The Archival Chronicles of Mentor son-of-Alkimos
BOOK ONE: PRELUDE TO A NAVAL GENIUS
This Book stages off Cephalos' mother, the Eleusian High Prestiess and entitled Diomeda, Hersë, born an Attican Princess. There's also his father, Deion, a martial-at-arms most capable of imbuing his son with the broad tactical repertoire that he exercised for eight intensive years at overland warfare against enemy encroachments throughout the north mainland of the Greek Peninsula. Throughout Cephalos' boyhood and early teenage years, his parents and extended branch royal family -- the sons-of-Kekrops or the Kekropids so-called -- offer him ample resources and collaboration. Family spirit and enterprise shall enable the lad highly skilled artisan commoners and highest ennobled comrades. Even as a lad he was strongly intermediary for the Kekropids, his mother among them. Their own career ascendancies increasingly introduce men nearest his age. They coalesced into covert and ambitious coalitions of royal youths, both sexes of them in avid support of his naval genius. Against him in this first book are the High Kingdom of Kadmeis, a precursor to Ancient Thebes; and the Minyans of the North Plains, a nation race anachronistic, thus too often misnamed, as the Achaeans.
His Birth in Eleusis:
Without previewing the extensive mythological analysis that has distilled Cephalos' biography, allow that he was born in 1389 BC and lived until 1305/1304. His life performed a destiny to enact two entirely separate lives, the first beginning with his birth at Eleusis upon the Saronic Gulf. This open inland waterway cleaves the Greek Peninsula from the east as far as its Isthmus. His mother was Hersë, a princess born to the House of Erechtheus over Attica as an only daughter of Kekrops and his wife Metiadusa — a high priestess and supreme sister over the Sanctuary of Eleusis. She lived as a little girl in Eleusis after her father, banished from Attica on account of calumny against his religious edicts, died at her age almost six years old;. She then returned with her mother to Attica upon the accession of her brother Pandion, who ruled Attica for twelve years most effectively and competently. He, too, was deposed, however — by the same patron clan chiefs that had deposed Kekrops. Hersë returned to Eleusis where her mother abdicated her sacral entitlements, easing the now princess-and-priestess over two distinct realms. She attained her most influential title of Diomeda, to live as the Supreme Sister Sacral & Majestic over Eleusis Shrine and its dedicated conservatories upon the inland Thriasian Plain of Greece’s north mainland MesoGaia.
Attendant that event of female sacral accession to a venerated title, Pandion came to treaty compact with his much younger sister Hersë. He intended to advance his own sons over any son of Hersë by any future restoration of their branch loyal lineage and dynast to rule over Attica. Thus a severe compromise of the claim rights of any son that Hersë, his sister, might bear. It was sworn agreeable that her any son should subordinate himself to his first cousins, the Kekropids. She bore Cephalos in order to affect a great naval peace complimentary to what his father Deion was performing to a great peace throughout the north mainland. In return for her acquiescence to Pandion, moreover, Eleusis was safeguarded as a most hallowed matriarchate. Instead of bearing an heiress, Hersë bore an only son, Cephalos.
Father and mother divorced after eight years elapsed. Their failure to conceive together an heiress presumptive to her title of Diomeda. As subsequent events and developments would prove, Hersë would forever regret why and how her estrangement from Deion. She would never regret, however, that her only child in life was by such a capable consort, because Deion rewarded her so manifestly through his siring of Cephalos.
Later, his lifetime upon the Eleusis Sound shall culminate in his attained royal and naval illustriousness. That shall also win him a brilliant and divinely gifted greatest love in his life. This first book introduces her as Skia of Aphidnai, a girl four years older than Cephalos by that coastal dominion of East or Bay Attica. She's introduced as a grown girl whose gift is her incarnation as Eos, Titaness Goddess of the Dawn. Eos' Sanctuary layed out east coastal Brauron of Bay Attica, who predestined Skia to receive her at her age twelve years old full promise to become the paramount High Sister of her generation at holy orders.
BOOK TWO: CEPHALOS & THE KEKROPIDS
Attica & The Kekropids by the House of Erechtheus:
Pandion and Hersë may have complicated the many earliest outsets in life of both Cephalos and his four much older first cousins. Their fellowship with him must have had impasses due to competition with each other. If so, those cousins were mostly appeased by Cephalos, a conduct wherefore all of their generation c and would prove brilliant on account of their faith and trust in him especially, and eventually in each other. Pallas was often of a contrary attitude, and would prove a rival of Aigeus. Even so a very little boy had faith in that cousin, who reciprocated as the only son of his beloved aunt Hersë. Aigeus became a Regent Custodian over Attica in the late 1380s, before he became the region's King upon his siring of the son Medeios off the lap of Medeia. Pallas’ vice-regency over Aktika, the Lower Peninsula of Attica, embraced a considerable cattle land and foremost repository of mineral wealth in Laurion. Nisos became the vice-regent over Aktë, or Gulf Attica, although he soon abdicated that vice-regency for the sake of the advanced agedness of his father Pandion and mother Pylia. Pylia was the elderly co-regent over Alakathöos upon the Upper Isthmus footed upon the north mainland of the Greek Peninsula. Lykos took over his responsibilities of vice-regency by a meld of his eastern based land stewardship and appointed vice-regency, East or Bay Attica, or Aktaia. The four brothers, therefore, became the highest royal Kekropids of a unified, succeeding generation to Pandion and Hersë.
Despite great disparity in their ages – the Kekropids by Pandion and Pylia only a short generation apart from Cephalos –, they made him their fifth paragon. Honoring their youngest male relative through their own great capacities of grant to commerce objectives, Cephalos seized on their opportune ities as offered. They also proved immensely cooperative and able at all their collaborations with each other. Nisos and Lykos greatly assisted each other's rapid ascendancies into adult life through their many agencies of maritime commerce especially created for Cephalos to fulfill. The Ward of Eleusis thereby became a ship builder by myriad apprenticeships of his boyhood. He also was an intermediary to conjoin all the rim powers along the Saronic Gulf. Throughout their only and youngest cousin’s prime years of manhood and earliest influences over Attica, therefore, they had built a dynastic ascendancy for their branch royal House to that of the House of Erechtheus. They aimed through his entrepreneurship a fullest burgeon of prosperity for all the rim powers by unifying their manpower capabilities of greatest artisanship, especially those of shipwrights.. For expository purposes and thematic scope,
Book Two centers upon Cephalos' earliest biography in voiced rendition of Mentör's best known hagiography of Cephalos. The book is also a vast regional proto-history set against the definitive prehistories of the North Rim Powers, about Attica in particular.
Cephalos at Juggernaut
By Book One Prelude’s end, Cephalos has performed a meteoric rise to the status of Merchant Prince over foremost maritime magnates by all the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers. From 1380 onward he progressed his precocious youth at naval leadership over them all by 1374. By 1360 BC, the end of the series Cephalos Ward of Eleusis, he had become a first ever Navarch (Admiral), a Consort Prince, and a High Prince Consort successively. Along that passage of his lifetime he began as a commodore over a small coast guard, from 1374 BC ff, and a navarch over an armada intent upon total rebellion against Crete, most particularly and strategically from 1368 BC ff. His earliest formed navy, of warships and merchant ships at convoys together overseas, became determinedly set against a broader tableau most definitively known from the prehistory of Crete. That so-called Mother Island remained an imperial sea power under its House of Minos, but its once broad ambit and cartel maritime commerce was had entered its years of rapid degeneracy beginning 1370 BC.
By the end of Book One Prelude, moreover, there has occurred his first sight of his greatest love of his lifetime. Her first sight of him is by promise betold her from her Goddess by her means of Living Dreams together. Before the first sighting, the youthful lives of Cephalos and the priestess postulant Skia must run their ordained parallel courses as strictly separated. A great waiting, therefore, follows upon the epiphany of their Fates to finally become conjoined by the skein of their Fates entwined.
BOOK THREE: PRINCE CONSORT OF MAGNESIA
Book III in series furthers our restoration of what Classical Greek Myth expunged of Cephalos’ biography. He’s already become paramount for his earliest formative coalition of small navies attendant to a great maritime commerce. Those navies center around Greece’s Saronic Gulf, where his naval genius, introduced through Book II in their series as briefed above, has him realizing the Second Era of Great Oared Vessels. His establishment of a coherent war navy of small class galleys, prototypes to the famous Triakonters of the era, shall prove propitious to its realization, howsoever immemorable by the PreClassical tradition of Classical Greek Mythography that sought to have its onset forgotten.
We now move beyond his birthplace in Eleusis. Sacredly and royally born through his mother’s twain exalted lineages, they propel him by her stature to Magnesia, an early and great Kingdom further up the north mainland. Ther in particular the layout of the small Bay of Pagasai, at the head of which Iolkos. He’s had a falling out with his first cousin, the Regent Custodian of Attica, Aigeus. While It shall prove brief and remorseful on both men’s parts, Cephalos makes a judicious and daring absence from Attica to hasten a reconciliation beyond an unjust rupture. He has to leave his naval ascendancy for his three best friends to carry onward, while he takes up the invitation to suit for a very young, supposedly promiscuous princess— the future Queen of the then obscure realm, Magnesia. The year is late 1272 BC.
Book Three Consort recites of the late 1370s, with Cephalos at his late to middle teenage years. Beginning with an invitation to court the Princess of Magnesia, a former Aeolian Kingdom, Cephalos discovers it a feudatory realm under the High Kingdom of Minya. In part to the earliest consolidation of north mainland kingdoms under the Great Peace of Aiakos son-of-Aegina, that young Great King is another man of great and superior destiny. Born upon the Isle of Oinopëi near the south mainland end of the Saronic Gulf, and later name an island after his mother’s name, Aiakos has confederated Aeoleis and Minya as loosely dominant over three Midlands realms that are fated to become Boeotia. His mother Aegina’s appointed martials-at-arms have brought Aiakos to imperial stature at his age only eight years older than Cephalos by 1381 BC, after four campaign years at sustained hostilities.
Aiakos’nascent Great Peace over the north mainland of the Greek Peninsula brings Cephalos into pursuit of major maritime objectives for Attica. His many ways affirmed genius is applied to how Magnesia’s Trials-at-Bridal can win him his next naval and maritime advancements through a first marriage of most illustrious consequence.
Odd, though, that he arrives Iolkos and Sesklon by far the youngest of the Princess’ invited consort aspirants. His most mature rivals, however, have even less experience of fray and melee than Cephalos has experienced as an utterly ruthless slayer of pirates. So, and eventually with opportune help from his father Deion, Cephalos becomes a quick study at fine dueling and other physical ordeals imposed upon him by the mostly incompetent referees who are staging the conducted trials-at-bridal for the Princess of name, Phima. An apt student, he’s soon instilling murder and mayhem into the hearts of his vicious rivals and supposed superior men-at-arms. His good results as a hopeless seeming land lubber become of his infuriation, especially after his feats are denigrated by a greatest ever equestrian culture of these yesteryears. Fury, nonetheless, reveal him greatly underestimated.
Of course, nothing is ever hopeless for our doughty hero of these longest times ago. We make him real from a farthest past of Greece’s Idyllic Age, even as we barely know him to have been dauntless over a long lifetime. So no wonder that our contemporary narrator Mentör can hardly bestir any suspense into his eagerness for Cephalos’ predestined, wholly successful outcomes. A precocious boyhood at juggernaut has become a prodigy athlete at-arms, even at dueling horsemanship, thus by extension a lithe and quick courtier of a princess who shall take him, her beloved prince consort, at both their earliest prime years at a Love’s discoveries. A man easy to riddance of formidable obstacles, the king and queen over the hosting tiny realm of Haemonia prove particular challenging. By ignoring them cleverly, he serves his bride as an ideal intermediary between her and far more formidable liege sovereigns than her parents. Much too of further assistance arises from the Princess’ lowliest subjects. They may be “a little people,” but they drill and hone our hero into his best aims for their future queen, whereby they shall come to their own ascendancy much alike his own through the hazard of his purposes.
Finally, once the prince consort of his bride and awhile a treated marriage of deliberate brief term, their wedlock faces contests and vettings far more seriously dangerous in order for a royal marriage that can endure for a lifetime. Cephalos elevates his immature princess out her distressed teenage years and into the luminous legacies bequeathed her by her illustrious late mother. He has to liberate her from her virtual captivity under a dullard and unambitious father, a petty king over Haemonia, until she can know just what Cephalos’ perfect service to her and the young Great King Aiakos shall afford her by Magnesia’s best possibilities.
BOOK FOUR: HIGH PRINCE OF ATTICA
Cephalos was a very late patriarch within a well-arrived age of illustrious mythic personages. By this serialization in restoration of what Classical Greek Mythology has expunged of his biography, Cephalos addresses boldly the formative coalition of small navies that he’s centered around Greece’s Saronic Gulf. His naval genius, introduced through three previous books, shall eventually realize a second era of great oared vessels. His establishment of the small-class galleys called triakonters attends the time covered within this fourth book.
This series spans a half century of Cephalos’ ascendancy throughout the Gulf Rim Powers, as we now move beyond his birthplace in Eleusis. He’s twice born royal and he has carried that stature back to Attica from a brief consortship to the Princess of Magnesia.
The five books in this series examine fully the decades from the 1390s to the 1360s BC. This fourth book, The High Prince of Attica, recites of Cephalos’ early years of highest royal ministry, beginning with his exalted marriage to High Princess Prokris of Attica. A sacral majesty, evocative of Attica’s deep roots in a matriarchal dynasty, Prokris is the sole surviving direct descendant by 1370 BC when Cephalos marries her. Prokris is of rich, great landedness while also a failed postulant to Artemis in her earliest divinity known to the first true Greeks. Having breached her vows of chastity far too many times, she’s been cursed with barrenness, which she cannot accept. She cannot realize Cephalos’ potency, but his overwhelm of her soon proves a boon to stymie any divine redress against her. He takes over her extensive governance, also that of Medeia, Queen Consort to King Aigeus. Accordingly, in addition to his naval exploits by Brauron of Bay Attica, and his immense orchestration of overland caravans and mercantile commerce over deep seas, he fulfills the highest ascendancy respective to both those illustrious heroines, as most certainly real personages of Greek prehistory.
This book, therefore, proves out a fourfold ascendancy in continuation of a series that shall eventually pit great wealth and abilities by maritime Greeks against imperial Crete of the wicked Great Minos and his loathsome son, the prince-Minotaur Asterion.
Cephalos, Ward of Eleusis is a five-book volume of translations of the Archival Chronicles of Mentör, son of Alkimos (born in 1285 BC). An artist at the contemporary writ by syllabaries, his composed literary style of protohistory renders the earliest Greek regions as first known and termed in accordance with their royal dynasties. We accept the serial challenge that the Chronicles require through our immersion in Mentör’s late-age mastery. By it great reward, a meld of the historicity inherent in Early Greek Mythology, along with copious discoveries since affirmed by legacy scholars off the digs. Thereby, S. W. Bardot plagiarizes unabashedly at his delivery to us of a robust Late Aegean Bronze Age. A Homeric scholar of expertise in Greek cultural anthropology, Bardot adapts his mastery to Oldest Greek through the Linear B decoded writ of the Bardot Group. His is the conceit of its legacy scholars to him, all conservators of whole repositories of syllabic script decoded from 1960 to 1986. It and much earlier scholarly colloquia of antiquity have brought forth Mentör and his own most personal sources of writ, by both dictation and real recitals in overview of the most famous Greeks living during the Late Helladic Period IIIA1.
This fourth book in the series, The High Prince of Attica, returns us to the foremost heroine of Books I and II. Skia of Aphidnai has become a high priestess of Brauron Sanctuary since we left her a blithe and winsome maiden of eighteen. Now she’s a lithe and winsome twenty-four years old, still a maiden and obedient to her Goddess and her invested powers. The Goddess now wants to mate her long chosen Cephalos, and he’s doomed to a most condoned bigamy by all civilizations known! Accounting her much missed, we bring her back soonest, resuming her gain upon Cephalos for his own sake. Eos the Dawn makes brilliant prospect ahead, bringing to Skia her own “love of a lifetime,” and to herself a delicious immortal incarnation at fullness of soul, body, and mind.
BOOK FIVE: NAVARCH AND WAR Commodore
Books Four and Five are a pairing of book-length presentations of Cephalos and his fully ascended and culminating naval endeavors for Attica and all the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers. However, unlike Book Four’s elaborations upon the happy years of his marriage to High Princess Prokris, Book Five describes the inevitable unhappiness which Prokris’ long known barrenness to bear children must cause him. Because she’s so obstinate to deny her complete infertility, the years after 1365 BC are fraught ominously over the term of marriage until 1362.
They persevere compatibly in all other respects of his stewardship of her and their superbly concerted high princedom together, acting as always since 1370 for the successful reign of Aigeus and Medeia over the lastingly unified Attica and their Saronic Gulf League.
The oppressions of still imperial Crete have also been halted, if not yet completely nullified. Book Four’s culmination, by two great naval battle successes in the spring of 1365, wiped away most all oppressive presence of Crete at naval warfare upon the maritime commerce mains. The Great Minos’ “White Sea” and “Cretan Sea” are no longer his lakes. Even so, he reacts to his reverses by accelerating the Second Tribute Takings to 1362 instead of 1360 BC, and he schemes to destroy his unknown assailants. Such quiet obstinacy should not have stifled Cephalos’ considerable success to finally make riddance of that great penance and the Great Minos as one and the same objective. He readies all his followings and supportive allies for a full rebellion and complete secession of the Saronic Gulf from any further maritime oppression by Crete. At first, he seems to carry on well, but the matriarchal petty rulers and governing matriarchs over the MesoGaia prove too loyally steadfast to the House of Minos. Cephalos must weigh the tactical advantages of maintaining his considerable momentum without their support, but Prokris’ woes over their barren marriage weigh him down, whereas the cautiousness of Medeia his powerful and influential liege queen must compel him to relent and compromise secession. Further to the accelerated next tribute takings is also their coincidence with the renewal of his marriage, which Prokris cannot continue for lack of progeny.
That dilemma, moreover, becomes moot because 1364 BC becomes the year that Eos the Goddess of the Dawn shall fulfill her promise to High Sister Skia of Brauron, her venerating mortal incarnation. Her marriage inevitable to Cephalos, we have wholly four books by the lead up to this fulfillment of two lives spent apart until that impending troth. Eos herself and her mortal incarnation as Skia want a divine, not just a sacral marriage, or hierogamy; and committed to the time is at hand, the supreme High Sisterhood and Sacral Elders become fully aware, then determined to accommodate their tutelar goddess and paragon high sister. By all means, they must vouchsafe Skia legitimate consortship with Cephalos. His always lesser awareness, but always strong suspicions of that divine prospect has him at mind to yield, by taking Skia to himself over a vernal festival held at Brauron Cove. His epiphany of her and the Goddess as one is both sensational and overpowering.
He manages the separate marriages through Skia’s two pregnancies and her deliverances to term, until 1362 when she’s pregnant and third time. Cephalos finds himself completely in love with two women despite all that explicit bigamy must so seem to our prudish modern sensibilities. Cephalos even competes for Prokris at her trials of suitors towards her remarriage -- his vying at then his only licit means to further invest himself in their wedlock together.
Eos proves uncooperative, however, She offers through him a bribe of Prokris, whereby to prove him her utter infidelity to himself since 1365. He must take disguise as a pretend suitor, not himself, but so feigning he must otherwise seriously seduce her. At that he’s successful, and she overwrought of passion over his sham self. The bribe from Eos once presented to Prokris proves the end of the estranged marriage to Cephalos, to which he reacts by repudiating her forever as still her triumphant suitor in sham semblance.
His defiance actually begins Bardot Books’ interpretation and carefully wrought denouement of a famous Early Greek Myth, “Cephalos and Prokris.” For Prokris in her fullest sense of shame of herself manages both to seek and also to gain reconciliation, by at last accepting his sacral marriage to and paternity of children by most fertile High Sister Skia of Brauron. All would seem to end well, therefore, but Prokris’ extreme jealousy of Skia and her prolific maternity shall undo her at last, even after Cephalos succeeds yet again to bring his four large war fleets against the Great Minos of Crete. For all else said of his early life and saga, he carried on to personify unanimity of all mainland Greeks to purge their seas of imperial Crete’s sea empire forever.
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