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
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