House Ascendant: Odysseus & His Family in the Early Thirteenth Century Bc.

By iUniverse

House Ascendant

presents the comings-of-age of the epic hero and his best friend by homeland Greece; theyre both famous from The Odyssey by Homer, although the book assumes our readers have not the least knowledge of them. So, accordingly, from Odysseus birth while under the care of his mother Anticleia our volume tells settings and tales about Odysseus as a boy. He meets Mentor while theyre both lads at war campaign with their fathers, both acting as messengers until Mentor becomes Ward-of- House under the tutelage of Odysseus father Lartes. An apprentice of naval command under his father, we learn of Odysseus teenage years until just past his accession to the co-regent title of Fleetmaster. Mentor, meanwhile, becomes a student and practitioner at the difficult arts of dictation through his commitment to writ inscribed entablature - itself best known to scholars as the famous syllabary of pictograms called Linear B Minoan. Odysseus eventual command over the Near Fleets of the Ithacan League has the able testament of Mentor to bring both their exciting lives through the zenith of the Mycenaean Age.

Protohistory, in contrast to our many novelistic approaches to historical fiction, employs biography as a framework against which events of authentic and plausible prehistory can be affixed. Expository fiction fills in the lost gaps by destroyed sources, while explaining robustly the regions and happenings surrounding the lives of several protagonists. It speaks, in general and solely, from the captured viewpoints of sovereigns, or of the highest peers attendant upon them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450263566

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Copyright © 2010 by S. W. Bardot

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-6355-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-6357-3 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-6356-6 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 05/06/2011

Contents

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Part 1

Anticleia’s Colloquy,

Chapter 1 Upon Mount Neriton

Chapter 2 The Naming

Chapter 3 The Big House

Chapter 4 Curious Urchin

Chapter 5 Autolykos the Diplomat

Chapter 6 The Slave Child Nurse

Chapter 7 Ithaca the Harbor Isle

Chapter 8 A Lad Graced of Dream

Part 2

The Consolidation of Cephallenia

Chapter 9 The Highlanders

Chapter 10 Runner

Chapter 11 The Brothers Son of Molione

Chapter 12 Mentor Formally Introduced

Chapter 13 Nestor and Ereuthalion

Chapter 14 The War Treaty

Chapter 15 Trial at Combat

Chapter 16 The Wanaktora

Part 3

At home and Voyages Away

Chapter 17 Five Years Apprenticed

Chapter 18 ë

Chapter 19 The Sibyl of Themis

Chapter 20 The Wound

Chapter 21 Merope’s Woe

Chapter 22 Eurycleia

Part 4

Master-of-House

Chapter 23 The League Council

Chapter 24 The Declaration of House

Chapter 25 The Dominions Under Review

Chapter 26 the zakynthian incident begins

Chapter 27 The Twelfth Law

Chapter 28 Feasting and Carousal

Chapter 29 Emissary

Chapter 30 The Kinswoman

Chapter 31 The Oechalian Bow

Chapter 32 Excursus on Training at Arms

Chapter 33 The School of Chiron

Chapter 34 Another Revelation

Translator’s Epilogue

Notes

Glossary of Exotic Names & Places

Author’s Note

Beginning with Anticleia’s Colloquy, we have by it a last part of an Archival Chronicle by Mentor son of Alkimos. The Volume runs on in three parts, through his first three Royal Chronicles, all a Protohistory centered upon Cephallenia of the Thirteenth Century BC. The sea power that displaced the imperial navies of Minoa and Mycenaea, Cephallenia became called instead the Ithacan League, for its famous harbors at Bathi Inlet of Ithaca Isle. My translation of Mentor, son of Alkimos, in redaction of the Master’s copious Entablature, composes a bildungsroman of Odysseus, son of Laërtes, from 1286 to 1270 BC.

For readers unfamiliar with composition as protohistory, or in genre as such, our definition is that of biographies of ancient personages as a framework against which events of authentic and plausible prehistory can be affixed. Expository fiction fills in the gaps which explain the regions and happenings surrounding the driving personages. Unlike novels of historical fiction, moreover, a protohistory is mostly about how known outcomes to the ancients came to the realities of their prehistory after a very long time had passed since the governing events. The entertainment was about getting from causes to effects by events, and much less about suspenseful process with exciting denouements by actions of central characters.

Acknowledgments

The informal inception of Bardot Books in 2008 has led to our third collaboration of four persons under the pseudonym of Salstonstall Weld Bardot. Our charter has been the fulfillment of a Greek protohistory from the Greek Peninsula’s two most exciting centuries within the Late Aegean Bronze Age—the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC. By necessity of its reliance upon Greek mythology, as emended to realize the earliest possible versions of the foremost sagas, our regional prehistories and biographical treatments of historic personages have been composed as expository fiction.

From that mission, we’ve arrived at a serious comfort level with fiction in lieu of canonized academic nonfiction, and at an intellectual self-honesty that our tight collaboration requires. Therefore, the translator expresses here an undying gratitude to Melody Lawrence and David Shaw, developmental editors; a fine team from iUniverse in Rachel Moore, Mara Rocky and Rosalie White, our production phase editors; and to Jerry Kelly, Book Designer & Consultant.

Our volumes shall, by their dedications, include our many other collaborators whose anonymity should no longer stand hidden. Accordingly, our first such dedication goes to L. Hugh Sackett, Archaeologist of the British School of Athens and Master of Classical Languages and Literature at the Groton School.

S. W. B.

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Frontispiece

Map of the Eastern Mediterranean within which the Settings and Locales that feature in this introductory First Volume of Mentor’s Royal Chronicles

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The Seas Composing

The Eastern Mediterranean

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The Home Sea

Of the Cephallenes

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The Mains of Crossing and

Maritime Commerce

Via the Northern Sea of the Earliest Greeks

Fig. 1. Near Ambit of the Isles. The Echinades Isles and opposing mainland in early 1285 BC.

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Vignette of

Greek Compass Rose

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Fig. 2. A Köra of the Late Aegean Bronze Age from an Illustration by Eric Shanower. This colored rendition depicts Anticleia of Gulf Phokis at the time of her marriage to Laërtes, son of Arceisius. Odysseus was born in January 1285 BC as a result of this union. Thirteen years later, they fostered Mentor, treating him like a second son.

Part 1

Anticleia’s Colloquy,

The Last of the Archival Chronicles

by Mentor, Son of Alkimos, the Highlander

Chapter One

Upon Mount Neriton

I should have known better than to travel up the mountain. The heavy heat rising off the becalmed water, so wrong for the season, and the clear cool air we could see above the mountainside of Neriton had compelled me to take my women and attendants up his long south face. Never had I felt so invigorated and healthy despite those halcyon winter days, a hot lull, remarkably so for just after the shortest day of the year.

After habitual warm drizzle, the eastern slopes had become abnormally hot. For almost that whole fortnight of the waxing of the moon, I recall, the timbers of our halls trapped the misting heat that hovered everywhere just above the shoreline. No breeze seemed to remove its heavy midday torpor. The evenings gave us no respite, and I had slept rather feverishly over those last days of my confinement. I’d become huge with the child and found almost any movement around the manor exhausting.

Yet, the higher meadows had already assumed a cool and brilliant green, while all the eastern outlooks upon foothills seemed coated in young grass. The dusky greens of the woods, as always, climbed every embankment. High up the mountain the woods held the coolest air. Usually it wafted gently down upon the face of our manor ridge. Now, instead, it had beckoned us to climb.

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Fig. 3. Ithaca Isle, The Harbor Isle, and Erissos Jut of Samë Island across the Narrows.

Samë Island projects northward, cleaving the Bay of Myrtoa on its west palisade and descending gradually eastward toward Ithaca, the Harbor Isle. Notice the Cut of Ithaca to the east, and a small cove running south-southeast of it. On the rise to the west of the Fleet Harbor, called Bathi, there is the Big House of the Cephalids, where the first three Royal Chronicles of Mentor, son of Alkimos, begin. The setting is just before the spring equinox.

I was deeply in love with my new homeland. I explored it whenever and wherever I felt disposed. The morning that I decided to go up the mountain had brought to the harbor a humid calm. The sun cast its light through heavy vapors. As the day proceeded without any breeze, the stilled heat in the house became oppressive. I needed the crisp air of the mountain. I was carried there in comfort during the early afternoon, and I had brought food with me for a late meal.

I took too much time over the meal. Once I felt the cooler air, I had no desire to make the return journey, let alone while the heat still remained heavy below. From my vantage over the Narrow between Ithaca and Samë. I gazed at the long reflection of the pale orange sun behind a gleaming haze. I gazed as the single orb became fiery, trembling upon distant water, while it was slowly blocked by Samë [Cephalonia Island].

And still I lingered, and saw, too, the half moon upon its descent into the far western horizon. Silenë seemed herself like a little cradle basket perfect for rocking a coming baby, her infant tucked hidden in the belly of her creamy crescent. Silly, yes, but all my thoughts then were of my own baby to come.

The lazy sticky weather that was so oppressive served up a kind of calm that came before a particularly fierce storm. Zephyr the West Wind drives upon the isles far more strongly than he does upon Mount Parnassos. The glowing horizon suddenly launched curved clouds, heaving up first in bright white billows, but then in steadily darkening grays that drifted high up into the afternoon sky. The massed ranks of the clouds moved rapidly toward us, reaching for the mainland in white streaks that then turned purple.

The first great tempest of a tardy storm season was upon us. The beauty of its gathered force was a rapture for me; I was soon enthralled by its tumultuous progress. After the days of soft calm, its ferociousness defined a balance point between two natures, where the cycle of one kind of weather retreated before another. It was renewed at its proper time. The storm was ominous, mysterious. I thought of the parched needs of the Mother, of her replenishing rains that moistened the soil that always brings forth the new grass and the growth of all things. I prayed for the farms and meadows, the love for the yeomanry full within me.

Then Samë disappeared under the gloom of those overarching clouds. Lightning danced over the murky line of Mount Kalon across the thin channel. Even so, I could not pull myself away, and it was only the horror my women had of typhoons that caused me to allow them to lead me away downhill to where we would be sheltered by the manor. We were well down the long south ridge when birth pangs forced me to order our halt. The storm and the onset of labor seemed as one to me, and I found great strength in that sensation. The dark sky was now fully above us, and we could see the drifting curtain of rain as it hung under the clouds and sped eastward beyond us.

Still, I did not consider my condition as a sort of plight, though the pangs were relentless and we were forced to make an encampment while I rested. My bier was brought down with great difficulty under a shelved escarpment. It was a gathering place among the shepherds, judging by a few bowls and traces of small, spent fires.

My male bearers made me a shelter from the winds, with a view of the storm as I demanded. The bier was a great comfort, even though the arrival of my child was causing me pain. My bearers were most anxious to press on. They were superstitious and very much against my giving birth in the midst of a storm. And they feared the anger of Laërtes if we were caught while still up on the mountain. The women, however, had found a hollow farther in the large overhang of rock. Assured that satisfactory shelter was available, the bearers hurried down the hillside to bring Laërtes and other assistance.

They had not been gone long before the rain plunged down upon us. The clouds seemed to break their lines and huddle together above us. It was as if they were reluctant to speed onward to the mainland. They arrested their progress along with our own down the slope of Neriton. Now my labor was strong, relentless. Now I knew that the rocky overhang would have to do for the delivery of my child.

So the birds also seemed to think. From the mounting gloom a large owl flew under the precipice. It found a perch on some roots that dangled down and looped back up beneath our stony canopy. Large eyes in a flat visage fixed upon me. The creature’s open, restful expression lent me reassurance that my time was at hand and that the birth might be easily performed. I did not feel the same danger that my women seemed to feel. They were virtually trembling with impatience for the bearers to return.

They caught nothing of that magical time.

I became heedless of the torrential rain blocking all vision of the land around us. Whether the parched earth was hard, or the rains relentless, I really cannot remember. Only that the water puddled around us, that the gorge was soon booming with plunging water. The birthing came fully upon me, and all I heard was the windy sky and the pounding of the earth with rain. The wind and the rain had a rhythm that matched the surges of the child forcing his way out of my body.

Odysseus came rapidly into our world, and I received him with a rush of relief from the short-lived but gripping agony he had caused me. In that moment, I was not aware of the great fear that had fallen upon my company. I said my own solace that it be theirs as well. I recall, too, that the night had descended early under those storm clouds, and that the eave above me dropped streams of water upon the ground just below my feet.

My women cut the umbilical cord, freeing my child, and slapped him gently to make him cry and take in his first breaths. My women wrapped him. All the time they were still whimpering in distress over the violent evening. They did not see the owl perching with impartial bearing, its head swiveling gently from side to side with casual curiosity. I knew that the presence of the owl was a portent, though of what I could not have said at the time. But I was comforted sharing rocky shelter with the owl during the storm.

Unlike the rest of the company, I was able to sleep that night. The tiny Odysseus’ moist head lay against my chest, his little body warming my breasts and stomach. It had been a good birthing. I took a mother’s pride in the reward of his cozy company. Never shall I forget the closeness of that night between the child and me. It was as though the storm had been intended to force a private intimacy upon us. I thanked Gaia Eileithyia for the rapid labor. Finishing my prayers, I opened my eyes and found that the owl had gone.

I did tremble just a little then.

The men could not climb the wet meadows and muddy ravines until well into the rainy afternoon that followed. By then I was cold and uncomfortable. I’m sure the men were furious about the trouble I had caused them. Laërtes followed soon upon their arrival. His joy in finding the child and me well made everyone calmer. There was plenty of weeping, for we are a sentimental people in the Isles. Some sobbed for my husband’s excitement, and others in relief that they would be spared further hard words from him. He must have been ferocious when they first told him I was trapped halfway down the mountain in the storm.

As they took me down the final steep slope, another thing happened that was surpassingly strange. I was being carried on a heavier bier than my own. The bearers had brought it up the mountain with Laërtes. I lay gently on my side with Odysseus tucked between my breasts. I was staring across the sky as we descended the slick ravine just west of the manor, and I saw the black belly of an enormous cloud. As it flowed overhead, light puffy clouds dropped down and coursed inward from all four directions. They swirled in light hues of gray and brown. The sun suddenly beamed from the east and bathed the earth beneath those clouds.

Because everyone’s eyes were on the perilous slope, I was the first to see the rainbow. Without thinking, I lifted myself up to see the view, causing the bearers to lurch, and the tiny one to give a sharp cry. The rainbow dropped its arc to the earth directly upon the Fleet Harbor, still quite far away, and as I held Odysseus close against my heart, I shouted, A rainbow! A rainbow! Look at the rainbow!

Well, the entire group stopped immediately. The bearers put me down and my attendants ran to me. Every face was filled with concern. Don’t you see the rainbow? I asked, pointing at it. They looked in the direction of my finger, and they all gasped with astonishment. But before I could feel relieved, their faces alarmed me further.

As they watched the rainbow climbing upward from their land, they must have taken my excitement as agitation. Usually a rainbow meant epochal change was coming to the land from which it rose. My attendants seemed to be terrified, although a rainbow was altogether a wonderful and beautiful work of nature. Certainly it was a powerful sign of good, just as thunder and lightning were signs of the goddess’ dark demeanor.

I had the comforts of home again before evening fell. For all the fierceness of the storm over the many days that followed, with the wind shrieking and everything in the house rattling and shaking, my memory will always be that it was the kindest of tempests, a sweet ferocity, a gentle deluge. And that rainbow: It was as though an old time had ended and a new one had begun.

Chapter Two

The Naming

As Laërtes related to Mentor early in his tutelary capacity:

The word that my wife needed rescue upon Neriton was brought to me while I was with her father Autolykos. He had taken the calm of that morning to be rowed across the channel, and he was to spend several days with us before going farther south to Pylos under escort and protection of the Ithacan League.

Coming upon him early in the afternoon, I had found him despondent with the loss of the properties under his former stewardship. They’d been a considerable legacy from his mother Chionë, not to say of dia-Amphithea’s [his wife] as well, hers a most considerable matrimonial demesne. He was steward now only of his mother’s dedicatory kine, now that she was dead. Yet, he remained as he’d been before the Isthmian War, overly possessive about everything under his care. He also felt the hatred of the people around him for his villainous acts during those horrendous hostilities.

I attempted to encourage him, pointing out anew that atonement would become manifest through his determined new beginnings. They were considerable and promising already, and through them he had found some assurance of the great respect that he’d enjoyed before the Isthmian War. But while I consoled him, I was distracted by everything else that was going on, and his bitterness tried my patience.

Notwithstanding, once the birth of my son had taken place, I considered it providential that the grandfather’s often postponed visit had occurred on the same day my son was born. I thought it appropriate to grant Autolykos the right to name my son. My own father had that honor under the custom of the House, but he agreed to allow the other grandfather to do the naming as a gesture toward the alliance of our clans. Father adored Anticleia for the sweet companionship she provided him in his loneliness. Her own father had earned his warmest respect simply by being her sire.

When I told Anticleia, she was cool to the idea of the naming, but her own good spirits led her to comply after a little argument. We brought the child before both grandfathers. Anticleia’s cortege, especially the adorable handmaiden Eurycleia, made a great ceremony of the presentation. Autolykos warmed to the occasion, though he was nervous with excitement at the responsibility of the naming. He asked for a few moments for consideration, and took many more than a few, sitting in silence as all waited. Finally, he spoke.

Daughter, it’s a kind land that can forgive the past so soon, and give me the blessing of naming the child of its leading house. He paused and took the time to look from me to my father, and then back to me. I understand, Laërtes, that there is something that makes this honor even more earnest—a custom all have agreed to set aside for this occasion. So, it is also a kind House that honors one grandfather, he said, touching his chest with a humble gesture of the hand, "over another who is supreme over these seas surrounding us.

"I’ve prayed for forgiveness for my crimes of greed and deceit. Now you have both answered my prayers, perhaps sooner than I deserve.

May these Echinades Isles be blessed by this child of my daughter’s birthing. Blessed be her maternity, come to fruition in the wrath of storm. May her first child’s judgment be hard and rightful, and may love triumph in him over rage. Let us call this baby Odysseus, Child of Wrath, that we never forget that good may be born from evil times surpassed. The mother was born at the onset of Atreus’ fury. May this birth mark that fury’s end.

He laughed, and then we all laughed. I was thrilled. It was a strong name. It rang of Storm Wrath, the god king known to our Hyperborean ancestry. The crone elders would greatly approve. I could see that my own father felt the same majesty in the name. He lifted the baby and pronounced him a true son of his father’s line. Then, still holding the child aloft, he gave the customary blessing to Anticleia for the gift of her fertility.

All the landed matrons, in the days that followed the birth, did her and the babe honor, bringing fine gifts and vows of protective prayers. There was joyful weeping among the folk. We are a people easily moved by strong feelings for a child. They wept the more profusely for our spectacular good fortune in having a son as our firstborn child.

Chapter Three

The Big House

Mentor, the Master of these chronicles, recites of the years before he became the ward of Laërtes and a fostered second son of Anticleia and the Wanax.

I have just addressed the year [1285 BC] before my own birth, at fully thirteen years before the Fates brought me to Ithaca and the greatest friendship of my life. I reach back over that span of years to tell a beginning - about the lives of three people who are especially dearest to my teenage years. But here, too, I’ll begin to tell some of the lore of my early years that I lived and learned upon Ithaca Isle, where I became a resident ward of the House upon the Harbor Isle, the House that soon enough would be named for its founder Cephalos.

My first lessons from Laërtes-wanax were by way of contrast between an Ithacan fashion of building and that otherwise by most places of the Great Land. The latter tradition, said simply, was to maintain huge edifices bouldered in ashlar as set within sprawling fortress ramparts. Their residential compounds they built inside bastion enclosures called a citadel or high city. The rocky land provided all the materials necessary for construction. That compulsion for colossal scale had come with the travelers and warriors returning from the coastal powers of the Anatol. They brought masons, mostly Levantines, from their travels. The masons acted as building supervisors over vast corvees of laborers commissioned to quarry, shape, and lever into place all the massive boulders and quarried stonework, and to oversee their layouts in ashlar.

Ithaca and her sister isles, Laërtes-wanax explained to me, had never needed walls of stones laid flush and rearing high. The water’s verges, on all sides, lapped mostly upon steep cliffs that were ample protection against intruders. And there the men were watchers, conditioned to gaze over the waters. Many coves and all-important havens leading inland were sheltered behind outer seawalls. Their pebbled sides faced the deep water. The large ships of naval and merchant fleets were moored inside moles. The majority of their crews encamped on the shoreline or behind natural breakwaters, and constituted an observant frontal line against any hostile fleets bent upon pillage. The winds themselves seemed to protect the isles, pushing against approaching ships.

These natural forms of protection were complemented by the bustling enterprise of our own ships, and the crews on the beaches residing in well-manned encampments. Ships were always ready and easily launched in large numbers. Unless they were out at sea on hire to some sacker of cities, the ships were at home undergoing repairs. The captains were recruiting new crews, or patrolling up and down the Ionian Sea. Foreign ships avoided the isles, and those that did approach carried elaborate credentials speaking to their peaceful purposes.

In short, containment upon the isles meant livestock in pens, and families in huts that shielded them from the elements. Buildings were made of huge timbers. Ithaca required many buildings and barns for the various enterprises of the League. The populace of the northern part of the isle used the two ports that faced the mainland, by the inlets known today as Phrikes and Kionion. The southern populace, dwellers upon or just below the largest inlet, called the Cut, congregated around a large manor compound built atop a ridge. The manor proper lay in a sag of the broad hill’s crest, equidistant from two havens: deep water Bathi or Fleet Harbor to the northeast, and the beach portage of Mesobingli directly west.

The manor’s buildings were constructed entirely of timber over socles and slab-laid cellars. Thick beams held up their long, steep roofs, and the walls were buttressed by such logs as well. An ancient fear of pirates determined their tradition of location in the heights and at distance away from the shores.

Elsewhere, roofs were flat slabs of mortar to provide household servants an airy platform for cooking and other activities. Eschewing slab roofs for peaked ones instead, throughout the isles the ridge tops of the roofs were constructed much like the spinal tongue-and-groove framing for the hull thwarts of the war vessels of the inhabitants, though the buildings rested upon walls of mud-packed rubble. Whole tree trunks stood upright as stanchions, or slanted at acute angles to buttress those roofs, all of which were heavily thatched and sometimes sodded over. The immense marshlands of reeds, scrub willow, and brush savanna along the mainland provided amply good roofing materials.

Arceisius had commissioned the manor buildings to have recessed deep balconies. His royal compound offered grand panoramic views to the northeast in the direction of the Cut, the eastern outlet of both major harbors that formed the thin waist of the isle. The manor compound was also built as a circular barrier against the ever-battering west wind. The foundations of the buildings had to be gouged especially deep. The roofs of these structures were much simpler, though, composed of a covering of wattle and reeds heavily chinked and smeared in the excellent clay available throughout the isles. The wide eaves almost touched the rounded, gouged embankment into which their facades were nested.

Wide south- and east-facing porches ran an extensive half-circuit around a set of verandas that were broadly terraced down both sides of the hill, extending along the cart paths descending toward the harbors at both sides of Manor Ridge. From a distance, the separate buildings looked like one broad, continuous roofline, leading the people to call the manor the Big House. Porches and loggias provided shaded breezeways against the eastern rising sun, and allowed the rain to fall into trenched gullies that formed gutters down the slope.

To this boy, an immigrant of the southern Highlanders, Ithaca and her sister isles of the League looked neat and plain with their huddling rooflines. But I soon found that those simple, lumpy forms disguised their generous and sometimes vast interior proportions. I learned that the prototypes of this type of construction derived from the roofs of buildings in faraway Hyperborea [High or Extreme North]. The ships once built in that distant land, unlike those of Crete or of Karia by Anatolia, bore a resemblance to the longboat dugouts of yore attributed to that highest north. Hardy seafaring men had come to the isles from there in several sweeping migrations. The first of them had earliest wed the native race of women called the Teleboea, and had happily settled among them.

Later, the Hyperboreans went forth again to far-flung lands, their sons returning after many generations. They were by then known most popularly as Lelegans. They did not remain Lelegans for long, however, because they, too, melded with other recent immigrants off either mainland division of the Great Land. These were the people I’d slowly learn about as the Taphians. By them had come the unity with the Teleboea by which Cephalos had established his own second lifetime among mankind. For his many deeds of greatness, moreover, all foreigners, including my own nation race of Highlanders, had come to call the Islanders by a single name—the Cephallenes.

Ithaca, my new home, was a wholly primeval landscape. Small ponies ridden by skinny lads were maintained for rapid courier service throughout each isle. In cycles, the lads, or equerries, were sent back and forth to the north mainland coast to put the ponies out to pasture. Haulage on the isles was by wagon or drays drawn by goats and tiny domesticated wild donkeys. A small lad myself, I winced at first at the fact that they seemed so greatly overburdened by their loads. But often I must stand aside in awe of some fifty yokes of oxen teams that were dispersed by royal stewards throughout the isles, beasts constantly on loan from an elite cull of their sturdy breed of bullocks and withers. They were truly magnificent animals as they plodded before the heaviest kinds of plows, sleds, and timbers hitched to their yokes.

These thrifty people limited any kind of exterior ornamentation. For example, they used the League’s cache of bronze primarily to cut and split timber, and to shave and smooth beams and planks. Only very rarely did they use bronze decoratively, the way the great houses of the mainland did with their thick slabs of bronze laid down for the grandeur and glorification of their thresholds.

Of the many buildings tucked into the slumping ridge, most combined residential use with the functions dedicated to the looming and fashioning of woolen apparel. Textiles were central to the internal commerce of the isle. They were used as export exchange and for domestic barter, including barter for crops provided from the few high matrons native to the isles.

Wherever such industry as the weaving of apparel was conducted, the chatter and bustle of women attended its routines. At first, the Islanders seemed mostly a race of women to me, but I learned that was only because their men were so often at sea or involved in naval enterprises at the ports. The women were highly energetic, for the most part very handsome, and always attractively slim of face and figure. They kept themselves fit and hardy. In contrast, my own nation was generally populated with fat and squat women. Over-indulging in fatty snacks and sweetmeats often occurred once their years of maternity were over.

Small children abounded in and around the workplaces in the compounds, darting back and forth to their mothers who worked in scattered groups within the various courtyards or under the various shaded verandas. The ground floors of the lodges were places of congregation most pleasant in winter, but too suffocating in hot seasons. They were arranged like long thin rooms, where storage of enterprise goods combined with communal activity. The lodge walls served to support the levels above them, where large, open chambers with buttressed loggias were situated. All were most suitable in breadth as the dwelling place for an entire royal household.

Where the roofs peaked were the long ceilings, all composed as though dugout hulls had been turned over and seen from well beneath them. I learned more about how warships were built from those ceilings than I ever could by viewing a warship that was afloat. Those peaked ceilings gave me a top-down perspective into the bilges of those ships, and it was very intriguing to me, especially since I was still just a lad.

The residential manors proper were separated from the central compound, or, as we boys always called it, the Big House, by a large esplanade of olive and fruit trees. High above the broad foundation of the main manor was a trellis made of light cedar that disciplined the sprawling grape vines. The arbor ran through all broadsides, the tendrils of the vines heavy atop them, until the sturdier vines must also weave an espalier along both verdant sides.

I saw that well composed trellis of vines for the first time when it was twelve years old. It was fruitful, but the vines were still a meager baffle to either wind or strong sunshine. Then, suddenly to my own reckoning, they thickened and grew dense, as if they had flourished at my own behest, after my arrival there. That dark yet marvelous place I’ll always identify with dia-Anticleia. It was her creation, her favorite workplace. Conceits of a self-centered lad aside, that grape arbor thrived for her, by her, on account of her. Its shade flourished over her happy entourage, her busy guests and her matrons of honor who were always about her. The plush verdure imparted a twilight glow upon the Dia’s always sunny presence.

Off that terrace, on its eastern edge, lay twin manor houses, U-shaped structures joined at their apexes. The trellised veranda led to the one on the west side, where two long, wide wings ran on opposite sides of an open courtyard. Each wing had an open, high ashen hearth basin set within it. One wing was used as the manor’s commissary, the other as a large hearth room with a capacious storage chamber below it that was reached via a stairwell at its far end. On the outside of the commissary wing were working areas, some of which were partly covered, where servants built fires to boil water or prepare meats for grilling on spits over the hearth basins.

The other house was much the same, and the two together allowed for separate households for the young and senior wanakes [that title, in plural, meant the co-regent chiefs-of-chiefs]. Together their floor plans could serve amply as a hostel for dignitaries, although such visitors were rare during my earliest years of residence there.

Crossings between the manors required only a few steps under a covered walkway, with thick doors on each side of the passage. Stairways led up and around the vestibules, respective to each manorial division, to reach the second story above, or to converge upon a large open gallery chamber, achieved by another hallway, after a walk-up of only a few stairs from ground level. The apartments of Laërtes’ family led off both sides into their upper story’s wings.

Dia-Anticleia’s generously proportioned private chamber adjoined that of her husband, after she had an outside stairway built of mortared shale that led by paved stones down to her apparel works. On the other side of the second story, there were benches on which the household servants could sleep fairly comfortably, whereas the children‘s rooms lay at the far end of the wing, along with a small alcove reserved for their nurse.

Such was the essential layout of the Big House. It was repeated with a slightly different configuration for Arceisius-wanax’ apartments and guest quarters on the second story of the adjoining manor. However, much of the ground floor of that equally vast dwelling, I recall, had come to be a desirable workplace for dia-Anticleia when the weather was inclement. Her active cortege of honored resident and guest matrons kept busy at the drop-weight looms and at stitching stretchers there. In the worst weather, their bustling presence tended to intrude upon Arceisius’ privacy, but he enjoyed those matrons’ high energy, and so he only complained when a storm’s duration overly prolonged their intrusion.

During good weather, the fronting court, terrace, and trellised verandah served as dia-Anticleia’s workplace. Her tall looms, sampler stations, and racks of spindles were spread outside and under the shading vines. Wide benches were arranged in a crude grid as seats for her seamstresses, their baskets of discarded spindles littering the ground.

The Dia assembled the most skillful commoners of the isles around her. They were happy in her constant company and with her astute supervision of the finest finished apparel of which the isles were capable—by far the best in the League.

Dia-Anticleia’s royal suite was composed mostly of honor- matrons or visiting maidens from far beyond Ithaca. Most of the isle’s own governing matrons also chose to be near her and her apparel activities. Their dwellings were clustered around the manor house. They were simple and tall multistoried edifices behind the stacked-level facades that strengthened the corners of every major lodge. Families could bond together easily in this dense communal pattern, for it looked like a sprawling palace community even as it was well made up of attached separate dwellings. Far from being a palace, though, there were no ramparts, walls, or berm defenses, except, that is, for all the hugely timbered buttressing that allowed all those structures to abut one another.

There wasn’t anything like that vastness of timbered edifices anywhere the mainland. Nor would I have discovered from any great fortress such a strong sense of tightly connected community as I felt and knew at Manor Ridge. Within such generous space of the compounds, the days were spent under the domination of women. Yet, there were many common men serving as porters of newly washed wool, of baskets of spun twine, or as packers of various finished works of bulk. These were mostly middle-aged men, forty to fifty-five years of age, and usually they bore some infirmity from their travails at sea.

The centralized location of the textile trades also allowed an easy intimacy between the children of many social stations. Daily quartering with the working women was an ordinary extension of their years of infancy. Boys and girls, be they slave, free, or noble, were left together all day to play games invented from their own imaginations.

Boys were particularly closely mothered, until their tenth birthday, when they were sent far away to become shepherds or apprentices at some craft. Many became underlings working in the harbor compounds below the manor houses. As children, though, the roaming play between them and the girls led to abiding friendships. They overcame every formal ordering of insular society: separation of the sexes, divisions of station or wealth, differences between occupations, even differences of capabilities.

In this setting of bustling enterprise, the small royal family of the Cephalids lived the way a child orphaned of his mother might dream of. But it need not be known as a place of dreams. Dia-Anticleia made it an everyday reality, a part of every warm season’s diurnal existence. From my awakening at dawn until sleep came at twilight, my existence was a welcome retreat into family. That, therefore, is the place of all my fondest memories—of the deepening warmth amidst family, and of the happy community of enterprise under its light and yet constant toils.

Chapter Four

Curious Urchin

Mentor’s recitation of his teenage year learning continues:

Odysseus grew up in that manor, staying close to his mother and the other children in the damp rainy season. But in the drier seasons he wandered habitually through meadows and woods with his nurse Eurycleia, a girl slave, in tow. They took with them any companions who wished to go along. Eurycleia had a mild manner and was outgoing by nature toward all children; and she and her charge had many followers—many more girls than boys, although I cannot say why.

I’ve been told by stately high matrons how profound their memories remain of those adventures they enjoyed as small girls when they visited Ithaca with their exalted mothers. To have Odysseus as their companionable guide was their most exciting experience at that age. They say that afterward they were confused about who was the most delightful, the lovely Eurycleia, only a few years older than they, but full of a worldly spirit; or the energetic, effortlessly friendly boy, so much younger than they but always the leader.

Still, I shall begin even earlier, when he was first a very little boy attended to by a half-grown girl. She was not yet, but getting close, to her maidenhood.

I recite mostly from dia-Anticleia herself:

Before his tenth year, or when he was in my care every day, my son was either much too present or too wholly absent during our daytimes together. In the rainy season especially, when we crammed the looms close together around the hot hearth of Arceisius’ dining hall, the boy’s clever and curious ways were both pestering and hilarious. He was always asking my ladies why and how, and they were embarrassed most times that they could not explain what they were doing. They had always done what they did and had always taken what they did for granted. He’d ask one question after another, but never simple ones. Always he asked why this or how that.

We would end up chasing him away. But he would sneak back, only to resume his exercise of dogged curiosity, and then we would have to laugh at his sneaky ways.

He acquired a clever way of asking his questions. He was very direct, which made the women of my attendance laugh in appreciation. He began with a casual way of inviting answers from the most haughty of them. They would soften under his banter, discovering something in themselves under his scrutiny. Their responses to him were not only better thought through than their usual replies to questions, they were also sometimes truly brilliant recitation. They’d laugh in astonishment at themselves, but they would always hug him because he made them feel so good about what they were doing.

In another way, he could always make the lowliest of my women feel that they were artists, although his skill of speaking with them was a little strange for a small boy. At first, I think it was because he could speak their native languages so easily. Later, he would even give my suite fluent instruction. And he could be quite fresh with them, which they greatly enjoyed. At times, I was on the verge of reprimanding him. But they adored him even when he was being a nuisance and a tease. And they seemed more content with their work when he was around.

Fig. 4. Genealogy of the House of Cephalos

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I recall one of his most remarkable questions, one that he posed to me when he was just seven. I have put its answer to a lifetime practice.

The fashion of my embroidery was then the simple presentation of animals, fishy creatures, and sometimes human figures. Noting my special style, he asked why it was good to have repetitive figures on a single piece of embroidery? Why not arrange them together? I shrugged. I had never thought about it before. I told him that the design was my habit, that it was the easiest routine, or that it was most tasteful that way. As I answered, I began to think of new designs where animals and humans could work together.

He looked at me with those lavender gray eyes as though my flippant answers were hiding something from him. Why, he asked, didn’t I use events, such as hunting parties, the fleets, or the festival celebrations of the League? Why not balance the animals with human subjects? I told him that of course we could make such designs, but we didn’t need a precocious urchin such as him to make the suggestion.

He grinned at me and said, My idea or not, Matai, why not do it?

A few days later he found me making a try at it. Next, he embarrassed me with his lavish praise. My women all laughed aloud at my reaction to his enthusiasm.

My next piece of embroidery came alive in my hands as a splendid tunic border for Laërtes. It was a scene of Nilotian hounds running with spearmen in pursuit of a running stag—rabbits and birds scurrying and flurrying away from that chase. It was imitative of Nilotis’ wares, but it was much more lively than their stiff presentations. And the next embroidery I did depicted the crews aboard their oar-breasted ships, each figure dwarfing the ship, with dolphins flanking each ship’s swift progress through a wave-curled sea. And then another matron was provoked to embroider a robe. Its waist depicted Cretan women in spirited procession before gracefully postured young men. They were driving sturdy bulls and rams to a celebration of thanksgiving for their good fortune.

The shrewd little imp paid that matron the highest compliment: Why, he said, it looks just like the Minoans made these!

The women giggled with shared delight and pride.

In the summer, though, we rarely saw Odysseus. I had put him in the care of the dear Eurycleia, a beautiful girl only seven years older than he, but who was growing ever wiser as he grew taller and skinny. He managed to make of her his wilderness forester. The other children loved them, since Eurycleia made sure that he involved even the shyest and meekest among them in his games. And his pranks! I had to make many apologies for him in those early years because of his naughtiness!

Often, the littlest children feared to follow him overland. But he was unmoved by the Islanders’ superstitions about the high wilds, which were one of his favorite haunts. Out there he was always exploring and discovering and practicing with his bow or sling. He would bring home hares and birds, but they were only his excuse for his wanderings that often took him far from home. Many times I received a weary herald from some matron telling me she would be putting him up for the night, that his travels to her side of the Cut, the other side, had taken him too far away for an easy return before dark.

In the final year of his childhood, he journeyed away alone, as the time for Eurycleia’s service to him drew near to end. He had lost interest in the small children who had loved to follow in his wake, and he chose to draw close to my marriage father instead. Because of Odysseus we all came to call Arceisius-wanax simply, by the name of Grand. I found them always together, usually midway into some long story, my boy the avid listener of his grandfather. His daily absences allowed his devoted nurse her freedom from constant attendance upon him. Her age and station had already changed her status in the household, and she now frequently attended upon me while I was at my routine governance of both manor households.

Despite the band of children who had followed him into the forests and fields, Odysseus had always loved the company of his elders far more than that of people his own age. If he wasn’t away by himself, he would be with the old fellows at the distant artisan compounds. Or he would observe the bartering in other manor compounds during the special market days when the country matrons visited with the produce of their outlying plantations. He knew all the market days and routines, and could explain them well, better even than most of the adults could.

While he was a wanax’ only grandson and the most likely heir to the Ithacan League, he had a keen appreciation of the low born about him. His calm serious manner and his level attitude toward everyone earned him their trust. They were open with him in a way they were not for most of us. They gave him the right to ask his precocious questions. Most of the common men assumed a dry humor in responding to his incessant queries. His style of humor, usually plays on the numerous pet terms of their crafts and trades, brought entertainment to their lonely occupations. He could awaken their pride in their skill and creative flair by using that same querying manner by which he had influenced my own and others’ decorative designs.

At the end of every summer, I took Odysseus east with me. In the early years, when he was only a baby, my time was spent mostly at the AcroKorinth. There the League did business with