Cephalos the Ward of Eleusis: Books IV and V

By S. W. Bardot

Cephalos was a very late patriarch within a well-arrived age of illustrious mythic personages. By this serialization in restoration of what Classical Greek Mythology has expunged of his robust youth, we have arrived at the apex of his covert and multifaceted subversion to destroy imperial Crete and its Great Minos.
Cephalos has also finalized the formative coalition of small navies for two great sea battles—the Annihilations of 1365 attendant to two eradications of piracy the same spring. Next he must address the Second Tribute Taking forthcoming in 1360 BC while his powers so ruthless against Enemy are still undiscovered.
Book IV, the High Prince of Attica, returns us to the foremost heroine of Books I and II. Skia of Aphidnai has become a high priestess of Brauron Sanctuary since we left her a blithe and winsome maiden of eighteen. Now she's a lithe and winsome twenty-four years old, still a maiden and obedient to her Goddess and her invested powers. The Goddess now wants to mate her long chosen Cephalos, and he's doomed to a most condoned bigamy by all civilizations known! Accounting her much missed, we bring her back soonest, resuming her gain upon Cephalos for his own sake. Eos the Dawn makes brilliant prospect ahead, bringing to Skia her own "love of a lifetime," and to herself a delicious immortal incarnation
at fullness of soul, body, and mind.
Book V, Navarch and War Commodore, finishes its fictional content rendered proto-historically, by the academic expository fiction of New Greek Mythology. Its conclusion covers his last Saronic Gulf years, from 1362 through 1360 BC, and reverts at least emendation to surviving writ about him. It completes proofs of his fourfold ascendancy that shall eventually pit his orchestrations of great wealth and the abilities of maritime Greeks against imperial Crete of the wicked Great Minos and his loathsome son, the prince-Minotaur Asterion. This fifth book explains the very odd ménage à trois that Classical Greek Mythology canonizes as Eos at mortal incarnation. Skia becomes her self-made greatness by gifts by the Goddess, and thereby Cephalos becomes their only choice for hallowed consortship—by subtle favors that the Patron Goddess Potnia, Athena daughter-of-Themis, happily condones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9781951568412

Book preview

CEPHALOS

WARD

OF ELEUSIS

BOOKS IV AND V

Title

Copyright © 2023 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: 978-1-951568-41-2

CONTENTS

BOOK IV: HIGH PRINCE OF ATTICA

BOOK V: CEPHALOS AND THE KEKROPIDS

GLOSSARY

Title

Satellite overview of the Saronic Gulf.

(Map illustration: Rhys Davies.)

Seas of the Late Aegean Bronze Age.

Genealogy of the House of Erechtheus, a feudatory under the House of Minos by Imperial Crete Island, by its lineage by descent until Cephalos, the grandson of Kekrops by his only daughter, Hersë.

The Rim Powers of the Saronic Gulf, by which the future Saronic Gulf League.

Copyright © 2019 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.

Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Carolyn Eckert and Mary Wirth

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940430

ISBN: 978-1-937650-85-8

493 South Pleasant Street

Amherst, Massachusetts 01002

413.230.3943

smallbatchbooks.com

"In her first passion, woman loves her lover;

in all the others, all she loves is love."

—Lord Byron, Don Juan

The author, left, with Billy Oates, RIP.

I regret to have to say that my best friend, Billy Oates, who inspired and earned dedication by our third book in this series, died this year in January. Having made him a model for my sixteen-year-old suitor of bride, to win the Princess and heiress presumptive of Magnesia, so he has inspired the hard-charging Merchant Prince that Cephalos became after that elapsed royal consortship. So the dedication here is to all of the Oateses that so splendidly have survived him.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Our serialization progresses, and the still nascent great civilization around the Saronic Gulf of Greece becomes more robust for our lay readers’ understanding—more complex as well—and yet I often feel that our tight-knit collaboration at literary production has been an inordinate blessing of many individual contributions to our continuing book art and structure.

Working the ant hill technologically has been the very reliable Fred Levine, from whom we’ll soon be expecting a next Labor of Sisyphus, the compilation of all five books into a single e-book offering. Always in our long-game plan ahead at navigation through Antiquity, there’s been constant judicious choice of helpmates. That I owe to Trisha Thompson, for whose developmental editing I’m especially grateful, as all works of self-publishing prove so increasingly futile to fund with any efficacy through print advertising and promotion. At design and structuring we are all glad for Carolyn Eckert and Mary Wirth. Just before their talents place Allison Gillis, whose past efforts also have kept us principals perky, bright, and bushy-tailed throughout our diverse endeavors.

My one strongest conviction is both theirs and mine: That good expository prose belongs to all ages of human endeavor, and ours has never ended, even as this author deplores how education in classical studies has deteriorated so greatly in general since the 1970s. Here again, we’ve refused to dumb down. Our mission remains one of highly organized complexity.

—R. Bacon Whitney

Book IV: High Prince of Attica

CºNTENTS

New and Major Characters

Translator’s Foreword

Fifth Archival Chronicle

CHAPTER ONE — A Promise Forestalled

CHAPTER TWO — Skia’s Next Accomplished Project

CHAPTER THREE — His Return at Strong Outset

CHAPTER FOUR — Her Sacral Majesty

CHAPTER FIVE — About Prokris Beforetimes

CHAPTER SIX — Medeia the Supplicant

CHAPTER SEVEN — Become Queen Consort

CHAPTER EIGHT — The Isthmian Delegation

CHAPTER NINE — Ships, Shipyards, and Shipwrights

CHAPTER TEN — Marriage and High Princedom

CHAPTER ELEVEN — The Kekropia’s Opulent Times

CHAPTER TWELVE — Recruiting at Large

CHAPTER THIRTEEN — The Cattle Pest

Sixth Archival Chronicle

CHAPTER FOURTEEN — Androgeös

CHAPTER FIFTEEN — Reflection Upon the Suspects

CHAPTER SIXTEEN — In Succor of Nisos

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN — Naval Reorganization

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN — The Rim Powers in Review

CHAPTER NINETEEN — Further Impending Toward 1365 BC

CHAPTER TWENTY — Prokris Too Much Alone

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE — Disguises and Deceptions

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO — Until Embattled

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE — Eradication of the Pirate Main

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR — The Great Sea Battle That Wasn’t

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE — Last Arrivals of Enemy in Strength

Translator’s Epilogue

NEW AND MAJOR CHARACTERS

IN ORDER OF THEIR INTRODUCTION

SKIA OF APHIDNAI: We reintroduce her as the future great love of Cephalos and the mother of their many children. Very early to be ordained a High Sister and Priestess by the Sanctuary of the Dawn at Brauron of Bay Attica, her grace is by the Gift of Dream, whereby she’s the mortal incarnation of her tutelary Goddess, Eos the Dawn herself.

PANDION: The deposed High Chief over Attica despite his powers regained since the Second Restoration of the Kekropids. While also the Consort of Pylia, the Meda or High Matron over Alkathöos of the Upper Isthmus, he has affected the ascension of his adopted son Aigeus over all rival branch royal clans of the House of Erechtheus. Now the widower of Pylia.

CEPHALOS: Still the Ward of Eleusis, he’s now the resigned Prince Consort of Magnesia. About to be reinstated to his navarchy (admiralty) over all emergent war navies by the Rim Powers of the Saronic Gulf, he’s also an understudy and adjutant at land stewardship for Vice-Regent Lykos over Bay Attica.

LYKOS: The vice-regent over Aktaia or Bay Attica since the Second Restoration of the Kekropids. He also became the appointed regent governor over Aktë, or Gulf Attica, since his brother Nisos’ abdication of its vice-regency.

PALLAS: The vice-regent over Aktika, or the Lower Peninsula of Attica, since the Second Restoration of the Kekropids as dynasts over the unified region that has become the Kingdom of Attica since 1370. He has made himself infamous for challenging Aigeus as king and his son Medeios as heir presumptive, believing himself his father Pandion’s direct successor by primogeniture.

PHAIAX: A foremost adjutant at naval command, since a lad a boon friend of Cephalos. We are unsure about his ancestry by the House of Erechtheus over Attica. He is about to take command over a small fleet of some twenty-five to thirty warships, all prototypical by an earliest class of triakonters, launched since 1371 BC. His ambit of patrol and surveillance is the Mid-Sea Isles of the Greek Archipelago—the later Cyclades Isles.

PHEREKLOS: Another foremost adjutant, somewhat late to have closely befriended Cephalos, his mother is an Attican of royal peerage by the House of Erechtheus. His late father was a Levantine of prominent residence upon Salamis Island, whereby his considerable usefulness at interpretation of the maritime Semitic dialects off the far-ranging Levant of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. He’s become the commander of a small Near Fleet, whose ambit of outreach ranges from Bay Attica to Pagasai Bay at the head of the Abantis Strait. He acts as an intermediary between Great King Aiakos, King Erginos of Orchomenos, Gla, and coastal Larymna, and the Levantine merchant magnates over trading colonies of the Lelanton Plain.

NAUSITHÖOS: The third of the Princes Erechthëid, their youngest, his adjutant command is a small fleet at the prospecting of coastal timber stands, while also at active patrol outside and westward of the Saronic Gulf. His ancestry remains almost unknown, but he’s a native of Gulf Attica and its fertile Kephissos River Basin. He shall prove a pioneer of the western mains by the South and Ionian Seas.

MEDEIA: The supplicant who became the consort mistress of the twice widower Aigeus, she has become since 1370 BC his wife and Queen Consort. He is still of the title Regent Custodian over Attica, pending his siring of an heir presumptive. Her past is littered with heinous deeds and directed homicides by her maternal homeland of Ephyrëa and her native (and childhood) fatherland of the Eridanos River Delta (the Po River of Italy). We are not in agreement with her stated origins by Classical Greek Mythology and drama. Her name by that lore, moreover, is usually spelled Medea, but should always pronounce as Meh-DAY-ah by Oldest Greek.

AIAKOS: The Great King of Aeoleis and Minya over those two High Kingdoms and many petty realms (basilëai) along and deeply inland the Strait of Abantis.

THE GREAT MINOS: The former prince-Minotaur over imperial Minoa, introduced as such in Book II of our series. He has acceded since 1371 BC to the imperial title of Minos as the son of the late Lykastos.

PROKRIS: A foremost heiress by the House of Erechtheus, she also has the sacral majesty as the last matrilineal successor to the House of Aglauros, whose deposed matriarchy once ruled Attica. By that combined lineage, she is a High Princess as cast off from the title of Holy Queen. Her lands of governance are extensive throughout the western divide of Attica’s Lower Peninsula, Aktika, while closely conjoined to the vice-regent temenos or estate landedness of Vice-Regent Pallas.

AIGEUS: The adopted son of Pandion, the deposed High Chief over Attica, he’s become the Regent Custodian over Attica since the Second Restoration of the Kekropids, the dynastic branch royal house by the House of Erechtheus.

MEDEIOS/MEDEOS/MEDEUS: The son of Medeia and Aigeus, the heir apparent, but not yet held heir presumptive, as the Prince of Attica.

NISOS: The abdicated vice-regent over Gulf Attica, to his brother Lykos, he has become the Regent over Alkathöos since his mother Pylia’s death and by concession of the office from his father Pandion.

ERYGERON: The sea overlord and resident navarch by appointment to the governance of Pyrrhaios Portside (the later Piraeus), a fortified marina and mainland shore station upon the Attican, or east end of Eleusis Sound. He had been briefly the skipper of a Cretan war galley into which Cephalos had enlisted while he was fifteen and sixteen years old. They are best friends from an arm’s-length distance between their separate navarchies.

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, and 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 at 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 the Master and his lengthy era of Early Greek Mythology at first authorship of prehistoric nonfiction.

His composition will remain, nevertheless, academic expository fiction.

CEPHALºS

WARD

ºF ELEUSIS

BOOK IV:

HIGH PRINCE

OF ATTICA

THE FIFTH ARCHIVAL CHRONICLE

BY MENTÖR, SON OF ALKIMOS

There was also an entirely new frontier to advance over the years 1370 to 1367 BC that she had to delegate away. It was by overland commerce drawn south into her domains, but without her, for once, to attend to them.

… There were, understand, new burdens, both by novelty and intricacy, in proof of toughest challenges ever. They all could be explained by the newfound prosperity of Brauron as a finest market destination, even if well beyond nearest whole regions at the origination of exported trades from farther up the north mainland. A comity of regular exchange of homeland surpluses, merchants of imports arriving inbound took away Brauron’s massive earned surpluses as their outbound distributive commerce by their own conveyances and Brauron’s pack trains, unto foreign or distant domestic client procurers. By the amassed net exchanges at Brauron, whatever export surpluses in remainder were bequeathed to Vice-Regent Lykos for his shrewd machinations at such transport and for his judicious export management in behalf of the commoner tenancies’ welfare through returns off his barter for their necessities. Attendantly, the ingenuity for distribution and the precise barter exchange befell Cephalos as greatly enabled by that vice-regent to serve him at extensive overland distribution.

Cephalos was not yet the prime known factor; he wouldn’t be for several years yet. The vast exchange of regional, sacral, and royal surplus [outputs] had become so reliable and regular by Skia’s accomplished diversity of exports, some so unique that they might as well be named for her. By her innovations at field and fended cropland cultivation, moreover, all of East Bay Aktaia had been earning rich exchange off Lykos’ embarked bulk exports. His reward was the aloof authority vouchsafed to him, in return for the autonomy granted to the High Sisterhood for their own greatly enhanced production schemes. For reliably amassed harvests and attendant livestock husbandry culls burgeoned through the informal sororal college cooperatives, whereby satisfaction of needs in common were also shared amongst them.

Skia’s reputation was undeservedly accepted for that kind of commercial imprimatur. She could not help become, inadvertently, a paramount client at reception of such reliable overland traffics that came south into Attica with intent to carry their goods in stock and in caravan train to the Low Peninsula. She could not help entice quality and novelty; so the High Sisterhood, on account of her, earned preferential treatment at [premium] goods exchange. Of course, she could not help but become a best end destination’s customer of foreign imports off Cephalos’ carefully plotted routes and circuits of traffics’ exchanges, all by enterprising caravan distribution off far northern origins.

The High Sisterhood, to sum up of such challenges by growth and burgeon, could only just barely manage these new demands upon their ample surpluses of reliable tradition, many of which earned foreign exchanges off their unique goods prized for superior fabrication. Upon the reckonings of such vast growth in diversity, so much of it was accounted to Skia as a top producer. She seemed to everybody clearly inspired to engender grandly new and far-ranging commercial traffics, albeit not yet for embarkations overseas for the far overland distribution alike to what Cephalos would be next scheming in Lykos’ behalf for all the eastern north mainland.

So for what had passed of manifest complexities from 1374 to the spring of 1370, whereupon Cephalos returned to Attica just at winter’s end of that last new year.

CHAPTERONE

A PROMISE FORESTALLED

Brauron was having growth problems, and Skia was very much at cause of it. Since we knew her, two books ago, her days had her either administrative or supervisory over many agrarian projects, even as the High Sisterhood also projected her accessibility to all near neighbors of the MesoGaia. Those matron plantation demesnes had needed her regimens since her marvels after nearly two years of deluge, floods, and washouts. They deemed her projects at land restoration an utter necessity. They did all they could otherwise to acquire the executive talents that might supplement her inspirited management most everywhere of Brauron since 1372 BC. Attendantly, Brauron had become both inviting and wholly receptive to an influx of transient commerce by caravans that meant to nullify the Sanctuary’s long-standing parochial detachment. It was becoming, at the very least, a vital byway of their traffics, much as a fareway is a byway as a feeder into a main of sea.

Formerly isolated as too far east, it had become a caravansier’s end destination whereby all overland and nascent maritime commerce at Brauron Cove could permeate southward and into the Lower Peninsula via the coastal hills and the skirts of Mount Hymettos.

Skia’s existence otherwise had become an intense and mostly unrelieved drudgery. It cannot be said, however, that she was unhappy, or even thought herself odd in her circumstances, as most certainly she had a right to be as a maiden in passage of her tumultuous, always passionate last teenage years. Because even I must doubt Mentör’s emphatic insistence that she was so contentedly repressed, I let him explain about the superseding divine existence that has made so much sense of Skia’s inherent strength of character—regardless my own occasional failure to accept credence in such description as requires my arts at translation.

So for what Mentör essays in outset of his Fifth Archival Chronicle. …

If any unhappiness there was over these obscure tween years now elapsed, it was owing to old friends gone away to their homelands [manorial plantations] throughout the MesoGaia. Sometimes that meant sad reflection, despite their happy Fates to have husbands already longtime arranged for them, men of ilk and tradition to become the most joyous reason for leaving their maidenhood after years spent in orders. They were matriculated, literally, just as so many sisters postulant had been throughout Brauron’s many generations of well-finished maiden heiresses at foregoing lifetime callings to become priestesses. Most such young women subsequently progressed easily through their [secular] First Estate of maiden heiresses [körai], bride-newlyweds [nymphai], or young matrons [medai] until finally accomplished of their first maternity. Those conditions settled their lifetimes near ahead, from youth into their prime years at maternity, by which, too, would become their next transfigurations of body and transformations of spirit.

Skia, of course, would miss such a passage as apt to her attained years of age, while still discovering the genuine enjoyment of the many early teenaged girls who entered the orders at Brauron upon much happier premises than she had enjoyed at twelve years old. The Kekropid Restoration was a regime predisposed to such existences as those maidens represented. Happy, such as we can define it for a priestess, derived solely from the Sister Elders at governances throughout Brauron Basin. Only they could explain the grace and divine calling that would lead their pledged novices into their advanced sororal governance as a calling of life itself. …

I must also argue in behalf of their safety by way of some important review.

… These early retiring sisters had enjoined themselves to their sororal residencies inadvertently, but for needed self-protection of their maidenhood by direct consequence. Their parents had just barely thwarted the two foul regimes of the Metionids, by whose dreaded marriage projects they would have become debased brides removed from their inherited lands and other ancestral perpetuities. Those two heinous periods, over the five years before Pandion’s accession and the nearly eight years after he’d been deposed, had nephews by patron clans married perforce to their youngest aunts of the deposed generation of landed governesses. Maidens or matrons who became widows had to take new husbands perforce the patron clan’s imposed consorts upon every such remarriage. Religion was patron led, too: Priests attendant to those foul regimes bullied the rural damoi while casually tithing all increase off the superbly diversified crop cultivation, subordinating such lands for their own brotherhoods’ remuneration.

Too many mothers of the maiden novitiates sent to Brauron were those governesses of First Estate. All had felt debased by new land stewardship, even after the Second Restoration [of the 1380s BC]. Their patron overlords had none of the capability of their tenants’ appointed headmen, under whose appointments whole families and communities native to Brauron could bring their talents and merits to bear. Skia in her earliest novice years had attracted many other tenants of skill, all migratory from abroad, and by whose influx the sisters’ supervisors had learned or earned most cordial working relations. No longer, therefore, crops seeded to vast stands, each large scoped cultivation thereby meant solely for surplus for export. The stands that had replaced the multiplicity of cultivated plots, both a staged and staggered diversity of fresh food consumption by seasonal sowings and reapings, made all of the MesoGaia suffer as Brauron had not ever in the least.

The Sanctuary’s orderly progressions of warm-season crops attended diversity of seeding and slip planting throughout the seasons of edible picking. The fruiting from profuse blooms to bounteous results off heavy boughs characterized the lush orchards, whose terraced grounds served also for intergrazing of sheep, goats, and cows. The new stewards by the priestly brotherhoods that once had thrived off the foul regimes had no comparable sense whatsoever of such intensive and diverse tilth, and they barely could cultivate the newly immense stands or whole field layouts of singular [species] grains. Meager harvests had resulted, thus the failed bulk exports of surplus to foreign destinations by Metionid exchanges for vitally needed imports. Even the cultivation of the livestock fodders must inevitably fail for such inept supervision as those imbecilic patron overlords must manifest most personally or through inept surrogates like toady priests. …

Mentör has ably said of the depression and despondency that had resulted from both long durations of foulest agronomic regime. He has meant to induce joy in his audiences over the two restorations of the Kekropids that brought both of those unhappy durations to bitter ends.

He continues in happy vein:

… Skia had come very close to the debasement perforce upon so many maiden heiresses throughout the MesoGaia. For she was just as they, the sole daughter of the governess over rich and bountiful Aphidnai. Once a High Sister so very early attained, she such a marvel since 1378 BC, she could stand instead as exemplary of her meritorious liberty, to warmly welcome and coordinate, even to nurture good spiritual habits in the many able newcomers to the sororal colleges. They came anew from proud mothers no longer threatened by the lapsed foul regimes of the deposed Metionids.

They came to Brauron free and anew, mostly on account of Skia’s manifest grace as become famous afar. So highly regarded, mothers once novices and youngest sister postulants themselves granted their daughters to become novices, or such as Skia had been at her age of only twelve. Entrusted to the sororal orders for their custody of her after a close probation, Skia at fourteen, with other sisters much older of age, had become confidently tutelary over the earliest maiden years and devotional hard labor expected of all new charges, the pledged novitiates. All those young sisters, novices and postulants, soon wanted to learn her hardworking regimes for Brauron, to make them their own—before, that is, they must retire from holy orders at nearly the end of their teenaged years to fulfill their mothers’ homeland governances as themselves, to become heiresses matriculated into a next generation of young matrons over their manorial plantation inheritances. …

Now that he’s at an onset of his new chronicle, from the winter of 1371/1370 BC onward, Mentör moves far past that review of Skia’s early years within the holy orders along the north verge of Brauron Basin.

… The High Sisters had eventually spared Skia the close tutelage required of her supervisory rank among the sisters postulant. They allowed her instead to become their finest exemplar of vast and intricate work projects, essentially earth movements and rehabilitation of lands of tilth, performed by tenant and foreign influxes of strongman labor, both populaces of which came off an enlarging workforce made ready at hand for her. She’d also soon earned alike the influxes of talented farmers, husbanders of livestock, and arborists. She now had nearly ten years of tenure as a planner [agronomist], taskmaster, and supervisor over many nearly finished projects. Most had been and remained of tremendous scope. Her own ventured governance of whatever was new and novel could then pass on easily to the sisters well above her age as become the regular stewards of supreme governance over far outlying plantations.

Their supervised maintenance was abetted by remote headmen amidst scattered hamlets of workmen tenants; those rustics served the ordained sisters subordinately and yet officially, too, by their proofs of masterful leadership, whereby, as well, orderly staged competitions between work groups. These, then, were the unskilled underlings of Skia to serve her that spring [of 1370 BC]. Their skillful exploits otherwise, however, often far exceeded those of their rivals by neighboring tenancies of the MesoGaia. So well reputed throughout those neighboring commonwealth demesnes, such men performed lowly governances for Skia as an opportunity of far finer prospects than they could achieve from other governesses of First Estate.

Her allure and repute was supposed of her sense of huge task, great project scope, and her fervent appreciation of all strongmen who came under her coordination. So, too, for the many sisters of all ages who shared her burdens as well as they could.

Earth moving and land reclamation would soon prove an integral and marvelous sharing of powers, as provoked by two years of heavy rainfall remembered as the Second Deluge. Skia’s [agrarian] regime established her reputation for a pervasive generosity of spirit, all sisters proving so as well unto each other, and to all tenants so enjoined to them because of their small hamlet homesteads. Their happiness in fairly shared burdens, at acceptance altogether of the often grueling hard work both tasked and spent—even under heavy rainfall of chilly season or while searing hot sunshine of the farming summer seasons—proved out as far more than a communal sense of simple good duty so constantly performed in mass. It was as though everybody was at charis—selflessness—toward each other, sisters and tenants enjoined by artful cooperation of their talents and skills as well.

Every year, accordingly, could celebrate such vast communal projects as either anew or well advanced or almost completed at their various stages of work in progress. Each of those two heavy rainfall years wrought basis for a next bold phase of finishing arts. Her formal assignments were doled out by the governing sororal [colleges], but upon her recommendations of merit. The best of her newly appointed tenant headmen became her leading adjutants over a vast cattlelands project about which I shall soon be remarking. …

CHAPTERTWO

SKIA’S NEXT ACCOMPLISHED PROJECT

If skia, that maid of brauron, must seem the beginning and the end of all commercial novelties—as by some grand reciprocity—Cephalos was her maritime means to both vital imports through Lykos as well as for conveyance of Brauron’s vast surpluses for export. His boon friends the Princes Erechthëid had also continued his pioneered routes of caravan redistribution through the maintenance to and fro of traffics upon the trails of his overland mule trains.

Putting that aside for a nonce, Mentör addresses the fact that Cephalos greatly wanted to envision Skia again, on a glimpse of her in the past, even as he still did not know her name or her provenance. …

Unbeknownst to him, he’d remained in Skia’s dreams. She was allowed barely a daily thought of him, though, especially as pertinent to the divine promise declared of him to herself. Since that exquisite epiphany, her Goddess had taken over all her [conscious] sense of ardent partnerships. All of them of a workaday sort, Eos the Dawn induced intensive vocation instead, or the dreams so intricately rendered that she taught Skia at how best she should next apply herself.

This would seem to mean that the Goddess was absenting herself because she was so fully preoccupied otherwise or elsewhere. The truth to be learned, though, was that elsewhere and otherwise lay a whole new learning by the Goddess herself of so many novel and fascinating human endeavors. The Goddess was eager to apply herself—to feel herself so applied—most especially since all the springtimes [since 1372 BC]. What she inspirited, I hazard to intuit, renewed her zeal to have Skia daily in execution as her surrogate everywhere abroad the Basin. For how else to explain the tirelessly graced personage that Skia had become in her Sanctuary’s behalf?

Accordingly, even as Cephalos is described by Mentör in full haste homeward to Eleusis, to stay there for a briefest sojourn until his new residency upon the Kekropia of Attica, we also must believe him ardently intent to gaze anew upon Skia. She had been the lovely and silent sentinel whom once upon a time of a splendid dawn’s sunrise had proven an epiphany, an ideal visualization of all that alluring womanhood could be.

He’d been especially tenacious. He had found excuse of visiting Rhapthë below Brauron Cove and Inlet, and then made next excuse of fulfilling his return voyage by circumnavigating Point Sounion. He had hugged the coast of Bay Attica on the prowl of whomever most feminine might be standing statuesquely upon bluffs and sheer cliffsides. There had been no sighting while he ranged southward, none either by his suddenly compulsive return back to Brauron. There, after searching through the inland sororities, he’d hastened by mount of a mule overland to achieve Eleusis at the far end of the MesoGaia. Nothing had become of any probes inland by that entire haphazard itinerary. All that effort, all that futility to find her anew as a sentinel, dashed his fervent hope of his part in her Fates, that they should fuse, intertwined by their skeins, before he had to undertake another marriage, to whose bride he must and would irrevocably dedicate his soul.

Search for her at naught, he must accept what next has to preoccupy his homeland resettlement within the much vaster context of the North Rim Powers upon the Saronic Gulf. So Mentör observes, but also belatedly explains of Cephalos’ hopes to have been revisited of Skia.

I have only from Cephalos’ late-life remembrance his years briefly abroad the Saronic Gulf at this time. It’s in attestation of what he said of forlorn feelings for failure to sight Skia while his deliberate distraction offshore Rhapthë. I have learned, incidentally, of what most likely had fully removed her from his any opportunity, perchance, to renew some rapport with each other, perhaps for a second intense moment of rapturous gazes upon each other.

Skia had taken up a major project of three years’ duration. The southernmost sororal college and its [relatively] small residency and hamlet tenancies had centered upon a longtime and well-established governance over Brauron’s once small cattle lands. She’d rarely had to visit there because its holy order of sisters had managed well without her. There hadn’t been much in the way of new initiatives, either, or borrowings off her exemplary regimes abroad the northern sororal conservatories. So there wasn’t anything much to say about adoptions of her genius that the sisters could not implement well by themselves.

What had brought off her much needed involvement south and beyond Brauron Basin was the great burden imposed by Brauron’s tremendous overland commerce. It was trending to exceed most everybody’s livestock, beasts of burden most obviously at dearth. So, too, for hostelries and a complete inadequacy of caravansaries. Most of the encroachment, welcome as it was, was by extension of the Lokrians’ long routes to terminus at Brauron Cove.

Even before Cephalos’ absence away to Magnesia, he had enticed such traders to explore Vice-Regent Pallas’ southernmost dominions of Aktika, for the purpose of worthwhile ore extractions [at Laurion]. Achievable only by coastal reach off the eastern royal road along an escarpment traverse cut into the long eastern flank of Mount Hymettos, such routes were well supervised by his veterans, his made surrogates. Thus they’d required little from him except the usual parlay over best trade goods, novel or enhanced, for lading over mules of caravan trains—or by lading their best replacements for better piece goods yet, often as discovered from origins along his newest routes. All of them had become well entrained by the time of his return to Attica. These goods, too, he’d brought into reliable distribution through his first cousins or their own proxies, who also aimed toward southern destination marketplaces by invitation of such outreach from Vice-Regent Pallas over Aktika.

Skia had not needed to lengthen or redirect by expansion the many cartways built over years past or just recently. The sororal colleges had offered sufficient hostelry, whereas newly safe shores, protected by rotating flotillas of coastal guard, bode well for new caravansaries staged at various landfalls. Recently, though, the broad carting roads reticulating southward screamed in demand for oxen, bullocks, and aurochs. New pasturage and breeding closes [corals alike a stockyard] would serve her best by location south of the Basin, as the forking vales to SSW and SSE and their wintertime feeder streams. The upland pasturage could tie into the several woodsmen’s hamlets and farmers at high foothill tract cultivation, whereby dense coastal coppice under development for the timber needs of Brauron Cove.

The fells by both demesnes so southerly located Skia anticipated would prove to much greater demand from Brauron Cove, once its fullest ascension as a maritime center all to itself. Dreams had told her so, of course, but that inclination was also a belief that the High Sisterhood had gathered from their liege Vice-Regent Lykos. Oddly, though, her dreams weren’t about shipwrights or lodging constructors, nor about culls off their new coppices upon coastal hillocks. Instead, she must learn of a strongest demand beyond those intents, for lodge buildings of many pillars to serve new caravansaries. …

[Such erections Cephalos had made commonplace abroad, but without her any knowledge whatsoever of his schemes. Still, she was all too capable of being possessed by thoughts of him, and of his naval prospects, as her schemes meaningfully confluent with his own ends for Brauron. Glimmering hopes of such coincidences with her plot and plans attended her constant gifts from dreams.]

… At her direction, accordingly, finest cattle were brought to the southern plantations after a brief breeding program in the northern countryside between Brauron and Aphidnai. Imported sires, intended to mount prize heifers, she had driven off all range to the northwest and southeast, from where they’d been under Lykos’ and Pallas’ cattle ranchers [respectively]. Skia had also directed the five northernmost sororal residencies to sponsor their own droves of heifers, most of which were by remuneration to the Sanctuary for her valued assistance to so many manor plantation demesnes, which had resurged at ranching since the last great parch. What they had bred of the heifers had become regularly granted tithes from neighboring demesnes to the High Sisterhood for it to allocate to the five colleges.

Her essentials [of program] had worked two ways, toward commingling the amassed heifers with breeding bulls to cover them, for such cattle breed stock was easily introduced from Vice-Regent Pallas’ cattle ranches throughout Aktika. He had been importing them from Crete for all the years of his acceded vice-regency. That way and means of exchange put his cow and calving herds under the able direction of the southernmost sororal college, for its sisters postulant to gradually cull over ensuing years to achieve prize calf yearling herds to sire beasts of burden. That college put all bull calves under Skia’s direct control, to the singular purpose of culling the largest and strongest of them for her intended use as bullocks and oxen.

That growth of herds, then, was the toughest challenge that she was so earnest to meet. It would also include fine bred woodland aurochs, whose immensely strong bovine stock [alike to especially huge bison] served to best purpose at heaviest cart drayage. Beasts to bear heavy wagonloads were hugely in demand, but as usual, the ken of it Skia had not an inkling of until the first yields of most promising offspring from southern Aktika. Moreover, such huge stock specimens that earned [premium exchange] the naval commanders afforded once settled in newly at Brauron Inlet [since 1371 BC].

Their many long lodges were newly erected by the builders brought ashore off their billets within the flotilla rotations of crews. Regularly put ashore by Phaiax, Phereklos, and Nausithöos, the men so landed served work force at drayage, construction, and corvée labor upon plantations located on the southeast verge of Brauron Basin. Oxen yokes and strings of bullocks were essential to amassing finest timber of considerable thicknesses and lengths for the new shipworks along both Brauron and Rapthë Coves. Aurochs proved out best at hauling that weight, along with the dugout longboat ship hulls that phased modularly by their inboard build-outs.

Skia’s plans and schemes fell into the commanders and crews perfectly. Bullock drayage, for instance, was mostly for seamless baulks of pine, firs, and spruce, all woods that had to be imported by stages, from whole areas so dedicated to their stacking and dry storage. They dragged whole immense logs upon newly broadened traces and wagon roads, off the old ones that traversed the Eleutherais Woodlands along the MesoGaia. There was also the prospecting for stands of finest heritage timber off [hardwood forest stands], all toward the precise sectional detailing that the shipwrights installed inboard of every midship vessel construction.

I’m told that Skia’s first appearance among her until then unmet southern sisters quite astonished them. They had expected a serene and yet very mature young woman of nineteen years attained. Whom they greeted instead might have been the frail and lithe Skia grown tall, but still as known well at the end of her fourteenth year and just arrived from her final year spent at homeland Aphidnai. She appeared just so young and lithely agile at the practice of a coltish grace. Only her mind spoke for its enormous maturity and facility at the articulation of inspiriting works. By the end of those next three years [until the end of 1368 BC], Skia was nearing her twenty-third birthday. Even then she would appear so much less than those years so attained.

Beyond that birthday, moreover, she began to sense the impending culmination of major ship construction under the various shipworks establishments along Brauron Cove’s north coastline and tidal shallows. She knew shipyards lay asprawl at well-concealed locations, howsoever kept unseen from seaward. She had little need to make company with the three commanders who brought the Cove’s near interior to a modular erection of workmen hamlets, each including covered sheds, earthen barrows, and apsidal lodges as community amenities. Cephalos and his commanders found the needs of tenancies well expressed through the governing High Sisters of senior ordination, the only acceptable intermediaries between Cephalos’ heirarchic navarchy and his first cousin Lykos’ aloof vice-regency. In return, expectantly, these new male denizens had become ever encouraging of the Sanctuary to practice regularly culled, freestanding forestry by building new stands of specialized timber by means of densely cultivated coppice.

They aimed such encouragement at the reorganization of all hillock woodlands crested by moist forest hummocks. They severally dominated the coast that lies between Brauron Inlet and Rapthë Cove and Lagoon. Dry forest, by contrast, surmounted heights of forest as gnarly pine woodland. They were also essential to clear land for sapling growth at close density of particular species, whereby to achieve soft and pliable lumber stocks, all pieceworks off which served the ribbing of newest war galleys once their dugout hulls were framed and their bilges finished by grouting of ribs and thwarts.

Such forestry the shipwrights would exploit for the longer term of each coppice’s projected layout. Density required thinnest and lithest trunk pines for uniform straightness by mature coppice cultivation. Staggered close apart for that far future, to the effect of groundcover laid open around stands for pasturage, thereby overgrowth of taller Pitys pines. Hardwood forest species were also kept straight upright of trunks, or pruned to render thickness by growth habit. By every kind of encouragement toward the long term, the cleared small wood by limb trimmings was used as fencing and hedgerow around the thicker and taller stands. In that manner of separating broader cleared ground, so, too, for replanting tall saplings of the most desirable [tree species].

It also seemed that Skia knew exactly where to prospect the tallest and densest girth hardwoods, whereupon she incented explorations by commander Nausithöos at prospecting far west. He always affirmed her directives, finding the woodland resources just as she described from her dreams.

Besides her nigh omniscient Goddess at constant observation of skilled practices and finds everywhere abroad, Skia had clearly learned a lot of what she knew of intensive cultivation of lumber from what once far-off Medeia of the Lower Isthmus had taught the Atticans of best forestry practices. For the then Supreme Sister of the AcroKorinth [before 1371 BC] was both strict and insistent upon exactly such forestry regimes as would fully replace whole timber yields by fells off her own plantations of old-growth steeps. All that was reared by coppice of saplings would eventually regenerate uniform stands of species given any aptitude of foresters for patience and nurture of woodlands cultivation.

As usual, however, what Medeia taught had inspired Skia through her Goddess of Dream. The more that she learned about what the shipwrights at Brauron were prospecting, or would need most plentifully in quality, the more knowledgeable she seemed to become at determining which tree species suited where, for what, and how best grown and maintained wherever. That’s also to say for how she learned weed and pestilence control, or by depopulating herds of foraging deer. Most pointed of all her schemes, notwithstanding all the rest that she directed of forestry, she had great demand for dry regime uplands whose cover might provide pasturage instead for beasts of burden rotated into summer grazing.

My main point in beginning this new rendition with such extensive arguments about Skia’s diverse new cultivations explains at the earliest why a decade later there was so much established coppice. Stands of species became so numerously interspersed with tall grass meadowlands that the fells, aside of their contribution to lumber for ships, amply fulfilled pasturage in consequence of her gradual buildups of herds. For simultaneously was the breeding and successful dropping season of offspring, by which select culls the yield of many beasts of burden, particularly the largest possible of attainment.

The fells did feed well, in turn, into the immense needs of Cephalos to construct a navy of superior vessels by the very warship classes that hereon I’ll ever so slowly be introducing.

Mentör presses us into such elaborate learnings of Skia by teaching what was most impressive to him from the standpoint of his own century, the thirteenth BC, by precedents of a whole century earlier off the fourteenth century BC. His appreciation is obviously most elastic at adding all these elements of perfected infrastructure together, even as he had little personal intimacy to learn for himself about the actual implementation, or means to ends, of each huge project of cultivated coppice.

Skia performed as always without the least prescience of what she was directing her laborers to perform unto precise results. General rewards to each phase of completion offered no expectancies whatsoever. She remained as always an expert about means to ends and how they involved a large influx of shipwrights and strongman laborers. Observing her august, uncanny precision at explication, there must arise much hearsay about her. I now know so belatedly how greatly appreciated she was as opportune to such workers. She was worth moving home and family. Many times before I’ve remarked how clear her expressed needs affected such talented men, even entirely new men of consummate skills, albeit without any explanation of the ends that they could and would achieve for themselves through her strictly explained means to enhance their artisanal skills. I can say that their populace must have composed the fastest learners of whatever Skia could do for them, perhaps even how then perfected, while becoming delighted in her ingenuity at yet other careful expression of so much that only they, solely alone, knew so especially well.

Curiosity over means to ends, accordingly, soon had attracted others of those workmen’s assiduous skills. They immigrated over winters. Their influx carefully denuded tall trees of their lower branching, kept their branch growth high aloft, and they sought to space new coppice so that there was least undergrowth allowed for foraging deer and other hoofed ruminants. Otherwise, by clearing away interferences with the [reorganized] woodlands’ best growth habitats, there was not much further need of curiosity or astute judgment from the best practiced hamlet tenants. The newcomers always requested permanent stay, whereby they addressed the needs for their own new skills by adding to the able workforce of that sororal residency farthest south by the plantation steadings below Brauron Basin. There, too, the hillock dry woodlands could be newly ranched over subsequent summers, ending with fine grassy stands bearing lushly under autumn cool nights before the forthcoming rains.

By three years later, the constituent sisters and tenant headmen amassed for Skia eagerly, in celebration, despite that her earliest arrival was remembered as two years of many days of rainfall while working constantly within dripping dense forested undergrowth. All that had been attendant upon her first-ever mobilized projects while the Second Deluge [so-called]. These eager dependents remained invigorated by her despite much of other work aggravations afterward, especially as imposed by searing hot days of midsummers become droughty anew and all over again.

What such yeomen tenancies must have thought an endless and yet doggedly practiced tedium, because seemingly a constancy of futile clearance endeavor, began to disclose a highly accessible dry woodland. It was growing above a deep, loamy topsoil, whose clearances they fed off well and regularly, while yet at another constancy, the whole eradication of invasive deer herds. Thus by project clearances completed, cattle range became mature undergrowth to those entirely new woodlands upon deeply isolated, upland meadowland.

Such must suffice in review of Skia’s exciting and yet routine progress as a happy enough maiden of elite stature, because she was very happily received everywhere of Brauron at last. Successful, too, as the fame of her labor forces’ painstaking civil works that inspired, engendered, and even fulfilled widespread replication abroad. Sometimes, too, most sensational finishes were measured by the prolificacy of the cattle bred through her appointed tenants, who smartly proved out their and her open-range management. While at that coordinated supervision, and while conjoined to her sisters of those southern ranches and nearby coastal woodlands, there wasn’t anything about any of it to precipitate anxiety amongst those denizens.

No ominous great perils in advent declaimed any adverse contingencies either. So, then, when an advent of pestilence came over the horizon, from Pallas’ cattle ranches of Aktika farther southwest, and then by most horrific surprise, I shall say of in good time. I shall also say in proof of Skia’s long-proven adequacy at readiness for most everything—without any prescience whatsoever afforded from her tutelary Goddess.

Skia’s coastal forestry and land clearances for meadows of temporary cattle land both bode to become famous by 1369. It created woodland preserves that also isolated herds from lowland swards striking southeast and southwest from Brauron Basin. That isolation, in fact, was famous all by itself for what it prevented of taint by feral cattle elsewhere over vast woodland.

CHAPTERTHREE

HIS RETURN AT STRONG OUTSET

Let us recall from book ii, as still familiar to its readers, the last circumstances immediate to Cephalos’ departure to Iolkos and the impending trials-at-bridal to be held there. Obviously there had to ensue a hiatus while his many ongoing developments within and abroad the Saronic Gulf. Let’s also keep firmly in our mind what he’d intended: to build toward an expansion of best relations between the Rim Powers and his prospective bride’s homeland legacy, the Kingdom of Magnesia. As though to establish maritime antipodes at both ends of the Strait of Abantis, the Rim Powers would own sound foreign relations with the far inland realms of the north mainland, where, until 1372, their very difficult means of any access whatsoever to that inland waterway.

Until the end of his consortship, Cephalos’ main mission of navarchy was the articulation of landfalls from Point Sounion of Attica to everywhere above it along Bay Attica. Too soon, though, he must learn to leave in abeyance the small, relatively insignificant realm of Haemonia and its small port of Iolkos. Phima’s incorrigibly recalcitrant father, King Akastos, would stifle any and all naval ambition through his ineptitude. That realm would prove an inevitable annexation by the Kingdom of Magnesia, but not until Great King Aiakos had rendered Phima sufficient defensive strength and sustained internal prosperity to properly integrate Haemonia. Clearest as the necessity of an annexation was, at first the need to renovate Magnesia’s Pagasai Bay was a more worthwhile and possible attainment. Landfall for assemblages of merchant ships, preparatory to embarking the north outer passage of the Strait, was the beginning of that outlet into the Northern Sea from as far west as Phthia. Iolkos and other interior ports to Pagasai Bay could then have the Great Peace of Aiakos to command that near sea of maritime commerce.

Again, just before his consortship, at far into the trials, [late autumn of 1372 BC], Cephalos had already conceived a concerted eradication of piracy, working from the intelligence maintained and expanded by his boon friends, the Princes Erechthëid. Surging ominously, only the southern outlet by access was safe from scourge. Cephalos and they must even wonder why approach to the Strait of Abantis via the Bay of Myrtoa was safest of all southern waters. Haunts of pirates were besetting the mains, northern isles, and fareways of Crete’s southern maritime ambit, despite the Cretan hegemony that supposedly guarded the verge of the Northern and Cretan Seas.

Attica’s ambit could expand far northward, and Magnesia might venture eastward from Pagasai Bay. By 1370, however, Cephalos had confirmed his suspicions and become determined to relieve the Aegean of all interferences by scourge abetted by the roving sea lords of Crete.

That was what he confirmed, suspicion that those former minions under the Minos Lykastos had exploited his dotage for their cahoots with pirates—while ranging their operations out of Pyrrhaios Portside of Attica.

Or, as Mentör intones. …

Too free to range where they liked amidst the Mid-Sea Isles of the Greek Archipelago, the sea lords had become held to no account, and thereby become corrupted. Theirs had become a sham protectorate during the last years of the very popular Minos Lykastos’ reign.

What Cephalos and his boon friends by the House of Erechthëus had built before the consortship to Phima was a series of commercial or tactical landfalls chaining southward along a highly trafficked maritime corridor called the Great Southwest Main. It reached as far as Rhodes Island, offshore and across the corner of the Anatol.

While the consortship, Cephalos could bring those landfalls under excellent royal sponsorships, until they were performing to high standards under Prince Phereklos, thus much beyond best expectations. So prospered as well his ascendant coalition of Aiakos, Erginos, and himself. They expanded tranquil waters as far below the Narrow (the Euripos as earliest known) of the Strait, to the Sacred Isles that began the Great Main. Next, they must bar Crete from encroachments, even to pushing them far offshore away from Bay Attica, as the eastern coastline was then still called.

At the Narrow, I again say here in recollection, there specifically was the concentrated trade colony of the Levantines. Their outposts there made an emporia situated at both sides of that pinch of channel. It remained under the light demands of fealty as the coalition had disposed to Kadmeis since the ascendancy of High King Consort Oedipüs by his marriage to the Euryanassa Iokastë. Its affirmed alliance to Kadmeis meant the Narrow was governed by an elite cadre that operated out of the high city Kadmeia.

The Levantines should not present a problem in Cephalos’ estimation. Easy prey abroad, the Levantines must fear a piracy that other trade colonists off the fortress harbors also dreaded. The Salaminians in particular had that dread despite their own peace with Crete where the sea lords were concerned. Those islanders, therefore, spoke in acclaim of Cephalos’ naval initiatives to their merchant magnate counterparts upon the Narrow of the Abantis Strait. Now home again, Cephalos wished to assure all magnates and governors of colonies a full baffle of pirates. It would be followed by a considerable Attican navy over warships soon to be promised his appointed navarchy from the North Rim Powers above Salamis Island.

Cephalos could not see any enduring aggravation to his patience at eradication of pirate peril, or any while he was away at brief marriage. Even so, my recollections are a belated knowledge that came to him only upon his realized consortship, after it had proved a marriage without prospect of permanence beyond the son whom he sired off Princess Phima.

Concomitantly, since his rapid ascendancy to either equal or exceed Kadmeis’ neighbors, petty kings all, High King Oedipüs had alleviated all brigandry along the Asopos River Valley. As far as its debouch into the Abantis Strait, no longer, either, was there anything tantamount to toll levies between the various Midlands whose shorelines touched the strait.

The Levantines of foreign origins had rendered the Narrow an entrepôt for fullest exercise of free ambits by all traders with Kadmeis, New Lokris along the Midlands proper, and by Cephalos’ created landfalls for the Upper Midlands built for Aiakos and Erginos during the protracted consortship [until late 1370 BC]. Oedipüs had enjoyed strongest trade relations with the Levantine maritime commerce, albeit circularly via his own elite merchant magnates. He’d made feudatory Levantines most active at redistribution from landfalls into deep interior outreaches, by the High Kingdom’s long inland corridors of overland caravans. Thereby their well-routed give-and-take in exchange for imported goods originating in the far eastern homelands ashore the Great Green.

Running between the Kadmeia, where an earliest entrepôt to make a capital seat for the Asopos River Valley, Oedipüs and his elite of magnates managed overland trails that were distinct from Cephalos’ own circuits and crossroad routes that traced north to south and thus vice-versa. Even so, the Asopos River Valley ran in parallel to the Eleutherais Woodlands to much farther west than the last most fertile plantations of the MesoGaia. Oedipüs and the Kekropid first cousins of Cephalos had mutually preferred this arm’s-length understanding, which their respective henchmen over small depots and most active entrepôts found simplest to accommodate without quarrels. Advantages of one over the other and vice-versa had built healthy competition between the qualities of goods trafficked, as between all rival parties at trade.

The consequence had been nothing to fight over, but much greater employ of idled and worthy men. Retired since the retreating, heavy influx years of turmoil, when the Minyans had driven refugees in mass from their homelands, overland commerce had quelled such displacement, while proving a true refuge for most skilled and meritorious men-at-arms. By that enemy’s abatement of hostilities, so for the ensuing peacetime commerce dealings. They had burgeoned into both a great and increasing diversity of goods by traffics newly founded since 1378 BC, even to drawing off farthest interior origins where newly fabricated articles and finest goods offered in trade from such far outback denizens as the North Highlanders of the Pindus Mountain Range. …

Never forget that regularized exchange, assisted by small barter of a greatest diversity of goods, was the sole means to currency by these times. Goods known for standardized parities acted as tender for international exchanges; they sufficed to meet the innumerable parity barter transactions that somehow brought complete satisfaction to all dealings of goods. Subject to many transport alternatives, so, too, the means of conveyance to fulfill the set barter parities through finally realized exchanges and deliveries of the physical goods themselves.

… All those prospects ahead for Cephalos, by the resumed commerce of his first cousin Kekropids aside, his homecoming resumed important developments abroad the Cretan Sea. Engaged in such prospects as were already in good process, about which he’d become precisely knowledgeable through his closest friends and collateral kinsmen, the princes of House Erechtheus, all its branch royal lineages by descent adopted him anew as their only real commander-in-chief over overland and maritime merchant mobilizations.

Most of the Princes Erechthëid’s activities since 1371 BC had them initially concerned with locating, then defining, the pirate peril, while building up the roving fleets at coast guard for both sides of Aktika. There was also under consideration of that peril the blunt end of the Argolid Peninsula. Along there, a specific stretch of coastline had somehow become a true Pirate Main, where, too, just inland, lay hideous haunts of pirates at the suspected compounding of their slave takings from depredation overseas.

Captives into chattel slavery were composed from innocents stolen off the seas wherever their indefensible coastal habitats. So were the harsh realities of coastal habitation in general. Full quell of scourge had proved impossible to sustain throughout most of the Late Helladic Period already elapsed.

Caught upon deep sea and conveyed into winter recesses indenting the Pirate Main, so were these mass abductions off foreign shores left to barest subsistence at survival. An ongoing hindrance to both the expansion and consolidation of Cephalos’ ambit of navarchy, the Pirate Main must become his rapidly ascendant adjutants’ foremost objective. Alas, we will learn to understand why it became so constantly forestalled, and any rubout was never brought to highest priority until 1365.

Near Seas’ piracy was in wicked symbiosis between pirates and their Cretan hegemons. These were by another ilk of sea lords, the obscure and mostly aloof superiors over roving sea lords at far foreign stations from Crete. Their corrupted underlings were the pirates themselves. Enemy at large