Reading record 26.8

 Argh, I am so sick of those decimal places!  🤬

Uh.  Anyway.

Today's book was Theseus, Volume Three, by Jordan Holt.  A graphic novel I backed on Kickstarter.  Volume one was back in 2020, so it's been long enough since the previous volumes that I forgot many of the individual quirks of this telling of the Theseus myth.

Or rather I forgot the problematic one:  the author chose to include the "Medea subplot."

Which is a genuine part of some ancient tellings of the myth, but it sucks.  (The subplot, not this book.)  Basically, it makes Medea into Theseus' evil stepmother, and...yeah, actually, that's pretty much all that needs to be said.  Making Medea into a villain instead of a victim was emblematic of the misogyny and xenophobia that was so prevalent in ancient Greek society.

There's something extra demented about adding Medea to Theseus' tale in particular.  (Again, I am specifically here talking about whatever ancient Athenian chose to add her into the story.)  Because let's look at the facts:

1) Medea playing the evil stepmother comes hard on the heels of the conclusion of Theseus' brief affair with Ariadne, who he abandoned on Naxos at the orders of Dionysos.  (Surprisingly, the author of this modern book chose to leave that out, so Theseus actually ended up with Ariadne.)

2) Medea and Ariadne play the exact same role in their own stories:  they are both foreign princesses who betray their fathers in order to enable the Greek hero to achieve his goal successfully, rather than dying miserably as they would have done unaided.

3) Both Medea and Ariadne are thrown over by their dependent Greek beau as soon as they are no longer useful.  (Excuses were made in both cases, but they don't change the hard facts of the matter.  Especially since there are versions where Dionysos does not order Theseus to abandon Ariadne, and merely picks her up after Theseus has sailed off and left her.  (Those versions presumably came from somewhere other than Athens...))

4) Medea and Ariadne are actually first cousins!  Ariadne's mother, Pasiphae, is the sister of Aeetes, Medea's father.

5) (And this is the big one!) It's actually chronologically impossible for Medea to have been courting/marrying Aegeus during Theseus' youth.  This is why:  in his old age, the twice-widowed Theseus abducted an underage Helen of Sparta, planning to make her wife #3.  Her twin brothers, Castor and Polydeuces, rescued her while Theseus was held prisoner in the House of Hades for trying to help his bestie kidnap Persephone in an attempt to marry her.  Castor and Polydeuces went along on the voyage of the Argo to steal the Golden Fleece from Colchis.  (This event basically had to be after the abduction of Helen, since Castor and Polydeuces are the same age as Helen, and surely would have been viewed as too young to Argonauts before that time!)  Therefore, Theseus is already old and twice widowed by the time Medea leaves Colchis!

This is, of course, the big trouble in trying to work with Greek myths, because you have centuries of ancient texts (even setting aside Roman versions...which very few people do, as pretty much anyone you ask is likely to know Ovid's version of Medusa's 'origin story,' despite that his version is literally not attested anywhere prior to his Metamorphoses, strongly suggesting that he just effin' made it up), which were written drawing on different traditions from different regions, and which represent the different opinions and agendas of different authors, etc.  There is no hint of consistency even in the actual Greek versions, and as soon as you start looking at modern versions as well (to say nothing of Medieval and Renaissance versions!) it becomes even more wildly muddled.

Uh...

Yeah, I have completely lost track of anything else I may have wanted to say.

So.

Erm.

Well.

Guess that's the post, then.

Original language:  English

Stymied

     So.

    I am:

• Overwhelmed.
• Lost.
• Confused.
• Frustrated.
• All of the above.

    You see, I'm trying to get to work on the rewrite of book four of the Atalanta and Ariadne books.

    Precis version:  I wrote the original drafts (for all seven books!) of these quasi-YA Greek-myth-based fantasy novels back in 2014.  During 2020's COVID lockdown, I re-visted them and decided they were worth salvaging, unlike most of what I was writing back then.

    Since 2021, I've managed to get the first three polished up and released, both on AO3 as plain text and on itch.io in a slightly interactive form.  (Though having just re-read the AO3 versions, all three still need a lot of work.  😭)  Anyway, having gotten book three out of the metaphorical door, it is now book four's turn.

    And.  Um.

    See, in book one, my heroic trio are mostly just in the region of Troy.  In book two, they return to their roots and go to mainland Greece.  In book three, they visit Athens, Aiaia (home of Kirke (aka Circe)), and then spend most of the novel in Thrace, which I had to give a fairly Greek-adjacent cultural setting, because it had to fit the myths of Heracles' visit to deal with the man-eating mares of Diomedes of the Bistones.

    Book four, however, is when they start doing a little globe-trotting.  (Or the closest you can get to same in a Bronze Age setting, anyhow.)  After visiting a trading town, they head to Babylon, looking for information on the big bad of the series.

    So.  Um...

    Mesopotamia is not my region of expertise.  (Technically, I have no region of expertise, being at best an amateur and at worst an unqualified hack.)  I needed to research it before I could write the first draft.  And I did research it.  Not as much as I needed to, but I did do research.  I read the Enuma Elish (not realizing that it probably wasn't written until several generations after my novel takes place 😰) and I looked at quite a few books in the library of the university where I had just started working on my MA in History.

    I was aware, of course, that the books were not the most recent, as the university hadn't been keeping all that up to date on history and archaeology in general, and particularly not Mesopotamian history and archaeology.

    If I was also aware of how much of a problem that actually was, I had forgotten in the intervening decade.

    I, um, I'm aware of it now.

    Having read both a general survey of Mesopotamian history and a specialized history of Babylonia itself, I dived into rereading the latest draft of book four so I could make notes on what needed to change for the next draft.

    Basically...everything.

    Apparently most of those books I used back in 2014 were approximately as old as I am, maybe older.

    Virtually everything that can be wrong is wrong.

    Whole sequences are centered around traditions that either I made up out of whole cloth or that someone else made up out of whole cloth.  Wherever they came from, what they are is completely incompatible with what is actually known of Bronze Age Babylon's culture.

    If it was just little things, I wouldn't have too much of a problem.

    But like...there's so much that's so weird that I have no idea what to use to replace it.  For example...

    For some reason, I had decided that it was "typical" for supplicants to sleep in the temples to request divine visions in their dreams.  This cannot be much more wrong:  temples in Mesopotamia were such sacred spaces that no one except priests and the most upper of upper echelons of society were allowed inside.  Random people--particularly foreigners!--absolutely would not have been allowed even to set foot in one, let alone sleep in one.  But I have to do something, because the trio had not so much visions as actual divine visitations, and these were vital to communicating the plot to them.

    Which, really, maybe is super-weak and I should do something else.  But what?  That's the problem, you know?  I have to put something in there to let the trio learn what they need to learn.

    And honestly I don't want to let go of some of it.  I love the visuals of Ariadne's visions, in which she's confronted with a giant blank expanse of clay and words and shapes appear before her to show her what the god in question wants to communicate to her.  (Which requires him to divinely teach her cuneiform so she can understand him!  And that's vital to what follows...)  And in Atalanta's dream, which starts out as a nightmare, she has a vision of an enormous ziggurat filled with praying statuettes (which I thought were still a thing in their day, despite that they were long outdated by then) which come to life and surround her and grow and chase her, and it's actually a pretty effective nightmare sequence, one which I have some interesting ideas about how to give the sequence a bit of a visual punch in the Ren'py version.  Eurysakes, as I recall, just has a conversation with the god he talks to.  That one's not particularly interesting, tbh, and could easily be disposed of.

    Another sequence that is both vital and kind of weirdly pointless is one in which they encounter a procession taking the statue of Ishtar to a temple to the underworld gods, at which time the goddess literally enters the underworld (again)...for apparently no reason whatsoever?  On top of me misunderstanding just why Ishtar went into the underworld in the first place (suggesting that the book I read that talked about her descent into the underworld was especially ancient, considering the full text that explained it was discovered in like the early 1950s), did I think she did it repeatedly, or that it was that important a part of her cultic presence?  Because...no.  None of that.  Additionally, the statues of the gods were essentially their physical forms to the ancient Mesopotamians, and while there were a few rituals that involved moving them around, they wouldn't have been wandering the countryside in the care of merely a few...a few...I don't even know who those people were accompanying the statue, because my original draft didn't make it clear, but they certainly seemed to be absolutely nobody!

    As a sequence, it's not necessary, but it accomplishes some important things, especially in that it's the final part of the Babylonian gods giving the trio gifts to ensure that they can triumph over their enemies--the enemies, in this case, more of the Babylonian gods than the trio--and is directly addressing Ishtar as the Lady of Battles, a function her Hellenic counterpart doesn't have.  Honestly, I need to address Ishtar's unique qualities more, since she has both masculine and feminine qualities, and in that respect she is actually kinda similar to Atalanta and Ariadne.

    Realistically, if they're going to get gifts from the Babylonian gods who want them to defeat the threat that looms over Babylonia, then they should have to do tasks to earn them.  (Admittedly, they did at least fight off enemies who were attacking that procession carrying the statue of Ishtar, but it was never explained why those enemies were attacking it, nor why Ishtar had on hand Marduk's bow and quiver to give them.)  They should have to seek out sites in the wilds where those items have been carefully hidden away, but...I don't know of any appropriate sites for that.  What they're being given are weapons the gods themselves used to fight their own foes, so it's not like they're things that mortals would normally have in their possession.

    Hmm.

    It would be a massive amount of new text, but it's gonna need that regardless, so maybe I do just need to invent challenges for the Babylonian gods to set before them, and for each challenge they pass, they get one of the weapons they need to defeat the villain-du-jour, plus a fraction of the information they need.

    It's a bit formulaic--especially compared to the earlier books--but it's a tried and true formula that's literally been around since ancient times.

    In the current draft, Atalanta--and only Atalanta--is taught "Babylonian" by Marduk so that they can communicate without him having to lower himself to use her language.  (I'm not sure if I didn't know at the time that the language was called Akkadian or if I figured she wouldn't know and it therefore didn't matter.)  I'm not sure how plausible it is for only her to learn it in the new set-up I just described, and yet I feel like certain points aren't going to work very well if they all know it.  (Not sure why Ninurta didn't have to teach it to Eurysakes when they spoke.  It doesn't seem even slightly probable that Ninurta would know Mycenaean Greek...)

    <sigh>

    I feel like this one draft is going to be the hardest part of adapting, rewriting and releasing the entire seven book series.  (They do visit Egypt in book five, but that's just a brief stop-over, more akin to visiting Aiaia in book three, rather than being the major portion of the novel.  Plus Egypt was better understood culturally at the time the books I was consulting were written.)

    Anyway.

    Final, bizarre parting note.

    In 2021, I had taken the most recent drafts of the novels (they had mostly just received minor rephrasings and such since their completion) and left annotations on them in the form of comments in Word.  For rereading book four, I opened up that annotated version in Google Docs so I could read it on my phone and leave myself further notes.

    For some reason Google Docs decided that all those comments I left on the document were made on December 31st, 1969.

    Which is:

• Before there were home PCs
• Before Microsoft Word existed
• Before Microsoft existed (as far as I know)
• Before the novels were ever written
• Before I was born
• Insanity
• All of the above

    Yeah.  Just wanted to share that.  (It's definitely not an error on the file or a dating error on the computer I was using when I left those notes, because when I open the same file in Word on this computer, each comment has the correct date from 2021.)

IWSG: What's in an ending?

 

    Since I've had this post sitting around 3/4 finished since like the 10th of April, and since it's about writing, I figure I may as well use it for this month's ISWG post.

    Instead of talking about the month's suggested question (the answer to that being mostly that I'm afraid of people actually reading anything I wrote, but simultaneously kind of afraid of them not reading it, too), I'm going to talk about endings.

    Or, more accurately, what is it that I look for in an ending?

    I ask because, well...where to start?

    Okay, so in my previous post I mentioned a fantasy novel I had bought on a whim earlier, a book I had decided would be up next from my "to read" pile.

    That book was fantasy in the sense of "historical setting but folklore is real."  So nothing strictly speaking invented for the novel, that kind of thing.

    When I finished reading it, I found the ending had left a bad taste in my mouth (in my mind?) but I'm not even sure why.

    It wasn't a bad ending by any conventional definition:  the heroes were triumphant, they didn't die, and their loved ones didn't die.  So, it should have been satisfying, yes?

    And yet, for some reason, it wasn't.  Not for me.  And I don't know why.

    I can identify a few things that may have been factors:

1. There is a sword in the novel.  It comes up early on and is brought up periodically throughout to ensure the reader hasn't forgotten its existence, then in the final climactic confrontation it's revealed to be the legendary sword itself!  Problem:  because this novel was based in real world folklore, said legendary sword is a very famous one from actual folklore and so I clocked it literally as soon as it was first mentioned.  Where it had been found signaled it as absolutely that sword and no other.  So what was probably(?) intended to be at least a little surprising was instead a "ho hum" moment because it was so incredibly obvious.
2. There's a fake-out moment (more than just a moment, really; it's maybe a chapter and a half long) before the final climax where our first-person narrator makes it sound like she's killed one of her companions.  That leaves a nasty feeling behind even when you're relatively sure she's lying.  I don't like that nasty feeling, and it definitely soured me on the entire thing, despite that it did turn out that she had not killed her friend.
3. The ending is very "restoration of the status quo" despite that the status quo in question was definitely not nice.  Obviously, as it was a historical setting (+folklore being real) the author was not free to change up the status quo beyond maybe changing things in that one village, which was made clear not to be the case.  But it just...it definitely left me feeling like "why didn't they accomplish more?"  Even if there really wasn't much more they could have accomplished.

    Following soon on the heels of that, I finished playing the Dragon Quest III remake...and was left feeling very underwhelmed by the ending.  Admittedly, Dragon Quest as a whole is not as story-intensive as some other JRPG series are (though the stories did become richer and more central to the experience as the series went on) and the endings are often pretty lackluster, but something about that particular ending left me particularly not satisfied.  Again, I can't even put my finger on what about it I was unsatisfied with.  Though the player character's lack of a homecoming didn't help...and the post-credits scene lost any punch it was supposed to have because although I was positive I had heard the name mentioned at the very end before, I have no idea quite where or who he was.  (Logically, you would expect them to be setting up that he's the big bad of IV, only I'm pretty dang sure that was not the name of the guy who was manipulating Psarro, so...also, after the scene it went "To be continued in" the HD remake of the first two games, so...are they saying that III somehow took place before I and II?  I am confused by that logic...but I just checked on the Dragon Quest wiki, and yes, that's what they're saying, which is very strange to me, but the end of Dragon Quest VI also seemed to be claiming that it was before IV and V, so...that's weird, but...)

    Anyway, so double whammy of "endings that left me unsatisfied without actually being bad" in short order.  (I was similarly dissatisfied with the ending of Zenshu, but in that case I know exactly why.  Though it still wasn't a bad ending, per se.  But that was a week or so earlier anyway.)

    Net result, it has me wondering if I am applying a double standard.  Am I being harder on the endings of works written by others than I am on my own endings?

    Thinking about it logically...I should analyze my own endings and see how they fit the criteria I feel like I gathered in looking at why that novel and Dragon Quest III left me feeling less than pleased.

    Setting aside fanfic for the moment, since there are always aspects there that are trying to tie together canon material with material of my own invention and thus making endings trickier to arrange, I'm going to look at series of books I'm 3/7 of the way through rewriting.  But since this is now an IWSG post and a few people will actually read it, I'll be more vague than I was originally going to be.

1. Heroes triumph, divine status quo is upheld, mortal status quo is not (though as of the ending it's not clear how much of a shake-up it will be, and it's later books that illuminate that)
2. Heroes triumph, divine status quo is upheld, mortal status quo is improved
3. Heroes triumph, divine status quo is upheld, mortal status quo is partially upheld and partially improved
4. From here on, I haven't done the rewrites (I'm working on the final research for book 4 now, in fact), so the endings aren't set yet.  Heroes triumph, divine status quo upheld.  The mortal status quo feels like it wasn't particularly even involved in this book.  In large part because my ancient Greek heroes were visiting Babylon, and I didn't have enough information about Late Bronze Age Babylon and its culture (plus I hadn't readjusted the chronology, so I thought they would be visiting in a period when Babylon was under Assyrian control, which was going to get heckin' awkward to write about without way more information than I had available to me).  Even with the new research I've done, I feel like I won't be able to connect events much to what's going on among the actual human beings because the current version is so disconnected that even in the new version the rest of humanity won't too be much impacted by the heroes winning the day.  (Aside from, you know, not getting exterminated by the machinations of the villains.)
5. There's a lot about the ending of this one that I don't even remember.  (I wrote the originals in 2014...and last reread the old drafts in 2020...)  I know the heroes triumph and that the divine status quo is mostly upheld (the villains of the series are trying to off the Olympian gods, ya see, so that comes up a lot), but I can't recall if there's any impact on the status quo of the mortal world at all.  I feel like this one, too, is a bit divorced from human society, though not as much so as the previous book.  They travel a lot in this one, too, but the travel isn't as responsible as in book 4, since their travel is mostly to Egypt and Crete, and I was able to research Egypt a lot more easily at the time, and I'm following the myths to treat Crete at this period as being basically the same as mainland Greece (which is probably not actually the slightest bit archaeologically accurate for this period, but I figured the myths needed to outweigh reality for a myth-based setting).
6. Heroes triumph but at a cost, divine status quo sort of maintained and sort of shaken up, mortal status quo not enormously altered but at least slightly improved.  Sort of.  (I mean, an inheritance issue that could have led to warfare and/or fratricide/sororicide is settled peacefully.  That's something, right?)
7. Heroes ultimately (if only barely) triumph, and the divine status quo is as protected as it can get when you realize that the gods are powered/created by human belief and the Late Bronze Age has about a generation left before its impending collapse.  (And yes, that's actually a minor plot point in the novels.  Or maybe more of a talking point a few times.  It comes up, anyway.)  Again, this one as I recall it is not enormously connected to the actions of other people, in part because they're really going all over the place in this one; they hit a large number of places, including stuff much further north where I had pretty much zero clue what the culture in the region would be at that time.  (I still don't fully know, even though I've done a little more research since then.)  There is at least a little improvement of the mortal status quo--if only for a small slice of it--though, so that's something?

    Looking at all of those, I feel like only the first three would meet my current standards.  Though of course books 4-7 are kind of more "part of a series" than the first three are.  Or rather...how do I explain?  Book 3's ending is where the heroes learn that they have a powerful enemy who's been involved with everything that they've had to deal with up until now.  Book 4 starts out with them actively trying to learn more about this enemy, and that continues right up until they finally deal with said enemy in the climax of book 7.  Because of all that, it's kind of like...the endings don't fully matter as much until reaching the ending of book 7?  Which doesn't seem right, but that's definitely how my brain perceives it no matter what.  (Maybe it's the side-effect of growing up watching the Star Wars movies constantly, and The Empire Strikes Back is the only one with an unsatisfying ending...)

    Obviously, since I haven't yet started the rewriting process for books 4-7, I can do what little is available to me to fix the parts of the endings that aren't up to my current standings for an ending, but...for some of them that might require more restructuring than I really want to put into the process.  Less like a new draft and more like a fully new novel, you know?  I'd like to get the rest of the series finished and released (in what minimal sense the first three count as released, anyway) sooner rather than later, and having to do that much reworking would definitely delay me a lot.

    I guess what most gets to me about this is that I'm not actually sure how much it matters.  Or rather, I don't actually know what other people look for in an ending.  Would most people be annoyed by getting through a novel and finding that the heroes' victory didn't do anything to change the status quo of the world around them?  (Since this is the Late Bronze Age, said status quo is definitely not pleasant, but there's not much I can do about that, y'know?  I'm not as confined by historical reality as the novel that set me onto thinking about all this, but I'm still bound to the larger aspects.)

    Even more importantly, are readers going to get frustrated that the endings become less satisfying after the heroes become aware of the larger flow of events and the actions of the mysterious villain behind it all?  I mean, to be clear, this is not an "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" situation with the same enemy just running off at the end of the book to come back working some new evil in the next novel.  There are smaller villains they defeat each time (though I think in the current draft both 5 and 6 have the same sub-villain, who had left a lesser (but also physically much larger) sub-villain to be the final boss of book 5) so it's at least got that much satisfaction, but...gnh.

    I'm not sure there is any real answer to this.

    I'm also not sure how many people have actually read any of the first three, or how many people are going to read the remaining four whenever they're made available.  And I guess it shouldn't even matter, since I'm making the books available for free on itch.io and AO3, so it's not like I'm trying to sell copies or anything.  I guess I just don't want to disappoint anyone who might read them, you know?

    I know one thing that probably turns people off who do encounter the books is the fact that the heroes are striving to protect the Olympian gods when a lot of modern works tend to want to get rid of them  or at least change them since they were not, in fact, very nice, and did a lot of genuinely horrible things.  But that's a very modern perspective on the Olympian gods.  The people of ancient Greece did not think of them that way.  Of course, we don't fully know how they did think of them, since they didn't write down their cultic practices, and thus the versions of the gods reflected in the myths are not actually the same versions that they actively worshiped.  (This is especially the case for Hera.)  Of course, in the end, I'm not trying to write about the actual religion versions of the Greek gods, but the mythological version, but that still comes down to the same thing, doesn't it?  If I want to use the Heroic Age setting and not completely betray the epic poetry that this is supposed to be building off of (though my writing is nowhere near good enough to be mentioned in the same conversation as masterworks that have survived more than two thousand years!), then the heroes have to believe in and want to win the support of the gods, and if they ever disrespect the gods, they have to suffer because of it.  Because that's what happens in the myths:  you tick off a god, you suffer and probably die.  (Unless you're Agamemnon, then when you tick off a god, you get hundreds or thousands of your own men killed (and/or your daughter) and you just sit there and survive it like a monster.)

    So that's something I could in theory change that might make my works more palatable to more people, but I don't want to do that, because that's not what I'm going for.

    I should probably write something else where I'm free to have characters tell the gods "get lost!" when they do the awful stuff they're known for.  (I should write a visual novel where Zeus finally gets his for all his skirt-chasing.  That would be epic.)

    ...I feel like I have wandered way off my original topic of "endings."

    Given that I am very bad at them, somehow that seems appropriate.

A to Z: Zenais!

 

    I am so excited for today's post!  Not because it represents the successful conclusion of the challenge, but because it's about Zenais!  😁

    She's a character I added to the new draft of The Martial Maenads, and I am super-proud of her.  (Even if she is rather blatantly, erm, inspired by someone else's character...)

    But first, a little background on the situation in which Atalanta and Ariadne meet her.  They've been sent to Thrace to deal with the threat of Bromalios, an imposter god claiming to be equal parts Dionysos and Ares.  (Hence the title of the novel, lol!)  After they're accepted into the cult's headquarters--which is more the ancient version of a cult than the modern version, I hasten to add--the girls find they're required to be given lessons in "dance" and song in order to be capable enough to be properly initiated into the cult itself.  And one of the "dance" instructors is Zenais, granddaughter of Heracles.  (Her name essentially means "daughter of Zeus," though in this context it's obviously not strictly literal.  (She is genuinely the great-granddaughter of Zeus, though!  Because these are novels in which the Greek gods are very real...))

A to Z: Teukros and Tekmessa

 

    Technically, I was also considering Thetis, but I decided I had slightly more interesting content for Teukros.  So, starting from the top:  Teukros (better known by his Roman name, Teucer) is the son of Telamon by a concubine.  In the Iliad, the identity of that concubine is not specified, nor are her Trojan origins mentioned (though they can still be surmised even there), but in all later works his mother is specifically Hesione, elder sister of King Priam.  (Which actually makes for one of the spots in the mythic chronology of Troy that feels off.  But that would take several posts to go into in any depth, so I'll leave it for some other time.)   The name Teukros proves his Trojan ancestry pretty efficiently, because Teukros was also the name of one of the mythic founders of Troy, hence that "Teucrian" is one of the words used to describe people or things as being in some manner Trojan.

    Although Teukros features prominently in Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, there's also nothing particularly exceptional about him there; he pretty much just follows the standard "devoted brother of Aias" routine that's set out in the original myths.  Which is not to say that he deviates from that in the Atalanta and Ariadne books!  Far from it!  It's just that being set almost twenty years after the war's end, I get to portray an older Teukros, king of a prosperous realm (and particularly wealthy and powerful because he controls copper mines that were so important to making bronze for weapons and armor!), father of a teenage daughter, and proud uncle who had raised Eurysakes to be his father's equal in just about every way.  (Which is only deviating from the myths in that there he would not have gotten to raise his nephew in the original version.)

            “Certainly, [the events in Egypt that were just under discussion] happened long enough ago that the princess wouldn’t know anything about it,” the king added, with a chuckle that made his nephew blush.
            “What, another fiancée?” Atalanta asked, laughing.
            “Of course not,” Eurysakes answered instantly.  It was quite possibly the fastest speech that Ariadne had ever heard from him.  “Egyptian royalty can only marry Egyptian royalty.”
            “That’s the only thing stopping her, from what I’ve heard,” King Teukros confided in the girls, making Eurysakes’ blush grow deeper.
            “I’d never have guessed you were so popular with women,” Ariadne teased him.
            “It’s not that,” he insisted, somewhat weakly.
            “I fail to see what else it could be,” the king laughed.  “You have a gift with the ladies that your father lacked.  Probably because your face looks so like your mother’s.”
            At the moment, Eurysakes’ face looked more like a pomegranate, it had turned so dark.  Ariadne actually started to feel a little sorry for him, so she decided to change the subject.

    Just being devoted and loving doesn't mean he can't do a little teasing. 😉  However, there's actually not much I can quote about Teukros in the present of the novels, because his sole appearance is so deeply mired in the overarching plot of the series that his scenes wouldn't make any sense out of context. 😅  So I'll just talk about the prologue to book five, since I omitted it from the post on Patroclos.

A to Z: Randomly, Ramses II

 

    Okay, not exactly "random," but...I admit that it's a pretty weird choice.  Only strangely enough I don't have very many characters of any note whose names start with R.

    He's also a weird choice in that most people would not put the Trojan War as during the reign of Ramses II, but I do.  Or rather, I did for the Atalanta and Ariadne books, which then bled over into Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, albeit only slightly.  (He sends troops to aid the Trojans in year...seven or eight I think, though he's only identified as "Ramses" so it could be Ramses III, who's more in the time frame typically associated with the Trojan War.  In any case, it's a one-time event with minimal repercussions no matter what you do...unless the feud between Odysseus and Palamedes is still going on at the time...)  There are reasons for my placing the date of the Trojan War when I did, and as I'm trying to be more relaxed about these posts now, I'm just going to quote what I had to say on the subject in the timeline section available at the end of the interactive version of Scions of Troy:

         So, there’s a lot to say here, and much of it could be spoilers for later books in the series, meaning I can’t say a lot of what I would ideally want to. There is a “traditional” date for the Trojan War: 1184 BCE. This would have the war either beginning or ending (depending on whether you see that as the start date or finish date!) less than a decade before the Bronze Age Collapse.
         I couldn’t use that for obvious reasons! Even more so than the “having the girls travel through what would be their equivalent of a post-apocalyptic wasteland is not what I wanted” reason, there’s also the fact that the myths firmly establish that a good deal of time passes between the fall of Troy and the fall of the other citadels. (Though the ancient texts are not consistent about just how much time, to be honest. And of course they had them all fall to Dorian invaders when most of them seem to have fallen more to earthquakes than to warfare.)

    My original drafts had assumed "about 1250" for the fall of Troy, but that meant that the girls were going to arrive in one of the locations for the later books at a time of great upheaval, and I preferred to avoid that.  So I shifted things around a little more, and put the start of the Trojan War at around 1267 BCE...which is about the same time that the Hittite Empire was going through upheavals as Hattusili III was overthrowing his nephew, Mursili III.  Meaning that the Hittites would have been much too busy to send aid to Troy!  I was so pleased by that coincidence that I decided that, as far as my personal headcanon is concerned, that simply was the date of the Trojan War.  (The deposed Mursili III fled to Egypt, btw, and the political wrangling and threats of war as Hattusili III demanded he be returned lasted for nine years, thus handily both proving that the Hittites had too much else on their minds and that Ramses would have been unlikely to get involved.)

    Even better than the upheaval among the Hittites was the earthquake that struck around Mycenae in about 1250.  This earthquake forced the rebuilding of the citadel walls and was when the grave circles famously looted excavated by Schliemann were brought inside the walls.  Which made for a perfect time for, say, Orestes to carry out his act of vengeance for his father's murder.  And more importantly made an excellent opportunity for Korythos to oust Aineias as the post-war king of Troy.

    In other words, I ended up with a time that fits the larger picture of the war's place in the Late Bronze Age world really well (aside from making the Dorian invasion take place several decades before the Bronze Age Collapse 😰), so I was extremely pleased with it.

    Corollary to all this, because Ramses II had an incredibly long reign (1279-1213 BCE), that means he's still seated on the Egyptian throne when Atalanta and Ariadne first escape slavery around 1239 BCE.  And that means if I wanted them to visit Egypt--and of course I wanted them to visit Egypt!--then he's the man in charge when they get there.

    And when they get there is in book five, so it'll be a while before it's been rewritten...and it's probably going to change a lot in the rewrite.  (Partially because I didn't put in as much research as I should have at the time. 😅)

    That's not the only reason, but I'm going to talk about that after I address how I characterized Ramses in the original draft.  (Which will probably not change too much in the final draft...)  Obviously, it's a tricky thing, trying to write fiction involving a real historical personage.  Even more so considering that the ancient Egyptians did not keep the kind of records that tell us much about what their rulers were actually like as people.

A to Z: Perfect Patroclos

 

    Today's choice is going to be particularly obvious to anyone who knows me well, as I am a self-described Patroclos fangirl.  I actually have a surprisingly varied selection of works I could talk about, too.

    On top of the prologues of the Atalanta and Ariadne books (the prologues are always set in and around the war), there's Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, the failed yandere visual novel I talked about with Deidameia, the play "Pyrrha," the visual novel set in the 1980s I talked about as the origin of Grant Nemo, the failed sci-fi novel I talked about (in the same post about Grant), and all its incomplete spin-offs.  There's also Ilios, my 2011 NaNoWriMo project, but...it's problematic.  😅  In the interests of not stressing myself out, gonna limit myself to just a few sources.

    One of my favorite parts of Better General is that Achilles has a madness meter (though it's a hidden stat), and for the most part the way you increase his madness meter is to separate him from Patroclos.  This can lead to him butchering you, or even the whole camp if the final blow to his sanity is Patroclos' death.  So there is actually a lot of material in there about them (though it's never enough!) and they can have some pretty romantic endings if they both survive the war...

Enraged at having had his concubine taken away, Achilleus left the war in the ninth year.  By the time the Achaian fleet returned to Hellas, Achilleus and his Myrmidons had unified the Hellenic people by conquering them all while the majority of their warriors and kings were still at Troy.  (This saved his descendent the trouble of having to do so nearly a thousand years later.)  Though Achilleus took several wives over the course of his long reign as King of Hellas, he had no children other than Pyrrhos, the boy he had fathered while he was hiding in disguise as a woman on Scyros; it was often said that his wives never conceived because he so rarely went in to them, preferring to spend his nights--like his days--with his faithful Patroclos.  The only serious threat to Achilleus' reign was the arrival of the Heracleidai, who attempted to take Hellas for themselves, but he was able to muster the survivors, sons and grandsons of his allies from Troy (even those who had initially fought against him) to work together to fight them off.  When he eventually died, his bones were enshrined in the same vessel as those of Patroclos.  Pyrrhos inherited his throne.

    ...or...

Outraged that you felt he was ruled by his desires, Achilleus returned to Phthia in a fit of anger, along with Patroclos, who had to spend days of intimate private time to convince Achilleus to spend even one evening in the company of other people, leading the gossip all throughout Thessaly to speculate that Achilleus had no use for anything other than his lover's bed.  Peleus was greatly distressed to see his son behave in such a childish manner, and swore he would not permit Achilleus to inherit Phthia if he did not begin to behave more appropriately, so Achilleus set off to the north with Patroclos to prove himself by conquering Hyperborea.  He never returned.

    ...or...

Achilleus returned to Phthia after the war's end, with many ordinary slaves, but no concubine to keep his bed warm.  Peleus set about trying to find a bride for his son, but Achilleus consistently rejected them all, and by the time Peleus died of old age, it was clear even to him that his son refused to take a wife because he wanted no one who could come between him and Patroclos.  Once his father was gone, Achilleus sent to Scyros for the son he had fathered there, and made him his heir.  When they eventually died, Achilleus and Patroclos were buried in the same grave.

    ...and a fairly romantic one if Achilles dies and Patroclos lives...

Patroclos remained behind when the rest of the Achaian army sailed back to Hellas.  He continued to tend to Achilleus' tomb until his own death, at which time a friendly local obeyed his wishes and placed his bones inside the tomb along with Achilleus'.

    But maybe what's most interesting is what can happen when the Trojan army is rampaging through the Achaian camp in the ninth year if you forced Achilles to be the first to disembark on the Trojan shores, and thus got him killed on day one.

A to Z: Odysseus, Obviously

 

    Honestly, who else, right?  I mean, he's already come up quite a bit as-is.  And I actually have a whole lot more to say about how I've written him, despite that I actually don't like the character.  (What with him being a serial adulterer who claims to be a devoted husband, etc.)

    So, there are three main works I can go to for talking about how I've written Odysseus.  (Unless I want to also talk about the version of Odysseus that is Grant, lol.)  But I can't really go all-out anymore on any of these posts, because it turned out that there was enough "timed pressure" element to April A-to-Z to trigger my heart palpitations.  😭  So, gonna be lighter from here on out.  (Also doing the bulk on my phone and only grabbing the quotes on PC.  Somehow my heart doesn't flip out as much when I'm on the phone.)

    So, those three works are Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, The Martial Maenads (which I had hoped would be released by now, but it turned out that I got so involved in writing these posts that I've barely worked on finalizing it for release 😰), and book six of the Atalanta and Ariadne series.

    Going in that order, Odysseus naturally gets a lot of unique text in Better General, for example the bit I mentioned about Aineias when I was talking about Idomeneus.  But perhaps the most unusual and truly unique sequence is his feud with Palamedes.

    In the actual myths, as is well-known, Odysseus was in some respects responsible for the Trojan War, because it was his idea that all of Helen's suitors should swear an oath to fight to reclaim her for her husband should anyone steal her away.  Also generally pretty well known is that when the time came, Odysseus did not want to obey the oath that had been his own idea, and tried to get out of it by feigning madness, hitching up a horse and an ox to a plow and then plowing his own garden, only to have the person who came to get him prove that he was faking it by placing Odysseus' infant son in front of the plow.  The man who thus exposed Odysseus' act and forced him to join the Trojan War was Palamedes, and naturally enough the traditional myths established that Odysseus took lethal revenge on Palamedes during the long war.  (Though other traditions held that Palamedes survived, and some even claimed the Trojan Horse was his idea, rather than Odysseus'.)

    The thing is, there are actually a few couple ways that Odysseus was said to have done away with Palamedes....so, since I was working in an interactive medium, I figured "why not do both?"

A to Z: Medeia

    It may look like a typo, but it's not.  Many of the Greek names that are typically transliterated as ending in -ia or -ea actually end in -eia in the original Greek.  (eg Deidameia, Iphigeneia, Penthesileia, etc.)  That may thus leave you wondering why I chose to use a spelling that will make people do a double-take and/or think I've misspelled it?

    Well.

    That's because.

    Um.

    I could say that it was to free her of the negative associations people have with the Medea spelling.  (Like my decision to spell her aunt's name Kirke instead of Circe.)

    I could say that.  But it wouldn't, strictly speaking, be true.

    I think, at the heart of it, I went with the -eia spellings across the board because it's hard to draw a line of "here's as far as I go in trying to use the original Greek spellings."  I tried to be even more accurate in Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, to the extent of using "Achilleus" and "Alexandros," but even my own fingers kept rebelling against those more-accurate spellings, so I pretty much had to not try using those again.  But as to the others, like the -eia spellings...for one reason or another, I decided to adopt them.

    Anyway, that's all beside the point.  Medea's story is pretty well-known...or at least, one version of it is.

    She was the daughter of King Aietes of Colchis, and when Jason came to steal away the Golden Fleece, she helped him out of love (or the illusion/delusion of love, anyway) and helped him escape, even going so far as to murder one of her brothers in some versions.  {Jason should technically be Iason, but again, my fingers rebel if I try it...}  Then after they get back to Iolcos, the pair--or Medea alone--trick Pelias and his daughters, leading to Pelias' death.  They're exiled for murder, and King Creon of Corinth purified Jason of the murder, then promptly starts trying to set up Jason with his daughter.  Realizing she's being thrown over, Medea murders Creon, his daughter, and even her own sons by Jason, and flies off in a chariot pulled by dragons, then goes around being blamed for any number of other unpleasant events across the Mediterranean.

    Well.  Part of that is the case in all versions.  The part about helping Jason obtain and escape with the Golden Fleece.  Pretty much everything else is not.

A to Z: Korythos

 

    I know I've already presented some Greek mythological characters as being quite obscure, but no one takes the cake for being an obscure mythological figure more than Korythos, son of Alexander and Oinone.

    Alexander (better known as Paris) of Troy, son of King Priam and Queen Hecabe, actually already had a wife before he went off to make Helen of Sparta his own.  Her name was Oinone (also spelled Oenone), and she was a nymph, daughter of the River Cebren.  Oinone comes up periodically in the ancient literature--Ovid wrote about her a couple of times--but their son Korythos is a particularly infrequently mentioned figure.  (He is so obscure he doesn't even have his own Wikipedia page, instead being on one of those list pages that talks about multiple minor characters who share a name.)

    His limited mentions in myth are rare, and follow a basic formula:  he's sent to Troy during the war by his mother (either to help his father or to break up his relationship with Helen) where he falls in love with Helen (or she with him) and is killed by his jealous father, who doesn't even know who he is.  That's the extent of it.  No impact on anything else, he just goes to town and dies, ceasing to be relevant.  (Or rather, he was never relevant to begin with.)

    What that means, of course, is that if you take a version of the myth where he didn't show up in Troy to be killed by his own father, then he's still out there somewhere when the war is over!  (Or that he never existed, but that's boring.)

    So, when I was writing the first draft of what is now titled Scions of Troy, I decided who better to put on the Trojan throne than Korythos?  He's a blank slate for me to work with!  😆

A to Z: Idomeneus

 

    Hmm.  You know, I bet I did an earlier April A-to-Z entry on Idomeneus.  (It's hard to come up with I-names, after all!)  Oh well.  This one is categorically different, as a good chunk of it will be talking about something I hadn't written yet the last time I took part in this challenge!  😆

    So.  Basics.  Idomeneus is the king of Crete at the time of the Trojan War.  He's a grandson of King Minos, and a cousin of Agamemnon and Menelaos.  He's a pretty tough warrior, but not quite in the top tier.  Frequently accompanied into battle by his nephew Meriones, who is particularly accomplished as an archer as well as with a spear.

    The main place he stands out in the Iliad is during the battle when the Trojans are burning the Achaian camp, when he pretty much stomps all over Deiphobos (who is both frightened of him and trying to dismiss him as irrelevant at the same time), only to be wounded by Aineias, who at least respected him as an opponent.

    As to what happened to him after the war, let's go straight to the quotes for that, because today I want to focus on my interactive fiction game Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon? in which you play a random, generic king no one's ever heard of, who is for who-knows-what-reason offered the reins of the Achaian army when Agamemnon suddenly drops out right as the fleet is about to sail from Aulis.  There are ten decision points for each of the ten years (though some of them lead to further decisions within the decision point), and I'm sorry to say a lot of them actually don't matter in the least.  😰  (Even sorrier to say that by the time you get to the last two or three years, the game is buggy as heck.  It was doing all sorts of strange stuff like forgetting Achilles was alive and sending Odysseus on missions when he'd been sent back to Ithaca in disgrace. 😰  I had to replay the whole game to get quotes for this post, 'cause trying to extract them from the Twine program files is really awkward considering how much code some of the text is buried under.)  Anyway!  I tried my best, back when I was making the game, to give a lot of alternate possibilities for individual events, leading to some very different outcomes...meaning that when the war is successfully won, the game gives you a long scroll telling you what happened to each character in your playthrough, and what happened to them when Agamemnon was running the show.  And this is what that said about Idomeneus' original fate:

         Under Agamemnon, Idomeneus returned home safely, but traditions vary as to what happened next: some say he made a foolish promise to sacrifice whatever first greeted him (which ended up, of course, being his child), others say that his wife betrayed him and he had to flee, and others say he ruled on in peace. Whatever the truth of his fate was, more than a thousand years later, the locals would point out a building they said was his tomb at Knossos.

    Yeah, not terribly exciting.  (Strange side note:  those same locals also claimed his nephew Meriones was buried in the same tomb.  I'm not sure why.)  That level of variation in post-war fates is strangely not unusual.  A lot of the others who fought in the Trojan War had both "happily ever after" and "ran fleeing from an adulterous wife" endings.  Large numbers of the latter ended up in Italy, for whatever reason. 🤷🏻‍♀️

    Anyway, the difficulty of writing about someone like Idomeneus is that he hasn't got all that much personality in the original work.  (By which I mean the Iliad, of course.  Most other ancient works that mention Idomeneus are mythographic works that don't go into detail about anyone's personality.)  Still, since he's one of the bigger players, he comes up pretty frequently in the game.

    The first major event involving him is almost immediately after the Achaian fleet lands on the Trojan shore.  At that time, in the original myth, Menelaos and Odysseus went to the city to make one last try at diplomacy.  It, needless to say, did not work.  😅  Anyway, in the game, you choose who accompanies Menelaos on the expedition, and Idomeneus is one of the options.  This is the first part of what happens if you select him...

        As Menelaos and Idomeneus prepare to depart, you call Agamemnon's herald Talthybios over and instruct him to attend upon them in their errand. He swears to report to you immediately upon his return to the camp and faithfully relate everything that should happen in the city.
         They are gone overnight--as you were expecting, given how long it would take them to reach Ilios on foot from camp--and it is late in the day when Talthybios finally returns to your tent.
         "We have returned from the city, Lord Creon," the herald informs you.
         "So I can see. I do not hear any jubilation in the camp, so I assume the mission did not succeed?"
         "Indeed not, my lord. We arrived at the city gates shortly before nightfall, and were admitted into the home of Antenor, one of King Priam's trusted advisors. First thing in the morning, he accompanied us to see the king, and Menelaos stated his case, requesting the return of his wife, and promising to do without the gold that was stolen along with her, in recompense for the lives taken on the beach. Idomeneus also spoke, as Menelaos' kinsman, and [as] he who had been host to the funeral games that had given Alexandros the opportunity to thus rob Menelaos of gold and wife. His words were measured, just and wise, and I was certain they would sway the Trojan court to agree to Menelaos' requests." He sighs sadly. "We were sent back to the home of Antenor to await Priam's decision. Much time later, Antenor returned, full of worry. He reported to us that Alexandros arrived in the council chamber with Helen at his side, and that the prince's honeyed words convinced the Trojan elders to turn on us with a murderous attack. Antenor came to warn us and help us escape the city alive."
         "And?" you prompt, when he does not seem to want to continue.

    Thus far, aside from Idomeneus' contribution, this follows what happened in the actual myth.  But--even though this is still super early in the game--there are actually two possible outcomes to these events.  In most cases, this would be the result of sending Idomeneus along with Menelaos:

         "Idomeneus said that he felt a measure of blame for what Alexandros had done. If he had followed what his deceased uncle would likely have desired, and not invited the sons of Aerope to his funeral games, then Helen could not have been stolen away. So he did not wish to run, but to stay and fight. Menelaos did not want to see his kinsman risk his life, and they argued long enough that we could hear the approaching princes in the street. Antenor urged us to flee at once, and Idomeneus insisted that Menelaos and I leave, while he remained to delay the enemy, promising he would escape on his own as soon as he was able. Alas, though we waited long in hiding outside the city walls, he did not emerge. Antenor sent word by one of his children that Prince Hector, though grievously wounded by Idomeneus, succeeded in killing the Cretan king."

    However!  The first (proper) decision you make in the game is who to have be the first man to disembark when the fleet arrives.  (Due to the fact that Thetis had warned/commanded Achilles not to disembark first, as the first to disembark would be the first to die.)  If you order Achilles or Aias of Salamis to disembark first, they're still the first to die, but they take Hector with them!  In which case, the result of sending Idomeneus with Menelaos is drastically altered...

         "Idomeneus said that he felt a measure of blame for what Alexandros had done. If he had followed what his deceased uncle would likely have desired, and not invited the sons of Aerope to his funeral games, then Helen could not have been stolen away. So he did not wish to run, but to stay and fight. Menelaos did not want to see his kinsman risk his life, and they argued long enough that we could hear the approaching princes in the street. Antenor urged us to flee at once, and Idomeneus insisted that Menelaos and I leave, while he remained to delay the enemy, promising he would escape on his own as soon as he was able. After we waited in hiding quite a long while, Idomeneus finally emerged from the city, supported by one of Antenor's sons. He is badly wounded, but he proudly reported that he had killed Deiphobos, the second most powerful of Priam's sons."

    To be honest, until I replayed it to get these quotes, I had forgotten just how much variation I had managed to put in this game.  I really need to give it a proper glow-up at some point.  (And make it actually keep track of troop numbers and rations and such so that the smaller decisions will actually matter...)

A to Z: Hermione and Her Household

    So, today I'll be talking about my take on yet another traditional Greek mythological figure:  Hermione, daughter of Helen and Menelaos of Sparta.  Also her husband, her son and a bit about her mother.  (Technically, I toyed with choosing Helen for today, but...the two most unique and interesting things I've done with her are in the unfinished reincarnation-and-giant-robots piece that I mentioned in talking about Grant, and some of the late spoilers in book six of The God Killers, which definitely won't be out for a couple years (possibly more than a couple at the rate I'm going) so...talking about those two would be awkward at best.  Though it's still awkward since Hermione is also only in book six.  But at least her material isn't a spoiler.)

    Anyway.  Hermione is probably not numbered among the best-known women in Greek myths.  (More likely the opposite, in fact...)  However, the antiquity of her character is undeniable:  in the Odyssey, Telemachos arrives in Sparta just at the end of the wedding feast as Hermione is on her way to Phthia to marry Neoptolemos, son of Achilles, so she's mentioned in one of the oldest of the Greek texts.

    Some basic backstory on Hermione in the original myths:  she was just a small child when her mother was taken to Troy.  (I've seen six and nine given as her exact age, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️)  Like Sparta itself, she was left in the care of her not-actually-grandfather Tyndareos, the previous king of Sparta, during the war.  (Since Helen's father was actually Zeus, not her mother's husband...)  That much is always the case.  As is that she had two husbands, one of whom is Neoptolemos, to whom she was promised in the final days of the war, to reward the boy for coming to finish the fight his father had started.  But how that second marriage came about varies wildly in ancient sources, sometimes from the same author.  (Euripides has some enormous variations in his plays touching on Hermione.  Also those touching on Helen, for that matter...)

    Her other husband, you see, is her double-cousin Orestes.  (He being the son of her father's brother Agamemnon and her mother's sister Clytemnestra.)  Why anyone would think that was a good pairing is beyond me.  (In fact, I have Menelaos being rather put out that his grandson is technically also his grand-nephew.)

            “We shall finally be able to proceed once my nephew arrives,” Menelaos said, nodding.  Then he winced.  “I mean, son-in-law….”  He let out a wordless cry of aggravation.  “This is why I wanted her to marry Neoptolemos!” the king shouted.  “I don’t know what my brother was thinking, wanting his son to marry my daughter…”

    In the ancient texts, there are two primary versions regarding how, when and why Hermione wound up marrying Orestes.  Either she married him while her father was away at the war (either at the command of Tyndareos or because of a prior engagement her father had set up, or even at the will of one or both of the couple actually getting married (gasp!)) or she marries him after Neoptolemos' death (though even in the former scenario, she still ends up with Orestes even if she was with him before Neoptolemos).  In fact, sometimes competition over her is the reason Neoptolemos is killed.  You see, Orestes is usually said to be the one to have slain Neoptolemos, sometimes acting alone, sometimes acting with the aid of the people of Delphi, and sometimes acting as a vessel for Apollo (in just the way Apollo used Paris/Alexander to kill Achilles).  Though sometimes Neoptolemos is killed without Orestes' involvement, either by Apollo acting alone or by the people of Delphi unaided, or by Apollo aiding the people of Delphi.

    With so much variation in the ancient sources, I obviously had to make some decisions about which would be the case in my own novels!

A to Z: Ganymede and Grant

    This is a weird one.  I was torn between these two characters for today's post, and decided to do both, in part because I don't have a huge amount to say about either of them.  (Also, I like the way their names sound together like that.  🤣)

    So.  Ganymede is not who you're thinking of.  Probably.

    See, the Ganymede I'm talking about today is a very important member of the Trojan court when Atalanta, Ariadne and Eurysakes arrive in Scions of Troy.  He's very handsome, but very mysterious.  He's also quite ambitious, and doesn't seem to get along well with the king.

    He doesn't make a very good first impression on our young trio (or maybe I should say they don't make a very good impression on him?).

         The herald led them across the agora to the palace, where a number of well-dressed Trojan men were waiting for them.  “Are these the visitors from Cypros?” the wealthiest-looking of them asked, addressing the herald.  The man speaking was quite the prettiest man that Atalanta had ever seen, which made her wonder if that meant he was King Korythos himself.  And yet, he didn’t seem to be any better dressed than her former master, even though surely the king of Troy should be wealthier than the king of a little port town like Methymna.  He didn’t even have a diadem, but maybe kings didn’t wear those except for special occasions?  (Atalanta had rarely seen her master outside of major religious ceremonies, after all.)  And yet, how many girlishly pretty men could there be in a single court?
         “Indeed they are, my lord,” the herald replied, with a slight bow.
         “Hmm.  Well, one of them certainly matches expectations,” he commented, his critical gaze settling on Eurysakes for a moment, before moving on to Atalanta and Ariadne, prompting a disapproving look on the man’s face.  “As to the other two…”  He frowned, and shook his head.  “It would not be proper to present them in such a begrimed manner to his majesty.”  So he really wasn’t King Korythos, then…
         “You’re quite right, my lord Ganymede,” another man standing near him said in a foul, toadying manner.
         “Ganymede?!” both Atalanta and Ariadne chorused at once in their shock.
         “It’s an old family name,” the man told them, with a smile that struck Atalanta as being rather vain.  “I assure you, I’m not the one you’ve heard of.”
         “I should hope not,” Ariadne chuckled.  “Zeus the thunderer would surely be much aggrieved to be without his cup-bearer.”
         The man called Ganymede laughed, but he seemed angry rather than amused.  “Zelotes!” he snapped.
         “Yes, my lord?” the sycophant at his elbow oozed, bowing deeply, even though his lord wasn’t looking at the gesture.
         “Take these three boys into the palace and see that they’re thoroughly washed before they’re presented to the king.  Washed and perfumed,” he added, waving a hand in front of his face as if in objection to their stink.   Personally, Atalanta thought they didn’t smell badly at all, especially considering that they had walked for two days straight before reaching the campsite last night.

A to Z: Ever-Enduring Eurysakes

    So, Eurysakes is both complicated and pretty simple.

    His character is the simple part;  he speaks slowly like his father did, he's big and tough and dependable like his father was, and he's vulnerable because when he was still a tiny child, his father died in a manner that ruined his formerly perfect reputation.  Where he becomes complicated is the fact that he's an actual character from Greek myth who I have gotten totally wrong. 😰

    You see, Eurysakes is the son of Aias of Salamis (better known by his Roman name, Ajax, which I hate because it sounds like a cleaning product) and his concubine Tekmessa.  Eurysakes is mentioned briefly in the excellent Sophocles tragedy Aias, as Aias leaves his shield with his tiny son (about three or four years old) before his death.  (The name Eurysakes, in fact, means "broad shield."  Because Aias was also known by the epithet "of the towering shield" as his enormous shield was one of his distinguishing features in battle, and helped him earn one of his other epithets, "the bulwark of the Achaians.")  That play is one of the only surviving works that even mentions Eurysakes.  The only other mention of him I'm aware of off-hand is in Plutarch, which I'll get to below.  (Oh, and a passing mention in Pausanias.)

    Now, most of the Greek myths are done by the time the Trojan War ends, but there are still a few stories that take place after the war, and even some after the Odyssey.  These mostly have to do with the fallout from the war in one way or another--the Orestes cycle, for example--though there's also the Heraclidae, the myth of invading Dorians that the Greeks used to explain why the society of the Heroic Age was so different from their own.  One of the tales of the fallout of the war is that of the return of the Salaminian contingent and the reaction of King Telamon to the news that his near-perfect son Aias is dead, and to the ignominious manner of his death.

    (Trigger warning:  to continue discussing this, I have to talk about how Aias died in the myths.  Therefore, I need to put a "read more" tag here for self-harm.)

A to Z: Dejected Deidameia

    So, today I'm talking about a straight-up character from Greek myths:  Deidameia of Scyros.  (Often transliterated as Deidamia.)  The eldest and most beautiful of the daughters of King Lycomedes, Deidameia is the mother of Neoptolemos by Achilles, who of course abandoned her to sail off to the war in Troy.

    And, surprisingly, there's not a huge amount about her in the original material that's constant beyond that.

    But there are some potentially triggering matters discussed in this post--because they're part of some tellings of the original myth--so I'm going to end the main page preview of this post after this paragraph.  I don't go into any details, but do briefly mention sensitive subjects, so if you have any concerns, maybe don't click on the "read more" link.

A to Z: Belligerent Bromalios

 

    So, this one is both similar to yesterday's and also different.  Bromalios, like Atalanta and Ariadne, is from my series of roughly Young Adult-level novels, The God Killers, taking place about a generation after the Trojan War.  Unlike the two of them, however, he's not directly named after a pre-existing mythological figure.

    He's also the villain of book three, The Martial Maenads, which is not quite released yet.  (Hopefully I'll get it out this month...)  Because of that, I don't want to say too much about him, yet I also want to make a decent post of this, so let's see what I can accomplish on that score.

    It takes awhile for the heroic trio--Atalanta, Ariadne and Eurysakes--to learn about Bromalios' existence.  They have to go to Aiaia to get Kirke's aid in breaking a curse for reasons that take several chapters to explain in the book.  (Kirke is better known by the alternate transliteration of her name, Circe, but given all the baggage that spelling has (including a Wonder Woman villain) I opted to transliterate the kappas as the letter K rather than the letter C.)  This is the first thing that's said about Bromalios after they've reached Kirke:

    “There is a man among the Bistones in Thrace who is preventing the proper worship of both Ares and Dionysos all throughout the region,” Kirke informed them.  Beside Ariadne, Atalanta shuddered at the mention of Thrace, and Ariadne couldn’t blame her.  “You three will go and put a stop to him in whatever manner is required.  When my father [Helios] reports that this is done, then I will break the curse.”
    “Why do you care about how they are worshipped?” Eurysakes asked, his eyes narrowing.  “And only in Thrace?”
    Kirke laughed.  “Maybe I don’t care.  Maybe it just seems like a suitably annoying challenge for you.  Or maybe I wouldn’t mind having two handsome gods owe me a favor.”
    Personally, Ariadne could have gone her whole life quite happily without ever having been told that Ares was handsome.  Some things she just didn’t need or want to know.

    Of course, the mention of the Bistones in Thrace triggers a lot of different thoughts in our leads!  In addition to the fact that they've recently heard a dramatic recounting (part) of the tale of Heracles going to Thrace to recover the man-eating mares of Diomedes, King of the Bistones, there was also this incident before the girls ran away from Methymna on Lesbos:

         The early part of the feast was calming enough. The bard was singing of the twelve tasks of Heracles, and after some rather tasteless and bawdy discussion of Heracles’ equally prodigious labors with the ladies, the mood suddenly turned more serious.  “Speaking of the Bistones, though,” the Aiolian guest said, “have you heard the most recent rumors out of Thrace, sire?”
         “Thrace?”  The master frowned, and caressed his beard with his fingers. “I have not heard anything of any note.”  He looked around at the other men of the court, but they all echoed his sentiments.  “What are these rumors?”
          “They say that there is a cult among the Bistones that worships some vicious barbarian god,” the Aiolian replied.  “A god so cruel that it demands human sacrifice, which the Bistones show no hesitation in performing with great frequency.”

    And also this one:

         At the conclusion of the feast, it was Ariadne who asked the eunuch bard for one more private meeting in the gardens, but this time she had no interest in learning new songs.  “Tell me more about these rumors your master mentioned,” she said as soon as they were alone.  “The ones out of Thrace.”
         “I haven’t heard much more than what he said at the feast,” he said, shaking his head.  “But we heard them from some people who fled Thrace in fear of the Bistones and their new king.  I believe their fear.  Even if the tales of human sacrifice aren’t true, there is some terror in the land of the Bistones again, with no Heracles present to purge it.”

    And this one:

         “You really need to stop panicking,” Ariadne said, sitting down on her bunk.  “If you keep burbling nonsense like that in front of other people, they’ll think you’re a coward.”
         “I’m not panicking,” Atalanta insisted.  “It’s just—even Kawiya told me I needed to get used to being parted from you!  But I won’t!  I can’t!  I—I—what would I do without you?!”
         Ariadne let out a miserable sigh.  “If the master’s guest has his way, probably get sacrificed by a Thracian cult.”
         Atalanta’s lower lip started to tremble.  She had been expecting—hoping—Ariadne would deny that part…

    While I'm pretty sure even in the original draft I had always had a threat of human sacrifice in Thrace as part of why they ran away, when I did the rewrite I was able to lay out early hints that more closely fit the actual reality they would meet in book three.

    Their arrival in Thrace is indirect, landing on the island of Thasos, just off the coast of Thrace itself.  The island is a Phoenician territory at the time, giving the girls a bit of a language barrier, since they don't speak Phoenician, and even the well-traveled Eurysakes only knows some Phoenician.  (Thasos is a real place, naturally, and everything I read about it said that it was the site of a Phoenician colony and gold mine in the Late Bronze Age.)

    None of the men on the docks looked at all surprised to see an Achaian ship arriving, but they were greatly surprised when the first ones to disembark from the ship were two horses!  In fact, they seemed quite panicked by the horses until Atalanta hurried to take charge of them.  “What are they so afraid of?” Atalanta asked, as her cousins joined her.  “You’d think they’d never seen a horse before!”  The Phoenicians were no longer panicking, but they were still jabbering away and staring at the horses in abject fear.
    Eurysakes frowned.  “It sounds like…”  He stopped again without finishing his thought.
    “Like what?” Ariadne prompted.
    “They think the horses will eat them,” he said.
    “What?  But…”  Atalanta shook her head.  “I mean, that made sense in Athens, after [spoiler deleted], but here?  I don’t get it!”
    “Given that those events happened just on the other side of a thin strait from here, their fear makes a little more sense,” Ariadne said, “but only a little, considering it must have been about a hundred years ago.”
    “More like fifty years ago,” a voice suddenly said from behind Atalanta’s elbow.  She glanced over her shoulder and saw that Ampelios had followed them off the boat.  “Heracles came here to deal with the man-eating mares of Diomedes about fifty years ago.”  He paused, looking thoughtful.  “Or maybe it was more like sixty?  Well, much less than a hundred, anyway.”
    “Still, none of these men were alive at the time,” Ariadne pointed out, waving a hand in the direction of the terrified Phoenician sailors.  Most of them didn’t look like they could be out of their third decade.

[snip]

    Ampelios returned to them, looking worried.  “They said that the Bistones are being more aggressive now than they were even in the time of Diomedes, more than doubling their land just in the last two years or so.  And…well, they don’t have any proof that anything unnatural is going on, but the Bistones have changed their emblem to one of a horse’s head with red teeth, so everyone here is afraid that they are once again raising man-eating mares, and that they’ll conquer Thasos next, seeking to gain control of the island’s gold mines.”

    After that, they journey onwards into Thrace, and eventually come across a temple...

    They soon came across what had plainly begun as a temple to Ares.  It was not particularly large or ornate, but it had two nearly identical statues in front, which had originally been statues of Ares, both depicting him raising his spear above his head—one in the left hand and the other in the right—as if to urge his troops on into battle.  The statues had been altered, however:  the armor had been repainted to look as if it was a leopard’s skin, ivy had been twined around the spears, snakeskins had been added to the base of the helmet, and a strange symbol was now painted on the shields.
    “Apart from the painting on the shields, I’d say they were trying to turn the statues into maenads,” Atalanta commented.  “Is that symbol one of those letter things?” she asked.
    “No, it’s not a letter.  It might be a pictogram, but if it is, it’s not one I’m familiar with,” Ariadne said, peering at it.  “It’s probably the crest we were told about:  a horse’s head with red teeth.”  Though if so, it was very crudely drawn…

    ...and inside they meet a priest who asks them if they've come to join in the worship of "the most holy and powerful Bromalios."  In the discussion that follows, the Trojan War is mentioned, as is the time that Diomedes of Argos (not to be confused with Diomedes of the Bistones) wounded Ares as that god was fighting on the side of the Trojans.  (This incident was in the section of the Iliad often known as the Deeds of Diomedes.)  To the girls' surprise, the priest replies that his god Bromalios couldn't exist if that had not happened:

    “It is quite simple, my child.  You see, the god Ares could not survive his wound, so grievous it was,” the priest explained, “and his brother god Dionysos was equally wounded in saving him.  They fled here to the land of the Bistones, and sought a cure from Queen Herais, who was Ares’ own granddaughter, and had learned many healing elixirs in her time serving as a maenad of Dionysos.  But even she could not save them, and their essences entered into her womb, and combined there to form our most holy god Bromalios.”
    “That doesn’t make much sense,” Ariadne said, frowning.  The very notion made her want to retch for about fifteen different reasons.  “I’ve never heard any rumors of the gods being killed, especially not by mortals!  And wouldn’t that make your god only about seventeen or eighteen years old?”
    “No, this was in the early years of the war,” the priest assured her, “so he was born of that mortal woman some twenty-six years ago.”
    “That can’t be right!” Atalanta exclaimed.  “Eurysakes said that happened in the ninth year of the war!”
    “As a priest of Bromalios, I know his age to a moment,” the priest said, glaring at Atalanta with narrowed eyes.

    (Needless to say, the priest's version of events is incorrect, and Atalanta was right about when Diomedes injured Ares.  Also, Ares did not need rescuing, and especially not by Dionysos (who was mentioned in the Iliad, but never actually appeared), so that part of his tale is also a fabrication by the cult of Bromalios.)

    I don't want to use any more quoted passages from my not-yet-released book, but obviously they do in fact go on to meet Bromalios and the reader learns a great deal about him.  He's unlike the earlier two villains in a very basic respect that I actually can't even share because it would be a total spoiler. 😰  I mean, I don't know if anyone reading this is going to want to read the book, but if they do then if I said any of that, it would spoil this one, and kinda spoil the previous books as well.  I suppose one difference I can admit to that isn't a spoiler is that I feel like his motivations and thought processes feel a little more "real" than those of the previous two villains.

    Oh, another thing I can spoil is that unlike the previous villains, he's actually hoping to score with Atalanta; well, he wants to make her his bride, so there's a certain political cache as the primary goal, but the desire is absolutely there.  That's actually very unusual for this series:  usually the villains just want to off the heroes and be done with it straight away.  There is another villain who wants to see Atalanta give birth to a child, but he doesn't want to be the father (or even if he did in the original draft, he won't by the time I'm done rewriting that book) and it's entirely about her bloodline not about her, if that makes any sense.  It's kind of funny, actually, because most of the people who want to try forcing Atalanta to get married are technically good guys:  there's actually a line early in book three about how Atalanta feels she can't return to Aiolia ever again because of the four thrones and three political marriages people have been trying to foist on her as the daughter of Achilles.

    I feel like I haven't actually been able to say much about him because it's all spoilers.  😭  Which is a pity, because I feel like Bromalios is actually one of the best villains I've written.  He's not a villain with a sympathetic side, but he does have his own code of ethics which he adheres to, and his goals are, as I said above, very realistic.