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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

 

 

 

Our five book serialization ended with a paramount biographical incident of Cephalos, a mostly expunged mythic personage or otherwise subject to the constant intellectual dishonesty of Classical Greek Mythology about him. To the Ancient Greeks he was either a pre-Hellene or early Greek patriarch and dynast, while living the Late Helladic Period of mainland Greece. The final incident cited was about his accidental manslaughter of his wife Prokris in 1360 BC. Treated as a major capital crime he was exiled from Attica with “all kith and kin,” essentially a relegation to oblivion. Both Thebes and the Ionian Isles, however, gave him a second long lifetime, almost a second creation within the Great Oral Tradition of purely recitative cultural legacy . Such were the Ancient Greeks’ resolves to end a most famous love story of Early Greek Mythology that their Athenians dismissed him summarily, advertantly quashing a most famous naval hero of their particular nation race.  They did so for the sake of the heroics of Theseus, a mostly concocted superhero made up in the 6th century BC, despite his actual historical  person finale as a terrible sovereign. There was besides, simultaneous to Theseus’ years of youth, another love story concerning Cephalos, which I bring out of its expunction a review here by utilizing the novel practices of the New Greek Mythology, to which I’m a recognized proponent. Through my means of honest restoration of his lifetime, the Saronic Gulf years of  Cephalos as a teenager, I also accomplish a riddance of the long standing false duplication of Cephalos by his name as cited for his birth in Aeoleis.  I must and shall insist here, in  this Bardot Blog, that only a single Cephalos should survive robustly intact what Greek prehistory has so deliberately obfuscated, to great blame upon the Ancient Athenians for being so consistently ahistoric.

The Third Book of Cephalos Ward of Eleusis applies the New Greek Mythology to my corrected version
of Cephalos’ brief consortship with an utterly fictitious High Princess. She was supposed Klymene
daughter of the falsely eponymous Minyas, the supposed founder of the nation race of Minyans. He’s
supposed to have invaded northern Greece in the 15th century BC from Eurasia .

A few cardinal assertions come first for me to essay: The Ancient Greeks of Attica were forever loath to admit that their gulf region was feudatory (“under vassalage”)  to imperial Crete. Regardless that they had to pay penance for the assassination of the Prince Minotaur Androgeos, the slain grandson of the pre-eminent  Minos Lykastos, the only natural  son as well of the “Great Minos” and his Euryanassa Pasiphaia. By almost all admissions of more ancient, much earlier Greeks, moreover, the Atticans were subjugated mainlanders  since 1600 BC, and over that duration they were unstinting at highest honors put paid to Lykastos.He was held as a paramount Minos while he lived through Crete’s recovery from the volcanic eruption of Thera. What he wrought until his death in 1371 BC, however, fell objectively short of his honest goal of a complete recovery.  Crete had to suffer as many other regions did a century and a half of eclipse of Imperial Minoa, by a created dynasty that must end despite Lykastos’ crowning support and imperial installation of Pelops, likely the most famous imperial exemplar of ascendant Argolis.

Alas, let’s not get into vague or hazy distractions that can unleash too many hounds upon the hunt for a Greece’s Late Helladic period as amost vanished away.

Allow instead three simultaneous developments which attended the decision of Herse to send Cephalos into courtship by the Trials-of-Bridal of a restored sixteen year old Princess of Magnesia. While we do not retain her grant name at birth, as declared by her mother Hebe, she was never named Klymene as the Ancient Greeks insist she had to have been. I’ve fetched up a toponymic name, therefore: Phima daughter-of-Hebe, by that mother’s subjection to an unwanted Minyan consort AKastos. She had long and popularly lived the queen of Magnesia, but deteriorated under conquest of the Minyans to leaving at last of life a princess heiress. Phima had to be briefly confiscate of kingdom, although it was half way to restored. The powers of guardian were given to her worhtless father’s custody after Aiakos’  systematic reconquests throughout the north Mainland, during which he accrued the dynastic Great Kingdom of Aeoleis and Minya. Phima was perforce become her father’s ward, based upon reasons of wardship wholly different from any others that had rendered Cephalos a ward and prince as soon as born to Eleusis, even if never to Attica. A final half of familial restoration to his contested bride Phima could only happen after her maturity and considerable royal standing reached at eighteen years old, two years afterwards her consortship with Cephalos was complete and terminated. For cutting explanations short as to why, the Ward of Eleusis was the foreign sired by a victorious courtier/suitor who must emerged from a mayhem on numerous  misconducted tried ordeals, including major duels, proofs of many weapons by demonstrated prowess, and horseback competitions of wholly different prowess demanding a wield of a  whole panoply of contemporary advanced weaponry. Emerge he did, and gloriously, especially considering his abilities as a man-of-arms had never before gone beyond any tested proficiency except for fighting haphazardly in melees against scroungy pirates, all of least mettle. His emergence as a hard winning victor had to have been most exciting, and yet that status was expunged along with the rest of his wholly self-made self. What should have thrilled all Atticans of his times, especially since he won as well many lucrative trade concessions for Aigeus awhile his sojourn as a matrilocal husband. Also reckoned for naught was what he had learned of training-at-arms from his father Deion, a most diverse champion by prowesses who his only son must summon in extremis and from whom to plead assistance in order to vie against a vastly superior ilk of rivals in an equestrian warrior caste that had overcome most all rivals amidst the north mainland Aeolians and Minyans.

All in all, the New Greek Mythology is a mythography of first ever writ  about glories  at individual combat that seemed predestined to become nullities….

A Preceding Incident                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Skia at Revery

Enough about all that. There is another preliminary to discuss,  for happening in the course of Cephalos’ voyage up to Iolkos of Magnesia in the autumn of 1374. There he intended sojourn awhile he was in presence for lengthily conducted Trials-at-Bridal .  His itinerary took him by  Brauron Cove, where secret shipworks that he’d founded with three boon comrades. Arriving at low tide he had to anchor briefly below a high bluff of Brauron Inlet. And there, at the top of that height stood a maiden priestess, High Sister Skia recently promoted from postulance, who was relivingin transport of ecstasy a dream of ardor by the night past. It had been about a man promised her by Eos the Titaness Maiden of the Dawn, a tutelary, or protective deity by some kind of divine cast of lots. As she exalted in that promise of the young man, so deliciously provided her, so Cephalos had appeared as the very young teen-aged self of that person. He had to pilot his galley passed her to navigate deep water beginning just below the height of the bluff. There was love at first sight between them from short distance above and ahead of him, even if savored much too briefly for the promised ones, after an instance of protracted gazing upon each other during the passage by of his galley. He’d then had to move onward to his destination, albeit most reluctantly his further skippering of his well-outfitted oared vessel. He must pine as well for her over many years afterwards, because their actual pairing were predestined most belated through the machinations of her Titaness Eos. whose embodiment Skia could not know was herself a incarnate an immortal.

For they were within the many happenings that could occur within an Idyllic Age that most all later Greeks would relegate lost to mind and memory.

Herse’s marriage making for Cephalos just preceded the fact of a chosen girl become  a novice, then a postulant and finally a most cherished Sister to a great teaching order of several holy sisterhoods, all congregated around the vast Brauron wetlands basin of East Bay Attica. Their sanctuaries and plantations thereto dedicated ringed the Basin at the end of the fertile MesoGaia which stretched from their a long way overland, then west and across the Isthmus to Sikyon upon the Great Gulf (of Korinth). There lay a prominent holy order as an oldest principate of the Argive House of Perseus & Andromeda. Vast plantations were all subsumed under the general name for Attica’s eastern MesoGaia: the Sanctuary of the Dawn, though, was by the grace and supposed founding of Cretans as a dedication to Eos the sunrise Maiden Daughter Day. A titaness, not strictly a goddess even as immortal, she was by Theia Blue Sky and and Hyperion, a titaness and titan respectively, of a genesis out of the Old and Ancient Beliefs in the Great Earth Mother. Even as a maiden goddess, I must add, Eos also owned a prominence as a trinity titaness, Daughter Day, that was much older and once co-equal to the Olympian Goddess Athena (whose form was  a matron before she became a maiden goddess).

Eos had, from first sight of Deion as the roving Chief of Wardens above the MesoGaia, lusted upon every glimpse of him. Knowing any consummation impossible, she sought that consolation for long years ahead  in his astonishingly handsome son Cephalos. Once he became a lad she had decided to mortally incarnate herself in order that a destiny between them become a splice in their skeins of Fates, whereby a long mortal life at incarnation could also be the splendor of his carnal comforts. For women by then were proving dotty over him, even if celibately. Furthermore, upon another vast plantation of the MesoGaia, which lay above Brauron’s so many, she found a body into which she might mortalize and invest her special divine gifts. She was the already extraordinarily beautiful daughter of Eioneda and Tricorythos, and a maiden heiress of great estate whom Deion had saved from a forced lengthy betrothal to the loathed progeny of the ruling Metionids. The mother Eioneda was a matriarch of governance over the Aphidnai Plantations of Attica’s land and sea border highest northeast. The manorial household lay upon the Bay of Myrtoa, surrounded by the lovely grassland the Marathon Plain; the dry forest woodlands and benchlands of grazing pastures within the Eleutherais Woodlands; and outlooks seaward over Abantis Island (later Euboea ).

Skia, a grant name at toddling age afforded a delightful daughter by her father Trycorythos, became inculcated by “her goddess” through living dreams. These had begun nightly when she was only ten years and already precocious and most difficult child for her mother Eioneda to grasp and account for. Possession of divine gifts to the pervasive stewardship over Aphidnai Plantation was too miraculous for her mother’s any comprehension. Once the child became invested with divine incarnation she told out all lessons from her goddess that propounded most amazing innovations of agronomy, whether of agriculture or livestock husbandry. Very meticulous at explanation, Skia had her own native talents for superb pedagogy through methods and programs that conceived massive land improvements. The final ordeal of Eioneda from her daughter, however, was that Skia bode aloud and loudly that she’d live her life away from her maiden age inheritances of Aphidnai, thus to thwart altogether what she honestly owed to her mother to become by succession.  She musy sustain as governess the finest tenancies of humankind at husbandry and agriculture, particularly with respect to cattle ranching and all its related commerce throughout Attica. It is very tough to be succinct about all the ramifcations of thwarting her mother, but we should sympathize with the mother Eioneda that she must assimilate her daughter as suddenly divine of some aspect, and do so without any bitter grievance and stressed patience until the time her daughter abandoned her.

Fortunately her doting husband Tricorythos realized at the earliest how his daughter was become a prodigy by divine agency. Through his friendship with Deion, a constant visitor to the borders imposed by the Eleutherais Woodlands, he exacted the perfect advice of how to place Skia’s upbringing through her teenage years at Brauron, where the  high sisterhoods schooled and finished maiden heiresses of the entire MesoGaia to a fitness and capablility  to inherit their matrimonial landed legacies. Deion, besides a most welcome guest of Eioneda’s matron house (‘oikos), had a comely and lusty handmaiden to service his visits over his painful estrangement from Herse, his wife. And while at sojourn he could properly boast that he was the salvation of many high born maidens from ruthlessly imposed worst marriages, or even worse then that, prevent their lander inheritances from being confiscated by priesthoods and incompetent nobles by the bullying Metionids. Eioneda had first been married to such a worthless, even useless husband, and so a Bronze Age boarding school was easily rendered tempting by the savvy Tricorythos.

Deion finally guided the family down to Brauron Basin at a time of most oppressive climate at hovering over all the MesoGaia and Eleutherais Woodlands. He left the party of three at the parched orchards surrounding Brauron, where once profuse blossoms in springtime, the chosen season for the trek and first ever visit to the Sanctuary of the Dawn. The visitors found at the farthest eastern edge of the Great Land, upon Brauron Cove, the planatations so worn down by the third year drought that hung over Attica. All was and everyone was at stint, accordingly, althoughthe Supreme Sisters and their most gifted senior postulants of holy orders received Skia as best they could. Skia was as though a divine apparition of somebody most special to Brauron’s recovery. But first those sisters of highest authority practiced constraint to allow Skia playmate novice and youngest postulants to attend upon her visiting explorations. Meanwhile, the holy authorities could quiz her parents, whom they received with another form of special unction that the governess Eioneda must expect as her due. Skia back from play with new friends was then invited into the conference to have her father Tricorythos explain her immense gifts. He described all themany and greatest outcomes for Aphidnai’s vast and complex land stewardship that had come via Skia’s so-called “living dreams.” He , of coure, had utmost credibility by the wayt his delight in his daughter made her nigh fabulous self seem astonishingly true.

At first the supreme authorities had to assume that the girl nigh maiden was gifted, perhaps greatly heightend as prophetic, despite Skia’s insistence that she knew most absolutely that she was not. Al;l that she was became of her goddess the Titaness of Living Dreams retained from her heavenly observances of human capabilities and capacities while driving before sunrises her chariot bearing the urn of Dew summers and for sprinkling wintertime Frost. For Eos’ awareness of the entire world arose from being driven across the daily courses of her steeds Phaiton and Lampos who broad reveal of all manners of newly brilliant human activity upon the surface of the Earth. Too, she was meticulously conversant with all state-of-the-arts newly practiced because the Titaness had taught her to retain all her learned acuities. They were, plain to tell, most advanced and advancing by human kind alone, as even the Titaness admitted of what she could not teach from her lovely head.

Astonished, the attentive listeners were seeping tears of utter gladness at consuming the girl’s insights into her most generous and favoring goddess. They beheld her a boon which they dared not challenge, or not until Skia had passed two years of residency schooling before committing herself to holy orders — while shuttling between homeland Aphidnaia and Brauron Basin should home sickness prove too much for an underaged novice to order . While that advice startled mother Eioneda into most violent protest, which only her husband could sooth and coax her out of, the several highest sisters confessed to the parents that their daughter, regardless her birth from an ennobled human womb of a secular matriarch, was all per se a divine incarnation, a harbinger of the Goddess Eos’ mortal revelation and her sometime clear choices of who most special must embody her for a lifetime of happy immanence so long as the incarnated choice would live. Even Eioneda and Tricorythos could not help being smote aghast that a Titaness had come alive and really tutelary as a most special boon to all subject deemed at last resorts from withering blight off the diurnal heavens.

The two years were conceded to the Sanctuary for Skia’s schooling, even though she already had imparted most convincingly much good advice to Brauron’s highest holy authorities. How to mitigate, for instance, the immense and most worrisome oppression of drought upon all of East Bay Attica that still lay prospectively ahead. According to what Skia had told her little hostess novices and postulants, though, all her advice told out over the brief visit were about creating new channels of irrigation, building earthworks from high terrain  for reservoirs and backwash lagoons as methodologically supportive of whole new tiny hamlets as tillage that would range the dried out immense basin of utter aridity. For it sprawled as desolation over all of the lowest terrain of Brauron. In fact, Brauron was mainly a winter season basin of many sinks for runoff of rains by huge watershed most everywhere surrounding the landlocked Basin, whereby it became most uselessly soggy wetlands  — except, that is for drainage from high terrain field and hilly pasture layouts of very long traditions of cultivation. So, Skia started off from scratch as somebody nearly impossible to believe, except for the keen sense of all adults at hallowed residency that she was indubitably the Goddess Eos, and as much so revealed for what she represented of the Great Goddess’ physical world most everywhere a great landedness below the sidereal heavens. Cryptic advisories as Skia’s might seem, by the end of the assessment period of two years, when then Skia had a choice to stay or go home, the entire populace of Brauron were without any hesitance to accept her credibility about all she’d taught and how exacted precisely when implemented or carefully installed.

For by then summer rains arrived just as Skia’s first advisories against erosive effects by runoff had been installed and the channeling implemented as effective. That fully rainy autumn was spent at defiing and suring up small reservoir cachements, in particular for back water by the damming of brooks and rills overrunning off saturated land into blockades to retain backwashing overruns. The heavens then began to deluge in earnest, until mitigation of flooding become a totally dominating priority. Skia had taught how to divert such inundation into Brauron Basin proper, and once collecting there nigh to flooding, she had taught how instead to articulate flood as delineated meres, shallow ponds, and fended plots ( a/o fends per se). Orchards on slopes were pruned down to the bare minimum green wood of main boughs composing fruit trees, until they had seemed starkly dead, only to “releaf” until wind blown leafy just as winter arrived for them to retreat perforce into dormancy; the next year had all fruit trees late flowering and greening but likewise most profuse in new growth off barest green wood. The tenant keepers of terraced orchards discerned and conserved all these happening most observantly. Blossoms had appeared late, Yes, almost worrisome tardy, Yes, but they filled all boughs and festooning new branching at last, too. The result was an emergence of well-formed fruit by most gradual earliest appearances, and yet the trees easily sustained temselves so prolific and robust of fruit without any culling until harvest time had become an exacting necessity. Concomitantly, all terraces, fields and pastures greened up very well despite the continuing rain showers by thunderstorms until the autumnal equinox. And while that earlier greatest harvest time of summer solstice had that first trial year remained lean, the summer planted crops afterwards brought to the garnerings made up for the shortfall.

The next autumn brought serious rain deluge to worry everybody grievously anew. But winter improvements by further earth-working of conduits, ditches and reticulated irrigation managed rain containment and repressed erosion, slumps and landslides off slopes. All of the Brauron hung on against another last deluge as though comforting hands of hidden overseers lay upon all tenants, working novices and sisters to help them at their guidance by Skia’ directives. That second springtime proved a season of early rain abatement, however, because two months just past as the vernal equinox had been sunny overcast. That had assisted soil retainage while preventing wilting dry sunshine. Indeed and then in fact, the greatest extents of orchards and low terrain under tilth used that new prolonged visitation of dry climate to show up later as high yielding by contour plowing and embanking of crop rows, while the wetlands still remained a muck of exposed mud flats. None of these outcomes were familiar to the oldest tenants, but they could hardly resent that obedience to novel directives were hurting their livelihoods or recognized expertise.

That lowest country of all terrain became Skia’s summer project to closely supervise under the guidance of her goddess. As the land readily absorbed healthy doses of rainfall into late winter, the basin was reworked and plotted for layouts of gradual seepage off ponds and meres, so that all new rains drained to the northeast and through a natural sluice into Brauron Cove and Inlet. And yet the new dams and overflow retainage caches which encircled the edge of the Basin made useful small creek and brook headwaters by rills that guided their excess run-off into the newly prepared conduits throughout the lowest levels of the  Basin. Such crops as were best as “wet of feet” such as flax, an earliest cultivar of wild rice and other watery legumes (such as the cresses} grew well until became bountifully flourishing. It all seemed so astonishingly antipitatory, wise and practical that even the oldest of tenants and groundsmen of the Plantations could adjudge the empirical results as the best possible, and exactly for what Skia and her Titaness intended. The time for Skia to return home to Aphidnai and rejoice her parents was celebrated with festivals of thanksgiving and ended with propitiation of much more from the global omni-observances of Eos the Dawn Goddess. Skia was especially glad to renew her father’s spirits of greatest confidence in her; and for once her mother chucked in her any last reeservations and invited Skia to replicate all that she ‘d done for Brauron by replication for Aphidnai’s many and much different layouts of needed land preparations and improvements.

Most of innovations brought Brauron’s rural populace to strenuous labors and very wearying outcomes wrought daily were proving entirely satisfactory regardless slowness to happy outcomes. Stress abated into a doggedness to aggressively proceed with novel dictates over the different climate and rainfall conditions next presented. Skia decided upon Brauron for residency to complete her schooling for a  finishing to rejoin her mother until her age eighteen. I skip over that period, however, because of, or until, another irrevocable decision that newly beloved Brauron must impose upon her for a lifetime calling into holy orders. That was her obedience to the Titaness despite the deferment unimplied in a promise of a prticular man whom she saw in living dream at actual advent to Brauron. Not that first time in revery upon a bluff of overlook to sea and far off Abantis Island, but immediate to the Basin by what he’d build around the Inlet that bled its seepage into the shallow Cove. Thus, at nearly nineteen year celibate, he had appeared as worth a great waiting over more years ahead,  after his lifetime brief hiatus at Magnesia, where he could build towards his own promise, that of a naval genius and royal navarcy over all that was launched in representation  of the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers.

Brauron at flood leveling everywhere, here is Skia’s tracery of containment berms that prevented erosive overflows.

Onward to Magnesia

Iolkos was a portside of summertime palace compound to which Phima, the princess on offer to courtiers, owed to her late mother Hebe. She’d been a little girl there until her father had flaunted the petty royal marriage to bed a slut of barest eligibility to sit with royal company. It was not the famous point of embarkation down Pagasai Bay by Jason at adventure to seek and find the Golden Fleece. Aeoleis had not yet a navy to countenance any crossing of the Aegean Sea, the inland waterway and small sea Propontis through the Bosporos to cross the Euxine Sea. It was not his fault that he had to be a fraud, practice many deceits and fail all his quests. The Ancient Greeks invented a great sea adventure under the supposed numinence of the Olympian Pantheon that id not yet exist except for much less revered precursors. In fact, all that Iolkos became navally became of Cephalos as typicall the great presence in the middle of highest and lowest people to him he could prove himself a primary benefactor. Book Three’s cover announces him by its subtitle, Prince Consort of Magnesia, an accession he won from his consortship with Phima, who he raised from high to nigh highest of all princesses in liege to Great King Aiakos.

Of all her suitors he was the most shunned as foreign, even by his intended bride who felt insulted by  the youngest of the consort aspirants who view for her. Even as stunned by his startling great looks at first fleeting meeting, she fooled herself that he was too low for her. She did not meet her obligations to host her courtiers at Iolkos, or at Sesklo where the horse competitions were held and where he began to climb to foremost in her estimation. He had to exercise himself hard to a fitness to meet all trials except those requiring equestrian mettle, bravery and ruthless competence. Unknowing that the princess repaired to the parade concourses every day, just as he did by jogging back and forth from Iolkos,  she only paid first attentions to him in secret, while peeking at his rush of practice seat-at-Horse under the training of her lowliest indigenous subjects, the Pony Men called the Didimoi, who were in fellowship with other diminutive nation races under deep subjugation such as the trodden plains Amazons and alpine ranging Centaurs of oldest mythic imaginations. Phima espied sneakily how rapid his aptitude for horsemanship, and how well he assimilated the martial qualities at fighting while riding mostly bareback upon superbly bred stallions. She quietly offered him a well-disciplined (by her) troika of stallions in peevish delight that they would likely kill him before he tamed them to fighting artistry by deft maneuvers. Cephalos conditioned himself marvelously because he was idled at doing naught else while spurned by king Akastos and his mean queen consort Chryseis, a typical wicked stepmother irked by envy for the bride. The Didimoi found his retired father for him under Mount Ossa, and drew him down to his son, obeying his summons to render his capacities for dueling to best efforts adequacy to fight Aeolian, Minyan and other rivals of pagan immigrant nativities who had been allowed amnesty to settle around and within the North Plains of the riverine dominance of the  Peneios River.

Deion became much more than he’d been, a rescuer of maidens from shame, infamy and humiliation while a champion-at-arms for ennobled and royal women. He was famous, of course, for having drubbed the warrior sires of the twelve other consort aspirants for Phima at marriage. But most of those superiors were much lesser civilized, virtuously blessed or nobly attained than the leading men most favored by the unwillingly absent Aiakos. That peerage of ministerial ilks was eager to know Cephalos and his constant coterie of naval friends who visited him at Iolkos awhile he was a-wooing. The uncle of Phima, Eriginos, the lauded king of Orchomenoi over the Lake Midlands, had cozened him north from his mother Herse, persuading  her that her young son stood apt for courtship of his beloved but oversexed niece, who had great need of a savior from her shameful flirtatious ways and feckless, ultimately doomed ways at embarrassing herself before highest peerage and royalty. Eriginos was her volunteered protector, but what she needed was youth and vigor and charis (utter selflessness) of a man contesting in her behalf while questing after her future great needs to excel at sovereignty in her own rights. Evening and early night confabs between many important commerce leaders, enjoined by other minisaterial appointees of Aiakos, learned Cephalos’ commercial objectives as a winning consort, which were mostly to do with developing the entire Strait of Abantis with well-equipped havens for the rest and maintenance of Round-Hull crews, whose merchants’ whole fleets would thereby compose an ambitious maritime commerce. All his aims to solicit these illustrious men became clear, and then reciprocal to whatever Cephalos could offer upon his return to Attica. From there the visiting boon friends, the three Princes Erechtheid, served Cephalos  navy sufficient to prospect all the best sites for building landfalls and havens along the Strait. There was only the brief time of last dusk and early nighttime to affect the many concordats cumulatively achieved. Deion and Eriginos proved prime catalysts to prepatory endeavors for all of them, but Cephalos proved an outstanding closer as a negotiating intermediary.

The Trials-at-Bridal, by contrast to such smooth coordination, proved a mess and mayhem of inept officialdom. At judging the string of daily competitions over most of two fortnights, there were arose deep biases towards a greatly favored peerage of Minyan Horse and young master-at-Horse. Cephalos made only one friend from his rivals, Trachis, who exposed the worst judges by choice and in representation of the fiendish step-mother Chryseis; she, it became clear, would wreck any happiness for her proud and naive princess step-daughter. So incompetent were the presiding officials that they blithely exposed the rival consort aspirants to most lethal rules of challenge. While supposed inadvertent at doing so, Cephalos found himself in duels verging upon hazards most deadly; exposed to ordeals at wield of weapons that could cripple or maim young men for life; and subjected to to suddenly contrived rules of competition, the last and most celebrated one in particular. Piecemeal by every trial they’d wreck fair chances of his becoming overall victor. Cephalos did better than middling at weaponry despite his lesser size and physical maturity, and regardless that he could not wield his own weapon of expertise, a Levantine long dueling axe and hook which could cleave armor and shields while also tearing away an opponent’s grip upon his own chosen weapon. Cephalos rankked nearly to highest at proficiency of combat where both opponents must wield identical weapons such as sword, dirks wielded two-handed and spear dueling and casting. That ranking showed Deion’s keen instruction. Then, in four match-offs of horse duels, each contrived to bring Cephalos against a clearly supposed superior, he killed two rivals while offering most accidental finesse at defense; he toppled five rivals by putting his own fierce stallion mounts in turns against his opponents; and finally he killed at tactical offense a most determined assailant, whose arrogance and overconfid-ence exposed him to Cephalos’ hurl of his axe. That last breach of rules, supposedly just barely licit, had the presiding officials determined to disqualify him. But the nearness of the suspenseful last challenge on offer dissuaded them, deciding them instead to let Cephalos suffer humiliation over a timed long circuit of a chariot obstacle course. Each rival must pair with royal equerries, but pairing with the Didimoi in order to drive his own chariot while he met all obstacles prsesented was denied Cephalos, The Pony Men were too low of caste, and Cephalos too foreign  and audaciously parvenu.

So, the morning of that last ordeal of a set course of targets , all which had to be smitten from a wheeling chariot that must neither course too fast or too slow came, brought to great spectacle and huge attendance the paired chariot teams. Cephalos at last desperate chance had gone to the palace compound to seek the bride  on  offer out the previous evening. He plead her assistance and skills upon the reins to succor his desperate need of a driver of his cart; because he was denied any equerry under the peer pressure which frightened all of them away. She had insulted him for killing his rivals and endangering permanently the horses of his opponents, and either most grievously. But she would spurn any denial to a consort aspirant of Pony Men as suitable equerry for driving a cart. Fair of mind about what was blatantly fair rulings, Phima also knew why he had to have been reckless, and why his explanations squared well with the truths that she would elicit perforce by her goading from him. He took on her rebuffs measure for measure by riposting. Later, she would say that she couldn’t deflect or quash his immense effect upon her, even as they argued to harshest points asserted against each other back and forth. She wilted from a strongest lust and sense his allure , and had to surrender to his request at last, never ever afterwards to her any regret that he’d cajoled her so persistently.

And so that next day when they competed as a pairing upon the timed race concourse, for a meandering and much looping circuit race timed to an elapsing flame of a lamp held by a presiding judge, they composed most lovely couple together at standing behind the apron of their chariot cart. Her uncle-Eriginos openly wept in rapture for her sight, her most obviously splendid attempt at highest majesty that might be affected for her that day in honor to her late and lovely mother, another finest equestrienne. The Didimoi had prepared his cart in an ideal manner for his fetching arrows from quivers both sides of the apron enclosure, and for many small javelins drawn from sheaves that hung high off the back of the chariot. They proceeded into the concourse and charged to proceed, Phima kept even speed and pace of the three gifted stallions, at glide solely by her own deftness upon the reins, as the cart passed targets of bow and others for impalement by spears. They were many by staggerings apart, and the stress of holding the reins deftly while “gentle-ing” the flow of her driving became nigh overwhelming of Phima stamina and doggedness. Still, she shouted out oncoming targets astutely. Cephalos’ constancy at aim was keen and true, and that brought them both a sudden surprise. For every early target that was smitten by arrow or spear, it was moved hastily down the concourse of racing to be presented yet again for a second try. The rules of the race, therefore, went against his superior rivals who were faster at the reins but aimless by constantly being thrown of targets by the bouncing terrain or overly veering of carts. So the count of well-won targets by Cephalos not only invigorated Phima to especial stamina at her own sustained prowess, but their show allowed him to daunt all at spectacle into repression of their worst felt biases. For the great attendance proved unanimous at the  couples’ winning of aimful score, until her uncle-Erginos and Phima could hug together with great shared grief over her glory so fulfilling of  her late mother, his sister. Weeping loudly and proudly, Cephalos joined in their embrace to cheers of the many surrounding Pony Men who knew so well the manifest tributes that Cephalos owed them and would subsequently bring to proofs.

The Two Years of Princely  Consortship:

Having expunged to full removal a second Cephalos from from the supposed Late Helladic Period of early Greece, the New Greek Mythology also dispenses with Apollonios of Rhodes Hellenistic Age Saga about Jason & Medeia and the Quest for the Golden Fleece by the Argonauts. There was no Haemonia where Jason’s family was installed; Iolkos was not yet a portside township for any substantive navy of Magnesia or the Great Kingdom and dynasty of Aiakos son of Aegina by some assignation connived by Zeus. Now that Cephalos has sojourned in supposed Haemonia and enjoyed lodgings for his courtship of Phima at Iolkos, bot places must hereon be identified with his deserved restoration and the great ascendancy that he brought home as fully underway after hos almost two years of consortship and princedom by Phima Princess of Magnesia by Hebe. That has to be the reckoning of the Great Oral Tradition of Early Greek Mythology, and no writ by Classical and later ages mythography can stand as legitimate, especially any by the supposed master work The Argonautica. And yet Cephalos will forghe a prehistory about the north mainland that renders Iolkos, Sesklo and High Pherai the beginnings of their true legacies to the Greeks of Classical Greek Mythology.

All of Cephalos’ sojourn and tenure of consortship fails to fully render him illustrative, because both lifetime milestones also began his fullest discretion about himself, his covert dealing outside of Attica at major trade diplomacy, and foremost and in particular his  careful non-existence as Navarch of Attica (admiral) and all the other Saronic Rim Powers. As he left for Iolkos he had only twelve ships of an important warship class of galley by debut of the Second Era of Great Oared Vessels. While he was at sojourn for courtship, his falling out with Aigeus was wholly repaired and the master development plan, to have 75 great galleys launched including those twelve had become a resurrected aborted building project. The program called for a new major shipworks to be located at Brauron Cove and Inlet, under the management of the three boon friends the Princes Erechtheid. Out of that venue in formal debut, kept mostly out of sight or concern of the sisterly High Orders of the Sanctuary of [Eos Titaness of the Dawn], was spawned an elite Triakonter class of warship galley numbering to 225 warships by 1365 BC. Considering how advanced the class was from inception, and how evolved so masterfully and innovatively over all successive launches off the slipways, speaks hereon to two main facts about the Second Era of Great Oared Vessels now introduced. First, Cephalos was their Navarch and First Minister of all Saronic Gulf Navies brought to therir shores of retreat; his role was courtly, bureaucratic and deftly coordinate of sponsorships earned from richest and highest echelon persons, including the MesoGaia’s hierarchic matriarchates which provided raw materials and onboard live stores sustenance for all warships impending to long periods of active duty. The recruitment of his early following proved elitely and diversely artisinal  of town communities, but supervised royally by his maturing generation after fledgling and apprenticeship standings of his second cousins. Operational sea duty and deep sea deployment, by contrast — and here I state with utmost emphasis  — Cephalos delegated to commanders and skippers, whereby all voyaging, cruising, convoying and conditioning of fleets for major sea battles.  Overseas encounters to the Princes Erechtheid required the allegiances of the Lelegans and other maritime nation races wo regarded Cephalos alone paramount, but the the lifetime record has Cephalos predominantly at strategic planning, and yet the Prince Erechtheid were counterpart of roles to his as the most active duty Commodores over distinct Far Fleets, even a fourth Home Fleet ported at the Pyrrhaios by way of conducting  diplomacy and trade liaison with the resident Sea Lords off Cretre Island who stationed imperial far fleets along Pyrrhaios Strand (at just outside of Eleusis Sound). I shall try to be meticulous to bring these clarity of contrasting command echelons at home with contextual demands that were seemingly complex or deliberately obfuscated to quash unwanted curiosities. I hope to guarantee a special clarity of exposition over the two decades 1370-1361 and 1360 to 1350, awhile the deft operations coordinated for Cephalos away from the his shipworks and fleet buildouts within the Saronic Gulf, along Brauron Cove and, at last, within the Bay of Alykai of Thebes.

The High Prince Consort and Co-Regent with Phima High Princess of Magnesia

Typical of covert methodologies and perfectly maintained discretion within the north mainland, king Eriginos , Great King Aiakos and all first Ministers or War, their remained the pretense that Phima had not achieved her ascendancy to Queen of Magnesia — that she was maintained as a Princess just as she was reckoned by her parents Aiakos and the consort Chryseis. Cephalos, that is, was always most apparently subordinate to her, even as he had full control over all strategic planning to elevate her security and secure Magnesia as a very important Kingdom, even if not aspiration as a High Kingdom such as Aeoleis and Minya were. and a confederacy of petty kingdoms (e.g., Orchomenos) became after his consortship was over. The main reason for the complete subordination as clearly apparent was the nature of a limited wedlock by the sacrament of marriage. Cephalos subjected himself to a short term marriage in order that he might resume his pledge fealty as a liege Kekropid to Aigeus. And yet all diplomacy affected with the above principal sovereigns had him a close peer to their courts, even Aiakos’ Great Court, so that all start-up enterprises were coordinate endeavors all realms participant.

This might seem that Cephalos somehow held himself at arms length from a true wife which Phima so greatly wanted to be. What was beseeming, however, was not so; Cephlaos exuded affection for her, bearing a highest standard of what a consort for a supreme matriarch attain if  fact, which is to say, always ready, always potent and able and exceedingly satisfactory at quenching the ardor of his first and foremost mistress. After the last day of the Trials-of-Bridal, all officaldom was dismissed and completely unwanted and unnecessary. Nefarious surrogates of Akastos and Chryseis were made to disappear and totally unwanted. Phime demands of ardor were well attested as nymphomaniacal from her first try of him. She screamed her heat, demanded long twilights if not every twilight before sunrise to quench herself at feeling impassioned anew; and all she had to do was disrobe, and he’d be at cover of her naked on the couch at any time the rest of the day. Both partners were greatly commended for their stamina on the couch, to the delight, I feel obliged to add, of their many servants of household and honor entourage at court.

He was careful as well that she not be hurt socially, for her father was pestered by her step-mother to shun her. Because Akastos was so indolent about his sovereign duties, and  Chryseis  so self-centered and jealous over a sensational passion, Cephalos imposed himself as an aloof first minister while brooking no objections from persons of high peerage who imposed themselves irregularly.  He proved as great a teacher as an ardent consort. They operated at befitting roles, both together or respectively, but always out of Iolkos: They were mostly accessible at a lodge high up upon Mount Pelion. not too far from the alpine campus which the later Cheiron of Magnesia founded for his famous school at arms and the teaching of war medicine and field surgery. The Portside Iolkos was fully nascent as the primary harbor upon Pagasai Bay for the Great Kingdom’s navies, where the capital seat of Magnesian navy and merchant marine performed navarchy for the entire Strait of Abantis. Together at High Pherai summers and less frequently at Sesklo during winters. Cephalos’ many nights at parlay steered his daytime preoccupations, which were construction and realty developments to develop landfalls outfitted for layovers of merchant marine and the hosting of foreign navies. They did not bother with insults cast against them for ignoring her parents’ court, which they knew as a frivolous and indolent uselessness.

He was very careful to curtail voyaging or deep sea excursions while Phima was pregnant. Upon the birth of their son, whose name was cast away with his expunction by the Ancient Greeks, they conditioned themselves at horsemanship and association with the Pony People who so delighted in their immanant and as yet future queen. The Cheiron matriculated under her and her taken husband for life, afterwards the acquitted consortship. All in all,  Cephalos nurtured her outgoing nature and sociability, what we call a common touch. That rendered her self-confident and self-actualized at her royal attainments and accomplishments. She joined him on all his nearby voyaging whereby she knew his boon friends from Attica well, and they most willingly knowing of her solid ascendancy which Cephalos seemed to  instill in all royal persons of far more years than he had. Phereklos would become her foremost liaison as his working associations as a ship builder and horse transport designer for Aiakos attested numerous cooperative enterprises with Eriginos of Orchomenos and the Great King when holding court in presence at Phthyia, Aiakos naval capital at the low country end of the Sperchios River Valley. There Phima could befriend Endeis, who took title of Great Queen, even as she comported herself at a most becoming modesty for being born that way as an Isthmian Maiden Heiress on considerable landedness.

Cephalos and Phereklos encouraged each other to bold seafaring eastward via the Dardanos Strait that wends along Troias of the Anatol and across the later MesaPontos that achieves the Bosporos channel entry into the Euxine Sea. [In order of their later names, they were the Hellespont, Ilion and City Troy, the Propontis and the Black Sea.] Phereklos was Levantine by his mother’s lineage, although he was a prince of the House of Erechtheus by an obscure branch royal house that dwelt Salamis Island. That Prince Erechtheid and Nval Commander had a nose for opportune sea faring, and he would lead Cephalos on a cruise with Phima. They would visit in orderly outreach the Upper Sporades Isles, a chain that “walked” ships above the Mid-Channel Drift for crossings eastward to Anatolia, while taking it westward on strong assisting currents by main of return. That first voyage attained the Bosporos where a colony of grain merchants active at faring mass exports of grain off the debouches of four main rivers of Eurasia (The Danube, Dnister, Bug, Dneiper, as most famously spelt]. They made a Great Grain Convoy of grain export distributed throughout the Greek Archipelago, where they were constantly urged to create entrepots for yet more voluminous redistribution to both mainland divisions of the Greek Peninsula. The way they meant to strategize would win a great export trade by assembling convoys to run down next along Anatolia and into the Mid Sea or Cyclades Isles, via bearings on variously on point from the west. They greatly wanted best entrepots possible to disable Cretan grain monopolies.  Their redistribution would deplete stocks by running during last fortnights of summers up the Greek Peninsula. The grain stocks while depleting, the fleet of barges was wasted, their merchant skippers frustrated at another bold scheme, to transform the huge grain hulks into horse transports for the shore to shore staggered export of finest horses bred by the Kadmeians, Aeolians and the Minyans. For such trade, the so-called North Rim Sea, in part to the Greater White Sea as the Levantines and Cretans were want to name it, was amassing mares-in-foal and yearling stallions that were competitive, even to being in highest demand, at being covered or covering breedstock of Troias and the vast horse ranches of the Imperial Hatti within the Haly River Basin of interior Anatolia.

Accordingly, there was much to parlay with the colonists of the Bosporos, by way of strategic master planning of two vast transport trades that would both begin and end the long fair voyaging seasons of the Aegean a/o White Sea. Phereklos proved ingenious at conveying how full conversions of bulk grain holds would allow their superior reliability to transport Horse across the North Rim Sea and onward to the Bosporos during autumns and onsets of winters. Cephalos would provide swift and maneuverable galleys of a class entirely superior over the Cretans as a safe escorting navy provisional from the Saronic Gulf and the Strait of Abantis. By his means of reliable security the early Greeks could win major apportionment of the last stocks available to grain distribution by late springtime and earliest summer convoying of Phereklos. That Prince Erechtheid would re-outfit the grain hulks and barges for horse transports which he would build over many years for Great King Aiakos’ two High Kingdoms of Aeoleis & Minya. The earned apportionments of grains for import inland of the Greek Peninsula would be three in number, for Attica, for the Istrhmus of Ephyrea as a mainland entrepot and for the Great Kingdom’s coastal kingdoms upon the Strait of Abantis as far as Pagasai Bay. The scheme was by no means tentative, but the build-out and implementation of the convoys and their shipping required a new conference with the colonists of the Bosporos. It occurred as Cephalos’ and Phereklos’ great feat accomplished through the young Attican class of Triakonters, some 75 ships in number as finally built and launched of the slipways.

Cephalos, however, curtailed his contribution to long negotiations with the House of Tros, to enable fromal grant of safe passage of grains running down the Dardanos Strait at beginning of fair voyaging seasons, and for convoying horse export transports over their terminating months. So Peherklos voyaged with the colonists back to their homelands where the grains originated from either storage of or massive garnerings as freshly harvested “winter wheats.” That allowed Phima to earn the credit of final apportionments to her Magnesia as a high royal bargain that might and must reward greatly her uncle-Eriginos and the younf Great King Aiakos. It also was one of Cephalos’ last great benefices to his adoring wife before their consort expired and he must repair to a career under preparation as his own along the Saronic Gulf Rim of the north mainland Greek Peninsula.

By then, of course, Phima wanted Cephalos in life marriage, which meant he must remarry her to attain their matrilocal marriage together. That was impossible from agreed outset, as between the formal arrangements made by king Eriginos and the Diomeda Herse. Eriginos had to have warned Herse that her Cephalos’ as a most welcome consort fulfilling of the ardent and hady youth of his niece was his only objective to fulfill. To attempt a lifetime marriage requiredd he live with Phima in Magnesia, at royal court yet to be built and established as ministries for him to direct or render stewardship. The betrothal unto such a long marriage woud require far  more severe trials-at-bridal, which even Phima would not countenance. From a naive and feisty maiden Phima had become far more sophisticated under Cephalos’ apt tutelages, this mature and smart enough to know their Fates spliced short and tight but not ever so enduringly as a lifetime marriage secured by progeny under a female dynasty that mother Hebe had been queen and heiress to. The sad realizations that she could not retain the man whom she was so much in love with took eighteen to twenty six month according to two versions of the how the happiest of consortships was ended. I think that Cephalos was gallant to afford Phima the longer term, while the shorter term supposedly obtained only because Hesre had arranged a stupendous marriage bargain for him as a consort High Prince, by a most advantageous wedlock if any that could be secured from his homelands as a one and only betrothal bargain.

As I have reckoned the difference of eight months as a matter of further duration of the consortship, it was mostly spent upon another voyage to the Bosporos, with only two more months of passionate adoration between the young royal couple afterwards. Phima could not attend the second long cruise eastward whereas it was an absolute necessity that Cephalos and Phereklos bond to together on final arrangements for either annual or biennial Great Grain Convoys, by alternately shared responsibilities to Attica and Magnesia (as feudatory to the Great Kingdom) as soon as convoy fleets could be assembled. The voyage was a complete success through compacts of barges sent down from rivers of the Rus, progenitors of the Ukrainians. The colony of the Bosporos would control all barge dispersals down the Dardanos Strait. all as expeditied by strong overflowing current by flood spates filling the Euxine Sea as though a small lake. Cephalos’ or Phereklos’ convoy fleets would receive them offshore Imbros Island by expediting the dispersal and distribution of heavy hulks and barges down the west coast Interior Passage of Anatolia. By then 32 warships could serve safe galley escort for the whole scheme to proceed.

By the time he returned to Phima in agony of her non-requited passions for him, they wound up the consortship with great flourish, having endowed Phima with many scattered benefices through Magnesia’s granted naval and marine heritage of his founding, even if ostensibly for the sake of Aiakos as much as for her. He also left her pregnant  and comforted, even if sorrowful for her many epiphanies by him which left her unmarried for almost eighteen years.

Cephalos sought the high sister  upon her perch of bluff outside of Brauron Cove, hoping that he might splice their destinies together. But that was completely quashed by the titelary Titaness Eos herself. She was not  ready forfietiness and carnal indulgence with her choice of mortal for her incarnation through Skia. By contrast, she was showing herself full of zeal at making Brauron Cove an Idyl of agronomic stewardship and livestock husbandry within the continuing Idyllic Age that was, in fact even if still only theorized, the closing warming period of an intergalacial floruit which would mean chill and blight over Eurasia from 1125 to 825 BC.

for R Bacon Whitney, Publisher of Bardot Books

The Maiden Goddess Eos the Dawn, for much favoring Cephalos father Deion as a paragon of manhood, decided to incarnate herself in the body soul and innate talents of Skia of Aphidnai. So embodied she would patiently – and divinely! –  intrigue at stalking Deion’s son, to partake his carnal comforts from his earliest manhood while she herself, by her realized mortal incarnation, would remain celibate as a priestess postulant. She thrived in East May Attica well-knowing Eos’ promise to her via “living dreams” of exaltation as a most graced supreme sister of the Maiden Goddess. Suggestive of  earliest daytime after a sunrise, the cover at right of Book II, Cephalos Ward of Eleusis, depicts the sensational allure of Eos at self-exultation of her mortal body.

We have a sometimes sad boy Cephalos at the end of the 1390s. He’s deprived of his father Deion, awhile various major developments of great powers near neighboring Attica, as well as an oppressive internal transformation of unified Attica. Aktika, or the Lower Peninsula had conjoined to two matriarchal agronomies of the north mainland Greek Peninsula, wherefore the dynastic House of Erechtheus began under the branch royal Kekropids to become a very important regional Kingdom. At steering the fates impelling Attica’s brief Helladic Period great destiny the Kekropids, while a misnomer for filial descendents from Kekrops, composed the four sons of Pandion and the one son by his sister Herse.  Pandion had been only a High Chief at sovereignty, and yet he was also a most exalted Consort Home Protector of the isthmian Ephyrea’s Alkathoos, his matrilocal homeland among the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers. Furthermore, he ruled over all the Isthmians obliquely, while at daily remove from Attica, he steered those rim powers and the isles within the Saronic Gulf as a shrewd inculcator of empowering aggrandizement of his sons. Towards the meritorious autonomies that Kekrops’ second generation descendants would realize, Pandion helped the general tranquility pervasive the lower north mainland. His younger brother-in-law (“marriage brother”), Cephalos’ father Deion, performed all the warring, bit mostly through defensive border diplomacy, excellent settlement of many nation races from further up the eastern north mainland. He protected the Maiden Heiresses of many manorial plantation governances upon the fertile MesoGaia, lying inland of the rim powers upon the Saronic Gulf and below the Eleutherais Woodlands buffering those coastal powers.

Important  to have said in outset of our serialization about Cephalos, and of the most especial of the Kekropids, he alone by his lifetime elapsed achieved sensational autonomous powers as both a naval genius over shipworks, and as a “social industrializer,” whereat by both promotion and actualization of common folk persons of talent, inquisitiveness and earnest self-application a middling common folk just short of a bourgeoisie could become coastally extant during the 14th century BC. These included the lowliest self-sufficient populace(s) of artisan community relations to, albeit beneath governing aristocracies at strong alliances with each other.  As his teenaged years of naval opportunities approached, his youth at fulfillment of important elders and highest born of realms, the so-called Esthloi (Worthies) were especially remarked as his most outstanding and appreciative beneficiaries from as early as his ninth year of age, 1380 BC. All his first cousins by his uncle Pallas’ many marriages nurtured him gladly at whatever they could sponsor to his gains for Attica through appeals to enterprising grown-ups who were ministers of royal courts or alike sovereign assemblies. He had the following of numerous second cousins, nearly his contemporaries of ages attained, by the prolific siring of his uncle-Pallas; These relatives, whom grandmother Metidusa had so generously kept close through alliances of great land stewarships and governances, composed the most meritorious generation which immediately followed Cephalos’ own, by his much older first cousins, (to which he himself we’ve proved the youngest born of true royal standing.

A middling level aristocrat or quasi-royal personage in myth, Cephalos has always a reminded me a bit about how the Bible cast Joseph to have become, a beloved youngest son of his father by the very many wives of his father’s nomadic seraglio. Also a precocious and most appealing lad, his ruthlessly envious brothers kidnapped and outcast him into slavery of Egypt, there to serve under their contemporary Pharaoh of Egypt who great queen he easily adulterated. Alike at appeal but  unlike Josepha as loner and outcast, thus without any ruthlessly envious brothers, the Fates made sure against any  possible repression or Cephalos, while also almost rendering impossible  any thwart of admiring, boosting and sharing persons in his huge successes while only a boy, all as won by having won a culmination of selfless devotions to higher and lower “betters” wherever he advanced his years by numerous preoccupations and digressive circumstances of lifetime.

The Saronic Gulf Rim Powers. First Quarter of Fourteenth century BC:

My mapping of the coastal low mainland of the Greek Peninsula angles the future Peloponnesus broadside, as seen aerially from the east, even as it occludes East Bay Attica at below the Isthmus of Ephyrea at the bottom of the depiction. The lowest left quadrant, therefore, shows the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers and the small isles within its confines, at outlooks southward by the Peloponnesus’ several long peninsula promontories. That lower quadrant was Cephalos’ boyhood domain, whereby Cephalos had almost no consciousness of powerful near neighbors until his teenaged years. Regardless his being “so blinders on,” he was intimate with all maritime commerce under various incipient actualizations during the first half of the 14th century BC.

Note, too, the lower right quadrant that depicts the utmost fertility by the agronomy of Low Midlands Kadmeis of future Thebes. Relations to Alkathood, Eleusis and Attica were greatly fractious when Cephalos was born in 1389. Despite the excellent tilth of the MesoGaia, ( the spotty beige terrain of grain cultivation plain to see), Kadmeis sought o annex the Saronic Gulf rim powers, but always fitilely because of the great threats of invasion and incursion that lay northward of both Kadmeia and Attica.

The lifetime stories of Cephalos at the earliest shall bring him along the east coast of the Aegean Sea as enforced by many other images substantiating the genius behind many coastal ascendancies above Attica in particular.

        Referring to the mapping vignette at left, it depicts close-up the whereabouts of Cephalos’ boyhood preoccupations  and systematic explorations, whereby, too, his many novel experiences of maritime commerce and trafficking. Observing meticulously the hard gained artisanal practices daily occurring ashore Eleusis’ closely allied rim powers and isles of the inner-Gulf,  the Saronic Gulf composed of  Pandion’s created vice-regencies for Cephalos’ first cousins, all that uncle’s sons but grandchild Kekropids alike himself. Alkathoos was where cousin-Nisos lived, as the seneschal of his mother and home base of his influnetial uncle Pandion by long marriage to Pylia, the ruling governess. Cousin Lykos was the consort of the matriarch upon Salamis Island, until he proved much too enterprising elsewhere of Attica in behalf of half-brother Aigeus, or too assiduously commercial in behalf of ruling governesses of First Estate throughout the inland MesoGaia. A dull lover of his wife, who let him, her consort, stray, Lykos was invaluble to his half-brother Aigeus while a Regent soon to become King Presumptive as soon as he might sire a son.  Pallas’ vice-regency of Aktika, was the entire coastal Lower Peninsula and East Bay Attica seashore, but it’s out of depiction by both my presented images. Cephalos and Herse, of course, lived centrally at Eleusis while becoming effective comptrollers at greatest maritime coordination of all Kekropid merchant seafaring running in, out and along the Eleusis Sound.

The assumption of considerable walking diurnally greatly helps an understanding of youngsters by the very oldest times. A smart boy planned well ahead his daily means to attend closely upon his greatest interests as they arose or happened or opportuned him. Ship building, artisan enterprise, constructions and landscape developments, special projects enabling enhancements of farming and herding entailed whole days for Cephalos as unceasingly upon his feet. Cephalos didn’t like to be cloistered within Eleusis Sanctuary, and Deion helped him arrange those full and opportune days of special enterprises wherever their coastal and inland venues. The maps above depict easy distances between each other by boating, but it was mostly by walking that rather daunting distances made destinations useful to a lad’s preparations for adolescence.

At his ages of seven and eight years, during times when Deion was martially at field as a warden upon the borders, Cephalos made of close visits abroad whole day observations from which he derived an expertide for miniature modeling. While his father was away his boy systematized such layouts by components of meaningful enterprises, how they were conjoined and coordinated with each other withal their social industrialization. He’d gather up, carve or assemble tiny components of piecework representation of communal village layouts, and he’d then array them at the center of a seclusive promenade off his mother’s bed chamber and suite where there was just enough naked ground for intricately modeled assemblies. He’d make mock-ups of increasingly precise venues that he’d visit, and he was happy to explain them to him mother and the many high priestesses whose morning, evening and other regular promenades could learn what he’d rendered painstakingly. They were amused and appreciatively informed by the accuracy of his representations through simplest modeling techniques, making sense of minute venues and how they crammed together meaningfully as very many artisanal or building enterprisies — meticulously coordinated efforts as betwen themselves, whereby operated the diversified skills persons who performed so much actual industriousness that compelled him constantly new  still-life representations.

Deion’s Good Parting Advice:

The father remained highly vigilant and astute about unwanted interferences in Cephalos boyhood. Deviant cult priests within the sanctuary of Eleusis proved foremost of vile ilks to be wary about, in part to another awareness of encroaching patriarchy at a bully dominance of Gulf Attica, Acte.  Attesting his constant championship of female governance of long tradition, Deion’s more acute insights ranged into other unwanted developments, owing to Attica’s still fledgling unity. They bore threats to the branch royal Kekropids’s wives of greatest exaltation, for they all married well in keeping with the lapse of a female dynasty, the House of Aglauros. Their protector especially under title the Kerkyon of Eleusis, Deion’s powers of anticipation alerted the boy to a major change-up in nrorth mainland maritime and overland commerces of the Saronic Gulf Rim Power. Discerned as immanent a tranquility that might prove lasting after the removal of the Minyans by Aiakos for the sake of the Low Midlands. That much earlier establishment than Boeotia had most to do with trades and exchanges from overseas by caravan treks throughout the north mainland, most particularly along the breadth of Kadmeis, where a High Kingdom inland to the northwest between Phokis and Attica. Likewise a cooperative routing of overland commerce into the High Plains of Aioleis and Minya under a young and brilliant Great King.

Deion left his following of many champions at arms whose ages and stages in life meant them to retire into domesticity by lay down of arms. They needed succor and sponsorship, and n o laxity of attention upon their bold transitions into whole new ways of life. A little boy was confident in his father’s outlooks, also brave to forward them as bereft of paternal council. His cousins the Pelopids, besides his shrewd mother their aunt, was ready to bolster the stations of lowly men of great merit by tutelary, or protective habits for rural commonwealth agronomy. Cephalos proved an intermediary through the Lelegans, whose sponsorship over specific following of Deion proved most befitting. Yes, it must have seemed complex, and at first fragile. Buy the Restoration of the Kekropids, despite hesitant Gulf Atticans, was pervasively well-received. A happy accident was the death of Laios, an incompetent high king just as he’d proven as an embarrassing martial adjutant. What began as a herding of wild donkeys called onagers provided the beasts of burden for long caravan treks carrying multiple export goods from the Saronic Gulf into north south routes of regular transits. Brigandage might have been a problem but the sure footed caravansiers were warrior veterans who could handle such miscreants easily. Upon the shoreline landfalls themselves. moreover, he was proven an excellent supervisor of longshoremen put to the service of foreign merchants who needed through new acquaintance of newly maritime following whom the Lelegans could educate into numerous competencies. To the foreign merchants the opportunity to gain new outreach and deep interior inroads of their barter exchange was paralleled by coordinated social industry ingrained into Cephalos childhood.

Along the lines of steady progress at overland caravan trekking, there was also the greatest help on call at literate communication of numeracy that Cephalos learned and received from boys older only a few years older than him. They were under tutorials as heralds and couriers within the sanctuary confines of Eleusis, where a learning of what imperial Minoa had innovated of writ and numerate accounting by Linear A Cretan entablature seen at right. It notated drafted transactions of ambitious trade exchange, by which Cephalos could report to superior merchant sponsors such as his older first cousins. Such active record keeping along the Eleusis Sound prevailed as far as the Pyrhaios  of Attica, a port where many off-ladings of ships became rapidly more frequent. Cephalos could insinuated himself into permanent merchant communities along the Isthmus where facility at numeracy was essential No matter that so much of it has yet to be decoded off wet clay tablets which have dried up and turned to dust since.

Undecoded Linear A entablature by scribes closely involved in the maritime
ambit of Crete Island. This writ has yet to become decoded for lack of finds,
but it infers to be transactional of barter exchange conducted
within important ports.

The litany of such burgeoning of specialist skills and the assiduous energies of artisanal classes and castes makes a tedious but necessary study. More interesting was ongoing building construction amidst active shipworks, where berthing or slipways for merchant class vessel buildouts. The Lelegans’ and Cephalos’ facilities at affording their superior sponsorships expertise arose through his own lofty superiors, a/o elder relatives and ministers of royal court, under Aigeus’ House of Erechtheus. Cephalos grew to have numerous ascendant outreaches going on all at once. Cephalos was never confused by any of it, and would prove the go-to-fellow that all superior relied upon. He knew how to be best informed, and he was actively inquisitive after new prowess to handle a multiplicity of landfalls, crossroad entrepots and overland trade caravansaries at coordinated conjunctions with each other. As he attained nine full years of progressing age, he was far in advance of almost all trekking charges and followers. His main challenge was to reckon with all the dull and average middle men who intruded upon his most reliable sponsors, while failing the highest communal standard of living for so many men and families by former warriors and sustainers of his fathewr Deion’s war years as a border warden. Only he could deftly adjust those veterans to family and social industrial orientations, their loyalties thus becoming steadfast even as they learned to rep[licate his proficiencies. Lelegan wives and grown busy children at landfalls of slipways were outstanding by proofs of how much they both liked Cephalos handling their husbands careers and commerce affairs, as well as grateful for shelter and common amenities to their sustenance. He affected subsidy of lodgings, cottage communities and the most overt amenities to social industry such as ovens, kilns, oxen yokes and heavy wheeled wagon portage. All his childhood modeling had him aware of the seemingly infinite necessities of dense social industry that spotted meaningfully along the Saronic Gulf’s coastal rim from Cape Sounion of Aktika to Argive ports beneath the towering Spider Mountain that formed the western horizon of the gulf .

Mature of mind and temperament, handsome and appealing to all shore denizens, and physically mature so seeming but not so necessarily so, Cephalos did whatever and however well, and he knew what his highest and lowest dependents needed to affect complex meritorious enterprise to requirements of merchant providers to all landfall entities at trrade distribution or import/export. Easily said but not done, of course, except that we must appreciate how highest born Cephalos was, how his daily associations purported, and how learned at coordinating highest and lowest echelons of diverse industrial practices, especially where ships, their landfalls and fastidious preparations for long cruising were so involved and greatly involving. His biggest problem was never developing following from elders and their children, but at cooridnating upon imposed functionaries whose seniorities could prove most interferring. He also could not become popular among them, because they reciprocated with envy and spite as he so apparently outclassed the. Genoius beneifits from modesty, but high intricate client relationships and requirements are not always for modest or submissive minds.

Herse and his cousins heard bruit of resentments from such underlings or working peers. As he frequented the east end of the Eleusis Sound where most active Attican ports contained within the vast strand of the then Pyrrhaios (later the Piraeus of Ancient Greece), he found the swarming commoners in service to Cretan Sea Lords to the the worst of the unmanageable. His mother was a paragon over all that Crete had of regular mainland presence througout the Saronic Gulf. These same sea lords very petty nobles very active at liaison with the royal court and senior ministries of realm. They thought hard to keep Cephalos in place, but also knew themselves circumvented by Aigeus and other family nobility of the House of Erechtheus. Non-dynasts vied with dynasts in support of all endeavors of realm, thus Cephalos’ popularity went to both antipodes of good working relations. Aigeus, we’re to learn slowly and yet well, had not the brilliance of his adopting father Pandion, aunt-Herse or half-brothers. The resentful turned the Regent against his foremost cousin despite his late wife Meta’s objections as conjoined with Herse’s. But she died and the second wife, a considerable land heiress Cassiope, was by Gulf Attican rural society and governance that bore envy and spite for the Kekropids, whom they deemed rivals by unfair preferment. Cephalos began to stand at epicenter when the Cretan Sea Lords sided with their toadies of royal court against him as well — with one glaring exception, most fortunately. This was a Cretan noble and governor over the Pyrrhaios, Erigeron, who also had his sister at highest place among Eleusis’ resident postulants of sanctuary. He was also most grateful to the Kekropids for providing his transient navy of Crete the manning of warship crews that fell short of full ship compliments by recruitment or press from the Mother Island.

Cephalos’ Brief Naval Service to the Cretans:

He connived to make welcome of Cephalos as a native Attican whom he could recruit and allow a special middling rank. Most appropriate to Cephalos’ thirteenth year as earliest a teenager, Erigeron groomed his services upon land to the Pyrrhaios as a facilitator of all kinds of needs not easily fetched up upon instant demand. Cephalos complied always; he proved dogged at doing so. So I skip over his years as a lad from ten to twelve, during which he became prominent upon all landfalls of frequent maritime commerce, even to a sponsor of shipbuilding of skiffs used as both fishing vessels to the handling of cast netting and passenger ferry service by crossings of longest spans of the Saronic Gulf. While a sideline under his most generous sponsors both relatives and closest peers of society, his designed skiffs were unique for both easy sailing and rowing by sweep oars. They were greatly admired crafts, and they became reliable at passenger conveyance, especially most skilled shipwrights and expert carpenters who were summoned as between ship-works’ sites for application of their considerable reputations. Alas, his impressive entrepreneurship drew ever more hostile enviousness between Cephalos and his mandatory peers or temporary “bosses.”

At thirteen, therefore, Cephalos had shipped out with ship supercargoes at short tramp shipping of goods outside the Saronic Gulf and by shuttling between the Mid Sea Isles “cyclopic” of the Greek Archipelago. He got his first sea legs going, and he learned important intermediary entrepots of trades exchange within such limited tramp cruising. He finally was allowed to ship out with Erigeron as a captain over a warship escort of the Cretans at sea service to the imperial Far Fleets of Crete. His middling rank was mindful of enlisted men and warrant officers of our modern navies to persons familiar with how large crews of able seamen aboard ships are supervised. So while Erigeron had mostly his command echelon to do with, Cephalos handled the needs and requirements of the crews drawn from career seamen and many able mariners from foreign culture such as the Lelegans upon all gulf and Cretan landfalls provided to the ambit of the great Mother Island.

Which has allowed me observe during Cephalos’ services to Erigeron how the Minos Lykastos in his last years of dotage conducted the Far Fleets as the superior to his only naval peer, his own son and heir apparent. We’ll know all too vaguely as the Great Minos after Lykastos died in late 1371 BC. For while the long aged and once brilliant Minos of Crete  had lost touch with the conduct of that near peer’s naval service, he remained still a most popular paragon throughout the Saronic Gulf’s isles and Crete’s mainland feudatories, the rim powers including the Atticans so properly designated (over their historical great objections. Everybody served the Minos with utmost unction, respect and admiration, even as they knew that the imperial navies of roving Far Fleets were for a decade corrupted and recently become suborned into nigh piracy upon the mains and fareways of the fair voyaging seasons. Nobody dared show the least disrespect, but the Minos was missing out on completely on much more of nefarious activities within his imperial ambit such as his appointed occupational governors over feudatories of the far west, along the Cretan Sea running to Eastern Mediterranean and upon the White, or future Aegean Sea northerly above but inclusive of the Mid Sea Greek Archipelago in its entirety.

In less than three years Cephalos served Erigeron outstandingly. His crews enjoyed high morale between all echelons on onboard ship serves and their proficiencies at the billets of oarage and sailing handling proved likewise top rate. Erigeron was steadfast to have the Minos reliant upon his own appointed governorship, whether he was land based or active at sea duty. He laso knew the hazards of comporting to the dotage of the greatly aged Minos after his so many decades of famous naval concordats that had brought a once waning naval imperium of Crete under cartel of leading sea powers such as the Levantines of the Eastern Mediterreanean and the Egyptians of the Nile Delta, or Nilotis. His son and nearest naval peer was abusing his father’s increasing feebleness at delegating his imperial powers to his highest commands and many subordinates while at supervising a great maritime commercer ambit upon “the Great Green.” Erigeron knew of this increasing corruption even as he had no part in any of it. He simply could not stand to have his revered Minos slandered as so oblivious to the embarrassing conduct of his son, a man of great authority but contemptuous of the mainland feudatories of Greece, and of himself at a great age for any sea duty other that courtly great dealings at home of the Mother Island with like imperialists over seagoing trade cartels.

By long tradition, nonetheless, Lykastos had conducted the Imperial Games and Regatta from Ogygia, or tiny Delos Isle as known later, to which all his top commands and sea going feudatories were invited with great forcew upon attendance. Erigeron as governor by appointment of the great Cretan naval station over the Pyrrhaios was invited, and only one of a few fairly excused from attendance because of his shore duties or navarchy as a foremost anbd favored surrogate of his Minos. Erigeron, however, enjoyed sea duty and liked especially such service to the Minos as he’d performed in the past. Cephalos, his command echelons over him and his sailing and rowing crews under his active supervision wanted very much into the Games and Regatta held in 1374 BC. They commanded much readiness  and fitness of preparations, but they also knew themselves competitive despite their war galley well past it best years when so many more recent would be competing at the Regatta. Erigeron knew how proud Lykastos was of his Far Fleets, but he feared any competition with his son over the Far Fleets less they be beaten by himself. He’d never live down the ire of becoming any kind of notoriety as a victor at the rowing race. And yet I put to sort shrift that conclusion to the Regatta without the fulsomeness of what I’ve written into Cephalos Ward of Eleusis, Book Two, (C. and the Kekropids). His war galley came in first to great lead, having prompted his fellow fuedatory navies to trail behind him but also far in advance than infit Far Fleet members who had greatly underestimated their preparations to compete tactically and magnificently.  Erigeron had not done well in the land competitions and trials of high peerage ashore Ogygia afterwards, but he had not needed to. Lykastos was glowing with pride over a Cretan victor and well-pleased that the feudatories who had trialed the race winner had honored him with best prepared attendance. By contrast, his son felt humiliated, deservedly, and wasn’t going to let his sea lords at residence of the Pyrrhaios let him know the collective wrath. Erigeron cowered abjectly, gave all the credit to Cephalos son-of-Herse, a young mariner of most outstanding ways deep sea or ashore. Herse was very popular herself with Lyksatos, who soon gave bruit of her excellent on to all the other gorvernesses of realm within the Saronc Gulf and inland as major tribute payers to the light exaction that Lykastos levied from them.

Herse went into a panic over the news that so overtly credited Cephalos beyond his immature station; but she could not do anything more than take three decisive steps. She caused Cephalos to be discharged honorably (1) From further naval service to the Cretans. (2) She pleaded with Aigeus to ask the Minos Lykastos for a small flotilla of seaworthy warships that Cephalos might command as a near coastal navy, a protective cordon thus served that welcomed returning ships off overseas fareways into the Saronic Gulf while escorting important allied merchant shipping away from Greece and the Gulf to all and many far ambits. (3) While at that service he would serve ministry over the naval building for Attica, meager as it was, by launching both warship galleys and the ubiquitous round-hulls that translated as strongolies [STRONG-goal-ies] or merchant ships of large ladings. That third persuasion, however, had rival ministers tremendously upset over that grant of preferment, soon greatly pestering Aigeus, despite how amenably the Minos of Crete himself had approved of all three set-ups. Herse did not need any dissuasion, however, after Aigeus had a fit of impatience over constant complaints from unworthies of all sorts and standings against Cephalos. For once the oldest first cousin had a hissy-fit of a falling out with his virtual nephew, a youngest cousin most doting and loyal, by blaming him for the huge fracas despite the tiny granted navy of 25 war galleys. For a while he had proceeded well under three greatest friends called the Erechtheid Commanders, his nearest appointed subordinates at coast guard and all princes by other branch royal households of the dynastic House of Erechtheus. Herse had to realize that Cephalos should fare abroad for a year or two while the sudden breach with his liege sovereign could be soother, at least by her, as it did in fact and much more so withal a fine reconciliation of all brief grievances. But her mind made up, and by accident of a most fortuitous great idea that was put under her nose, Herse decided that Cephalos should go away and a-wooing of a foreign bride on offer to him for a brief consortship. She made him pack his stuff and leave the 25 war galleys to the protective coast guard while he was away. There was much weeping by all the friends he had within the sanctuary of Eleusis, many little maiden hearts  especially broken that he was going away to become such as young consort for another worthy of his superb good looks.He immediately left thePrinces Erechthies behind his brief self-exile for Aigeus’ sake, but he had them his rovers and spies towards far advanced goals and opportunities that all the four late teenagers together had contemplated to build their lifetimes from.

At which point, just here, Cephalos’ stories resumes away from Attica, but not very far off, as an extended sojourn of newly liberated Magnesia from the Minyans……..

for R Bacon Whitney in pseudonym

 

The cover of the first book depicts Cephalos’ mother Herse a few years after her marriage to Deion of Dauleis. Born in Attica during the last five of twelve years that her brother Pandion ruled unified Attica as High Chieftain,  she became formally a prominent princess for the Attican House of Erechtheus as daughter of Kekrops, and by upbringing of her mother Metiadusa. Nevertheless, she retained high priestesshood by hereditary sacral majesty of neighboring Eleusis, and lived within its Sanctuary precincts until her graced accession to Diomeda after living there for ten years.

 

The Ancient Greeks had very little knowledge of, and have proved mostly incredible at saying anything about, the boyhood years of Cephalos during the 1390s BC decade of their Late Helladic Period. He was a subject of considerable revisionism as new epoch arrived and a peaceful era matured. They finally expunged him in order to render Theseus the superhero of the Atticans’ mostly disappointing century from 1360 to 1250 BC.

And yet the previous decade, just after 1394 BC’s equinox precisely, proofs are ample to have rendered amazing consequences to the Late Aegean Bronze Age and to Attica in particular. That year, Pterelaus of Taphia and Lord over the Teleboeans managed an armada of dugout longboats to navigate down from the Echinades Isles, hazarding early spring storms by full gamut of the Ionian Sea. His force passed through the Strait of the Messenes and rounded Cape Malea of Lakonia of the South Sea, at last to strike down upon the Bay of Argos. There he managed under superb covertness to land his overly manned vessels upon the debouch of the Inachus River. It sopped seepage off soaken marshlands of the Great Argive Plain. In the course of an entire morning Pterelaus struck northward to wipe out the Elektryonids and their father the Great Wanax and dynast over the Argives. Freed of troops by various other landfalls, the longboats’ crews entire struck all late winter retreats where Argive vessels of all kinds were lalagagling at preparations for a new fair voyaging season, both merchant or naval warrior fleets idled. Whether to destroy them them where parked, or to haul them off their landfalls as commandeered carriers for forthcoming spoils gains, so and such was realized in a single day. Those ships of conveyance came to a very large number of capacious holds, which the returning raiders inland would manage homeward by sweep oars carried aboard in many hundreds.

We’ll have much to say about that single great event and the transformation of all southland Greece before it became the Peloponnesus. But only after our several Bardot Blogs have reviewed Cephalos’ lifetime and naval genius unto a mid-century transformation wholly otherwise as naval as realized in 1365 and 1362 BC.

Cephalos the Small Boy

The usurpation of his uncle Pandion began various threats and incursions arriving from the north along the Eleutherais Woodlands, from Kadmeis to the northwest, from fallen Lokris above Abantis/Euboea Island, and the Upper Midlands of Later Phthiotis and Magnesia. These were displaced people, thus inferior foes, which Deion found easy to repulse or bring to treaty immigration by every trials of arms presented to the petty chieftainates along the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers. He was made Chief of Wardens for all of them, even the vile Metionids who sought his protection of Attica, even as their mismanagement and imposed impression lay hear upon the people of his brother-in-law. That brought up wife Herse’s ire, because she sought to humiliate those usurpers’ sovereign regimes. He also had to be away from home upon the threatened border marches.

Cephalos, however, was doted upon by grandmother, mother and father. Little boys don’t appreciate closeting company or closed socieities opf priestly enclaves and various orders of high sisterhood by Eleusis Sanctuary. He toddled along the Isthmus and Eleusis Sound as he early found the agility and stamina to follow his father’s curiosity for all matters maritime. Being with his father was always welcome change from well-meaning Metiadusa and Herse once they discovered he was going to be a prodigy of many talents by his age six. Deion exposed him to the commoner minions, rustic damoi and hamlet laoi, who inhabited the setbacks from seashores at long and short walks from the steep path that led him up and down daily from his mother’s suite of the Sanctuary. Deion was particularly indulgent upon a seafaring caste and class of shipwrights and constructors who abounded water’s edge of all chained landfalls of maritime commerce. They were as close to an upper middle class populace as the Greek Bronze Age afforded. Staged shipwork projects were going on every day, and Deion attended upon as many of them as best he could. Cephalos sparked those denizens of the name Lelegans, by a famous ethnicity who were actually Hyperboreans of oldest anmcestory, but become Lelegans or Leleges. They were most famous for itinerant migrations from Baltic to the the upper Adriatic Sea, wherefrom many settlements down to the Maw or outlet of the Great Gulf of Korinth and Amyklai (of Lakonia and Andania), where beganthe many staggered out-migrations that made their artisan caste leading coastal protectors and boat builders upon Crete Island, wiothin the Mid Sea Isles (the Cyclopes), the Archipelago and Karia of Anatolia. They were eventually going to adopt Cephalos as their preferred taskmaster, the ideal middleman for the many enterprise opportunities that he’d strike up for them from the most ennobled and royal, petty ilk or not.

When Deion had to be away, Metiadusa preoccupied Cephalos as a little boy as her errand boy for all sorts of duties of stewardship over the Thriasian Plain of the Eleusis’ agronomic apportionments from the inland fertile MesoGaia of the Saronic Rim Powers. These were capped in late springs and rainy season autumns as vast garnerings of winter crop-harvests and orchard pickings, which the Thriasian Plain’s  special temperate climate was allowed to lead, even concert for all the family members of the House of Erechtheus. No matter the internecine strife between them since the Metionid usurpation of Pandion: All families by all generations arising were greeted jovially by Cephalos as a junior steward to arranged long holidays of residence for the dynastic clan of Erechtheids, many as they were by their branch royal houses for both those most pleasant times of every year. While Cephalos was the youngest of his own royal dynastic generation, so his four first cousins by the branch royal Kekropids were as though uncles married to his aunts. And yet the most prolific uncle Pallas and his many wives offered him many sired second cousins who happily doted upon Cephalos, as much their uncle as he was first cousin to their father by the pecking orders within the entire House of Erechtheus, howsoever scattered.

While lucky in many male cousins, their wives soon marked him out fro his wonderfully outgoing ways and accomodations of themselves. Very early they came to a consensus about him, which forever stuck as the Homeric sobriquet went: Cephalos was the handsomest adolescent and became the handsomest man of his generation, thus automatically of paramount importance throughout the matriarchal governance by vast manorial plantations laid out beneath the MesoGaia as it carried its fertile tilth and pasturage from East Bay Attica all the way westward, fully across, and then down the Isthmus to Sikyon eastward and below the intensive agriculture around the high city AcroKorinth of later Corinth. He was fortunate in his bright and highly experienced grandmother otherwise, by allowing him escape from a deviant enclave of priests who composed a teaching order from boys and girls under tutelages of his mother Herse. Deion and Cephalos helped her discover how pedophilic Eleusis had proved cyclically in the past when resurgence of sneaky queering of naive boys slightly older than Cephalos. Not only did Herse put and end to such sneaky regime, but she gave perfect excuse of Cephalos to absenting and busying himself with the maritime communities along the long rim shoreline of Saronic Gulf. For Deion’s generosity at training seafarers by drill-at-arms was reciprocated by Lelegans who were happy for Cephalos’ company all by himself as he grew to learn the routines, skills and material needs of shipwrights/constructors as an growing boy. He never failed his presence upon most special stages and phases of project buildouts, at which the Lelegans proved exemplars and teachers such as he’d never have found anywhere else than the density of highest skill practitioners along “The Rim.”

Deion nonetheless had much to preoccupy him as Herse and him grew estranged at their marriage. Their passion did not abate, but the decade of their marriage compelled them to immersions in pursuits whom they could not share with each other. Deion proved a perfect chief warden of the all borders, but he had nobody else, neither Pandion or his oldest first cousin Aigeus, to serve him adjunctly and bear his burdens as vital surrogates. Herse had no capacities to become a greatest land warrior’s wife, and yet she astonished her husband for how perfectly she managed feudatory relations of most rim powers to the imperial Minos of Crete. She kept the burden of such a feudal superior and his paramountcy light and easy to carry on adroitly. Deion could not get a word in edgewise about his unique intelligence otherwise about what Imperial Minoa was boding to become soon, and then intransigently. For the long reigning and most popular Minos Lykastos had greatly aged by the 1390s BC and was becoming mired in his dotage accordingly. While, by stark contrast, his heir apparent, the then Prince Minotaur, was becoming advanced of middle age as a rude bully over all his father’s feudatories, such as they were hither and thither  throughout the Archipelago, the Mid Sea cycladic isles, the South Sea and the far west Ionian Sea and Gulf. Fractured relations were boding to prove most grievous overseas and embarrassing as between all deep sea commercial relationships. Attica and Eleusis solely except, whom he blithely ignored and not worth his while, the Prince Minotaur was condoning piracy on unwanted mercantile rivals and ambitiously innovative merchandisers. Worst of all, both his father’s  subordinate sea lords and occupational governors, once become subordinate to the miscreant Minotaur, were assessed as lazy, incompetent, highly apt to cheat at trade exchange compacts and abuse treaty obligations by goods confiscation or purloining. Such affairs, of course, were often highly involving and complex, the way the Minos Lykastos had to make them over a long lifetime of building Crete’s sea dynasty  back from the calamitous losses to the Volcano Thera since 1505 BC.

The consortship and former good interplay of husband and wife was lost by 1382, just as Aiakos offered exclusive opportunity to Deion to lead his vanguard forces into full repulses against the occupational Minyans over the Low Midlands and Lake Midlands just above them (both later parts of Boeotia the region and nomos of Ancient Greece). Cephalos at nine was unable to understand how fraught his parents had become because neither of them stinted him in any way. He’d been allowed unusual liberties to strike out for himself, as soon I shall review. He also had no means to help his parents reconcile, and no way to reason any that would work. Deion was never to remarry on account of Herse. She, without an heiress whom she greatly wanted conceived, never could find a mate who charged her carnal vitalities by other men who would approach her in courtship. Metiadusa was nearly dead when she limply must concede that her daughter’s happiest youth that should have been became defunct.

I retreat, therefore, into circumstances rapidly arising abroad of Attica that charged both of Cephalos’ parents with paramount roles apart for their son.

The Ascendancy of Aiakos son-of-Aegina:

Aiakos was eight years older than Cephalos, and upon that celebrated birthday he assembled his liege martial-at-arms, including Deion, to begin the reconquests throughout the north mainland that virtually reinstated the great matriarchate of Aegina lost to the Minyans at five years before the High King Labdalos over the Kadmeians died. That death was most meaningful to Deion, who could honorably eschew allegiances to the High Kingdom  and refuse Laios who newly ruled from the Kadmeia, and take up command full force instead of all vanguard Light Foot. He gained that capacity from Aiakos instead, and proved illustrious to the rapid overruns and repulses of occupational Minyans over five years. He first regained the Asopos River Valley. the seat of mother Aegina’s matriarchate. Enlistments of powerful allegiances enabled a second campaign, late started on account of the gathering the necessary logistical wherewithals of a most supportive Aiakos. Deion then enabled the reconquests of the Upper Midlands, liberating conquered Aeolians to build Heavy Foot and Horse to consolidate all reconquests from the Minyans that lay below Lake Boebe of the High Plains. That effectively overlapped  the third and fourth campaign years as full reconstitution of the High Kingdom of Aeoleis, whose matriarchate of  the Tyroides still remained expunged of its most prominent manorial plantation governesses. The fifth year campaign was suppose to reconquer the High Plains by the enormous riverine Basin named for Peneios River as a system of outstanding watershed off the Pindus Mountains’ Lower Range.

Aiakos had accelerated his ascendancy as an outstanding administrator of rearguard in support of four Strategoi of Generals over heavy force movements, including chariotry that variously aligned behind Deion’s vanguard advances and humiliations of the Minyan might consolidated as high as the north rim enclosure of the Magnesian Mountain Range. Knowing themselves beaten, fully throttled, they prayed peace of Aiakos as an unconditional surrender of all force except the one condition that they remain settlers upon a new high kingdom of Minya. Aiakos accepted but only because his mother exacted from the governing interim of armistice a full restoration of all conquered Tyroides of matron First Estate. Willing on unwilling, such women as had survived the original Minyan conquests throughout the Fifteenth century BC married Aiakos most prominent men, creating thereby a hybrid Aiakid Dynasty which held the sacral majesties of the restored women as co-regent with their arranged husbands by Force Aiakos. Aegina began a great healing after many decades of deepest hurts, but she did not live to attest any great mled in peace of Aeolians and Minyans by the reckoning of final reconquests. Aiakos married Endeis, a woman of greatest prominence upon the Isthmus of Ephyrea. She had thought she was going to marry a poor boy by his mother Aegina’s flight from her landed matrimony at birth, A most lovely and modest woman, she was dleighted to marry a man who she long had loved as her betrothed, while laughing off and away any haughty pride she might reasonably could feel once she became the Euryanassa, or Great Queen, of Aeoleis and Minya, the two constituent high kingdoms.

That, alas, removed Deion from Cephalos’ boyhood and lad stripling years, until he was needed to support his son at the trials-of-bridal for the Princesss of Magnesia that came afterwards Aeoleis & Minya had been reordered. Our next Bardot Blog shall say of their reunion, and of the brilliant tutelage-at-arms that the father affected his son with as nigh a champion-at-arms graduating from man-at-arms under the Cretan Far Fleets that he briefly served.

The Death of High King Laios and Remarriage of the Euryanassa of High Kingdom of Kadmeis.

Labdakos dead just as Aiakos’ reconquests were initiating their momentum northward the north mainland, the Atticans and all other Saronic Gulf Rim Powers were breathing high releif from the bellicose regime that the Kadmeia’s High Kings were so intent upon formenting. Peace settled upon the broad low country whose lands of rich tilth aligned above the Eleutherais Woodlands. They still stood as buffering forested expanse above the Saronic Rim, but north to south roadways and back could have other meanings, that towards Deion’s great hope as once a chief of wardens, that an overland great caravan commerce could build from the many veterans who had served him all his life as most willing adjutants and foremost men-at-arms. Deion had also helped settle many displaced populace from that incursions of the Minyans, and he left to Herse and other rural matron governesses of First Estate whom had been liberating under Aiakos to see them gainfully progressing well.

Occludes from much if any notice was the tormenting internal affairs of the High Kingdom of Kadmeis. At the end of the 1380s BC, no date well ascertained, Laios was murdered upon his travels over the several passes of the Treton Mountains that led down and through the Isthumus of Ephyrea by was of dispersing access variously to high roads on the other side of the land bridge between two mainland divisions. One such high road was called the March that led up from small ports upon the Great Gulf ( of Korinth) to the final High Road which achieved the High City Kadmeia. Laios, the only man mounted of his protective entourage of men-at-arms, was moving covertly for no apparent reason after leaving piedmont Great Argos via coastal Sikyon. What then was witnessed was Laios at being accosted and commanded to halt by a young noble, an adopted prince of Sikyon who was charged with clearing the passes over the Treton Mountains of brigands and other theifs upon the wayfares of high countryside.

The young man of clearly most fit youth and most promising manhood was Oedipus, the adopted son and prince therefore of Sikyon. He had accosted Laios with best manners and high dignity, but was esp[ied to be soemwhat halt of foot movement as he approached near to the covert High King. Laios’ reaction had been violent and openly hostile, by contrast and moved to barge past Oedipus as an unwanted assailant. Worse that that, he took sword in hand to smite the young noble, but without any summons of his henchmen to assist his forced passage of the road ahead. Oedipus had parried, at which defense he provoked the entourage to react aggressively in defense of their liege. Laios’ violence had gotten in their way immediately, as he thrashed his sword to slay the young man. He smote his short spear into Laios’ groin while hastily blocking his horse against the steed’s chest for an instance. While unbalanced thereby, he gained the other side of the horse for readiness to take on next challengers. They rushed him haphazardly and lost their lives to Oedipus deftness at wield of the a dirk,until he could arm himself better by filching weapons off his every adversary slain. Laios was already toppled and bleeding out to death in the dust arising from the mayhem. Seven men-at-arms were supposed killed, or such was the report of Oedipus as he fled away and down to Sikyon to state his version of events. Unknown at the time, and not until much later time, a seventh protector bore a deathly wound from which he only barely recovered as he hid shamefully in the brush around the killing site. He could not admit that he’s failed to protect his liege sovereign.

All else of the incident makes a flimsy beginning to a heavy and hard tale to tell about Oedipus at innocence by duels in self-defense. Much more importance lay in another beginning of a mythic saga about him and that tale as it was brought to a greatest drama by adaptation to many other circumstances wrought upon the stage by Sophocles to the play Oedipus Tyrannos.

And here be forewarned that his dramatic adaptation proves consistent with most everything brought to adaptations or versions of myths by the Ancient Greeks. The saga that became that masterpiece of Classical Greek Drama (and mythography) I’ve rendered in two parts, by the First Book of Cephalos Ward of Eleusis and a transitional book which narrates its conclusion. Here, therefore, I only address the first part of forthcoming Saga of Oedipus & Iokaste. For it relates to all matters and formalities attendant to the widowed Euryanassa Iokaste, whereupon immediately conflict of my version with Sophocles contrived plotting of Laios’ manslaughter by his son by his siring of Oedipus. Here, too, I greatly simplify my own books version drawn from the contemporary man-of-writ Mentor son-of-Alkimos at a telling an entire century later than the actual incident.

First, after the honest telling of his slaying brigands upon the high road pass of the Tretons to his parents Olybos and Periboea of Sikyon, they honestly investigated the truths of the manslaughter and found from the Kadmeians duly that the main principal in the killing was High King Laios of Kadmeis. Astonished and greatly chagrined, we can suppose, the Regent and queen of Sikyon must confess their adoption of Oedipus from his mother, a priestess of the small sanctuary that located at Sikyon. By his father’s arrangement of trysts for young prince Laios, for motives solely his own as a royal sire, the priestess had willingly bedded the prince. She had thought to fulfill her wants of maternity as most young women in holy orders might do or did. She wanted to know a man discretely and Labdakos had provided the requisite arrangement. Anonymous, she’d been  fruitfull of child as she wanted. But she was also forbidden to reveal any child of the assignation and she had to avoid any publicity of the lovely baby conceived. Laios would have nothing to do with her, even to finding her abhorrent and his trysting of her to his shameful disgust. The younf father also told her that he was fated to a death my hand of his own son. He’d then wrenched the foot of the baby boy such as to render him maimed. He remarked that the maiming would disclose his fated slayer as soon as seen, as indeed Oedipus limp and  halted approach had verified upon the heights of the Treton Mountains.

He’d then deserted her, but somehow was force reminded of his paternity of the unwanted baby by his father before he’d died. Polybos and Periboea ahd reported to him their adoption of the baby as joy in son and a prince to adore the parentally. After such sharing as confirmed Oedipus true mother and her forsaking of him, it seems that Laios would not have marital relations with his bride Iokaste, even to relegating her to a seraglio of servants and honor maidens of the High Court Kadmeia. That created an astonishing circumstance most peculiar to the Kadmeian royal successions that gave supreme place to brides royally native by the aboriginal Aionians and somewhat lesser royal place to indigenous Spartoi, who were hereditary of rights of courtship of such offered brides. Oedipus, in fact, was of royal right to court Iokaste in remarriage, and he discovered Laios’ bride to be only of young maiden age in her early twenties of age. Notwithstanding her youth and barest tenure as Laios’ bride, Iokaste was an entitled euryanassa, that can be translated as either empress or great queen. Future royal lineage was for her to establish by her husbands seeding of her loins, perhaps as drawn from a Spartos who sutied her as agreeable well-chosen.

Instead Laios had shunned her and relegated her to seclusion. Her brother, known as the son of Menoiteos, the new High King had entitled Kreon with rank of high priest over the nobe order of Spartoi by five families indigneous to far west Kadmeis and its borderland with Phokis. Accordingly, their order had considerable aversion to Oedipus as soon as he presented himself eliginle to court the widow of Laios for her supreme remarriage and upheld paramountcy by succession. Despite any such objections, Oedipus duly marriaed Iokaste who found in him the man of her true wants — and  wantonness — for the comforts of marriage and highest sovereign sway. Two sons were conceived followed by two daughters who were assumed to assume the royal and sacral successions to their mother’s supremacy. All else of the Saga of Oedipus had to await nearly twenty-five years elapsed for yet other circumstances to  the final facts still left unknown or unattested.

Polybos and Periboea had not divulged who the victim of Oedipus had been as accosted within the Treton Mountains.  They had only told Labdakos that the issue of the arranged assignation with the priestess who had been open to conjugal relations with his son Laios had been rejected just as she had been, too. So left unsaid was that Oedipus had slain an unknown brigand of some important standing, at least as his adopted parents had heard him out. All else was kept in abeyance for fear of prying into dangerous unknowns.

The Second Restoration of the Kekropids, circa 1380 BC.

Even as Deion left Eleusis and the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers, the hated Metionid regimes that he’d had to protect continued on a wholly unpopular to the Atticans. Pandion, whom three brothers Metionid has usurped, had incented the deposed High Chief to secure himself as king maker for the House of Erechtheus. His brilliance to posture himself as the head of the branch royal Kekropids (“sons-of-Kekrops” even though the children of Pylia of Alkathoos and her wedlock to Pandion) had him a prime determinant of who would ultimately gain merited autocracy over Attica and principle protector of Eleusis, his mother Metiadusa’s hereditary realm as its Diomeda passed to Herse.

The brother so much older than the sister had never suffered sybling aggravations, despite they led mostly separate childhoods and lives since becoming adult. Pandion feared only one form of contention or dissension from Herse, that which might be begotten of a son born by her. Cephalos would have been much preferred as a daughter instead, to become the heiress to Eleusis by succession to title of Diomeda which Metiadusa had been at his birth. Pandion also had another small dilemma attendant his long marriage to Pylia of Alkathoos. First he’d had to adopt the son Aigeus by her first marriage, whose actual sire was an Isthmian named Skyrion a/o Skyros. Three sons were then off her lap outside of Attica, the paternal homeland by which they had no nativity; they were not of the royal blood or sacral earth born, which was likewise to say they were not, therefore, of autochthonous descent Atticans, a very important basis of succession as between rivals to lead the Attican House of Eerechtheus. Indeed, Aigeus had higher standing than his half brothers as a foreigner royal born by an alien royal matriarch such as Pylia, who even had here own distinguished matron dynasty that brought her sons another special exaltation.

All these small concerns bode to loom large for any claimant of succession, and Pandion did not want his beloved nephew to get in the way of his sons’ ascendancies. He must not prove claimant to rule Attica, howsoever his special merits to earn status as a petty chieftain or king. Attica bode to become an important kingdom once well knit as unified by its three parts, Akte, Aktika and Aktaia. So he brought herse to  a concordat that she was willing to accept. Her son, while ward of Eleusis, stood high as a prince of the House of Erechtheus, but he must pledge fealty to any branch royal relative that rose to best claimant status to rule Attica. Cephalos was welcome to the royal court and to vie for all the important ministries of the future kingdom to earn highest administrative status. He might prove as great martial leader, or a navarch over a navy, or a minister of great portfolio, as we of modern times might deem a chancellor. But Pandion wanted Aigeus to have a direct track to becoming king, whereby to crush his rivals of other branch royal families of Erechtheids. And so it was done, Herse earning Cephalos preferment as the twain princess and priestess as she was by highest hereditary claims.

The actual civil war occurred as mostly an insurrection against the greatly unpopular Metionids and their new religious establishments through their created brotherhood of loathsome priests. Aigeus led all fray with the support of his able half-brothers, who won to themselves vice regencies. He as head of state permanently seated Pallas upon the  Lower Peninsula, Aktika. Nisos, the second half brother, earned Gulf Attica or Akte, whereby an expansion of his appointed royal duties for his mother Pylia in capacities which we of modern times associate with seneschals. Lykos the youngest son, was appointed judiciary and leading religious offices, as a man of good religious calling to the practiced traditions most respected by highest and lowest denizens kingdom wide. Cephalos became at age eight a frequent squireof his father’s visits of ministry to the Metionids while they still ruled. He knew all the important ministers of the Attica’s royal court incidentaally, but also, most likely, better that Aigeus did as he wound up a successful civil removal of the Metionids and all challengers to his accession to king with a small “kappa.” Because the accession of Pandion to his father Kekrops at the time that father was deposed by the first Metion, his rule had been called the First Restoration of the Kekropids. Thus Aigeus accession, by support of his exiled father  and as once revered mother Metiadusa became immediately a foremost Attican and Kekropid, and most welcome to a Second Restoration of the Kekropids as though his father Pandion had never been deposed.

That left Cephalos. a fifth Kekropid prince-of-House Erechtheus to find his own way upwards or laterally towards a most successful manhood in part supported by his revered mother Herse, who would prove herself a prnce-maker worthy of finest brides most everywhere abroad.

for R. Bacon Whitney, Publisher of the Cephalos series of books…..

We are about to release another eBook, a sequel to another, a trilogy which we packaged under the cover design at right. Composing from our three hardbound books by a serialization fanned out above, being of the common title Cephalos Ward of Eleusis, Books I, II, and III, the joint venture Publishers have released since 2012 advanced maritime prehistory of earliest. Greece from 1405 to 1360 BC had the Isthmus and the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers orchestrated their shipwrights and many landfall slipways into an effective league of commercial maritime sponsors. The serialization is a pioneering book project of a style we call academic prose fiction. We think ourselves at proof that it remains the best and easiest means to a through education of how the Pre-Hellenes of the 2nd millennium BC became the earliest Greek ethnicities, and how their young meld pointed the way to two more by Iron Age Greece that produced the Ancient Greeks’ Classical Age Geography. Books IV and V have been left out, but they will comply with an evolved naval and mercantile focus upon two major sea engagements — devastating sea battles  each and again directed against Imperial Minoa of Crete Island in 1365 and 1362 BC. They shall take a theme  of covert strategic revenge, in redress against an even more vengeful imperial Minoa which was compelled to exceed herself. Because most prehistorians do not agree that such conflicts were ever enabled by Cephalos as  a strategic navarch, or per se as a true person of historical composition,  I continue to call all released books about him patently fictional, allowing that even a mythic personage could speak for an entire millennium’s conclusions.

Each book in series a proto-history by special determination upon a narrative genre wrought in oldest time and places,  there’s a need to review the eBook Trilogy. It serves the whys and wherefores of genuine prehistory even if least rigorous: Lay person readers who are new to our Bardot Blogging until 2020 deserve a succinct understanding of robust historical accuracy. Faithful readers of the entire serialization shall enjoy the reviews a process of considerable enhancement of novelty, while an overview of a lifetime which the Ancient Greeks wanted expunged for absurd reasons that our venerable humanities scholars still adhere to wrongfully.

Where Our Bardot Books began:

First, there’s our dependency upon mythography by Classical Greek Mythology, despite that it greatly  constrains book authorship by S W Bardot as a poseur and translator of a fictional Bronze Age author — Mentor son-of-Alkimos — at firmly inhabiting the  times and places which concluded the Late Helladic Period of Greece. The Publisher, we remind, started with the reign of Kekrops in dotage and death in 1405 BC. That mythography postured two King Kekrops of Attica alive the 15th century BC. Ancient Greeks have proven as wrong as any Classical Greek Mythology ever written can be. And so, I have conflated away the first, or legendary, Kekrops, as a make-believe  dynast and patriarch in order that the singular Kekrops proves out as a champion of a quintessential hallowed matriarch who aspired for their co-regency together. The dynast and patriarch never actually existed, but our Kekrops had three brothers and a brother -in-law who coveted what that matriarch, Metidusa, wrought  by the one King, their brother Kekrops, just before he died of his dotage in 1399 BC, after being deposed for certain overzealous reinstatements of Attica’s oldest and ancient revered beliefs. A very popular sovereign to his very end, even so, so, too, was his sacral wife by Eleusis, the “arch-widow” Metiadusa, who lived on as the entitled Diomeda, or High Sister of Grace, over a special teaching sanctuary by a great teaching order of priestesses who preceded her.

The contrived duplication of a sham legendary House, as somehow conflated with a true branch royal house by the patriarchal dynasty attendant the Attican House of Erechtheus need never have been. Thus there was no need either for two scions named Pandion, successors to respective Kekropses, or two lovely daughters, or much younger sisters named Herse. The legendary maiden of the two was never seduced by the God Hermes because that future Olympian deity didn’t exist yet; he was only the God of Cairns, of pathmarks duly disclosed to heralds and couriers under dispatch of their illiterate principals. So our eBook  allow a very able and true son Pandion was born to  young marriage around 1430 BC. The young and frothy marriage of Kekrops and Metiadusa suffered for her many miscarriages subequently, until she finally bore a daughter, Herse, late in life to become her heiress, or successor to a foremost hereditary sacral majesty known by 1405 BC. Metiadusa, abdicated her title of Diomeda to Herse in 1388, when the daughter was only fifteen. Over the years since she’d been born, moreover, the Fates would have little Herse spend her girlhood mostly in Attica. There she became a high priestess for both Eleusis and Attica, until attaining as a foremost teenaged princess over the Atticans as well. Indeed, excepting only one other dynastic daughter by patriarchy, Prokris of the acclaimed House of Erechtheus, Herse was amply compensated by the special adoration of the Atticans and Eleusis for her very special and most brilliant gifts of mind and memory. Too, she had the cardinal virtue  charis, meaning the selflessness to shower back upon her menials what they afforded her of utmost exaltation. At sixteen, concomtitantly, the Trials-at-Bridal for her were held, as between suitors invited towards marrying her with possibility of a lifetime consortship happily ever afterwards.

Herse stood communally as a nymph, or dynastic bride of the very first worth. There was never any need to make a legendary sham of her parentage, of her hereditary stature, of her ultimate sacral maternity of a single child Cephalos. No need, either, for his paternity to be made a sham of misplaced grandeur imposed upon a foreign husband to Attica via his martial prowess to prove a Kerkyon, or greatest champion-at-arms, which Eleusis fielded martially and selflessly, as behooved him to prove how he could with utmost satisfaction of special persons to his heart and precocious mind. And yet the Ancient Greeks never could take him either for his true illustriousness amidst the highest potentates of north mainland Greece.

The postured Kerkyon was Herse’s taken husband Deion. He was already a champion-of-arms out of the Low Midlands of north mainland Greece, [long before they became constituted as Boeotia].  The Ancient Greeks never got his ethnicity either, as both a Phocian and Kadmeian. In his boyhood he showed off most promisingly of martial ilk, whereby adopted into the champion men-at-arms in fealty to the Kadmeians. He was brought up to fight under their High Prince Labdakos, becoming a champion skirmisher at prowess of many light weapons. He was so natural and versatile  a great leader that he soon proved a master strategist over all light forces-at-arms of the Kadmeians. Under that cited liege warlord and sovereign, he moved into his twenties as constant to offensive vanguard, while achieving major defensive repulses of predatory Minyans. That enemy nation race of horse peoples had been conquering the north mainland above the Low Midlands in many piecemeal fashions. Labdakos became High King of Kadmeia for drubbing them, but only briefly at the regal title after a prolonged lifetime wherein he was compelled to be solely a reputable roving warlord  unjustly disabled from rightful royal succession by two imposed oligarchic regencies who blocked him from supreme ascension. I will not explain here how: Suffice to say in review, at a date uncertain around 1410 BC Labdakos triumphed at a severest rebuke of the Minyans under special vanguard strategies of Deion. The warlord strategized rearguard deployments of heavy champions-at-arms and -at-cart (chariotry) under his  junior heir, prince Laios, the High King’s son. Deion drove back the Minyans to the High Plains, future Thessaly, while Labdakos regained and revived all low country plantation matriarchates of Kadmeis along the vast Asopos River Valley which runs flay low country to thesea where future and most famous Aulis situated. Alas, just as he ended his campaign season by full regain of those Lands of Aegina, the Minyans hazarded a final resurgence directly against Laios the son, to occupy anew her hallowed person’s landed inheritances. They mangled the Kadmeian rearguard and humiliated Laios. A shameful defeat after a time of immense regains, the Kadmeians were compelled to rest at arms indefinitely,  thereby to restore themselves to the imperial strengths that Labdakos and Deion might have enabled them, had he not died only a few years later, in the early 1380s BC.

Deion easily retained his repute and highest standing as a formidable martial-at-field, especially over major force deployments of royal Foot Troops against heaviest Horse and Chariotry. He was compelled to retire to Dauleis to serve the Matriarch Lebadeia of Phokis, after Labdakos could no longer stand him an army of elite warriors. He had no wonderful princess to court conveniently either; or he did not until he received invitation from roving proxies of Metiadusa who bade him come down to Eleusis, there to prove victorious at the trials-of-bridal conducted for her daughter Herse as recently ascended to her the title Diomeda. The newly instated Diomeda presided a rich sanctuary principality (as Eleusis veritably was, besides being also an Attican protectorate who greatly needed a superb martial-at-arms. Deion won over all rivals easily and proved most winsome to the sixteen year old bride. Their effusion of passion from each other rendered a first son soonest and and easiest of delivery. They named him Cephalos, “Brainy,”  upon his first birthday, 1388, after his brilliant year of infancy. (Bronze Age Greek babies began aging, sometimes very ably and precociously, from the date and year posted after their natal deliveries).

The Ancient Greeks kept on goofing by making deliberate mistakes about Herse’s husband and entitled Kerkyon, Deion: They had him born to a earliest patriarch named Aeolus as the fourth, perhaps fifth paragon son who would form up and rank as a strategos, or general.  Five martials-at-field vied for their exiled matriarch Aegina. She dwelt Oinopia Island within the Saronic Gulf, in good view from Eleusis, reposing there as a refugee from her beloved Asopos River Valley. Driven offshore by the Minyans at their resurgent martial occupation, many other Aionian mothers of sons of Aeolus, a polygamous mythic personage thus believed, pledged themselves in fealty to Aegina — and ultimately to her precocious son Aiakos (he’s most often spelt in Latinate Greek, as Aeacus, which orthography I refuse to use). Their sons would regain all that such powerful matriarchs, the former governesses over vast plantation agronomies, had lost to the Minyans.

That regain began when Aiakos was fifteen years old and had become a stupendous prodigy under his mother’s tutelages. It took five year s into the decade of the 1390s to accomplish his mother Aegina’s  full restoration as a greatest Aionian over a low country ethnicity that sprawled along the Strait of Abantis (later Euboea.) Deion would again win all vanguard tests of arms, for her and Aiakos, before his son Cephalos was enabled oldest friendship in their respective early manhoods. Although their mothers were close and of mutual highest sacral elities of womanhood, they least rewarded each other  despite Deion’s most apparent strategic genius. He was also became fated to lose Herse in marriage when their marriage no longer delivered children that justified their wedlock as a lifelong consortship. For a barren marriage, once proven as such after 100 solar months, a Great Year, became devoid of any new progeny after Cephalos. Deion was, in fact, virtually divorced from Herse earlier, when he took up as martial-at-arms to concert all of the petty chieftainates and realms conjoined to Attica upon the Saronic Gulf. For once acquitted at that, thereafter he left the Low Midlands, too,  forever to dwell within the High Plains, which, before their common dub as Thessaly, bore the toponym of Great Kingdom of Minya after the reconquests of Aiakos which we’ll review in the next Bardot Blog review after this one.

Let’s pause here to consider how rapidly paced I’ve been at review of the prelude book about Cephalos and his parentage. Clearly, the review by all of the above events and developments has required a deep immersion by audition, a full dunking by the reading too, whereby by a hearty and rich soup of offered contexts about powerful men and women of a mythic and mostly lost pasts. That momentousness is why I’ve spooled my proto-historical biography of Cephalos coming-of-age over three books, leaving to a last two books his early paramountcy as a naval genius — one duly paramount over an entirely new era of great oared vessels, especially those of warship classes. As we’ll move into their contexts, moreover, I shall prove at times equally dense. That’s why proto-history, my own preferred genre of historical fiction so nil of novelistic bents, is so ideal as a pedagogy that teaches of all the earliest Greeks who were forming up as distinct ethnicities, and yet ever onward towards their making of a great Bronze Age civilization that would vie so readily with many others developing abroad the Eastern Mediterranean and other very young  and contiguous Seas.

 

[The PreHellenes were a people to originate many languages from Proto-Indo Europeans who descended the Greek Peninsula in accordance with what Professor Drews of BVaderbuilt University expounded. Note how many there were from mainlanders of far off Mittel Europa of Eurasia. I have inserted as PreHellenes the mid-sea Minoan islanders and the Baltic Sea nomads called Hyperboreans who became better known as Leleges or Lelegans. I have not included the Levantines or the Egyptians because the latter are so disputacious aboit even least blood ties with any Asiatic or African peoples.]

Why we’re great Teachers of the Pre-Hellenes and Earliest Greeks who composed from Them:

The Ancient Greeks have proven inept, or at least unreliable over the centuries, about the father Deion. He has had to come through our serialization of Books as a Chief of Wardens over all the coastal realms upon the Saronic Gulf during the 1390s. That title means he was a chief over consorts lord protective of outstanding rural matriarchs coastal living inland the Saronic Gulf and Cretan Sea. He proved sutied to tulutuous events and developments. As soon as his marriage to Herse for a Great Year, for instance, his brother-in-law Pandion was deposed as High Chief of Attica at only 38 years old, despite he was the dynast of the House of Erechtheus. That son-of-Kekrops had to return cowed to the homeland of his wife Pylia, to whom he’d been married as her consort home protector of the realm Alkathoos. It lay just west coastally of the Eleusis and shared the Eleusis Sound of the Saronic Gulf. Pandion became a great man there, by serving all matriarchal governesses of the Great Isthmus of Ephyrea (before it became Korinth and Megaris during the Archaic Age of Greece). Pandion from there was always stalwart for Deion, and stubbornly his subordinate, but the good brother of Herse could not allay the consequences to her barren marriage.

That barrnenness wasn’t the only estranging issues that breached what started off as bright and hopeful royal wedlock. Herse and her mother were firmly loyal to Crete’s imperial House of Minos, as were most mainland matriarchs, whereas Deion was dubious about the ruling Minos Lykastos, who he suspected was losing his grip upon an oldest and greatest ever sea empire (a thalassocracy), that of Imperial Minoa since 1600 BC. In his boyhood the Cretans were becoming seriously suspect as ruinous of the great maritime commerce of their liege sovereign. Crete was still under repair of its serious losses of ships to the volcanic eruption of Thera, a largest island of a group of isles, circa 1505 BC. That cataclysm had so weakend Crete herself that she was conquered by Argives and Anatolian Karians (who called themselves Millawandans of Anatolia across the White, or much later Aegean Sea. The Minos at Cephalos’ birth was the great grandson of Cretans best described as hybrid pre-Hellenes to both primordial Crete and Argos. His immediate forbears were excellent Thallasacrators, or sea emporers, who brought Crete back through her cartel relationships with the Levantines of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Egyptians, or Nilotians, of a great desert empire capped by an immense deltaic region offering maritime surpluses. The Argives had lapse concomitantly since its invasion of Crete, despite their great dynasty achieved through the progeny of the famous Perseus and Andromeda over all the Southland of Greece since 1590 BC. The north mainland divorced itself from Crete altogether, to face down new enemies nomadic by arrivals from the north, or along the North Rim Sea of the Cretan White Sea. The reason for such seccession has never come clear, we admit, but we think it may have been due to higher incidents of piracy along the Cretan mains within that sea, and the primary instigator was the Minos Lykastos’ heir apparent, nameless except for his princely title of Minotaur, albeit not to be confused with the much later mythic personage of that name.

Whatever the instigations, Deion learned from seafarers and active shipwrights upon the Saronic Gulf that the most admired Lykastos had lost control over his far fleets under the commodoreship of his son, also the husband of the Euryanassa Pasiphaea, the Empress of Crete who actually superceded that man despite he was the Minos.

Herse was also inculcated with her own worst prejudices, against the Kadmeians and Minyans who would conquer and exploit all the lesser powers of the north mainland. Deion realized her ingrained hatred of the Kadmeians, to whom he’d been of outstanding service, and of the Minyans whom they mutually loathed. Pandion had been deposed by his brothers, who consolidated their patron clan powers over the Lower Peninsula in order to usurp them, under the active agency of High King Labdakos. Pandion held no grudge towatds him, however, for knowing that Labdakos had bribed him despite his refusal of any cajoling that would have conjoined barely unified Attica to the High Kingdom and quasi-imperial confederation of the Kadmeians. Instead Pandion insisted that he martial and mobilize all the consort home protectors of female rural governances into a mutual defense, or sometimes obligatory repulse, of both Labdakos and the Minyans. At that he should have won the love and pride of Herse in him, her own consort by title of (The) Kerkyon of Eleusis. But he did not because Herse p[roved pig-headed against her brother and her husband. So woe to her that she lost a man who greatly impassioned her to temporal disagreements that eroded their marriage away, even as barren as it also proved.

I cease at review of Cephalos’ parentage and his infant and toddling years. His boyhood until had attained age of nine years old (when he was really aged ten). For by the end of that boyhood I have much more in review to summarize and succinctly explain by our next Bardot Blog.

August 10th, 2023, b y pseudonym of the Publisher, R Bacon Whitney

Readers regular to our serialization of five books about Cephalos know him brought by his Fates to the embracing arms of Eos the Goddess of the Dawn. Greek Classical Mythology has him stolen away to Syria, where the Goddess also known as Maiden Daughter Day was supposed to reside. Her brother was the sun god Helios Hyperion, who charged forth behind her ascents of sunrises to over reach by midday his summit apogee of daytime. Her abrupt abduction of Cephalos, told by Classical myth to have been ”the handsomest man of his generation of mankind,” was deemed a deliciously salacious act of most torrid lust. It was deemed heinous, too. Eos’ “rape” prompted the extreme jealousy of his wife Prokris, who could not accept the dominance of the Titaness at render her supposed husband for a lifetime utterly forfeit for the rest if his natural life.

Early Greek Mythology attests “theosophically” and very differently: Recitals, or rhapsodies about the true origination of Cephalos’ storied capture, begotten of the intellectual honesty inherent all Oldest Greek myths and fables, became the opera by the Great Oral Tradition of Pre-Hellenes and earliest Greeks. Its era spans from 1625 to 123o BC as most precisely bracketed. Writing the New Greek Mythology for the Bardot Group of Scholars of Antiquity, has been the passion of my pseudonymous self, S W Bardot. The Group aroused me with their version of Eos love-making doings through a famous myth owed to his recited father Deion. He’d been from 1390 to 1381 a Chief of Wardens, or “keepers at defense,” while up against 15th century incursions constant by Minyans at investitures of the north mainland Greek Peninsula. Greeks, or foremost pre-Hellenes as they still were at 1400 BC, had supported unanimously Deion as both champion and martial-at-field, a keeper of the northern regions already ancient as the tiers of Midlands broadly configured above the Saronic Gulf. That inland enclosed water was encircled by the Argolid Peninsula, the Isthmus of Ephyrëa and Gulf and Low Peninsula Attica.

He had not only rebuffed the Minyans from well before 1400 BC, but he’d saved the heritage culture of both sacral and petty royal matriarchates—all preHellenic petty royal dominions aggregating to petty kingdoms (basilëai). Their primordial order spread across the Mesogaia of Alkathöos, Eleusis and Attica, as governances of “First Estate.” Some were secular as matrilineal inheritance of an elite and highest ancestral womanhood whose primary era was cited by Hesiods as the second great age of creation of mortals. The MesoGaia, or “Middle Earth,” also included the Isthmus, once known as the region of Ephyrëa and comprising much later Ancient Corinth and Megara (Korinthos and Megaris in Oldest Greek). Father Deion’s most important protectorate petty realms involved the dominion of holy orders called the Sanctuary of the Dawn: It located north mainland East Bay Attica as several sororal colleges surrounding Brauron Basin.

Cephalos, as our series of books states titularly was a child born to Eleusis Sanctuary. His mother was its Supreme Sister by a governance of name/title Diomeda. Likely it was the most intellectual of all the many shrine principalities, but did not stage highest religious holy orders such as Delphi and Olympia Plain most definitely did as the sanctuary Oracles of (Mount) Parnassos and Olympia (Plain). The Sanctuary of then Dawn was founded by Cretans of especially strong geniuses for primeval agronomy. It never should have been the cause of major and famous myth about Cephalos’ youth and his Saronic Gulf years particular to his earliest lifetime until he became thirty years of age. During that span of years he was made clearly evidential by his services to his two tutelary deities, the Goddess Athena having become most inspirational of his branch royal family of Kekropids—even as still subservient to the greater dynasty of the House of Erechtheus.

Introducing the Future Panantaxia of Brauron

Eos had fallen in love with Deion as a champion of the esta lishmentarian First Estate; but she could not ever have him her lover. So she waited patiently for Cephalos’ proper time for wedlock to herself through the special nurture of her self-incarnation, as a mortal born baby, “Skia of Aphidnai.” By embodying herself for a long lasting mortal life, Aphidnai Plantations became her home. It was a great grassland reserves of the transhumant Lapithoi at cattle herding uplands of the Eleutherais Woodlands. Otherwise Aphidnai’s grasslands included Marathon Plain situating just interior to the small Sea of Myrtoa, in part to the multi-partitioned Aegean Sea of oldest name places. Eos’ name of final remembrance was Skia, daughter of Eioneda and Tricorythos, and her Fates were all alone to herself, as the Panataxia of Brauron Sanctuary, a name/title achieved at her age of thirty years old, in 1364 BC.

It’s important to know that she knew Cephalos was promised to her since her age seventeen, but she would not have him to hold and love until that year so cited.

Her parents’ first and only born child, thus blessedly a daughter born to become her mother’s maiden heiress, Eioneda’s vast heritage lands became a self-indulgence of Eos to practice a new mortal life upon. Skia accorded by manifesting early that she was gifted with special knowledges to tame and govern land by divine inspiration. She was a very shy little girl and precious. Given to most authorititive pronouncements to her mother’s underlings of longstanding tenancies. Eos appeared to her in slumber to hike her high aloft and beside her own standing upon a chariot conveying the Urn of Morning Dew, warm seasons, and of Sparkling Fost, over chilly months, of a thirteen month long Lunar Year. Observing the face of Earth below, Helios illuminating all the states-of-art of humankind just behind her chariot’s coursing, wherever and whatever revealed by laborers appeared as daily strivings beneath Eos and Skia. For Eos was earliest a deity of omni-observance, immortalized as such, but also greatly frustrated at communicating her keen knowledges of most important human activities and pre-occupations. She was, accordingly, an astounding teacher of all toilers of Earth, helpful in as many ways as she could invent, but through Skia she could be immenant upon the face of Earth herself.

What passed mundanely below, became instructive Living Dreams. Vouchsafed to her gifted Skia, they were perfectly memorable and meticulously instructive to whomever would listen to her small girl’s voice of shy self-confidence. Her gift caused greatest upset of her mother Eioneda, because her obvious brilliance dashed all her maternal hopes for Aphidnai’s perpetuity, through, of course, Skia’s obvious abilities of highest governance and ingenious land stewardship. In the course of Deion’s warden duties, her husband Tricorythos comforted Eioneda while making a best friend of Deion, Aphidnai’s border warden and frequent visitor. The two friends finally agreed that the family must make pilgrimage for Skia to the Sanctuary of the Dawn, there to seek close counsel of the High Sisters and Sister Elders, both supreme over Brauron’s sororal colleges. For they knew all the divine gifts bestowed unto mortals, and they would fathom Skia’s gift for exactly what it was. Not that they could explain adequately what a Dream Clairvoyant was all about; it just seemed that Skia couldn’t convince anybody, despite her best instructions of nigh miraculous improvements to Aphidnai. Skia’s brilliance was a huge problem of implementation.

Introducing Brauron’s Holy Orders of High Sisterhood

Mother Eioneda became greatly upset all over again and more so upon observing the Sanctuary of the Dawn by trekking down to Brauron Basin’s north verges. after a period of devastating drought, three years long including their winters, it seemed that all the north mainland seemed was withering away. Its varying populace of novices, postulants, tenants, drovers and orchard keepers appeared starvelings, and even the governing sisters and sister elders conveyed themselves lean and haggard. That most impressive leanness of everybody, to bear up so well the ravages of blighting drought impressed father Trocorythos and good guide Deion. Both men could appreciate the core strength which the Goddess Daughter Day imbued her most devoted. It all had to be very good for little Skia.

For that was what she was at age twelve, even if the hostesses of the Sanctuary immediately knew that Skia was as their tutelary Goddess herself. Despite the rarity of her divine immanence by indulgent appearances, ever since the founding of Brauron by Cretan seafarers, “from before the Idyllic Age,” Skia proved bedazzling. What confounded them, though, was Skia’s bold attestation of her gift of Living Dreams, whereby “her goddess” manifest herself “between my sleeps and awakenings, just on the verge of slumber and daytime awareness again.” By what she indulged mortals to know about, by her coursings aloft the heavens above, whatever was best for humankind to know was revealed as Eos’ best human offerings from earth, heaven and sea. Such as was revealed by all or each, moreover, her gifted incarnation Skia could teach them methods and means assuring exact outcomes promised. For the merit of means would always assure the finest outcomes possible upon implementation of told projects to completions.

Actually as first encountered, Skia could say means, instruct of methods, but she was painfully shy, thus disappointing at declaring outcomes. And yet all of the Aphidnai high sisters could attest immediately of marvels become of Skia’s any instruction. For they had the special grace of reception of taught divine implementation and last results therefrom divinely promised. Skia simply had no powers of prediction whatsoever; she was not mantic of divine gift and she would never become so. The High Sisters asked Skia to sojourn with them for two months so that they could have a clearest examination of what her promise and providence might shape out to finally become. Declaring complete faith in their diagnoses, with Deion serving support of Eioneda’s and Tricorythos’ patient acquiescence, that invited sojourn would confirm or not their daughter’s immanence to become of foremost of their holy orders — with complete certainty that she would prove “All Worthy.” For that’s what panantaxia means in Ancient Greek. That to say of wholly practical reckonings of their utterly utilitarian theosophy of Brauron’s holy orders, Skia would be asked to stay two years at Brauron, a term of probation and further matriculation of her gift of Living Dreams. Only then, afterwards a final reckoning, would she take holy orders among their sororities, or sororal colleges.

What those two months revealed of Skia’s taught prognostications, and how they became to advanced works-in-process over two years of obedience to her dictates, begins a progression of visual attestations that complete this Bardot Blog. While they all depiction of Brauron have appeared in Black and White renditions within our books, what twelve year old Skia wrought from 1383 to 1381 BC told the High Sister the much greater impact by all geomorphological changes until 1360 BC. Accordingly, some of our images need to become colorized decpictions, which follow.

Explication is afforded each image presented in our slide show panel by WEB.com.

The Prehistory of Greek Writ

Since Early Greek Mythology means for us solely oral source recitations, in general, allow nevertheless that other great scholars to our best knowledge have ferreted out, or taken reasonably upon faith, corroborations of mythical historicity despite the lost writ by formulized syllabaries  of  the Greeks extant  during the long last floruit of the Late Aegean Bronze Age.

Theirs is the premise of “our real fiction.” It evolves from supposition and requires careful working hypotheses of other prehistoric sources; they include vastly studied material science and art. Earliest myths were wrought upon masterful pottery and mosaic panels that illustrate a latent historicity through their subjects depicted and reflective of period. Ceramic arts affected such content until the enabled transformations of their subjects through description by Greek alphabetic writ. Homer, we believe, was the first to supplant myths written from syllabaries as recitals of his own bardic genius dictated master scribes of alphabetic writ.

The Bardot Sisters, who long preceded my publishing of Bardot Books, tasked with the philology inherent a transition from writ by syllabary to alphabetic writ for the purposes of historical or literary exposition. They also were tasked with the writs of numeracy by many Bronze Age cultures and their scriveners. Our philologists were once young female bright stars at languages and their decoding from fired entablature.  They became my own nice old ladies until they passed on from the Bardot Group. They taught me much that is new and otherwise oldest inspired, so that I can dare becoming the pseudonymous Master Translator of all their own composed Oldest Greek. For without them, there could not have become, in any way substantively, Saltonstall Weld Bardot. Without him, though, there couldn’t be Robert Bacon Whitney, his publisher and the founder of Bardot Books since 2007.

We have an entire section of this website devoted to him

Late or Last Age of Patriarchs: Fifteenth Century BC’s Second Half Dynamics:

Far into this century’s Late or Last Age of Patriarchs, until rapidly emergent new dynasts after1415 BC, conquerors or interlopers by foreign origins ceased rampancy and trample of the indigenous natives under matriarchates. Instead, they took upon themselves the native models of sovereign manhood. They took wives of matrilineal sacral majesty and were vouchsafed in return the status od Medon or Governor in an idiomatic English sense. I often use the term Consort Home Protector, unless the new and mighty husband was a Warlord won to the status of Overlord –Tëretaön [Tay-Reh-TAH-own]. They became Helleniized as their generation matured into civilized consolidations of martial gains and females’ pacification eftorts. This movement had already united over the Fifteeenth century BC the three earliest, core pre-Hellenic ethnicities which defined the early Greeks.

The generalized theory behind this predictable tendency of invaders to become “nativized” has been attributed to the syndicated political commentator Joseph Alsop, who was also a Classics’ enthusiast. Mentör corresponds to Alsop’s coherent argument that interloping conquerors abandoned all rapacity once they’d succumbed to a nigh idyll by comparison from where they’d come from. Marital aspirations for the primeval, still extant matriarchs of native sovereignties took over. The warlord conqueror courted them on their own terms in order to become the Consort, or Lord of House, or Consort Home Protector. They knew nothing about agronomy, of course, while his aspired bride was a governance over vast plantations under tilth or at regularizing livestock husbandry. They prospered off his “maiden nymph,” her mother, or her grandmother, even to supporting their fellow interlopers his subordinates to provide for.

A Husband or consort proved apt to melding  with matriarchal agronomic regime. He willingly became of Second Estate by pledged loyally and due homage to the female First Estate over the sovereign order. He undertook the role and model of a selfless champion defender. His life was a forfeit to defend that hierarchic order. The best of them, Pelops, proved exemplars of patron land stewardship and martial readiness of the rural commonfolk and townspeople. He conducted agrarian surpluses to export commerce. All such roles put in play for his Meda or High Matron, as realized by Hippodameia for Pelops. He became the prototype an Elite Man, Esthlos, by his willingly subordination to her Persëid ancestral dynasty.  After a while, he roved a Late Patriarch over all the Argives, becoming a self-made Hero, after selflessly managing the salvation of his wife’s First Estate of Great Princesses.

Our Bardot Blogs have much to say about the Greek cultural anthropology of matriarchy, co-regency of husband and wife, and the sometimes off marriage traditions which arose from men and women safeguarding each other’s granted heritage and inalienable legacies. For there came a time when the matriarchal Idyllic Age vanished — or, as Hesiod expressed the end of Silver Age humankind and it replacement by the first martial metal bronze, a Bronze Age humankind began in transition to the bellicose Iron Age humanity.

Herakles the Superhero

The most remarkable departure of Classical Greek Mythology, by its eclipse of the Earliest Greek Mythology, is its vast accretion of stories and anecdotes that enlarged the mostly obscured mythic saga about Herakles. He’s no way to be found in any paramount posture of a truly itinerant hero, or a sometimes maniac under Olympian Hera’s supposed scourge of his mind. For, all-in-all the mythical accretion of a Saga, he became the pan-Hellenic superhero. He exists as such, though, solely by much later myths, most of early writ by the alphabet, and long after the lifetime of his true mortal self – Alkeios son-of-Amphitryon and Alkmenë. His birth is still disputed as either Argive or Theban, because both those parents were born Great Prince and Great Princess, respectively. And yet Alkeios was conceived in Thebes where Amphitryon was custodial regent, and whereto Alkmenë followed him, to make amends for causing his banishment over the “staged accidental death” of her father Elektryon.

Although a fabulous oral rendition out of the Greek Dark Age’s final invaders and interlopers seems to deliberately confuses us, there’s even dispute about his true historical name,  the approximate date of his lifetime’s end, and how he died. For the most part, however, Alkaios/Alkeios became a composite superhero of many generations of last arrived ethnic Greeks, the Illyrian Doric Greeks and the Greeks whom Dubbed Achaeans. They affixed an agnomen or homorific of acclaim, Herakles, over many epochs that ran into the Dark Age. The contrived superhero becomes clearly a Doric prototype of the superior form of prehistorical patriarchs out of Anatolia, but he’s not yet so lodged within the prehistory of Mentör’s lifetime during the Thirteenth century BC. He knew the Dorians as most prudish and deeply religious Highlanders who were still a mostly quiescent, obscure tribal culture by his alpine nation race. That Herakles became born from both those last arrived ethnicities conformed to a ruthless, brilliant strongman and furiously raging made him a harbinger of the rough and tough Hellenes who emerged from the four centuries of the Greek Dark Age and was finally formulated by his feats over a brief Greek Renaissance.

Before the Polis, or City-State

There was no urban density in the LABA alike the later Polis or City-State. During the LABA only Troy and Miletos of Anatolia came close to that model of both rural and township statehood at concerted meld. Although the first conceptualized polity, subsumed by the Polis, evolved from earliest Greeks at mass flight away from the Greek Peninsula and west coast colonist within Anatolia’s much milder Dark Age after 1100 BC. There the meld of townsmen and rustic bumpkins took a long time to gestate into a prime governance best described as urban. Refugees from Hellas upon Anatolia proved first concurrent with trends by the Age of Colonization. Organized expeditions of eager colonists reached a zenith from 1150 to 950 BCE, whereby urban entities harmonized their commoners of both rural and town folk (the damoj and laoi). Any prior tradition of such polity lies far beyond the purview of Mentör and our opera by his syllabaric writ. Mentör’s times are best characterized by large regional sovereignties or tribal lands which we should translate as commonwealth commerce entities. There’s a taint of communism about the broadly landed entities at nascent social amalgamations; but they’re not in any way comparable, or as foul as the proletariat that Marx, Engel, Lenin or Stalin made a sham of deeply venerating. Rather, the social contract that led to the polis, or poleis, evolved into oligarchy and limited franchise democracy. What was lost by either form was “a prosper alike, suffer alike” perceptual attitude of all citizens under oligarchs and demagogues. Neither form affected their populaces alike the happy matriarchal traditions of Matrons reciprocating Tenants at harmonizatiion of dual work and enterprise sharing as a commonweal.

Wilderness Bufferlands

Finally, the most stable regions of the LABA were lowland or littoral, as either surrounded by wilderness or mountainous barriers.  They were the founders or an orthodox polytheism which Demeter, Hestia and Themis got rolling until its inclusion of all deities composing the Olympian Pantheon. There were important step evolutions between the trinity of goddesses and the final pantheon  By contrast, the tribal lands of Highlanders dispersed the alpine central massif running down both mountain range divisions of the Greek Peninsula; they were religiously dedicated to the Goddess Beasts Wild (Theia Therön). Conservatories or sacral preserves acted for integration of buffer highland disallowing intrusion by lowlanders: The Highlanders were active a hunting guides, and they might have allowed invaders to trespass over them briefly. Nonetheless, the wilderness was never attractive habitat for permanent conquest by waves of hostile bands of interlopers.

Such dispositions remained bucolic and nigh idyllic until Pelops and Aiakos — conqueror and re-conqueror, respectively, over the south and north mainland divisions of the Greek Peninsula. The change of dispositions began with Pelops, after he subjugated the coastal Westlands of the south mainland peninsula. He consolidated those conquests through formal cooperation with the Southland Highlanders. They assisted his formal adoptions of petty royalties, composed of indigenous, mostly west coastal high chieftains. He resettled his foreign-born, equestrian caste of elite warriors among them, even to bringing them west and out of his homeland of birth, Maionia of Anatolia. His systematic territorial gains of Argolis and the Argolid Peninsula he accomplished through a dynastic marriage, whereby husband and wife bonded their respective hereditary landedness to each other. Afterwards, Pelops, a High Prince by birth, fell into the predictive pattern of subordinationm whereby conquerors succumbed to their wives, an imperial Great Princess in the case of Hippodameia.

Aiakos would perform much the same kind of creation, of autonomous imperial regime, through his re-conquests of territories, by which the last waves of Minyan invaders had to forego all of modern Central Greece of the Peneios River Basin. Having fully reversed or repulsed the Minya, by chasing them back to their oldest former borderlands, By then they had become too well-settled to turn back to their former homelands – above the Aegean’s North Rim Sea, the Dardenelles & the Strait of Dardanos and the north coast of the Sea of Marmara. Desperate to stay permanently settled, the Minyans rendered unto Pelops their homage and liege fealty in 1381 BC. Attaining further, after a complete capitulation of their equestrian might, Pelops let the Minyans settle peaceably as a High Kingdom. He placed them in confederation with Aeoleis, his first founded High Kingdom. Upon that stupendous outcome, Aiakos performed at maritime and overland commerce, at astute administration and by fortuitous marriages a much more expansive imperium, establishing a confederate Great Kingdom. Its construct upon the north mainland consolidated his lesser petty royal realms, falling just short of another High Kingdom that finally recomposed into later Boeotia. His underling kings, men of considerable martial strengths, served him in fealty. Eventually ruling autonomously, their descendants enjoyed “the Patriarch” who lived so long above themand. His ensuing martial successors predeceased him, but their equestrian and martial paramountcy endured on as Aeoleis and Minya until the Trojan War. Into its hostilities a second Peleus fatally volunteered all his might and force over a 10-year duration. The Minyans who fought under his son, the Great Prince Achilles, are known from Homer’s The Iliad as Myrmidons.

The Trojan War Era

A duration from mid-1266 to 1230 BC, its truest knowledge necessitates an almost complete abandonment of credence in Classical Greek Mythography. Its mythographers engendered a 30-year close of that era, whereupon it vanished and the Late Helladic Period IIIC began circa 1190 BC. We have to recognize the hard fact that the Bronze Age Greeks never actually knew who the Trojans were before Troais became a High Kingdom of northwest Anatolia. The 40-gap years became very prolific of recited epic poetry and fulsome prose accounts, such as survive from Quintus of (Anatolian) Smyrna. He lived within a coastal entrepöt inhabited by the many Greeks who had chosen not to return to their homelands upon the Greek Peninsula and/or Archipelago.

They became dubbed squatters after the Sack of Troy and the Wasting of Ilion. They were properly spoils takers, but they were far more than bare subsistence denizens that the Ancient Greeks of the First millennium BC eventually displaced by mass migration into Aeolia, Ionia and Doria. By then some eight epic recitals of considerable length had set down a Saga of the Trojan War. It was totally by and about Greeks, and not about Trojans in fealty to Great Kings over the imperial Hatti of central Anatolia.

We have essayed, of course, who Helen really was, by whom born and wherefrom her sacral matrilineage to rule the Highlanders. She lived from 1284 to 1225 BC. Her death is attributed to the vengeance of widows of Rhodes Island, acting in support of their queen, Polyxo, who had lost her husband Tlepolemos to the war for which Helen was solely blamed. This may not be a credible death, because alternate obscure versions have her dying of old age much later than 1225 BC. Importantly, she was neither Helen of Sparta nor Helen of Troy. She was an only daughter entrusted by her mother Nemesis to fostering by the House of Oebalos over Lakonia. The Wanassa of Lakonia was Lëda of Aetolia, a devoted subject of Nemesis. She was the Queen Holy Matriarch over all Highlanders of Greece. Helen, therefore, was the heiress presumptive to a new realm, a virtual imperium, the Wilderness Wilds of both mainland divisions of the Peninsula. For such a grand renewal of that realm had been prophesied, to wit, that Helen and her twin brother Polydeukes (Pollux in Latin myth) were force sufficient as combined for an arousal of all Highlanders wherever situated their tribes, phratries, and broadest regional brotherhoods.

Our book, Penelopë, Princess of Lakonia, accounts for Helen’s childhood as both a foster sister and dearest held  cousin to the many granddaughters of Gorgophonë  — the fourth Wanassa of that name; she was also  Queen Matriarch over a vaster region than Lakonia – Amykai. Helen’s only foster brother was Kastor, whom Classical Greek and Roman mythographers have often mistaken as a fraternal twin of Polydeukes. He was the son and heir presumptive of his father Tyndareos; and while he lived he had hoped that Helen’s twin Polydeukes would become is junior co-regent, by succession to his uncle Ikarios, the father of the first cousin Penelopë.

From such beginnings, and through her maidenhood and marriage to Menelaos, we account for her abductors, the Trojans led by Alexander (Paris) and Aeneas. Once stolen away from Lakonia, there next emerges her life as an Anatolian suppliant under the protection of the Hatti Great Kingdom. From their she learns that she’s to become queen consort to Alexander, High King presumptive over Wilusa. Thus she’s the successor to his mother Hekabë, the wife of High KIng Priam over the Trojans. Helen abides her captivity as the exalted matriarch over Wilusa for nearly eight years. Then, finally and briefly, she’s for two years a Trojan High Princess, no longer the queen of Wilusa, but in part a suppliant, instead, under the safeguard of Priam and Hekabë. So only very late in the Trojan War was she an occupant of the famous siege bastion, the high city Pergamon, within which Fortress Ramparts Ilion that the Greeks are supposed to have sacked.

Both as prehistory and Early Greek Mythology Helen becomes through our Bardot Blogs the subject of an entirely original biography, which ends with her later life as the beloved Wanassa of the Wilderness Wilds.

 

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