Cephalos, the Ward of Eleusis: Books I-III

By S. W. Bardot

Cephalos was a very late patriarch within a well-arrived age of illustrious mythic personages. They had real biographies, although Cephalos' has suffered mostly expunction by Classical Greek Mythology. He and other founders of "Houses" ruled within the Late Aegean Bronze Age, their realms at domination of both seas and mainland divisions that compose the Greek Peninsula. By this serialization, Cephalos becomes paramount for an earliest formative coalition of small navies that centered around earliest Greece's Saronic Gulf.
Here we have a half century of his ascendancy within those Rim Powers from his birthplace in Eleusis, even as he's twice born royal by his Attican-born mother, Hersë, the acceded Diomeda, or High Princess, over Eleusis Sanctuary. She's also a greatly landed governess from her illustrious mother, Metiadusa. The Rim Powers of Cephalos' greatest intimacy were the Upper Isthmus, the three united parts of Attica, Salamis, and Aegina Islands. The parents of Cephalos influenced this shoreline coalescence by accepting and settling the turmoil and influx of many displaced persons from the north mainland, by movements of Aeolians and Aeolidans that characterized all his boyhood years at the beginning of the fourteenth century BC.
Book I, Prelude to a Naval Genius, stages off Cephalos' mother, Hersë; and off his father, Deion, a martial-at-arms most capable of imbuing his son with the broad tactical repertoire he exercised at overland warfare and by dueling in melee. Throughout Cephalos' boyhood and early teenage years, his parents and extended royal family offer him ample resources and collaborations that would enable skilled artisan colleagues and ennobled comrades their own career ascendancies. Increasingly men nearest his age, they coalesce into the covert and compelling coalitions that bring the last ever imperial Minos over Crete to utter ruin.
Book II, Cephalos and the Kekropids, brings us to Cephalos' teenage years, the 1370s BC, when his naval initiatives can confidently progress through the extensive peace and prosperity that his father, Deion, has created for all of the north mainland. There is a juggernaut of prodigious feats by Cephalos as he develops overland commerce by caravans and is assigned a gamut of shore offices and commands. This Third Archival Chronicle also introduces Skia of Aphidnai, the mortal incarnation of eos the Goddess of the Dawn, and Cephalos' greatest love.
Book III, The Consort Prince of Magnesia, picks up in Cephalos' mid- to late teenage years, as he is establishing a coherent war navy and pursing maritime objectives for Attica. An invitation to court from the Princess of Magnesia can win him further naval advancements if he can outlast more mature rivals at feats of horse and chariot, dueling, and other physical ordeals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781951568177

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CEPHALOS

WARD

OF ELEUSIS

AN

E-BOOK TRILOGY

Title

Copyright © 2022 by S. W. Bardot

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be copied,

transmitted, or reproduced without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Designed by Carolyn Eckert and Mary Wirth

ebook ISBN: 978-1-951568-17-7

CONTENTS

BOOK I: PRELUDE TO A NAVAL GENIUS

BOOK II: CEPHALOS AND THE KEKROPIDS

BOOK III: THE CONSORT PRINCE OF MAGNESIA

Title

Copyright © 2015 by S. W. Bardot

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be copied,

transmitted, or reproduced without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Designed by Carolyn Eckert and Mary Wirth

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

S. W. Bardot is the pseudonym for the Bardot group, scholars of antiquity from 1925 to the late 1970s. That leaves the dedication of this book to me, as publisher.

Men of considerable maritime culture and accomplishment upon the sea mains and fairways are well charted by all four genealogies of my forebears. Their few luminaries were enhanced greatly by their women, as I have been. So many predeceased them, but they married many times and well. Women at nurture of me did nothing else than simply love me. So, accordingly, this book is dedicated to my grandmothers, Martha Phyllis Whitney and Katherine Saltonstall Weld, my mother, Adelaide Weld, and her twin, my aunt Kay, and, finally, my three aunts née Whitney and five née Weld.

The help in bringing this book, and its four sisters that shall follow, to release spans a lot of time, considerable constructive critique, and great publishing art by this finale year, 2015. Yes, this has been a difficult work to bring to modest length without tedious disclosure of its essential research. For the final pages here wrought I give my utmost thanks to Fred Levine and Trisha Thompson at Small Batch Books. By their publishing craft I was allowed truly prodigious editors, Josh Parr, at getting me right, even to bending or molding me while I shed my worst habits, and Allison Gillis, who has brought it to finesse. Very great thanks for book design and layout go to Carolyn Eckert and Mary Wirth. Together we’ve made a big work digestible. I also look to the past, in gratitude for the developmental editing by Melody Lawrence.

—R.B.W.

Honor now to them all! Tell forth the sons of Royal Houses! Never shall the tide of time drown the tales of [our] heroic forefathers. Their lives are a defiance of death: endless glory [attends] their procession!

AFTER THE CHORUS OF

EURIPIDES’ ANDROMACHE,

PERFORMED IN 425 BC

BOOK I: PRELUDE TO A NAVAL GENIUS

CONTENTS

Early Major Characters

Translator’s Foreword

CHAPTER ONE — The Mother Hersë

CHAPTER TWO — The Father Deion

CHAPTER THREE — His Birth

CHAPTER FOUR — His Earliest Childhood

Transition

CHAPTER FIVE — Skia: A Life, A Love

CHAPTER SIX — Daunting Times and Developments

CHAPTER SEVEN — Skia Visits Brauron

CHAPTER EIGHT — Finales

CHAPTER NINE — Two Last Years at Aphidnai

CHAPTER TEN — Aigeus’ Outbound Pilgrimage

CHAPTER ELEVEN — Aigeus Homeward Bound

CHAPTER TWELVE — The Elusive Aithra

Translator’s Epilogue

EARLY MAJOR CHARACTERS

in order of their introduction:

METIADUSA, 42: Sacral heiress to Eleusis; wife of Kekrops since her age fifteen.

KEKROPS, 67: Declarer of the House of Erechtheus, a dynasty over the earliest Ionic Greeks; third successor to the Founder and Patriarch Erichthonios. Now the Medon, or High Chief, over Attica.

PANDION II, 26: Son of Metiadusa and Kekrops, soon to become the fourth successor as High Chieftain over Attica.

METION, 64, and PANDOROS, 62: Kekrops’ brothers and usurpers.

PYLIA, 23: Pandion II’s wife, the Meda, or High Matron, over Alkathöos.

LABDAKOS, 58: High King of Kadmeis, as briefly at reign. He has spent most of his life as High Prince and Warlord over the Kadmeians.

LAIOS, 34: High Prince, son of Labdakos.

AIGEUS, 19: Son of Pylia, adopted son of Pandion II; the natural son of Skyrios(-ion).

PALLAS, 17, NISOS, 15, and LYKOS, 12: Sons of Pylia and Pandion II.

LYKASTOS, 62: Minos of Crete and Supreme Thalassokratör over the Minoan Imperial Navies.

From Their Births:

HERSË: Daughter of Metiadusa and Kekrops.

DEION: A man of warrior caste by Dauleis, the later Plains Phokis.

CEPHALOS: Son of Hersë and Deion, the born Ward of Shrine to the Sanctuary of Eleusis.

Famous Personages from Early Greek Mythology:

AIAKOS: Born c. 1397 to Aegina, supposedly by Zeus, during her years in refuge upon Oinopë Island, which would later be named for her.

IOKASTË: The future entitled euryanassa over Kadmeis, wife of Laios.

TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

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 nonfiction. 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 nonfiction release to the reading public, we no longer dare cite the convention of our first fathers of history—that of formal and fictional expository prose, by way and by intent and by means of teaching young people about their earliest forebears’ 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 protohistory. 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 nonfiction 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.

Mentör’s writ, by strong contrast, 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 fourteenth 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 Mentör 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 nonfiction.

His composition will remain, nonetheless, academic expository fiction.

The Greek Peninsula by ambit of Cephalos in exile.

Satellite overview of Central and Southland Greece in the fourteenth century BC.

Genealogy of the House of Erechtheus.

This is a reproduction of the tabulated Late Aegean Bronze Age by the Middle Dating Method. The method now used is the Latest Dating Method, which most scholars find an artificial nuisance imposed by Egyptologists to dominate relative dating of Minoan, Classical, and Anatolian studies based on artifactual judgments of the material antiquity that survives.

With due consideration to prior academic precedence, the Translator adheres to the Middle Dating Method for dating of the historicity latent Early Greek Mythology as originated by the Great Oral Tradition of the pre-Hellenes and earliest Greeks who are subjects of the e-books compiled herein.

The Greek Peninsula and Archipelago.

This is a miniature version of the famous map produced for the mythologist Robert Graves for his book The Greek Myths. It is still a bible of ancient place names, or toponyms, for Classical Greek Mythology based upon Ancient Greek history. The translator has adhered to earliest known names of regions and places that the pre-Hellenes and earliest Greeks rendered orally. I have used the accepted alphabetic orthography of Oldest Greek, which itself is derivative of their most authentic phonetic rendition of Homeric Greek as can be deemed acceptable for academic writing. We avoid the Latinization of Homeric Greek or the Anglicization called Greco-Roman orthography.

CEPHALOS

WARD

OF ELEUSIS

BOOK I:

PRELUDE TO

A NAVAL GENIUS

CHAPTER ONE

THE MOTHER HERSË

the saronic gulf of the earliest greeks had long prospered as an epicenter of small realms surrounding its expanse; most of them were closely allied with each other, and all but the Isthmus of Ephyrëa were longtime tributaries to imperial Minoa of Crete Island. Their subjection was light to carry, and they enjoyed considerable autonomy by the end of the fifteenth century BC. I begin Mentör’s serialization of Archival Chronicles a generation later than that century’s closure, by setting Cephalos’ parents within the turmoil encroaching upon the Gulf from the north in the 1390s BC. For the Minyans were driving southward upon the Midlands above the Saronic Gulf’s two primary buffer lands: the immediately bordering Eleutherais Woodlands, and the Asopos River Valley just above them.

Before immersing his readers in that geography and time at the opening of the fourteenth century, Mentör affords the background to the mother and father:

Hersë, Cephalos’ mother, was born in the twenty-fourth year of her parents’ marriage. Her mother, Metiadusa, the Diomeda of Eleusis since early youth, had married Kekrops when she was fifteen. The union had produced the second Pandion immediately, but was not fruitful again, despite Metiadusa’s many pregnancies, until Hersë was born.

Metiadusa’s sacral legacy was far older, far more eminent than any royal attainments that had come to her through her marriage to Kekrops. She chose him as her consort for life, which meant that he was the less honored of the exalted couple. Agreeably his status within Attica was that of her supreme sovereign, but his patron clan could not and did not ever exceed her ascendancy. He and his clan were relative upstarts, moreover, their royal status much too recently attained. He was never a new man, or ever so deemed within the social hierarchy of the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers; but he had to prove a superbly accomplished sovereign to build his realm up to the stature of Metiadusa’s. Being lesser by his birthrights than Metiadusa, he had to vie against the considerable discord that every succession to the House of Erechtheus seemed to have incited. All his forebears had fought close relatives and rivals during their early reigning years. Regardless that they had brought into perpetuity his branch of royal lineage over Attica, his son, the brilliant second Pandion especially so enabling, ensuing fathers and sons had each to sustain the enormous challenges from rivals of their respective generations.

Amazing, therefore, that the Kekropids would endure two usurpations, and yet restore themselves twice over, only to recede ultimately into secondary royal status at last, after the infamous Theseus’ many failures as a sovereign had ruined his branch line’s royal legacy.

Extremely aged at Hersë’s birth, Kekrops enjoyed his little girl as the final accolade of a long and successful reign. To acknowledge his gratitude officially, he bestowed a fifth part of the consecrated herds of Attica to Eileithya the Midwife. The kine were sent down to Amnissos of Crete, to the Goddess’ preeminent shrine there. To Eos the Dawn, the tutelary deity over the MesoGaia, his wife Metiadusa accorded the same fraction from her herds through a special dedication of their pasturage to the farthest east sanctuary of Brauron. Her consecration must have been an invocation, for a blessing of her increase by the belated providence of her baby daughter. Certainly, Brauron [the modern Vravrona] is the most blessed place of the many we shall know through these Archival Chronicles; and, too, because our author Mentör places Eos, an earliest tutelary goddess over the fertile MesoGaia, above all other cult deities in kind, even over the Atticans’ patron Goddess Athena. By the later devotions of Cephalos’ descendants, Eos even stayed paramount over all deities of the later Olympian Pantheon as their specific cult devotions emerged as the New Beliefs of the earliest Greeks.

Those proper thanksgivings by the parents of Hersë proved insufficient against an immediate visit of divine disfavor upon the father Kekrops. Close upon her birth there ensued a usurpation by his brothers Metion and Pandoros. The impetus of that reckless and ultimately repudiated overthrow resided partly in their brother’s dotage. Yet it also reflected the deeply felt religious dissent of a high priesthood under the powerful uncle Xüthus, Kekrops’ uncle. A devotee and exploiter of a new cult devotion, that to the Consort God Poseidon, the ambitious uncle had spent most of his life subverting the Old and Ancient Beliefs in the Great Goddess and her offspring of titans and titanesses.

Notwithstanding Kekrops’ sagacious temporal reign and his later, highly important re-establishment of oldest religious precedence for Attica, two rival branches of the House of Erechtheus had deposed him. His much younger wife than he, hiera-Metiadusa, was reduced to bringing her aged, rather confused husband out of his homeland and into her own, a neighboring homeland, Eleusis. There she repaired her husband’s condition but not his fortunes. His dotage lapsed into dottiness, by which an exuberant second childhood that he could enjoy with little Hersë. Kekrops lived a contented forced retirement upon his wife’s plantations of the Thriasian Plain. He died there when Hersë was only five years old.

Mentör then says:

Despite her very brief years with her father, Hersë did not forget her memories of him from her infancy. She could later describe every moment with him, even when she had herself grown as old as he was when he’d died.

Hersë was filled with grace, even from her infancy. The crone elders of Eleusis Sanctuary insist that she skipped before her ninth month, but that she didn’t utter a word until well past her third birthday. That she was the Goddess herself in miniature thereafter I cannot doubt. In poise, manner, speech, and stride she gamboled about Eleusis as though she were the Corn Maiden in some diminutive springtime carnal conformation. Ever a bright, ebullient child, she was that dream that all aspiring mothers have for their daughters yet to be born. She served habitual days of merriment to both her parents, as though by a special grace bestowed from the Goddess, at the time when retributive adversities upon the royal couple were at their worst.

Our modern sages say that a happy and blessed woman makes a life not worth telling. Her existence is too lacking in vicissitudes. The pleasure of her attainments become boring as they continue uninterrupted. Mentör was able to discover very little adversity in Metiadusa’s life.

There was no tainted destiny in Hersë, either, despite some far future reversals that were to demean her briefly. Despite Mentör’s unremitting curiosity about both their long tenures over the Sisterhood of Eleusis Shrine, he found only cherished memories of both mother and daughter—about two exemplary women of brightly benign, always generous dispositions toward worshipers of all devotions. . . . . . . Yet even as I may personally doubt the effusive praise still spoken of Hersë’s early childhood, the idea that her whole life was founded in some divine immanence seems indisputable to me. My own hard-won gifts being somewhat like hers, albeit by no such grant from birth, I can understand that her native inspiration had a more formidable force than mine does. I know above all else that she was truly a mnemonic savant, that rarest of all adepts. The Sisterhood of Eleusis still declaims upon her perfect memorization of their most ancient recitals. Her voice retained clearly songs in their aboriginal intonation, each brought to enduring recitation by her honest interpretation of speeches that we no longer learn or use.

As rendered by her with astonishing projection of voice, her recitals related with an unfailing precision the stories of our ancestresses; about whom among them came from where; in what order; and how land was vouchsafed to each of them as a perpetual legacy according to their lineage. The holy recitals declaimed upon the divine provenance of the Earth Mother herself, as her bequests to those ancestresses so soon born after the Creation.

Such feats of memory Hersë had accomplished fluently by her eighth year. She began then to nurture lesser savants of her gift, including a few most special lads. By her example they acquired that special confidence in their abilities to recite abroad the legacies of yet other holy shrines endowed by the Great Mother. Hallowed places longtime lacking in adepts such as Hersë were invested by her protégées with an ability to relay their sacral heritage into perpetuity. Most remarkable of all her attributes, what she recited and the way she recited it had a profound effect on her auditors. Her versions became the authorized ones, followed fatuously by her students for their own practices.

Such very special lads became the greatest heralds of their time. . . .

The influence of Hersë’s mother, Metiadusa, upon her aptitudes must have been pronounced. The guidance of the Hiera must have begun from the first years of the family’s forced retirement—from Attica into Eleusis. That Hersë was no less well directed after both mother and daughter returned to Attica, in regained majesty, is attested by the sensation that Hersë caused for her true native people after the sudden, fortuitous accession of her brother Pandion to High Chieftain over Attica. Just short of eight years old, she seemed so superbly well-spoken, of a voice at projection far exceeding her years. Already promising a loveliness of form, she was tall for her age; that lent dignity and ease of comportment to her every posture at recitation. But what she said of the oldest recitations since the Advent had the Atticans imbued with a fullest sense of thanksgiving for her having been born upon their land, while so obviously by the nurture of Eleusis as well.

For immediately upon Kekrops’ death, almost six years having elapsed since his forced retirement, broad clamor and riot deposed the co-sovereigns Metion and Pandoros. The internal strife led also to the banishment of the uncle Xüthus to Mount Parnassos, with the resultant total collapse of his extortionate brotherhood. The former Prince Pandion, who was the long beloved Consort of the Meda, or High Matron, Pylia of Alkathöos, was invited into his rightful succession. It was his destiny to rule Attica brilliantly, popularly, most profoundly for twelve years.

Duly arrived, then, the First Restoration of the Kekropids.

The Eleusinians, among Mentör’s many source informants, say that Metiadusa returned briefly to the Citadel of the Potnia Tritogeneia. She abdicated her title of Diomeda of Eleusis while continuing her excellent plantation governance there and upon the smaller Rharan Meadowland. She effectively conjoined the latter to the Attican MesoGaia, and asserted herself in sacral governance over both.

Because her daughter Hersë was a princess born upon Attican soil, the much younger sister immediately attained highest standing within the postulant orders of high city Athena. By her urbane presence among her brother’s subjects she grew over the next few years into the maiden stateliness of that patron goddess, as tutelary over the craftsmen laoi who skirted the Kekropia. Within the hallowed olive grove of a sacred precinct the Hiera proclaimed Hersë’s ever faithful service to Potnia Athena. By that ordination, she was accepted as a divine providence duly delivered—once, that is, the Atticans could regularly attest to her psychic gifts. Hersë came to know the Goddess for her two most formidable aspects—as the Maiden Daughter of the Goddess Dispenser; and as Maiden Wisdom, the still-disputed Matron Daughter of Crone Themis the Forecounselor.

Mentör, therefore, affirms for Attica a dual mother-daughter relationship much like that of the Matron Goddess Demeter [Divine Mother] and Persephonë [Slayer of (Winter’s) Blight]. That was no accident, of course, but it must surprise us modern readers of the Master that these early antecedents to a mature religion of a later millennium had the early force to carry their precedents so very far into the future.

IN EXCURSUS

Progressive Creations

While Hesiod remains the academic canonical authority upon the origins of Greek deities, his disgust with the Ancient and Oldest Beliefs as a fundamentally matriarchal religion needs some annotated discussion here. The earliest Greeks emerged from several religious evolutions of pre-Hellenes, until a series of etiological myths of creation. The First Creation, from the Void, was by catalysis of Eros, or Love, whereby the fusion of ethereal Nyx the Goddess Night with Chaos God of All Force. The offspring of their Big Bang together was Eurynomë. By the Old, rather than Oldest Beliefs, she was deemed the Pelasgian Mother Goddess.

She’s supposed to have laid an egg, the Omphalos, from which both Theia Ourania and Theia Thalassa were hatched. They were, concomitantly, the first titanesses of Sky and Sea; as such they manifest the Second Great Creation. In the abstract, moreover, they were envisioned as an endless horizon of elemental air and water. The Third Great Creation was by their mutual parthenogenesis, by contracting those limits and forming their sister of trinity, Theia Gaia the Earth. The Old Beliefs then espoused that Gaia/Gë accorded with the Ancient Beliefs, Okeanos and Thethys, proving a duet of god and goddess at paramountcy over five other First Couples. By this particular creation, which remains obscure and highly abstract, the god of each couple has some attribute of force or energy or power. The goddess of the couple was physical, material, and emotional, for the reason that passions and feelings were earliest believed as tangible.

The Final, or Last Great Creation, was Gaia’s, whereby all living things took earliest animate form, either through her parthenogenesis—with the implied imbued essences of her sisters Sky and Sea (air and water)—or through mating with her sons the first titans to produce anthropomorphic deities such as giants, monsters, cyclops, tritons, and, of course, mankind.

The serial creations, we must understand, were deliberately simple and limited, although they evolved into multiplicities of divine creations by the long era of a divine consolidation from which the New Beliefs rather abruptly emerged. I do not deal here with the emergence of the Olympian Pantheon. Further annotations shall prove specific to each Olympian and their most important precursors, by earliest deities that weren’t necessarily pre-Hellenic Greek.

As for Metiadusa’s own temporal governance, Mentör hardly underestimates her reluctant performance as a competent land governess. But other deeds earned higher praises of her than from him. She merrily consecrated the Citadel Kekropia to her husband’s memory. She caused the Sacred Way to be built to Eleusis. Later, she brought the Sanctuary of Brauron closer by cartway thoroughfares. Along them she built and popularized hostelries, and soon enough they were inhabited around by the rural skill castes under nearby governess matrons of large plantation demesnes. Because her induced feeder cartways ran mostly north-south, Metiadusa is credited also with the unification of Upper and Lower Attica by the fertile buffer zone of the MesoGaia.

From Metiadusa, Hersë would learn during her early teenage years the able management of tilth and husbandry and how the integrated yields by contiguous lands along the MesoGaia made up a rural construct of numerous small matron commonwealths. Hersë’s innate sense of the Earth Mother Goddess as the All-Holy-One must also have been by Metiadusa’s inspiration. Hersë, successor to her mother’s sacral titles and duties at Eleusis at only her sixteenth year, was remembered nonetheless for her own great sophistication and most learned application.

Of Hersë’s consecration to the specific offices of the Diomeda, by sacral birthright, and about what that investiture first entailed, Mentör shall tell us later. But first let’s address how and what he introduces about the sire of Cephalos.

CHAPTER TWO

THE FATHER DEION

Deion, the paleopatËr’s father, was born in the recently oppressed land of Dauleis. That small region lay west of the Lake Midlands, the heartland of later Boeotia and central Greece. Its western hillocks and winding vales lay separate from both the High Kingdom of Kadmeis (a precursor to Thebes) and Orchomenos, whose western verge of fertile basin drains into Lake Kopais.

Deion became an itinerant man-at-arms as soon as he’d achieved proficiency. He became expert at light skirmishing by tactics of swift maneuver and covert strategy in hilly woodland warfare. He resettled first near Phokis, where he proved his prowess to the High Matriarch there, Lebadia (from whom an important plain later took its name). Her realm, despite its autonomy, was then a loyal protectorate of the High Kingdom of Kadmeis. At any call to arms from that quarter, she enjoined Deion’s caste of men-at-arms to Kadmeis’. For her fidelity to their imperious warrior ilk she won spoils’ apportionments off the High King Labdakos’ gains from warfare.

His realm, however, can be defined by reference to certain complications that attended his accession to power.

Many small but successful farming communities composed Dauleis together with her near neighbors. They had no matron plantation tradition such as Mentör would have known by that idiom. They were easily protected by small force, or they were easily recomposed after a few stray trespassers might trammel them. Quickly passed rampages made for resilience in the Dauleian people, and created a proclivity in her young men toward a proficiency at some weapon of choice.

Despite that resilience, the hit-and-miss tradition of intermittent wars had to end. Deion’s home community became utterly defenseless against new settlers who arrived as whole migrant families under belligerent clan leaders. The nomadic ways of their amalgamated tribes were too often in pursuit of permanent conquest. Formidable waves of conquerors, the equestrian champion Minyans paramount over all, were driving the established indigenes out of the north central mainland of the Greek Peninsula, compelling those clan leaders to render their people subjugate to conquests for permanent territorial gains.

The first waves of incursion had enjoined the displaced to inhabitants of the Upper Midlands, pushing the settled Aeolidans out of their transitory settlements after an earlier vast dislocation from Plains Aeoleis of the Great Peneios River Basin. Once the new settlers arrived, moreover, the Midlands showed fatal weakness as a fragmented region of disunited matriarchates. For whatever features any of those small lands had not yet offered before, for permanent occupation by much earlier bullies, suited those newest trespassers of horse, cart, and highest equestrian caste very well.

They found the Midlands identical to their own stolen homelands in the far north and northeast of the Euxine Sea. What had served cattle well beforetimes served even better for horse pasture and the breeding of war steeds for chariots. The Aeolidans must bemoan a second displacement after a first by their earlier invaders, the main waves of Aeolians, who suddenly suffered very much the same plight of forced flight southward. Second time and first time displaced settlers became a newly amalgamated people, nonetheless, and by including in their refugee migrations the Oechalians, a people masterful as archers and sling-spearmen, they conquered north mainland territory inland of the Saronic Gulf and above the Isthmus of Ephyrëa.

After the Minyans had conquered Orchomenos and the Lake Midlands, the flux of newly constituent neighbors became the happy inhabitants of the Asopos River Valley. Initially they squatted amongst the meek and wholly unhappy subjects of a Meda, or High Matron, Aegina. It was deemed her ill fate that she had attained that status so young, as barely a nubile Maiden Heiress to her mother’s realm. Fortunate, therefore, that her very fertile land required a dense population to realize its best potential as a commonwealth agronomy. The interlopers contributed strong means to a restoration of whatever the native rustics had briefly forfeited to them perforce, as they shed their patriarchal and nomadic legacies in exchange for the prosperous and traditional coexistence beholden to, thus in fealty to, Aegina. That prosperity accomplished, the great potential of the land released, word passed northward about what they’d found in Aegina’s and other southern matriarchal regimes. That word included how very vulnerable were the native inhabitants. The Aeolian race flooded into the Low Midlands, pushing their own kindred Aeolidans down upon the Isthmus that divides the Greek Peninsula.

The enormous influx of conquerors also smothered Dauleis with Horse-tamers. Doughty men-at-arms such as Deion must soon have sensed the futility of holding any sustained muster against intruders of elite equestrian caste. The Dauleians had to suffer droves of squatters, and make do with a new existence as a native ethnic minority. Hardly alone in such vulnerable circumstances, Deion left his homeland in order to find himself a new land and a more promising liege sovereign.

He was typical of his caste in that quest for a powerful patron such as Labdakos. The days of stalwart martial champions under the landed governesses were fading away. His own caste had usually joined communally with the manorial plantation societies, with the status of occasional armed retainers. The sovereign champion for the women of the manorial societies was usually a co-regent, her Consort Home Protector—sometimes an uncle, oftentimes a father, most often a husband and the sire of a landed governess’s several offspring. Such men were barely higher in rank and status than the ilk into which Deion was born. Each lowly master-at-arms spent his life in wait for whatever combat he, a steadfast minion, must perform as champion of some exalted maiden. Leisure, preparedness at arms, and the perpetual restlessness from keeping quiet a violent nature, attended the aspiring champion-at-arms until the next summons into battle.

Mentör then expounds:

Deion was atypical in that he showed an early ability to invent combat tactics particular to whatever special warfare came to hand. He was also distinctive in eschewing the hauteur and dullard’s lack of curiosity that so typifies the armed retainer. To his enduring good fortune, he never was too overly beholden to his sovereign liege’s genius-at-arms. Instead, and here all my sources remark upon him with emphasis, Deion was independent-minded, to the ultimate benefit of both his High Matron Lebadia and her assertive patron overlord, the High King Labdakos. He was highly respected for his self-initiative. And he was capable of great generosity to the meek and defenseless dependents of his lieges. In all this he was helped by a handsome physique, a certain braggart gallantry, and a pleasant disposition toward his fellow man.

Somehow he sparked special recognition from his fellow masters-at-arms. Upon the ferocious advent of the Minyans, who were driving the Plains Aeolians down upon the Oechalians and kindred Aeolidans, Deion made a broad recruitment from the entire scramble. Rallying his distressed peers of caste and ilk, he had them retreat south as an elite force, abiding there briefly in the hope of finding that perfect sovereign liege who could retain their band as a true standing army. He intended to lead each young man he recruited to champion ranking while they progressed together through their inspirited youth.

Deion’s elite force acquitted itself with excellence for Lebadia, who was suffering the backlash of the newly oppressed and displaced Aeolians. Next he exceeded himself for Labdakos. Several fierce campaigns against the rampaging Minyans, drawn down by an alliance with barely subdued Orchomenoi directly against Force Labdakos, convinced the High King of Deion’s genius as a martial-at-arms while only a yeoman war leader.

While Labdakos tangled with the Minyan subjugated Orchomenoi, Deion took the bigger fight by leaps and dodges across country, his maneuvers ever northward of the Lake Midlands. He centered his first campaign along the alpine ridge of Mount Orthys, a small mountain range between the Upper Midlands and the Great Peneios River Basin. Gaining an overlook of the latter by the passes from the south into its lowlands, he carried his force across ideal chariot warfare terrain. Having hurdled unhorsed border provocateurs out of Haemonia, a small kingdom below the skirts of Mount Pelion, he invaded where the real enemy resided—the newly conquered territory of loosely settled Plains Minyans. His engagements there led to a temporary repulse of their entire invading force. Then, reversing his assaults, he rubbed out the most recent braggart conquerors of the Upper Midlands.

Still, a single genius at his kind of light-armed tactics couldn’t do all that a warfare of repulse required. An onrush of dashing charioteers trampled the gently sloped lowland below the Sperchios River. Their maneuvers culminated in a late campaign’s feint, as though to surround Labdakos’ rear guard. His supposed support of Deion, at his far vanguard in the north, failed because the High King withdrew to thwart that daring chariotry. Deion was caught above the advances, only to find even his rear guard removed and his force naked of support to consolidate his triumphs. Just as the campaign season came to an end with a long delayed winter recess, the vanguard Force Minyan against Labdakos ended their feint and retreated. They drove all the newly displaced within the resultant void of battlegrounds into devastating sweeps of panicking refugees. They again invaded the Asopos River Valley to co-opt the harvests there.

The High Matron Aegina, earlier that summer forced into flight with all her entourage of dependants, took suppliance of Oinopë Island. There the sacred precinct of the Goddess Aiphia (Cretan Britomartis as alternatively named) welcomed her into holy orders, soon to advance her to their supreme sister. Having become a refugee, and later a sovereign of most benign governance, so Oinopë Island would be eventually named for her forever.

There, too, Aegina and her honor matrons reared their sons off anonymous warrior sires, nurturing their boys for a future day when they must fight to regain her Low Midlands. It may amuse modern readers that much later Aeginetans deplored their forebears as so many bastards of matronymic names, for which they could not establish any genealogy based upon any ennobled patronymic forefathers. Yet foremost among all those small boys was the famous Aiakos, the greatest bastard of them all, whose siring was supposed of Olympian Zeus upon the lap of Aegina in some bold mortal guise.

To sum up so far, Deion was too late in returning from his successful campaign via the Upper Midlands to fully secure the Lake and Low Midlands. His band of elite men could not affect the salvation of the Asopos Valley from refugee incursion. Labdakos’ distraction with the Orchomenoi had allowed their Minyan allies to outflank him. They accomplished formal entry into their places of conquest farthest south within the north mainland Greek Peninsula. Deion only managed to destroy their avenues of resupply, thereby compelling them to retreat back into the Great Peneios River Basin. To his south, however, he couldn’t prevent the flux of lowly displaced peoples—Aeolidans, Aeolians, and Lokrians off Mount Orthys—from permanent trespass upon the former lands of Aegina.

Mentör opines here:

I can’t quite believe in Deion’s inability to drive those trespassers away. More likely he didn’t want to disturb the lowly squatters, the worst displaced of whom he found in most destitute condition. These were composed of entire families and whole tribes once headed by bold warrior clans. He wanted to uphold their esprit for another time and opportunity. He would have them adequately settled. He likely sought to leave them some concession from the loose armistice that Labdakos’ failed rearguard support had caused the Low Midlands to suffer.

Besides Aegina’s calamity of constant trespass, moreover, the High King and the Rim Powers, all small matriarchates upon the Saronic Gulf, had to abide the Minyan threat along a common buffer wilderness. Formerly a vast hunting conservatory, from the Isthmus’ north mainland footing striking out far east above the MesoGaia, it was called the Eleutherais Woodlands. These free forests wended their way through and under the south escarpment of the Asopos River Valley, and its pristine timber tracts of old growth evergreen species. They then broadened into a preserve of high dry forest; all of it splayed upon high benches at deep setbacks from the sea coast of the Strait of Abantis. The buffer land’s reach was important as well for its far western access to the inland waterway of the Great Gulf (of Korinth).

Every martial commander who had been tested against the Minyans was accorded superior status as either a champion-at-arms or an adjutant martial-at-field. Deion’s ability to repulse heavy chariotry by combining light skirmishers with heavily armed foot troops had proved a most sensational feat of leadership. His horse captures by stampeding the retreating Minyan carts became renowned on all sides of the Eleutherais Woodlands. He emerged, accordingly, as the most prominent man to lead any force of rapidly deployed skirmishers against any new enemy that might invade the land on horseback or by drive of chariots.

Surely they would come again, and they’d renew their attempts to conquer permanently the entire north mainland.

Mentör infers that Deion’s reputation was fully accomplished by the time he was twenty-one and still a yeoman champion-at-arms. From that time forward he was a man of rank and authority over much older men, his martial peers—except for his liege sovereign warlord, the High Prince Laios, a close contemporary. He remained renowned for his consistently durable physical mass and doughty stamina afield while wielding his powers over rapid, immediate commitments of force. He amassed followers always and from everywhere. The consistent nature of his prowess made him a martial prodigy who seemed ageless yet always youthful, even if of a superbly preserved physique appreciated only belatedly.

Alas, irrespective of his personal glory just then, at the end of a particularly bold campaign season, and despite his retained massive recruited forces, he was gradually diminished of person over the next twelve years. Peace pervaded the north mainland, but Labdakos was ungrateful to his adjutants who had fostered it. Not that the Midlands weren’t still a turmoil of squatters, of desperately displaced peoples, of militant adventurous intruders who stirred up the oppressed. In that meanwhile the peace helped the Minyans amass their strength from new nomadic following off high northern hinterlands. Deion, despite his bold achievements, couldn’t advance his highest ambitions by remaining under Lebadia in Phokis.

Peace inevitably means the lament of the militant caste. Besides, the Maiden Heiress of Phokis, Köra-Chionë, was too young to win herself suitors of Deion’s age. There also wasn’t any opportunity for him to serve as her Lagawataon, or regent Overlord and Home Protector, because Labdakos’ son, the High Prince Laios, preempted that avowed duty as an early initiative of his high princedom.

Accordingly, Deion was pleased to receive an invitation from a roving proxy in service to hiera-Metiadusa. For the sake of the newly invested Diomeda of Eleusis, he was made welcome by that man to contest as her consort aspirant. The prospects of a lovely maiden matriarch, by grace of her mother Hersë newly so seated, were the more astounding because she had just celebrated the first anniversary of her ordination as the Diomeda over Eleusis at the tender age of sixteen. Her standing befit Deion’s highest sense of service. Stifled ambitions and a predisposition to be pleased by the offered bride drew the Champion of Plains Phokis to the Saronic Gulf Rim and Eleusis Sound.

IN EXCURSUS

The Duology of the Foremost Matron Goddesses

In these oldest days, when the paramount wisdom tradition was through the cultivation and husbandry of livestock upon open land and terrain, the propensity of the earliest Greeks was to render the Great Goddess Mother through trinities of attributes, by her transfigurations as crone, matron, and maiden. The oldest aspect was also the most transcendent, as we believe was Themis, the crone grandmother of Athena who came to be called the Potnia, or Holy Queen Goddess of the Atticans. Athena was originally the matron form by her trinity, in attribute as a high city goddess. Only much later Greeks insisted upon her maiden form as a goddess wise in warcraft and counsels of highest generalship.

The Eleusinian trinity had Gaia the Earth Goddess in the crone status; Demeter was the matron goddess of agronomy, or the governance over tilth and husbandry. In an abstract sense she afforded the Greeks a sense of Dispensation, Apportionment, and Measure, for she was not so clearly as her name means, so very simply, Goddess Mother. Korë took the maiden form of spring or annual goddess of renewal, demarcating the few chilly, wet months from those of the long, warm cycle from mid-spring to last autumn months of the solar year. Korë later took the name of Persephonë, a name of Argive derivation; it became of the abstract sense of Destroyer of Winter’s Blight. In a more general idiomatic sense, to most Greeks, Korë meant Corn Maiden or Grain Maiden.

To accentuate the sense of Demeter as the Goddess of Advent (of Civilization), let’s last consider the trinity over the wilds or woodlands. Such important, even essential, buffers typified most regions of mainland Greece; and so it should not surprise that Gaia, the Creatrix of all living things, retained transcendent crone status over the Wilderness Wilds. The matron form, the most powerful Theia Therön, I shall translate by name somewhat prosodic, as the Goddess Beasts Wild. The maiden form was invoked as the Huntress Maiden, deemed a goddess of chastity and usually envisioned as barely a nubile maiden, such as Homer has Artemis appear in The Iliad. That final, or Olympian, name was derived from a matron form goddess of Anatolia. There she was a maiden huntress only in the sense of preying upon hind, for sustenance of herd populations, and predators, to save domesticated livestock herds. The later Artemis was much alike the Roman Goddess Diana, a chaste, even frigid maiden, and much advanced of form beyond the age of nubility, thus of a sportswoman’s qualities such as later Greeks associated with the hoyden Atalanta, perhaps the swiftest maiden to ever live in Antiquity.

We shall have more to say of the Huntress Maiden for how her cult devotions operated outside of wilderness settings. For above all else she was tutelary over grown girls and just barely maidens as protective of their innocence, their physical purity, and their plain good health. For women of all ages while young took holy orders by vows of chastity, and even slave girls could take that oath to preserve them from rape by their masters.

CHAPTER THREE

HIS BIRTH

Pandion, once he’d become the head of the Kekropid royal branch of the House of Erechtheus, became essential to the mostly obscure child years of Cephalos. Of the same branch, despite that he would be born to Eleusis, Uncle Pandion would be both the grandfather and tutelary sage of Cephalos, since Kekrops was denied him as too old of age.

Pandion’s early years, during most of which he’d attended upon his banished, gradually failing father, were likely his happiest ones. Upon completion of his late teenaged years under the nurture of his mother’s generation of matriarchs, he’d become the life consort of Pylia, the High Matron or Meda of Alkathöos. Effectively adjoining her land in cooperative cultivation with his mother’s realm of Eleusis, he soon had the Upper Isthmus under comparable stewardship by adjoining its arable lands and swards of pasturage.

Hersë had come into her sacred title of Diomeda at the moment when her mother Metiadusa was forced to retire yet again into Eleusis. That second retreat was compelled by her brother’s resignation as Attica’s High Chief or Medon. Suffice here to say that Pandion had refused a bribe that would have made his chieftainate subordinate, even feudatory to near neighboring Kadmeis of the Labdakids. The Metionids, actually the children of the earlier deposed usurpers Metion and Pandoros, accepted the bribe’s incentives to Attica’s apparent expansion northward. Accordingly, the rival royal branches committed foul treachery against the Kekropids through both internal provocations and overt temptations of the High King Labdakos to accept their pledges of fealty. Leaving the details of such treacherous subterfuge aside, we move here with priority to the good relations between brother and sister despite the great difference in their ages.

Pandion as an appointed overseer, thus effectively a warlord as well, had stretched his powers too thin for protection of three contiguous realms by his integrated stewardship over the fertile MesoGaia. Yes, he’d amply proved that office thrice over by the bounties of them all, while siring three boys off Pylia. He’d also adopted Aigeus, Pylia’s five-year-old son by an earlier consort, Skyrion (or Skyrios) of the Isthmus. Their natural sons together were Pallas, Nisos, and Lykos. Born abroad in Alkathöos, however, those three Princes Pandid could not be regarded as native and blood royal to Attica just because their father owed his own paternal descent from Attica.

The fact that their foreign matrilineage overrode their patrilineage compelled their father to assert the royal branch Kekropids’ rights of accession as superior to the rest of the Erechtheids’. In amiable consequence the trials for Hersë’s bridal were preceded by a royal compact between brother and sister. The stipulations were about their respective hereditary claims upon Attica; or better said, how to uphold their mutually held resolves, both the sustenance of Eleusis’ strictly neutral autonomy, and an exclusive grant right to Pandion to lead at assertion of his nominated successor. His interests guided solely toward his sons’ legacy, the particular issue of claim had to be that they were blood royal even should the Attican Council Elders, by then become puppets of the Metionids, decree them alien.

By challenge to his kinsmen Erechthëids, accordingly, Pandion first declared the High Chieftainate of Attica a succession solely for him to nominate, and for the elders of the council tribes to approve in majority. Even so, the Elders might refuse his choice if they could prove that his nominee was unfit or inept or null of sovereign achievements. Otherwise they must sanction his choice as though it was their own appointment. Peculiarly, moreover, Pandion could assert Aigeus, his adopted son and chosen heir, far better than he could argue for his natural sons. If, that is, Aigeus married well and particularly to an Attican of royal or sacral stature, he’d then become Regent-of-House under probation, until Aigeus sired a son by that exalted wife. Aigeus and his adoptive brothers, in consequence, were doomed to become rivals, Pallas to prove always the most contentious of his three half-brothers. The argument of assertion, please understand, would likely have to meet any test at arms, even by trials. Pandion would prepare his sons for their best mettle and prowess in the field thereon accordingly.

To keep members of the family amicable, even if also alert and competent as essentially co-equal, Pandion put off the issue of the future accession—and other serious matters affecting other branch royal clans of Attica—to a future time or until a proper restoration of the Kekropids could again ensue. Pandion anticipated that the Metionids would fail to earn favor from the general population and the elders over them. If the other royal branches ever forced an alternative accession, he’d have the corrective rights to inveigh against their rival nominees.

One might suggest that Hersë could have remained an obstacle for a future son’s sake. Her hereditary claims equaled her brother’s, and on matters of landed inheritances she actually far exceeded him. And indeed, a claim was later lodged by Pandion’s Attican descendants, in retrospect, that he greatly feared a rival claimant by the maternity of Hersë the Diomeda. But Mentör found that an impossible reckoning to believe from the circumstances then obtaining. Notwithstanding her powers of assertion, Hersë had no interest in abusing her joint status as native princess and priestess of Attica in order to confound her own brother. The time of royal and sacral euryanassai—imperial matriarchs as translated—was long past. Their tradition, by a legendary dynasty attributed to the patriarch Erichthonios, by whom a consolidation of its final territorial definitions under sway— couldn’t be revived. Hersë, moreover, was always utterly devoted to her brother and her nephews, his sons. She was just as ambitious for her nephews as Pandion was—most particularly about their legal standing as sons Kekropid, thus truly Attican of the blood. For the happenstance of their birthplace hardly overrode their siring by an exalted High Chief who’d voluntarily removed himself to oversee two closely allied realms off to Attica’s west.

The younger sister’s claims would be indisputably worthy because she was the last born daughter to Pandion’s and her generation of an ascendant dynastic House. True, Hersë was almost a whole generation younger than Pandion. He wouldn’t ever have wished her or her issue any ill on a flimsy supposition that her maturity to matron status might, by some wildly odd chance, provoke her to treachery against him. Concomitantly, only a born genius could bear to thwart her brother’s aspirations of a patriarchal Kekropid restoration alike to his own after father Kekrops. Her behavior had always earned his trust, just as his had always earned hers. So it was left moot that her any son could most certainly fitly rival her nephews.

Notwithstanding whatever else was left tacit in favor of Pandion’s exclusive governance over any next accession to the House of Erechtheus, the impositions upon Hersë were as much for her protection, from the menace of clan and internecine rivalry, as from any genuine fear that a little sister might provoke an effective challenge to Pandion’s determinations for Attica.

Pandion did command several further stipulations from his sister. The first was that any children she conceived stood secondary in nomination of accession to Attica’s High Chieftainate. Her issue must yield to his own sons, even to the adopted Aigeus. Since Aigeus was closest to Hersë’s own age, likely he was her dearest-held first cousin as well. Certainly that bore out over the years to come.

Eleusis, by a second stipulation, was decreed a sacred land of sororal alliance to both Alkathöos and Attica. Eleusis must be ruled in perpetuity by a Diomeda appointed by a College of High Sisters. Her electors must be invested for both merit and grace, free from any foreign interference except for her consort won from trials of bridal for her sake. Eleusis must never be compromised by either Attica or Alkathöos—or even have that effect somehow implied by influences brought to bear by a neighbor, such as Ephyrëa or Kadmeis. Notwithstanding that his sons’ sovereign interests might be compromised later by that imposition, should they be restored to their birthrights by a reunification of Attica’s branch royal clans, Eleusis’ autonomy from all Kekropids of the patronymic Pandid was declared sacrosanct.

Finally, by a third stipulation, any encroachment upon Eleusis by imperial aliens—Kadmeis or Minoa—would become a grievance of war, requiring a full mobilization of the Saronic Gulf Rim Powers. That it was as such, and proved, a less important stipulation than the others lay in the extreme provocation that would be required in order for the Rim Powers to put aside their traditional standoff at neutrality from warfare.

At sixteen, when Hersë became eligible to earn herself suitors, Pandion’s conditions were easily accepted. The amity within the coastal ring of Gulf Rim Powers had passed far into a third decade. Although advanced in age, the Minos Lykastos of Crete remained an outstanding patron over their maritime interests, and likewise a friend and frequent guest of Metiadusa and Pylia during his biennial trips along the north mainland. Tributes upon his mainland feudatories, as imposed by that particular Minos, had stayed light, and they felt even lighter because of the annual abundance by tilth and husbandry. Over his reign both harvests and culls had been consistently high in yield and ample of quality surplus. Lykastos’ naval hegemony over the Saronic Gulf had the blessings of prosperity off the seas as well.

So the announced suit for Hersë could proceed with the wishes of the second Pandion and all the Erechthëid clan branches, including those well represented by Pandion’s usurpers. Noble orders, wherever else situated, were likewise happily predisposed toward the new Diomeda and whomever should become her consort.

***

In the dialect of Eleusis, the winning suitor of Diomeda was called the Kerkyon.