imposed upon her, but Aiakos made sure that the orphaned Maiden Heiress and princess could achieve beyond the meager potential of her weakling father. Cephalos’ mother Herse had also set up the several opportunities for Cephalos, mostly wroughjt alliances, afterwards the trials-of-bridal yielded him forthright as the winning consort aspirant. Uniquely, moreover, the consortship which Cephalos attained as a Kekropid matched his wardship by Sanctuary Eleusis. For his bride was a ward as well under a principality called Haemonia, a small and poorly attained maritime realm, whose custody by her father and guardian was appointed by Aiakos in part to his many masterful restorations.

To say of Magnesia’s best conceived prospects, its Pagasai Bay and dominance  over the Upper Strait of Abantis (Euboea) offered  great maritime wealth and influence by the rich and yet petty royal dominions who’d enjoyed no accessibility to the Aegean Sea.  His won opportunity of the Princess was meant  to extend East Bay Attica as though at most natural  meld of its coastal length of the Aegean might also undertake the coastal landfalls along the entire length of the Strait of Abantis. The latter expansion of Attican and Aeolian coastal landfalls afforded small north mainland ports to the new Great Kingdom and  Magnesia as they both ranged westward from Phthia under Aiakos  and from the ideal Bay of Pagasai for eastern seafaring overseas to Anatolia. The effect of such a localized mercantile hegemony, itself shared by many inland dominions and demesnes, would prove exemplary by adroit replication of  Cephalos’ homeland Eleusis Sound, the Isthmus upon the Saronic Gulf, and a league or amphictyony, (inclusing Aiakos’ birthplace Oinope Island (the refuge of his mother Aegina from Minyan conquests). The entire linear gamut of landfalls along the Strait bypassed Kadmeis, a high kingdom which might have impeded best maritime developments obtainable by a fulfilling maritime ambit.

Admittedly, an accurate projection of all the oldest geography, wherein the above elements and all else of Book Two’s atlas of times and places, has taken much obscure research. I think I attain for lay readers some mastery over the organizational complexities of an entirely novel maritime corridor for the north mainland Greek Peninsula. That, after all, is what the New Greek Mythology can also be about — the orchestrations of complexities within places and times that many they royal entities shared with each other for a first time. The various entanglements shed their difficulties, and become clear assimilation by readers, because my hero Cephalos proved so consummate and catalytic as an intermediary awhile his late boyhood and most accomplished teenage.  In spite of how little can be rigorously known about Cephalos’ earliest progressions, the very fact of his Saronic Gulf beginnings and an east coast Aegean lifetime involvement until his age 33 years old, tells him a marvel within the considerable ascendancy which a lingering Idyllic Age afforded his fellowship of Kekropids. Whether the High Professoriats shall prove agreeable, or not, Cephalos was mostly Eleusinian and Attican prodigy along a maritime periphery of their academic Mycenaean Age, all other sovereign powers and ethnicities so much more significant by what a young man’s ascendancy as naval genius attained for them without being anyway Mycenaean himself..

Let me repeat, therefore, with further emphasis: The Mycenaean Age into which Cephalos was born was in severe decline as a south mainland Greek Peninsula’s nascent civilization. Almost nothing  became of the Argives as well-shed of the Late Minoan imperial period of maritime Crete Island by 1400 BC. Great Argos of the Argives and their nation race upon the Argolid Peninsula became isolated under twain ruling dynasties, each suffering respective downfalls oncoming near ahead as the 14th century BC would evelop them. By plummet of so many  heads of state who were ruling from Mukenai (“Mycenae” by latinized Greek), the Greeks who composed the House of Perseus and Andromed were proving a smallest part of all earliest Greeks graduated from the ethnic indigenes of the south mainland Greek Peninsula. All that Cephalos need ever have known about them in his boyhood was that they were mostly illumimated as scattered Perseids. Cephalos lived his youth wholly uninvolved with any of them before 1362 BC.   Only subsequently did his later , or second lifetime of new opportunities, entwine him in the successive Great Wanakes (Chiefs-of-Chiefs) and their ascendant brethren Great Princes and Great Princesses. By then, moreover, a mostly reduced Great Argos was long past the legendary and admittedly great Inachus River Valley since the Argive establishments until 1550 BC,ff. Whatever he got to know about them, moreover, derived from far past hindsights of Cephalos’ greatest friend by much later lifetime, through Amphitryon, the sire of the superhero Herakles who was born to Thebes even as a foremost claimant Great Prince over piedmont Great Argos. No wonder, then, that Cephalos at meagerest outsets into and through the glorious years of the Saronic Gulf’s many maritime ascendancies outclassed so much that had fallen to meager by the Mycenaean Age’s relegation of main populace Argives/Mycenaeans to depredation of foreign shores and quash of their potential as domesticated denizens of Great Argos.

No wonder, either, that mother Herse sought avenuesof esacape of Cephalos by his brief acquittal of a consortship as attained his middle teenage years. He had become too much at the middle of what was happening for Attica and for the Kekropids spotted the lowest shores of the north mainland Greek Peninsula, a bit too popular among the Rim Powers, and having brought upon himself notoriety while briefly at service to another plummet, that of the Late Minoans awhile the dotage years of their long reigning Minos Lykastos, Herse had arranged new vistas for him. We can discuss his next ascendancy as a detailed record of accomplishments, his virtual sabbatical from the Sarong Gulf of just over two years brought him back home in good steading, and thereby the resumption of his naval career under regent custodian Aigeus, to meaningful assertions of naval power and capacity to override various corruptive forces which would visit his later lifetime beyond 1360 BC.

 

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…………..

 

Original First Part Posting of August, 2012

Posted on August 14, 2012 by R Bacon Whitney, Publisher of Bardot Books

Because of the popular reception of this particular Bardot Blog, I’ve enhanced it for further clarity and better understanding by lay readers. Our academic posture is aggressive by its refutation of Classical Greek Mythology and our fullest re-assertions of Early Greek Myths as cutural prehistory about Greeks of the Late Aegean Bronze Age. 

      A Portrait of a young Alkeios son-of-Amphitryon, at 17 years old and as the appointed Champion Home Protector of the Argives. By a sculptural depiction and commission which has him in depiction of Herakles by the Hellenistic Age, afterwards his apotheosis as the superhero of the very last of the Greeks at incursion of the Greek Peninsula.On the subject of these two great men by imperial Argolis, my now greatly dated Bardot Blog explained the 14th century BC’s last forty years of duration for the great civil works that were implemented by the Argives. The two mythic personages, of course, survive mostly from what Classical Greek Mythology explains of them biographically, for lack of befitting prehistorians that survived from the Late Aegean Bronze Age to attest for them. That final mythography, alas, greatly revised the earliest myths of robust biographical content, until the Labors of Herakles/Hercules were completed by the 8th century BC.  The final authors of the major revisionism were the Dorians; they supplanted the Argives of the Mycenaean Age, whose sub-Mycenaean duration ended under the impetus of a greatly regressive Greek Dark Age. Giddy to think themselves a master race by the end of the Era of Helen, for originating from alpine precursors called the Dorian Highlanders who ruled the Delphic Oracle, they adopted Herakles as a superhero and major cult heroic figurehead, becoming the son of the primordial Thunder God Dyaos, the future Olympian deity Zeus. It is impossible to understate how greatly later Ancient Greeks believed in such a broadly general-ized, apocryphal national hero for his inordinate feats of manhood. But what must really amaze us of modern times is how great the range of Hercules’ later feats and travels, until he became fabulous beyond all possible credibility.

The real mortal and prodigious young man who became Herakles was named Alkeios Son of Amphitryon. He was believed of inordinate heroic capacities and yet he was mortally ill-blessed with a short life. That the Dorians caused him to rise above his mortal human condition predestined to apotheosis, which occurred while he was still a young man, supposedly attested some innate immortality as blessed by his formal initiation into the occult Eleusinian Mysteries. There was no such apotheosis, however, until the last immigrant nation race, the Achaeans/Achaiwoi/Ahhiyawans brought from Anatolia and sub-Balkan north country a deified mortals such as the Great Kings of the Imperial Hatti became upon their deaths. So, there’s puzzlement.

This Bardot Blog shall not explain those esoteric intricacies to a greatly expanded until vigorous mortal legend, or any time frame much beyond  the 1360s to the 1310s BC of Greek prehistory. The basis in prehistory that must rule honest biography has a mortal man Alkeios of the honorific title Herakles, one of several so honored by the many passing generations of alpine Greek Highlanders. He arose from the career accomplishments of a real person Alkeios, accordingly.

Here’s going to be much unlearning to learnings anew of the Great Oral Tradition’s genuine origination of Herakles.

Born In Thebes, but always a Great Prince of Argolis

He was born in New Thebes during his father’s regency over the New House of Thersandros there; it replaced the High Kingdom of Kadmeis and the House of Kadmos. Even so Alkeios was royally, even imperially descendant from two branch lineages of the illustrious House of Perseus & Andromeda. For Amphitryon and future wife Alkmene Alkeios’ parents were akin, he the oldest of their royal generation by dynastic descent, she of the youngest by her sacral generation. Alkeios’ brief life was spurred to greatest mortal feats by his branch royal line kinsman and nearly exact contemporary Eurystheus, the appointed Great Wanax Regent over imperial Argolis after the death of his liege, a founding patriarch, the dynast Pelops the Conqueror. His accession occurred in the 1360s BC in his very old age, whereby his appointed imperial title of Great Wanax, or Chief-of-Chiefs.

Both Persëid kinsmen, Alkeios and Eurystheus, were greatly favored by the Conqueror. Pelops’ grace upon them was by separate ways, and intended for different purposes at employ of their distinct great talents by their youths. As Bronze Age Argolis regained imperial stature after the 1360s, and then began expansionary outreach as a meld of oldest and newest dynasties under Pelops, the once formidable House of Perseus & Andromeda instated Eurystheus as the custodial regent over Pelops’ sons Atreus and Thyestes. Eurystheus and Alkeios led this fused dynasty together and most ambitiously. As such collaborators at a great peace by Pelops, they became by strictly human and mortal assertions dual of supremacy in concert. They did not survive in the lore of Antiquity atsuch amity, however, for the mythography that survived beyond the Early Greek Mythology and the completion of the Great Oral Tradition of pre-Hellenes and earliest Greeks.

The New Dynasty of Pelops

While it can definitely be stated that Pelops died as a patriarch in the fullest sense of hereditary royal entitlement, by him there ensued a virtually new dynasty which was immediately imperial. Most peculiarly it extended from one much older and more alien high kingdom than Argolis by Anatolia, where his own father Tantalos was High King of Maeonia and.or the Seha River Lands, both satellite to imperial ascendancy of the Hatti (a.k.a., the Hittites). He crossed the Aegean Sea to avenge depredation by Argives, conquered Elis circa 1405 with his uncle Pleisthenes, and they expanded that footing into an important kingdom over the Westlands’ many petty kingdoms of the future Peloponnese. He then had lived his life onward to appropriate Argolis through a marriage of his son Chrysippos to the most important bride to be won from the Argives. Her name was Hippodameia. After decades of diplomacy to arrange a betrothal, his quest was ruined by his son’s overt homosexuality. Belatedly, Pelops would marry Hippodameia in his old age, still delighted for her prospect as he came to marital age, whereupon he consolidated an imperium by melding her Persëid dynastic matrilineage to his patrilineage by the High Kingdom of Maeonia. Such, to repeat with emphasis, was how a “Dual Dynasty” might wed together the House of Tantalos by Anatolia and the long indigenous House of Perseus by Argolis as indubitably Greek – or just as the much later legend-makers of Anceint Greece must insist he’d been from birth. When he died, therefore, Pelops had achieved the stable conditions of a great peacetime, through, I must again repeat, the still extensive sway of the Persëids over all native denizens of the future Peloponnesus, Eurystheus ably sought to maintain his own forefathers’ legacies, whereas Alkeios enforced his own despite two exiles he had to perform in most aloof capacity. Empowered by his kinsman sovereign Eurystheus having disclaimed his any sovereign status in behalf of Thebes, thus a necessity met bravely and honestly to keep the tranquility of Argolis both internally and externally efficacious.

The result was an imperial Argolis which stretched from the alpine coastline overlooking the Saronic Gulf, and the Argolid Peninsula to its western armature, all the way to the western piedmont of the alpine Southland whose streams and rivers flowed into the Ionian Sea. It became named the Peloponnesus late in the 11th century BC for what Pelops so ably wrought, first but briefly militarily but subsequently by his many decades of patient, dogged and truly amazing diplomacy as a pacifier of his original intentions towards dire redress.

Great Princes born, but Great Wanax Solely by Appointment

Alkeios and Eurystheus, moreover, were Great Prince by royal branches that rendered that title alike a Grand Duke, each born into the conditioning of valiant young men such as their Persëid forebears once had been — model champions-at-arms and able land stewards for the domestic matriarchal governesses who ruled over the agronomy of the Argive Great Plain during the early 14th century. From such women of sacral majesty and exalted matrilineage both Great Princes of House derived their own royal majesties, as appointed to standby supreme powers during major crises or warfare. No war, that is, once had meant no such supreme supremacy for the male sex as warlords. Peace meant all territory was vouchsafed, or assumed still fully reverted, to the traditionally able governance of women.

That last assertion, alas, is today a greatly underestimated doctrine about the Argives of the Late Aegean Bronze Age. Many modern scholars wholly disbelieved in any matriarchal genesis of the pre-Hellenes, despite a long tradition of classical studies at the charting of the Greeks’ most illustrious royal dynasts who had been woemn. So disbelieving were the ancient historians, about matriarchy of any characterization; so for why they were still utterly dismissive of so many foremost female exemplars who married truly supreme men. Even today there’s barely a notional possibility of a championship or home protective role ever reserved for men, as conducted by outstanding consorts a/o husbands as consort lord protectors of their wives, or their mothers, or even their sisters as attained to foremost sacral supremacy over both genders of elite personages.

So, accordingly, we’ve considerable unlearning ahead to accomplish for most readers of Bardot Blogs. We put the lay scholars among them, sending them forth on their ways and best means of properly addressing the two great paragons of this Blog’s title.

The Law of Patriarchal Genesis & Dynasty

First, though, some lessons to such necessary remediation as required to explain why both great men’s biographies must be rendered in order to expunge any fiercest rivalry with each other. For that rivalry by Classical Greek Mythology is an utter nonsense, and not just because Ancient Greeks at mythography offered feeble premise as Eurystheus’ primogeniture and Alkeios’ inevitable resentment of that fact. That riddance of rivalry done, the attendant myths of contretemps dismissed, we can then remove, as well, any residual impression that their respective personalities, and,or characters, were somehow too dichotomous, thus too inimical to their separate postures of sovereignty throughout their lifetimes. How a fierce rivalry was built up beyond normal human proportions by Ancient Greeks, who lived far later than both great men, requires royal succession as strictly determined by primogeniture, as the primary, if not the only proper claimant requirement of male rule by divine ascension. In the Bronze Age, hereditary rights to supremacy arose solely upon the severe precondition that a man of a particularly well esteemed royal lineage must pass his lineage son-to-son-to-son until a third direct succession. The son need not be a first son, but that third direct accession, or fourth successor, become a hereditary dynast, a divinely sanctioned “namer of House” for all his descendants to inherit after vetting of merits. So that fourth man declared the first forbear as the acknowledged patriarch, and then named the House of his dynasty after him or any of the direct forbears preceding him — notwithstanding that they had been appointed to their supreme powers. There had to be exactly such a track record for a lineage enabled dynastic, until ultimately deemed hereditary by all the sons and descendants by the name giver of House.

[There are exceptions to this severe rule about hereditary dynastic succession, mostly due to founders outliving their direct male offspring. Nestor, the Wanax over the Messenes, and Diomedes, King over the Argolid Peninsula & Massif of Spider Mountain, come to mind. But they are exceptions that prove the rule of three direct successors from an initial patriarch. The exceptions made for them make too clear how their royal legitimacy was by sound circumvention, unanimously approved at the times of generational ascendancies  and prehistory concurrent the Trojan War.]

From the patriarchal great grandfather through two direct filial successions to his great grandson, so the reckoning of Ancient Greeks for both Eurystheus and Alkeios as Argive Great Princes. They were both of indubitable hereditary standing. However, yet another Great Prince, Elektryon, by another branch royal lineage of the Persëids, had superseded them both as Great Wanax over Argolis. He outlived all his claimant successors until he died of a goring by a bull that Alkeios’ father Amphitryon was held scapegoat for, even as earlier made the blessed guardian of Elektryon’s daughter Alkmene.  Eurystheus, by the branch of the Sthenelids was successor to his appointed father, a fourth Sthenelos; Alkeios, though, was by the foremost branch of the Alkëids, after Alakios son-of-Perseus. Both of them were of equal hereditary claimant status to rule imperially over Argolis.

Pelops had become a new dynast, instead, by claiming the rule of succession as applied to his royalty by the High Kingdom and House of Tantalos of Anatolian Maionia. Ancient Greeks greatly objecting  he gained full legitimacy nonetheless; but only by marrying Hippodameia, the foremost sacral majesty that attested her own direct descent from the root dynasty of Perseus & Andromeda. Pelops, moreover, became the arbiter of who would become his successor, if not his own sons. Duly he appointed Eurystheus as a regent custodian and guardian over a hereditary imperium. Chrysippos was dispensed with so that collateral cousin Alkeios could become a chief land steward and also Argolis’ foremost champion-at-arms. Pelops had lived to know that in his extreme dotage, perhaps, after all his very long life as loving the idea of both Great Princes as co-regent, whereas a proudly untitled Sthenelos conceded their foremost exaltation for the great feats that they both engendered for him complicitly, together, by remembrance that he was briefly their liege sovereign.

Here, at this juncture of the many biographies under examination, I defer the further complexities of my original exposition, the Bardot Bog of August, 2012. I have a new book just past its professional editing, thus now pending my last formal emendations before its design towards public release. Its Book Six, but the first in a series, Cephalos in Transition and Exile: Argives and Kadmians. Cephalos’ Saronic Gulf yearsof lifetime are ending, but there is much that has been redacted away from the previous serialization about him, Cephalos Ward of Eleusis, Books I-V, the last of which ended with the accidental homicide of Prokris owing to a famous mythical short story about the ending of their remarriage (1360) ending 1362 BC.

What begins beyond the book of transition from one serialization to a second articulates the second lifetime of the hero Cephalos, whereby his steady ascendancy in the far west of the Greek Peninsula & Isles as the future PaleoPatair of the Cephallenes and appointed High Chief over the dominions of the Ionian Isles. What I have redacted away about Alkeios as the future Herakles in earliest making as an Argive superhero belongs to the second half century discussions and prehistory of the 14^th century BC. Those decades began with the birth of Alkeios in 1349 BC in Thebes, as delivered by his adulterous mother Alkmenë after her husband Amphitryon, Alzeios’ sire, must discover her longtime lover Rhadamanthys of Crete Island. Their ardent affair had venues of Mycenae and Tiryns before his diplomatic presence within the high city  Kademia of (New) Thebes, whereby adultery of a betrothal and long deferred marriage by the arranged endogamy of Alzeios’ parents, which by preponderance of the scholarship about them proves out a true mating of Amphitryon and Alkmene, despite her long time belief in Rhadamanthys as a sire of sufficient potency to have her discovered of child by him.

Not so. Alzeios was not begotten of an illicit tryst as Classical Greek Mythology has insisted for the birth of Herakles. He was not sired by Zeus off the perfidious mind and lap of his mother. She was left to wonder why she’s never been impregnated by Rhadamanthys, whom she’d marry in old age after Amphitryon died of a wasting disability that we cannot diagnose of that here’s premature dotage during the sixties year of age and awhile his popular, but somewhat complicated regent custodianship for the new dynasty and House of Thersandros over Ancient Thebes. I do not want to reckon with the complexities as yet, until my sixth book about Cephalos becomes released. So the second part discussion about the harmonious Eurystheus and Alzeios must still be formalized as speculative, even as I’m sure that my argumentative assertions of their biographies and prehistory will hold up for both Great Princes of Imperial Argolis. I only must regret that the original Bardot Blogs that rendered all that prehistory were deleted from the archives of Word Press, a very reliable compiler until WEB.com managed to ineptly purge all 180 of my Bardot Blogs. Therefrom they are irretrievable. The original drafts which I retained through many back-up discarded desktops and their several hard drives became several years later, in 2022, the victims of a hacker whom I refused to remunerate at the time he broke into my data bases through the server of my e-Mails. He despoiled of all drafted Bardot Blogs going back compositions beginning in 2008.

I leave this treatise, therefore, such it now must compose in two parts and starkly naked of its original sources copyrighted as Bardot Books.

 for the Bardot Group

In Attribution:

While she’s never been a contributor to the Bardot Group’s symposia of the 20^th century, Marianne Nichols must be credited for a most distinguished academic record at mythology, and particularly for her efficacious approach to Classical Greek Mythology’s historicity by what’s residually by the Ancient Greeks’ mythography. Such content she has drawn with marvelous coherence from earliest Bronze Age mythic personages and regional events. The following book is out of print, but it’s well worth referencing or acquiring as a collectible edition.

So, accordingly, for Man, Myth, and Monument, by Marianne Nichols, 1975.

This autumn has brought me many unexpected Facebook Friends’ requests, despite their great majority cannot be knowledgeable about myself as a prehistorian, or a scholar publisher of rediscoveries of mostly lost pasts of the earliest Greeks. Few of these new friends, none of whom I’ve declined, know how three major ethnicities evolved separately from distinctly primordial pre-Hellenes. I assume them keen to know how they would  evolve from distinct aboriginal immigrants or refugee populaces drawn to the Greek Peninsula, to resettle themselves until indigenous within its long cherished Idyllic Age. They were each strictly oral at communication, and at first  pastoral nomads who displaced hunter gatherers.  While they became able herders of livestock by their wanderings they were named Pelasgians, a name that stuck for all north mainland denizens. Herodotus, an historian of Ancient Greece, and born to Anatolia across from the Greek Peninsula, explained how they converged as a silent people at two continents apart, and yet always very close  by encounters while sea crossings of mains from each other and with Cretans who we’ve dubbed Minoans. The Greeks then became called Pelasgiotes (Pel-ASS-gee-OHT-ayss] by the Anatolians, because their propensity was to trespass, harass and enslave inhabitants of the subcontinent. Herodotus somehow knew, moreover, that his earliest Asiatic antecedents had to have been of such a same aboriginal nation race, or genos, as the Greeks. His own were precisely called Arzawans, whose wandering diffusion ceased upon its populating the southern corner of Anatolia, with Rhodes Island settled offshore as a sentinal outlook northward over the Anatolian Corridor, while an important entrepot to receive seafarers running the Levantine Corridor at navigating export commerce as overseen by proto-Semites and sponsoring Egyptians at mostly unstudied forays of exploration.

Withal else  to say, Herodotus himself was as “Helladic” as the indigenous Pelasgians had become, because his seaside of such forbears had hugged the eastern Anatolian shoreline in active communication with another entirely unknown race, neither aboriginal or indigenous as ever ascertained purely native, that was identified with Crete Island. It lay west below their White Sea at north of “the Great Green,” as the Mediterranean Sea was earliest ever called by Egyptians and themselves. Whoever that insular race had first composed from, they’d adopted the oldest Greek language of then maritime prevalence, dubbed proto-Indo-European as earier prevailing off the southernmost mainland of Eurasia. Later termed Luvvian, a dialect of speech  became best formed and evolved from some strictly exotic Eurasian origin, even if its offshore Cretan speakers soon greatly surpassed all else of aboriginals that remained strictly land lubbers. They forsake any Levantine languages antecedant the Eastern Mediterranean coastline, such as they were pluralistically as undefined proto-Semites or Indus-Asiatic speakers. They could converse in Egyptian as spoken upon the heartland delta of the Nile River and along the massive shoulder of North Africa that formed the Great Green’s littoral. Those Cretan Islanders drew their civilization off the advancements of the Near East, the first known Orient of Asia. Quick learners because a bright maritime nation race, they brought off the south mainlands above Crete Island their own oldest Greek, to make a highly communicative civilization which later mainlanders knew primordially as “civilized.” The Greek Peninsula and  subcontinental Anatolia were acculturated by the Islanders, and then socialized by them in a manner that had them dubbed Minoans by 1800 BC. For Crete Island was becoming by then climatically idyllic to easy human existence and development, thus also  without need of agriculture propagation of  readily harvested vegetative crops.

Mind you, even the earliest Greeks from the incubation of Pre-Hellenes completely forgot their Idyllic Age. Somehow Ovid, a Roman of Latin Classical Mythology, bespoke a Mother Muse Mnemosyne, whom we must never forget is a name that means cumulative perfect memory of a purely divine kind. Accordingly, I skip over the rest of such primordial preambulation to state that the forms of pre-Hellenes became sufficient by melds to become fluent with each other as Oldest Greek maritime speakers. They fused altogether as earliest Greeks despite that were often hostile and trespassing upon each other for all times onward. Crete Islanders found ample room to evolve with the west mainland pre-Hellenes, while also nurturing eastern Anatolians  at their strong anchoring footholds upon west coastal Asia. For Anatolian at the very least endures exactly as that. Three ethnicities fused as fluent speaking Oldest Greeks, therefore, from whom the Cretans advanced under idyllic conditions of easy living until become evangelistic of their cross-seas mainlanders apart. Without need to do so, moreover, they adopted the agriculture of Nilotis awhile the Egyptians’ whole millennia at becoming wholly dependent upon an agronomy enabled by the Nile River. Cretans whom that nation race called Keptiuns, were Greeks who readily intercommunicated over a long era of Eastern Mediterranean nascent civilization.

Where Our First eBook Began

I have skipped over much of the Idyllic Age to proceed hereon. During the Fifteenth century BC, northern Eurasians proved most active and hard suffering by chill climate change off highest northern latitudes of their continent. Herodotus generalized these Eurasians notionally as Minyans, although scholars insist they belonged to the numerous languages evolving from proto-Indo-European which Academia knows mostly from Sanskrit of a primordial Indus civilization. The Minyans conquered docile Idyllic Age southerners to the east as far as the Iberian Peninsula, before all such Caucasians were compelled to shed their inherent violence for the sake of the especially well-settled women living the long peninsulas that thrust far down and into the Great Green. Those women were governesses of vast plantations that required little toil, but much of diverse expertise that their valued tenancies multiply applied, either to their cultivated landscapes of tillage or to livestock husbandry practiced at a quasi-industrial scale. Those governesses and their tenanted diversities were still immersed the Idyllic Age of interglacial climate warming of Great Mother Earth, howsoever manifestly cooling she was as well. That’s why they made a happy work of mating with earliest Minyans who could stave off all later chilled Eurasians bent upon violent incursions. The best known Minyans never got anywhere near Crete Island, or the Southland of the Greek Peninsula or the Arzawa of the Anatol. North mainland Eurasians always, they became somewhat oddly parochialized as Aeolidans, i.e., foremost descendants of Pelasgians as become named, then Aeolians on account of a newest introduced equestrian culture out of Albania and Azerbaijan. Until finally they, newly called Minyans, had become adoptive of a special breed of warhorse which enabled their most rampant conquests of the Greek Peninsula by Fifteenth century BC. They were altogether of a fourth major ethnicity of sub-Balkan Peninsula pre-Hellenes. The Minoan inculcated southern governesses easily made manly Greeks out of them by instilling those last intrusive horsetamers with  their hedonistic Minoan Civilization, despite the considerable confusion which that stodgy academic term-of-art has caused our any understandings of a closing Idyllic Age whose memory by the Greeks became obliterated.

There would thereon and subsequently be constant turmoil within the Idyllic Age as southerly and maritime; but only because of encroaching interglacial climate change had compelled all pre-Hellenic agronomy to become hardened by tilth and husbandry thjat could withstand blighting freezes. Next centuries’ blighting chills could cause total crop failures and other starvation upon the pre-Hellenes who wouldn’t cope with them. By the time that they could cope quite readily with harsh wintertime of reliably withering blights upon their agriculture, they had become most veritably Greeks. Once that was prevalently, the hardy maritime people of our five books produced a single paragon from among them their best born progeny by matriarchs and their tamed patriarchs. He began as the child  Cephalos son-of-Herse by the siring of Deion of Dauleis. Herse was a typically strong woman off the Idyllic Age, which she alone remembered because of her mental gifts of memory. Everything had come easily again for her mother Metiadusa and herself. Her father Kekrops lived long as a protective co-regent, but he was usurped by his brothers after Herse was born. Her much older brother Pandion restored his royal house and patron clan superiority, but he, too, was unthroned, and as well by his own patron clan of many rural families composing a dynastic House of Erechtheus. Herse remained typical of her mother’s easy going matriarchal land tenure. She led a hierarchy of rural matron governesses called Medai, who finally had to seek recourse of newest best men, the Esthloi, to become their Consort Home Protectors (Medoi). Deion, just such, became her protective mate for a Great Year of 100 Solar Months (8 1/4 years as a modern calculation of that duration). Amiably a strong man, a brilliant champion-at-Foot both Heavy and Light , he taught his fellowship of warrior counterparts what composed a manhood at unhorsing of Minyan equestrians and charioteers. After pummeling them into the ground of Great Mother Earth, such men as he’d replicated were happily disposed to their women by their Great Goddess over all south peninsula pre-Hellenes, called the Mycenaeans, whom Aacdemia prematurely founded fallaciously as some kind of paramount and imperial Greek ethnicity.

The Finality of the Greek Idyllic Age

The Idyllic Age begun with the coalescence of the pre-Hellenes from 2100 to 1600 BC  must wane from 1600 to 1200 BC by the Fates whom they deemed themselves bounded by. As it ended over the latter duration, Bronze Age Helladic Civilization of early, middle and late phase Eras successively elapsed, even if afterwards 1200 BC there was an interlude of many and considerable diffusions that preceded the Iron Age become fulsome as resettled newly and variously after 1000 BC and during the 11th century. The paramount child aforementioned, the hero of our saga of five books composing most of the Late Helladic Age’s zenith of the greater Late Aegean Bronze Age becomes a life at attestation of an Era in part “Late” as well by the dynasty of Attica, the House of Erechtheus which he served, lived and thrived within as his Saronic Gulf years. The second eBook, whose cover displays to the left, covers that earliest lifetime with which he proved a prodigy at land stewardship while a genius at the navarchy of merchant and war navies that supplanted Imperial Minoa until the full eclipse of its thalassocracy (sea empire). I ask my readers of both my eBooks, once a their separate full releases to reading publics, to accept that my New Greek Mythology is an evolution of my own lifetime. All that I’ve written into this posting of a Bardot Blog is composition of prehistory by decomposition of Classical Greek Mythology whose oblique renderings of earliest Ancient Greek Mythography are uniformly fantastical. The proof of that has been my lifetime as a classical scholar who has had to unlearn all that was once deemed solidly prehistorical about the Late Aegean Bronze Age of the Bardot Group’s cited pre-Hellenes in promordial trinity. That was also an unlearning of not much; the prehistory of the earliest Greeks thereby formed barely composed 35 pages of a standard text of Ancient Greek History, If it was German it might have taken 45 pages. If it was English or American, however, such a textbook was barely worth study, because Academia deemed all that it had to teach the most solid understanding of many great bronze ages as were possible to be learned in any rigorous fashion.

That has changed, however, as prehistory has steadily become more robust, more multidisciplinary and more readily imaginable such as the New Greek Mythology can render the Late Aegean bronze Age.

A Heroic Intermediary and Last Patriarch: His Saronic gulf rim years

Cephalos, born in 1389 BC as a consistently reliable date now inifinitely tested and reexamined, is a victim of expunction by the what literate Antiquity conveys of him through rediscovery. The date also implies that he was at the very heart and heartland of maritime earliest Greece, at a founding, in fact, of the Second Great Era of Oared Vessels. His warships evolved as serviceable naval warfare and the transport of warrior personal, as all billets of seafarers therefore once defined of their passenger rosters.

How does he reasonably reemerges as a mythic personage from a mostly lost past? How may he be considered paramount if a victim of expunction? How does the New Greek Mythology achieve a modern fictitious biography which renders reasonable the two lifetimes such as he lived them? I sketch the answers out through robust reinterpretations of Classical Greek Mythology, which is also to say about Ancient Greek mythography since the Greek alphabet was created and dissemin-ated in the Eighth century BC. For Early Greek Mythology, such as the New Mythology recreates is by definition wholly fictional. I explain why by the following Translator’s Prologue that’s frontispiece for all five books of my first serialization of Cephalos’ lifetime.

“First then be known to lay readers, the writ of oldest times past, whenever developed through a literary master, made no distinction whatsoever between fiction and non-fiction. They are but terms of art for our modern trade book literature of the commercial mainstream kind. Now that modern times have most of our academic presses taking that distinction so far to extreme that anything of our deepest pasts must be a non-fiction release to the reading public, we no longer dare cite the convention of our first fathers of history, that formal and fictional expository prose, by way and by intent and by means of teaching young people, has to be recitative about their earliest forbears’ pasts.

“What I put before any readers who are entirely unfamiliar with Antiquity, or before our oldest aged readers who can’t remember most of what was taught them or learned by themselves, is proto-history. It is, by definition, academic expository fiction, because it is without the eclecticism of our academic tract releases, or the esoterica that delights the modern inner elites at our most erudite disciplines. Prehistory, after all else said, is what editors and publishers call “a conceit,” a feat of daring by a presumptuous author who attempts to meld prehistoric non-fiction with fictional mythology, whereby the totality of oldest times past is brought to a voice in recital that’s both academic and novelistic by conventional forms of compositional art.”

Explaining my contemporary Master-of-Writ, Mentor son-of-Alkimos:

“Mentör’s writ reflects his pride to have known intimately the highest and best personages of his own lifetime; to have recorded their information via dictation or by keen remembrance of what those luminaries said about their sovereign affairs. He’s all about an ancient voice of the first ever bardic recitals. In his later lifetime that pride became of his ability to sleuth out the leading personages and their host regions of the century prior to his own, the 14^th century BC.

“The Translator prefers to express Mentör’s contemporary voice at length, but he also redacts or reverts to explanatory commentary. There is such a need of a translator’s arts, to have a third person and modern voice for some particulars that induce sound understanding. Notwithstanding such tactically placed discussions, the translation is in idiomatic English as drawn from centuries of translation of Homeric and oldest Lyric Age Greek.

“Which means, alas, that we begin with seven, near to eight centuries before any of that Greek that still survives! So, then, by expressing Mentor as a composer in the Oldest Greek script ever, the real “conceit” of his Translator is to have both him and Early Greek Mythology at first authorship of prehistoric non-fiction. His composition will remain, nevertheless, academic expository fiction.

The First Book:

Herse as Graced by the Owl of Athena

Academia has adhered to the Pre-Classical Tradition of Historiography is the only valid Ancient Greek History that can be taught  in our elementary and secondary schools. It also means that all prehistorical biographies of popular mythic personages are valid even if their lifetimes were influenced by the Olympian Pantheon of occasional tutelary deities who guided or drove mortal lifetimes to illustriousness. Cohabitation of goddesses with mortals  to procreate demi-gods a/o demi-goddesses were commonplace by lore even if no longer believed so by Ancient Greeks who contrived their biographies. Literary analyses of mythic personages includes sculpture and art where deities of the Pantheon are clearly immanent in the lives of their favored mortals. One reason why Cephalos was expunged from Classical Greek Mythology as though unmentionable relates to the Athenian superhero Theseus, a much lesser man but a much greater mythic personage, nonetheless, because he was deemed a child of Poseidon, or duly sired by that Aigeus  and that god upon the eager lap of the mortal priestess Aethra. The Ancient Athenians wouldn’t tolerate any near rival to their national hero of Attica, because had once ruled as a king-of-kings above any born to Attica.

Accordingly, the Olympian Pantheon can present a clutter of divine attributes and powers to its member deities by way gifts that they give away to their favorite mortals. Because Cephalos was highly favored by Athena, albeit much less so than her greatest mortal love, his great godson Odysseus son-of-Laertes, his grace by her was powerfully mental, by implants of strategic genius that he was largely unaware of. And yet it was very correct that Cephalos could mate with a Titaness, Eos the Sidereal Dawn, without any need for her to compose her physiognomy to a gentleness that had him coital of a passion for her that should have crushed his bones to bone meal upon her climax by his couching of her. I’ve had to accept  as a rule or law for such cohabitation, to wit, that she needed a mortal incarnation, a human  surrogate to inhabit for her lifetime. No way else, I must accept,  that a female’s ardor could attain a celestial climax wherewith the satiation of two mortals so perfectly compatible at their nigh every nocturnal mating beyond the Dusk.

Eos’ decision to take mortal incarnation was due to Cephalos’ father Deion, a champion-at-arms and an especially effective Martial-At -Foot, who was best befitting the late century 15th BC. Minyans off the North Rim Sea were constantly at incursions of most advanced equestrian warfare, having overrun and displaced many ethnicities of earliest Greeks who had been their forerunners. Upon his marriage to Herse, 1390, and almost as soon as they’d conceived Cephalos, the various consort home protectors, medoi or high chiefs, appointed him their Chief of Wardens. Most of them were marriedod to coastal matriarchs whose dominions of governance were upon the fertile MesoGaia that makes and inland belt from Aphidnai farthest east, over and down westwardly therefrom, to Sikyon and Aigialaia along the south shore of the Great Gulf “inland sea.” Having proved himself a Minyan Killer, by butchery of their finest breed of horses as well, Deioon had attained especially well despite last reverses Minyans upon the new 14th century BC which were forfeited away due to the ineptness of High King Laios of Kadmeis (later Thebes). Upon becoming the Chief of Wardens, however, he resumed his record of Minyan defeats, even as his marriage was failing for Herse’s seeming barrenness after Cephalos was born. He had to move on and away, and he did so by becoming a liege of young Aiakos (most often spelled Aeacus) to deliver reconquests which reversed Minyan tides of settlement all the way up to future Thessalia. The Minyans sued for peace as a nation race, and the subsequent surrender allowed the High Kingdom of Minya in part to a confederation of reconquests which raised Aiakos to Great King of Aeoleis & Minya, by way to a final imperium which also “confiliated” north mainland petty kingdoms that later composed Boeotia (caused 80 years after the Trojan War by displaced Thessalians driven out from the North Plains by the refugee Thesprotians).

Aiakos stands in proof against the absurdity of an Age that the Academy has insisted to have been Mycenaean upon Schleimann’s discovery of Mukenai upon the Great Argive Plain. At the time of Aiakos’ nascent great kingdom and north mainland imperium, the Argives as a nation race was in severe decline, owing to decline of the Perseid Dynasty over Argolis since 1500 BC, and to rub out of the branch royal Elektryonids by a famous sea raid in 1394. Beside the Argive failings, even as offset by Cretans conquests of the Proitid Dynasty whose Argives ruled over the Tirynthians of the Argolid Peninsula, Pelops was conquering the Westlands, the petty kingdoms of the west coastal Southland, that had long withstood the Argives except as their piratical marauders.

This is all by way of review of the circumstances to years immediately before Cephalos’ birth in 1389. If there was anything left of a Mycenaean Age it was about to be resurrected by Aiakos over the early Greeks of the north mainland Greek Peninsula. But any ideas about an Era of Aiakos, or Pelasgian Empire & Age never achieved any implementation. Rather, the real potential of the Earliest Greeks were to become of an ascendancy of the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers in 1362 BC. That regional identity composed from an arm of the Argolid Peninsula, the entire Isthmus of Ephyrea populated by earliest Corinthians and Megarites, and all interiors littoral to the  north mainland Attica below the Eleutherais Woodlands. Without their coalescence of cooperative naval powers, by both war navies and merchant marines, the tenuous imperial hold upon those mainland populaces by imperial Crete would never have happened. In fact, they were denied by the Ancient Greeks forever afterwards the final oblivion of Minoan Crete Island in 1354. Why? Because the Ancient Ages Athenians never admitted that they were feudatories under vasselage to the House of Minos over the Cretans. As they were, or course, by a preponderance of evidence that all other Greeks could apply in refutation of a so-called Era of Theseus as an Athenian superhero alike Herakles became for all Greeks after the Late Aegean Bronze Age was over (at some still undefined Dark Age date or duration within the Iron Age which preceded Greek historical Antiquity.

These are highly pregnant assertions, all of which underlie Cephalos Ward of Eleusis: Prelude to a Naval Genius. And as they play out for its readers, few as they are so far, I shall be proving how the New Greek Mythology postures fictional proto-history that far exceeds any alternative pedagogy at the teaching and knowledges that attend any assimilation of the Late Aegean Bronze Age.

A next Bardot Books posting shall extend the realizations of my assertions through the same first book, and by the two others that strike an ascendancy by the coming-of-age of  father Deion and Cephalos, together and apart successively by their orchestrations of the branch royal Attican House of the Kekropids over the Atticans.

Ancillary Parallel Developments

Just before the estrangement of his parents Herse and Deion in the 1380s of Cephalos small boyhood, four distinct developments would by forceful combination affect a rapid ascendancy of the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers. The first was the death of High King Labdakos over Kadmeis, the quasi-imperial precursor to Thebes of Ancient Greek History. He had bribed uncle-Pandion, the much older brother of his mother Herse, to accept an expansion of Attica to include the low country that generally characterizes west coastal terrain upon the Strait of Abantis. Such territory was shared by Kadmeis and Attica, but the division between was the extensive Eleutherais Woodlands that reared from the eastern coastal edge all the way to just above the Great Gulf that was the western inland waterway the cleave the Greek Peninsula into two mainland division. Pandion refused the bribe on the grounds that he was going to be suckered into a land possession that he could not hold in the face of Labdakos’ imperial intentions. The High King then orchestrated a usurpation of Pandion — at the end of twelve years of successful and popular sovereignty over Attic in main parts — by his three brothers, Metion at lead. That deposition succeeded, although Pandion remained of highest stature as the consort home protector and husband of Pylia, a regional governess over Alkathoos (later Megaris) which footed the Isthmus of Ephyrea ( a whole region) to the north mainland as contiguous to Eleusis, Cephalos birthplace. Before he died, moreover, Labdakos built “a March,”  meaning a fully possessed right of way from high city Kadmeia, through Plateia to the corner of Eleusis Sound at exactly where Alakathoos and the Sanctuary of Eleusis made common corner of its outlet into the Saronic Gulf. But then Labdakos died in the mid-1380s, and there was an onrush of a Minyan incursion to swipe the Lake Midlands of Kadmeis hastily away. His successor and son Laios proved inept to repulse the Minyans despite strong strategic options that he could have effected. Then Laios died, however, and there was a remarriage of his young teenage wife Iokaste to a bastard son, Oedipus, whom Laios had conceived with a priestess by way of proofs to his father Labdakos that he wasn’t an overt homosexual, as he was. Oedipus courted Iokaste by a unque trial-at-bridal to wed her, and he did so as the adopted son of a regent Polybos and his sacral wife Periboea over Sikyon, which locates upon the south shore of the Great Gulf as contiguous to the Lower Isthmus of Ephyrea.

[Please note furthermore about this development, that the varying geography alludes to very tight conveniences of locations by all borderlands near Kadmeis, as implied by what I’ve sketchily introduced of distinct eventualities per se. Also note that Oedipus was not the natural son of Iokaste by Laios, such as Ancient Greek Tragedy alleges most famously of her remarriage through the foremost dramatist Sophocles — a very unreliable prehistorian about strong neighbors to his homeland of Attica, most of which he regarded as impediments to the hegemony of Athens which she was aspiring towards in the 5th century BC.]

The second major development was the coalition that Aegina built, once a foremost governess over the Aionians of Kadmeis but become refugee from her lands under conquest of Minyans. Her son was the future most famous Aiakos (Aeacus in romanized Greek), whose imperial future she aspired to through oaths taken by formidable martials-at-field that placed them in fealty to him. Those ablest war leaders, five in number, were called the strategoi, a later Greek word for “general” but meaning here a designated specialist over a force level under an appointed and unifying supreme commander. It had taken until Aiakos’ fifteenth birthday for Aegina to cut loose their specific wields of force, 1385,ff., at a grand plan of reconquests of territory under Minyan subjugation. Deion, become available at the end of his term of hallowed consortship with Herse, led all vanguard of both light and heavy Foot, Two strategoi were martials of Horse at chariotry, and the last two were specialists at mobile force of Horse, including all tactical maneuvers of rearguard reinforcement. Aiakos proved from the get-go  a consummate logistician at every accomodation of Force Aiakos in whole. It took five campaign years to affect the entire plan of reconquest, whereas the fifth was actually spent at Aiakos’ earned surrender from the Minyans that he become their great king in return for their patriation to the North Plains of the Peinios River Basin of many rivers at reticulation. That geography, which would later compose Thessalia of Central Greece, came into the name of High Kingdom of Minya, at equality with High Kingdom Aeoleis by all eastern north mainland possessions below the Sperchios River that runs through Phthiotis [(p)HEET-hoht-iss] as pronounced by Oldest Greek as Early Aeolic Dialect. Needless to say, this development was the beginning of a new Pelasgian or North Mainland great kingdom that would greatly exceed imperial Argolis as dubbed Mycenaean.

The third development was the nascence of the Westlands of the Southland awhile the conquests and consolidations of Pelops after his uncle Pleisthenes died as named and entitled Polyxeinos. The original invasion of those great men was a crossing of of the Aegeans Sea by Maionians of Anatolia who were bent upon redress and harsh vengeance against predator Argives belonging to the branch royal house to the Perseid Dynasty and House of Perseus & Andromeda. Once Force Maionia became singularly Force Pelops by the 14th century BC’s beginning decade, sustained reinforcement by Levantines of the Eastern Mediterranean and by Cretans under the Minos Lykastos thalassokrator had all the accomplished Westlands a league of petty kingdoms which Pelops converted to sustained expansions without violation of the vast tribal lands of the South Highlanders. In fact, he’d even created a symbiosis between the Highlanders and himself at the economics of vast grain surpluses which the south alpine Greek Peninsula yields without any cultivated agronomy whatsoever during these times of the late and yet still Idyllic Age of Eurasia.

The fourth development came just after the third, upon the death of the Minos Lykastos in 1371 BC,  whereupon the corruption of the Cretan highest  peerage under his successor, the Great Prince and entitled Minotaur over his father’s Minoan Thalassocracy (a sea empire spanning all archipelagoes around the Greek Peninsula). That successor would become the King Minos II of the Ancient Greeks’ invented prehistory during the Lyric Age, 850 to 500 BC, and Classical Age, 500 BC,ff. His wield of his father’s declining war navies would become infamous for despoliation of imperial feudatories wherever they were most prosperous and subjected to a cartel of merchant magnates out of the Levant, the Nile Delta of the Egyptians and Crete Island & Archipelagoes. Such a defined imperial hegemony, please understand, reflected Crete’s major losses of territorial possessions upon the Greek Peninsula and Anatolia during the Early and Middle Minoan Periods that equate with those Helladic by mainland full developments of earliest pre-Hellenes.

The image discloses the geography attendant to this posting from its beginning to end. The colored terrain from top to bottom depicts in hues blue-green the south end littorals of Aiakos’ Great Kingdom of Aeoleis & Minya; the High Kingdom of Kadmeis and the Great Gulf (of Korinth), in hues of saffron; in ruddy hues the Rim Powers of the Saronic Gulf; and, finally, in lavender hues what remained of imperial Argolis at lowest point within “the Mycenaean Age.”

In closing this long posting, I would add to the Bardot Blodg a fifth development because of its slowly developing consequences to Attica after the Second Restoration of the Kekropids, effected by Pandion by the seating of his stepson Aigeus [AYE-gee-oss] by wife Pylia of Alkathoos as Regent Custodian of the Erechtheid Dynasty over the House of Erechtheus,  so declared in the 1380s BC by Attica’s first King Kekrops son-of-Erechtheus (but also by an almost lost, much bedimmed Cretan dialect of the name Erichthonios). The importance of the Second Restoration I severally assert here. Upon the budding ascendancy of Aigeus he suffered much of woes, becoming twice a widower when his wives Meta and Chalkiope died and he still a Regent Custodian because neither wife had delivered him an heir which would have entitled him the King of the Atticans, whose unity of three precursor vice-regencies would make the nation race fully sovereign of territory as, in fact, Attica. When Cephalos was nine years old, he was a witness to Aigeus progress to the Oracle of Parnassos at Delphi of Phokis where he sought affirmation that he would marry and have a son and heir. In the further course of that itinerary in progress, Aigeus would fall in love with Medeia (lat., Medea). She confessed the collapse of her marriage to Jason and the soon necessity that she would have to flee from Ephyrea, the region over which she held governance by the matriarchal theocratic title of Supreme Sister of the AcroKorinth, (which was the high city of the Isthmians a/o Ephyreans).

Upon the return progress of Aigeus’s itinerary, having met Medeia as halted by a great storm which broke a three year drought, he was storm tossed again, at crossing of the Saronic Gulf, and barely escaped to the dry land of Troezen, an Argive principality and feudatory upon the west coastal arm of the Saronic Gulf. There he would meet King Pittheus and his priestess postulant daughter Aithra. She would bed Aigeus most ardently, vigorously and frequently to become impregnated by the end of the sojourn. By her would be delivered Theseus as the son assured Aigeus, but as so born under violation of his sire at disobedience to the Oracle of Parnassos. For the intent of the Sibyl at prophecy projected the eventuality of Medeia flight from Ephyrea to Attica in supplication of Aigeus at the high city Kekropia of Athens. There she became his mistress and finally his wife-wit-child, by Aigeus siring of Theseus as a supposed misbegotten heir to the Kingdom of Attica. For in the course of all events now told, Medeia’ deliverance of Medeios as their son and heir presumptive occurred the fulfillment of the prophecy which Delphi had assured to Aigeus. His wayside trysting of Aithra, at ultimate scorn of Medeia’s selfless assistance to her husband’s fortunes both wayfarer from storm and  King of Attica, would have long term repercussions as the fall of the Kekropids as the preferred rulers of Attica.

for the Bardot Group

I shall avoid copious review of Book Four in the biographical serialization of Cephalos, 1389 to c1304 BC. Howsoever its importance to Early Greek Mythology as both interesting and strongly illustrative of how well working the New Greek Mythology entailed, that academic approach speaks well to the content of this Bardot Blog.

Because it is always timely to remind lay persons to Antiquity that EGM is the copious recitative opera belonging to the Late Helladic Period of earliest Greece. Therein its several centuries of oral dissemination there also developed a formative unity of three major language groups or core ethnicities, into which two more inflections melded during the Greek Dark Age. Classical Greek Mythology is mostly mythography, because excerpted out of earliest writ of the 8th century BC. It sometimes expunged most famous mythic personages, Cephalos serving as primary example, and otherwise got them mostly wrong, as Theseus still is despite his briefest moments of true glory within CGM opera, Classical Greek Drama in particular.

Our review Bardot Blogs have reached a pivotal point that this fifth in series affords about Cephalos’ Saronic Gulf  years until 1360 BC. We are passing from mythology that has scant proofs about him that are accurate to mythography that’s well evidenced by modern scholarship of well-supported Greek prehistory. By 1360 BC it now has to be said absolutely that Cephalos master-minded, coordinated most able counsel and took at least strong catalytic part in the executions of two epochal sea battles in 1365 and 1362. As usual he gave most of glory away to his longest loyal followings, whose enormous diversity has challenged prehistorians of Greek Antiquity for never having been able to articulate themselves, their families and precise roles within innumerable constituencies of actual protagonists. But the last Great Minos of the imperial House of Minos died an obscure death and end of dynasty in 1352 BC solely on account of Cephalos. He was the sole naval genius that defies the exultation of Theseus, a landlubber who never essayed a serious sea voyage before his glorious role in the investure and systematic sacking of Knossos in that same cited year.

Returning to the pivot point, Cephalos earned major kudos from his consortship with the future queen of Magnesia and the opportunities she afforded him to rank high among an elite closest following of Great King Aiakos over Aeoleis and Minya. While a wedlock of brief duration, it was enough for a lifetime of thanksgiving by her of him, and for a love that was the making of her as a strong sovereign who commanded great and varied benefice to all her people, even those among them that were ignored as aboriginal or impotently indigenous.  They resurged and thrived under her sway while much more powerful princedoms and kingdoms far exceeded her own by their endowments. At last, nonetheless, Cephalos could not refuse his mother’s match-making of a next great marriage of term, by which he became instantly an exalted High Prince as well as Naval Home Protector under the reign of Aigeus and Medeia.

Cephalos made one lame and yet determined effort to evade that marriage in order to reunite in mind and flesh and soul with incarnate mortal Skia, High Sister of Brauron Sanctuary. He had no idea at all of how exalted she had become as the mortal incarnation of a Titaness, Eos the Maiden Dawn by the trinity of titanesses (Dawn, Midday, and Dusk) composing sidereal Daughter Day. Eos afforded her favored models through her omni-observance of humankind at all its highest skills and advances of states-of-the-art by manifest productions. by that attribute graced herself, Skia was responsible for Brauron Sanctuary’s earthworks reformations whereby a complete resurgence from a devastating three year drought, just less than two years of rainfall deluge following; and an extermination of feral wild a/o domesticated cattle which overly prevailed the entire MesoGaia of the Great Land of Gaia. For she alone mitigated a great Cattle Pest (rinderpest)  within East Bay Attica when all of the Great Land succumbed to plague. So, at eighteen years as surmised of her age when Cephalosa first espied her standing a perch of high bluff outside Brauron Cove, Skia had far more than great physical allure for Cephalos. They simply knew each other as somehow promised (to her) and appositely well-fated (for him). But there was no place that she was in appearance, or by any form of apparition despite Cephalos persistent searching

That he did not find her was his fault. Before his next great wedlock, Skia knew her promised man as the newly appointed hegemon under his first cousin Lykos, vice-regent over both Gulf and East Bay Attica. That title meant he was going to on-scenes at governance over the Holy Orders of Brauron even as Lykos and he were so amply wise as to allow the Sanctuary autonomy over all land stewardship(s)  that yielded immense agrarian and livestock surpluses every year. And yet the mere sight of the handomest man of his royal generation of princes had Skia so frighted that she concealed herself as soon as her opportunities to see him while his offices in behalf of Brauron. For that was her nigh tragic flaw — a crippling shyness for which she allowed herself to be severely scolded by all her sisterly brethren who adored her for every days she was in their lives. For shyness had no prevented popularity, or friendships galore to had from all the vast plantation communities that encircle the central Brauron Basin.

Prokris, High Princess of Attica and (dynastic) Heiress of the House of Aglauros

Herse as both a princess born to Attica during the reign of her brother Pandion, and a priestess heiress to her mother Metiadusa’s title of Diomeda over Eleusis, had the double attainments that only Prokris exceeded. But this assertion is an unwinding of a complicated tangle, a/o muddle, created by the Ancient Atticans about their illustrious forebears. Now that prehistorians have come to another consensus about Attican royal genealogy, however, we have an unwinding indeed. Until only recent decades, prehistorains preserved the fallacy of a predecessor patriarchal dynasty to that of the House of Erechtheus/Erichthonios. I have called it the Legendary Dynasty headed up by a Kekrops who was later doubled by dynastic affirming Kekrops whose successors accord with the proper genealogy of the House of Erechtheus. The legendary dynasty, therefore, had a counterpart matriarchal dynasty which deserves the name House of Aglauros on account of the several women of that name who married to fallacious patriarchs. For greatest reluctance also has to admitted the Greeks of all ages always esteemed patriarchy over matriarchy, and were apt to expunge female dyansties. The Ancient Atticans, moreover, refused any admission that they’d ever been ruled autocratically by mariarchs, just as they spurned any genesis of their distinct nation race as ultimately by Crete as a longstanding feudatory subject to the dynastic House of Minos until Kekrops unified Attica from three powerful chieftainates.

And yet it is verifiable that Kekrops son-of-Erechtheus affirmed his own dynasty as Erechtheid but also restored to the House of Aglauros all prerequisites of sacral majesty as retained matriarchally after a long lineage of female potentates that governed the Lower Peninsula of Aktika before its fusion with two high chieftainates of the north mainland, Gulf Attica a/o Akte, and East Bay Attica a/o Aktaia. But even as the sacral majesty was properly restored, the lineage of Aglaurids was peetering out. Aigeus by his father’s arrangements married Meta, a name or name title for an heiress to the House of Agleuros. She had a sister whose name does not survive who delivered Prokris as the sacral daughter of very last generation as the dread Fates would have it, a doom of her as a priestess heiress condemned for her violations of celibacy and postulance to the Cult of the Theia Theron, a matron titaness whose name translates as Goddess (of) Beasts Wild. The Cult rendered itself immanent, supposedly,  by the Huntress Maiden, a daughter titaness who evolved to become the Olympian Goddess Artemis after the Era of Helen, a/o the Trojan War Era.  All of the above, please understand and accept as recent complexities of prehistoric imposition, have meant a thorough recasting of Attican prehistory. But out of the attendant complexities emerges a more wholesome Prokris who distinguished herself by her somewhat belated by eventually torrid love for Cephalos.

Herse undertook her marriage making to combine Cephalos and Prokris in high princedom to solves a major dilemma of Aigeus after his Aglaurid wife Meta died in childbirth at bearing his heir stillborn. Her sister (of unknown name) inherited the offices of sacral majesty, even as she was inculcating her little girl Prokris into becoming a novice postulant to the Huntress Maiden. That the sister remains so unknown stems from her early demise at shortly after Meta’s. By then Prokris had become a court favorate of Aigeus and his taken Reent Consort Medeia, a refugee from the Isthmus of Ephyrea, where she’d fled as Supreme Sister after quashing a usurpation by her husband Jason and killing her children for the heinous shame of that put down. The complexities of Medeia are well-covered by Book Four of the serialization, as well as the ample truths by reinterpretation of a most undeservedly maligned heroine of Early Greek Mythology. For her greatness in Attican prehistory have been too long denied, whereas her value to Aigeus has been both expunged as well as left mostly unadmitted by the Ancient Atticans.

[Note: Important to say aside, in outset to further review, that despite how enormously copious both Early and Classical Greek Mythology remains, and despite all of the blasphemies asserted against Medeia now introiduced, she lived a long life as fully absolved of the murders. They included his uncle, her youngest brother, Jason’s next intended bride Glauke, along with her father the Kreon of the high city Kadmeia. Many other would-be usurpers of Ephyrea died of her intrigue, but far more importantly, she never was adjudged owing any penance for slaying her three children by an eight year marriage to Jason. In fact, for all the blasphemies and accusations of homicide by before she married Jason, she was formally absolved of them all — despite due regard paid that she eventually retired perforce from Attica and her most successful marriage to king Aigeus under calumny of a heinous accusation against her, by  her stepson Theseus for her attempted murder of him. Indeed, despite many murderous rivals that might have been considered men to far exceed her by the litany of western literature, Medeia remains the most famous murderess to have lived a long natural life. Her place in the atlas of true times and places, whether before or after  any other real history more globally well-known, she was a true paragon.]

What we have is a powerful threesome of heroines triangulating around Cephalos as their champion and acknowledged inferior. King Aigeus was a lesser light as a king of Attica; Medeia and Cephalos brought off an ascendancy for him owing to Aigeus humility and selflessness in behalf of all endeavors performed in his behalf. Prokris came to marriage accursed of barrenness, a condition attributed to her many promiscuous relations with lesser men; king Aigeus adored her nevertheless and Cephalos consoled her felt humiliation for accursedness by Artemis by raising her already high level of sovereignty to a real partnership with Aigeus and Medeia. He turned out to be the only prince whom she assisted into great ascendancy who never let her down or disappointed her. Finally Cephalos was able to formally consort with Skia, become her promised man, after she achieved pinnacle as the hallowedness as the Panataxia (“All-Worthy”) over Brauron’s several great high sisterhoods. Cephalos earned all that he gave to his three great women early during his High Princedom with Prokris, but he would fail to prop them up when when they acted against for his consistently for reasons of great force and bad luck — theirs — which he could not extricate them from. By 1360 BC, therefore, his had lost all absolute glory owqed him, without any illustriousness ever afforded him except for his High Princedom and Supreme Navarchy. The last great loss was the death of Prokris unwittingly by his own hand in a hunting accident. For it he was banished, as was all his kith a kin from Attica and the Saronic Gulf.

That exile began in an official sense in 1362 BC, when his only recourse became a series of sworn homages to Thebes as a new region to rebuild after calamity and ignominy as the High Kingdom of Kadmeis under the illustrious House of Kadmos. And yet it was hardly surprising to his oldest and newest followings of all meritorious castes and classes that he found himself exalted over a second lifetime her regained in the far west, at far beyond his born legacies by the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers. Furthermore, he became a High Chieftain and Homeland Lord Protector over the Echinades Isles, even as he became known to all foreigners as the Patriarch and High King of the Cephallenes and the Ionian Isles before he died circa 1304 BC.

Our next two postings will be reviews of naval genius and his wrought ascendancy by it to destroy the imperial thalassocracy (sea empire) of Crete, ruin the House of Minos and regain all followings, whether highest or lowest, by their loyalty to him as finally reckoned and afforded him. I will address Books Four and Five of Bardot Books’ serialization through Small batch Boioks of Amherst, Massachusetts, wherein the two orchestrated great sea battles which he strategized and his boon friends the Princes Erechtheid fought and won to complete triumphs

for R. Bacon Whitney, Publisher of Bardot Books