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1Marc Aramini# *LATRO IN THE MIST*: FELL ARES QUITS THE SPEAR-PROUD THRONG
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3>The Twenty-fifth Day of December, when ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world, when God in the beginning created heaven and earth, and formed man in his own likeness; when century upon century had passed since the Almighty set his bow in the clouds after the Great Flood, as a sign of covenant and peace; in the twenty-first century since Abraham, our father in faith, came out of Ur of the Chaldees; in the thirteenth century since the People of Israel were led by Moses in the Exodus from Egypt; around the thousandth year since David was anointed King; in the sixty-fifth week of the prophecy of Daniel; in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad; in the year seven hundred and fifty-two since the foundation of the City of Rome; in the forty-second year of the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus, the whole world being at peace, JESUS CHRIST, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to consecrate the world by his most loving presence, was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and when nine months had passed since his conception, was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah, and was made man: The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh. (“The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ from the Roman Martyrology”)
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5Gene Wolfe has attended Catholic Mass and participated in Communion regularly, and, assuming that he has often gone to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, he has heard the words above with minor variations for decades, spoken in a chanting voice which seems to posit a causal relationship between the *Pax Romana* and the coming of Christ: at a sufficiently civilized state to achieve peace, humanity was at last globally prepared for divine redemption. While different Christian faiths may or may not ascribe to this “condition” of Christ’s appearance, it is one of the few reasons that might be offered when some curious querent asks, “Why, after all this time, and all the noble souls sent to Sheoul or Limbo in perpetuity, has the Redeemer come at last?” In Wolfe’s books of the Roman mercenary Latro, the gods act in several ways: as individuals, as focal points of reverence, and as sentient symbols manifesting certain objects or philosophies active in the world. Many of the gods display two (or more) natures throughout the course of Latro’s narrative, which we shall generalize as fluctuating between chthonic and empyreal: the Virgin Huntress seems a more auspicious ally than the Dark Mother; Kore’s young visage contrasts with her putrescent, rotting back; and Cybele treats Latro more kindly than the blood-thirsty, child-consuming Earth Mother. Perhaps the gods can change. Indeed, Wolfe suggests a shift in the strife-filled pagan world towards peace, as expressed in a poem the narrator recites to prove that he is in fact a Hellene at the end of the second volume, an adaptation of Pindar’s first Pythian Ode:
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7>You quench the bolt, the lightning’s fearful fire,
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9>The eagle rests his wings, that never tire;
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11>To hear you shaken by your song,
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13>Fell Ares quits the spear-proud throng. (*Arete*, XL 602-3)
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15Though the amnesiac Roman Latro does not consciously realize it, he is an essential part of the mythical system of his pagan world, and his presence in ancient Greece serves multiple purposes. One of them hints at the rise of a new world order under Rome, as Greece falls from its prominence. The power of Rome, perennially symbolized by the eagle, will take its traditions and religious beliefs from Greece and create an order where the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine can bring Christianity to Europe in one fell swoop.
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17For the Peace of Rome to become a reality, humanity had to subjugate the world with sword and fire, the tools of war, personified as Ares or Mars, in the hope that one day the sword could be cast aside forever under a unified humanity. The Persian conflicts recorded by Herodotus, during which Latro’s journeys are set, ultimately resulted in something like a Greek Enlightenment, but only after the scattered and disunited Greeks, against all odds, triumphed over Persia and its “Great King,” Xerxes.
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19Beyond the historical underpinnings of the novels, Latro’s path follows an ancient tradition tracing the center of power from Persia to Greece and then to Rome before eventually being taken up (at least according to some English poets in imitation of Virgil and the *translatio imperii*) by England. This moving center of power might be illustrated in Latro’s shifting allegiance: the story is one of a Roman who leaves the Great King’s Army to serve Greece, ultimately focused on his homeward journey towards Rome, until his journal is eventually translated into English in the modern era. The syncretism on display concerning the religious systems of these various peoples begins to show much the same shift: the Zoroastrian faith of the Persians was one of the oldest monotheistic religions in the world, and we see it clashing and synthesizing with several other philosophies over the course of Latro’s scrolls. The Greek slaves of the Spartans worship the Great Mother, Gaea, but the Spartans themselves glorify the Huntress and the Moon, while the people of Athens obviously reverence Athena (who has less of a role in the conflict than the other “two” Greek female deities involved). While these disparate female principles struggle for dominance, the masculine gods are surprisingly hard to see in the text, though we are reminded at the beginning and end of the first two volumes of Dionysus and Pan, who even appears in the introduction aiding the Athenians at the battle of Marathon in 490 BC, a pivotal defeat for Darius of Persia before Xerxes came to power. The first Latro book provides the date 479 BC for its opening action. The presence of Pan in the introduction reminds us of one final important literary and historical tradition: the tale of the Emperor Tiberius hearing a voice declaring the death of Pan, a clarion call signifying the symbolic end of paganism and, in some traditions, the death (and therefore triumph) of Christ, who assumed “all” true authority.
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21Before a comprehensive look at the plot and the religious and historical references Wolfe used in the Soldier series, one key scene between Latro and the slave girl Io late in *Soldier of Arete* clarifies her impressions of the narrator, which situate him at the heart of the divine struggle occurring both on and off stage. During their journey to Thrace to retrieve both the engineer Oeobazus for Athens and the Horses of the Sun for the Amazons, Io tells her master that even though the mantis Hegisistratus (a historical Greek advisor of the Persian general Mardonius, in whose service Latro begins his journal) and the Amazon Queen Hippephode have been making the decisions for their group:
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23> “[Y]ou’re the one who really ought to.  … [I]t’s not any of them that the Thracians are afraid of. It’s you. I was in back of you this morning with my sword, and I could see their faces. Polos says they call you ‘the hero,’ and it means Pleistorus [the Thracian Ares] is inside you even if you don’t know it. … You see the gods sometimes, master. You really do. Once you saw the King of Nysa and touched him, and then I could see him, too. He was old, and he looked like the black man – but … […] One time before the Shining God gave me to you, I went to the theater back in Hill. It costs a lot, but sometimes a rich man will buy seats for poor people, and that time my old master did and let us in first. The actors wore masks, but the people in the play didn’t know.” (*Arete*, XVIII 448)
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25Io’s words strongly imply that Pleistorus, also known as Ares or Mars, is actually somehow inside Latro, and that the characters of the novel are re-enacting a drama unaware of the masks they wear and the roles they play. The very start of the novel presents the idea that people (and perhaps beings beyond the merely human) should be addressed by the role they are serving at the time. A priest of Dionysus introduces this concept when he speaks to Io, even tying it in to the nature of the gods and their dominion in the ancient world: 
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27>“He is a potter, we will say. He is also the father of a daughter much like yourself, the husband of such a woman as you shall be, and the son of another. When our men march to war, he takes up his helmet, his hoplon, and his spear; he is a shieldman. Now answer this riddle for me. Which is he? Shieldman, son, husband, father, or potter? … Then how will you address him when you speak to him? Assuming you do not know his name? … You will address him according to the place in which you and he find yourselves and the need you have for him, will you not? If you meet him on the drill field, you will say, 'Shieldman.' In his shop, you will say, 'Potter, how much for this dish?'
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29>”You see, my dear, there are many gods, but not so many as ignorant people suppose. So with your goddess, whom you call the Lady of the Swine. When we wish her to bless our fields, we call her the Grain Goddess. But when we think of her as the mother of all the things that spring from the soil, trees as well as barley, wild beast as well as tame, Great Mother.” (*Mist*, IV 39)
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31Similarly, Latro goes by a name which denotes his role at the time of his service to Persia: a mercenary or brigand. Only in the very final scene of the first volume do readers learn Latro’s name, from a dying Roman soldier who recognizes his comrade on the field of battle: “I found him beside the broken eagle. He wore a lion’s skin, but a spear had divided his thigh and a dagger had pierced his corselet of bronze scales. The lion was dying. ‘Lucius…’ He used my own speech. ‘Lucius, is it really you?’” (*Mist*, XLIII 315). Learning Latro’s name on the final page displays another structural parallel between the first two books: the final words of *Soldier of Arete* reveal a divine name that might be equally applicable. Pindaros writes:
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33>As for this poor servant of the Shining One, the patron of the muses, he and his slave will return to their own seven-gated city [Thebes] – or perhaps journey to far-distant Sicily, rich in flocks, as the grave emissaries of glorious Hieron, splendid in victory, importune. If that be so, he prays the blessing of Ino, white keeper of the chambers of the sea among the daughters of Nereus. Permit us to voyage in safety, O lovely Ino, to that great city, Syracuse, the precinct of Ares. (*Arete*, XLIII 623)
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35As the final words of the book assert, the city of Syracuse in Sicily, which seems to be where Latro was headed, is the precinct of Ares, and it might be prudent to infer that the priest’s speech at the start of the series refers specifically to our main character: when he fights among men away from his home, he is called Latro; when he comes across human friends and comrades from Italy, he is Lucius; if there is any trace of divinity in him, as we hope to establish, he should be called Ares, though the characterization of the God of War in Wolfe’s series does not match the classical Greek model of a blood-thirsty and violent savage.
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37The Roman cognate of Ares, Mars, features far more positively in Latin stories as the father of Romulus and Remus. The boorish and chaotic struggles instigated by Ares in Greek myth transform into the noble and ordering force of the Roman Mars. One of the final assessments of the character of Ares, given on the last page of Latro’s writing in *Soldier of Arete*, before Pindaros provides closure in describing Latro’s triumphant escape, provides an overwhelmingly disciplined and stoic figure closer to classical depictions of the Roman God of War:
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39>”War isn’t all blood and death, lad. And it isn’t always the biggest army that wins. Pretty often it’s the one that drills the best, and keeps its armor clean, and stands up best to long marches on short rations. Old Ares isn’t some kind of monster, see? Think of him as a plain man that wants to win the war and get back home to Aphrodite. He’s for training, discipline, and fair play with the men. And he whistles when he loses just like he whistles when he wins.” (*Arete*, LXII 620)
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41The syncretic approach Wolfe takes to his gods and goddesses incorporates an almost Egyptian divine fluidity, in accordance with his primary sources, and Ares’s indifference to triumph and defeat will eventually even achieve a Christian resonance. As Herodotus (to whom *Soldier of the Mist* is dedicated) notes:
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43>The names of almost all the gods also came to Greece from Egypt. My enquiries led me to discover that they are non-Greek in origin, but it is my belief that they came largely from Egypt. With the exception of Poseidon and the Dioscuri … and also Hera, Hestia, Themis, the Graces, and the Nereids, all the gods and their names have always been found in the country of Egypt. Here I am repeating what the Egyptians themselves say. As for the gods whose names they told me they do not recognize, I think that they were given their names by the Pelasgians. … The Egyptians do not have hero-cults, however. …
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45>It was only yesterday or the day before, so to speak, that the Greeks came to know the provenance of each of the gods, and whether they have all existed for ever, and what they each look like. After all, I think that Hesiod and Homer lived no more than four hundred years before my time, and they were the ones who created the gods’ family trees for the Greek world, gave them their names, assigned them their honours and areas of expertise, and told us what they looked like. Any poets who are supposed to have lived before Homer and Hesiod actually came after them in my opinion. (116-7)
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47It is worth noting that Latro’s memory palace, inspired by the physical association of certain thoughts with material objects, preached by another historical figure, the poet Simonides, also contains some Egyptian (and Christian) imagery. At one point, when he learns that enraged soldiers from Kemet haunt Corinth, he cuts the name Kemet “across the chest of the hawk-headed man” in his memory palace (*Arete*, XXX 530). [Kemet means “land of the black soil” in Egypt; usually the usurper Set is known as “lord of the black soil” in opposition to falcon- or hawk-headed Horus, who controlled more fertile lands. In Wolfe’s book, Kemet refers to Egypt as a whole, however. That hawk-headed figure in Latro’s palace represents the War God Horus in Egypt.] When Latro seeks entrance to the Pythian Games (similar to the Olympic Games and held at Delphi ever four years), his chief rival, the Spartan runner Pasicrates, denies that Latro is a Hellene, but Latro’s Egyptian mental images help him recall that he is in fact qualified to participate: “The palace rose before me, tier upon tier. Frantically I hurried from image to image – a man with the head of a crocodile, another with that of a hawk” (*Arete*, XL 602). This prompts him to remember the vital verse taken from Pindar in which Ares quits the spear-proud throng, proving himself in the process.
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49[The crocodile headed figure is Sobek of the Nile, an ambiguous, apotropaic water and battle god who eventually became associated with Horus and was assimilated into the triad of Osiris, Isis, and Horus. Horus, interestingly, is the falcon- or hawk-headed god of war in Egypt. Thus, both Sobek and Horus, when transposed into Greek culture, become Ares, though Horus remains one of the central figures in Egyptian mythology. If the War God, too, has chthonic and empyreal natures, Horus would be the transcendent empyreal one, contrasted against Sobek’s apotropaic and demanding nature. The Spartans, who are noted in the text as the most warlike people on earth, might be strengthening the chthonic qualities of the personification of war through their behavior. (One other point which we mention only for completion involves the nature of the struggle between Set and Horus to prove dominance: Set attempts to rape Horus, but Horus fools Set into consuming his semen instead in a series of events which prompts a boat race for dominance. The strange relationship between Latro and the runner Pasicrates, whose name means “He who dominates” and who excels at races and molests the centaur Polos, might somehow mirror the conflict between Set and Horus, though we will offer a different suggestion for Pasicrates’s importance to the plot in the conclusion to this essay. Nevertheless, Pasicrates’s reconciliation in a dream helps alleviate Latro’s suicidal depression.)
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51By the end of the second volume, Latro’s spirit for combat has vanished, and he even considers throwing himself from a cliff. The causes of Latro’s melancholy include the death of an Amazon lover, the abuse of the centaur Polos, and, most importantly, the slaughter of the Spartan slaves during the manumission ceremony – can a just or worthwhile world contain such violence and death? The massacre of the helot slaves by the Spartans and their entire approach to war might be affecting the avatar of a being whose entire purpose was once battle, as Latro seems to embody the concepts of *arete* (which implies both manly excellence and moral virtue).]
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53The mythical systems of various nations manifest themselves in Latro’s visions as he travels, giving the gods slightly different faces over time. While these gods are fluid, on the surface they do not quite attain the same homogeneity that Robert Graves introduces right at the start of *The Greek Myths*. His assessment of Neolithic European worship asserts:
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55>Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch; the heart which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery. Thus the first victim of a Greek public sacrifice was always offered to Hestia of the Hearth. … Not only the moon, but (to judge from Hemera of Greece and Grainne of Ireland) the sun, were the goddess’s celestial symbols. In earlier Greek myth, however, the sun yields precedence to the moon – which inspires the greater superstitious fear, does not grow dimmer as the year wanes, and is credited with the power to grant or deny water to the fields.
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57>The moon’s three phases of new, full, and old recalled the matriarch’s three phases of maiden, nymph (nubile woman), and crone. Then, since the sun’s annual course similarly recalled the rise and decline of her physical powers – spring a maiden, summer a nymph, winter a crone – the goddess became identified with seasonal changes in animal and plant life; and thus with Mother Earth who, at the beginning of the vegetative year, produces only leaves and buds, then flowers and fruits, and at last ceases to bear. She could later be conceived as yet another triad: the maiden of the upper air, the nymph of the earth or sea, the crone of the underworld, typified respectively by Selene, Aphrodite, and Hecate. These mystical analogues fostered the sacredness of the number three, and the Moon-goddess became enlarged to nine when each of the three persons – maiden, nymph, and crone, appeared in triad to demonstrate her divinity. Her devotees never quite forgot that there were not three goddesses, but one goddess; though, by Classical times, Arcadian Stymphalus was one of the few remaining shrines where they all bore the same name: Hera.
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59Wolfe definitely shows the Triple Goddess in competition with the Great Mother, but there are still moments in the text when it is difficult to tell them apart. The appearances of virgin goddesses such as Artemis, Athena, and Hestia throughout the novels, for example, never explicitly illustrate if Athena and Hestia are aligned with the Triple Goddess, though it is clear where Artemis stands. (We can, however, infer that Athena is selfish and chthonic in Wolfe’s brief glimpse of her, perhaps corrupted by her city Athen’s love for gold and its willingness to work with the violent Spartans.) The cross-cultural manifestations of the gods and goddesses are easier to assess and understand, but the blending between mortal and immortal figures from myth also complicates Wolfe’s narrative. We can even see some of this in the character of Io. One important mythological connection between Egypt and Greece involves the story of a priestess from Argos named Io. Zeus coveted the mythological Io, and to avoid Hera’s wrath he turned Io into a cow which eventually came under Hera’s power, until Hermes managed to free the bovine girl from captivity. Eventually, the cow, tormented by a persistent fly sent by Hera, fled to Egypt. [Even more strangely, in the Argive dialect, Io is said to mean “the moon” – and the struggle between the Earth Mother and Selene the Moon Goddess informs much of the theological strife in the first two volumes]. In Egypt, Io gave birth to the bull Epaphus, whose Egyptian cognate is Apis – in effect becoming the Egyptian goddess Isis. Demeter, Io, and Isis are all sometimes portrayed with horns in art. In antiquity, the war and sky god Horus was originally considered a brother to Osiris, Isis, and Set, and only later did he become the child of Isis.
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61In the very last part of *Soldier of Arete*, when Latro reaches his most confused and lowest point, a strange misconception occurs to Latro: “Io taught me her name; I thought her my sister, but she is my lover” (*Arete*, XXXVIII 583). We can make this simple or complicated, but both of these explanations rely on Io’s name. At least in the *Iliad*, Aphrodite is the sister and lover of Ares, though Hesiod offers her a different origin. If the name Io reminds Latro of the moon, she is of course associated with a sibling figure in the Triple Goddess – if it serves as “joy,” it also invokes the Egyptian Hathor, goddess of joy and feminine love, who became associated with Isis, and is therefore also intimately tied to both the mythological Io and Aphrodite. The complicated shifts in Egyptian mythology over time cast Horus as both brother and child of Isis. (These resonances do not suggest that Latro’s young girl has a divine nature – it might merely be her name which confuses Latro, whose memories have been subconsciously returning in the presence of the faun Aglaus.)
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63In the final scenes of *Soldier of Arete*, three women vie for Latro’s attention: Hippostizein, an Amazon impersonating the dead Pharetra; Anysia, a dancer associated with daggers; and Io. Since Pharetra means “bow-case,” we are left with images of a bow, a dagger, and (in Argive) the moon: the three symbols of different aspects of the Triple Goddess - Artemis, Hecate, and Selene, respectively. Returning to Egyptian imagery, one of Horus’s eyes represents the light of the morning star, the other the moon, which might link Lucius (whose name means “light”) and Io (or the Triple Goddess) in etymology and myth. The Egyptian triad could also echo the Holy Trinity of Christian doctrine, and those familiar with modern critiques of the Jesus story might have already heard of the parallels between the story of Horus and that of Jesus. It has been suggested that the Virgin Mary and her child are highly derivative of images of Isis and Horus. These echoes throughout the Christian and pagan worlds definitely interest Wolfe.
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65Since Herodotus’s chronicle begins with the abduction of a woman named Io, it is worth a quick mention; the kidnapping eventually escalates to the conflict in Homer’s epic of the Trojan War. Interestingly, Herodotus chooses to begin from the point of view of the Persians, just as Latro starts his journey on their side. [The second sentence also reinforces why Latro calls the Phoenicians the Crimson Men in his narrative]:
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67>[1]According to learned Persians, it was the Phoenicians who caused the conflict. Originally, these people came to our sea from the Red Sea, as it is known. No sooner had they settled in the land they still inhabit than they turned to overseas travel. They sued to take Egyptian and Assyrian goods to various places, including Argos, which was at that time the most important state, in all respects, in the country which is now called Greece. Once, then, the Phoenicians came to Argos and began to dispose of their cargo. Five or six days after they had arrived, when they had sold almost everything, a number of women came down to the shore, including the king’s daughter, whose name (as the Greeks agree too) was Io, the daughter of Inachus. These women were standing around the stern of the ship … when the Phoenicians gave the word and suddenly charged at them. Most of the women got away, but Io and some others were captured. The Phoenicians took them on to their ship and sailed away for Egypt.
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69>[2] According to the Persians, that is how Io came to Egypt … and that was the original crime. Later, some Greeks landed at Tyre in Phoenicia and abducted the king’s daughter, Europa. … [The Greeks] sailed in a longship to Aea in Colchis, to the Phasis River, and once they had completed the business that had brought them there, they abducted the king’s daughter Medea …. [The Greeks responded to a demand to release Medea,] “You have never compensated us for your abduction of the Argive princess Io, so we will not make amends to you, either.
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71>[3]A generation later, the Persians say, Alexander [Paris] the son of Priam heard about this and decided to steal himself a wife from Greece. He was absolutely certain that he would get away with it, without incurring any penalty, since the earlier thefts had gone unpunished – and that is how he came to abduct Helen. (Herodotus 3-4)
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73The Greek response, to attack the Asian side of the conflict, poisoned Persia against them. (The Phoenicians claim that Io came willingly after sleeping with the ship’s captain at Argos and becoming pregnant, but since these details are not directly related to the conflict which ensued, they seem unimportant to Latro’s narrative as well.). As we can see from the quote above, the approach Herodotus takes to his historical account blends history, myth, and rumor, even tying the war with Persia into the oral tradition of Homer, and Wolfe seems to take much the same approach in forging Latro’s story.
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75Wolfe’s exploration of the evolving world at the beginning of history treats the pagan gods as a reality, which others can experience primarily through Latro’s touch. Yet why can his touch make those gods visible to other mortals? We should keep in mind that even in the world of pagan myth, Gene Wolfe is still a mysteriously Catholic writer. The conflict in the background between the various gods and their agents, much as in Homer’s *Iliad*, seems to be something that can be “won” or resolved, and the implication courses throughout the series, despite disunity and war, that the nature and reconciliation of those gods, to some degree, depends upon their worshippers. Both Gaea and the Triple Goddess manifest disturbingly violent and more nurturing aspects of themselves at different times in the text, indicating fluid personalities, though they are always somehow terrible. At one point, Latro sees Hades, who tells him, “I do not understand mercy, and thus I am as I am; but perhaps [Kore’s mother Demeter] will be merciful to you, and I can learn from her. I hope she is at least just” (*Mist*, XI 92). The words of Hades hint that the gods can learn from each other, and Latro’s painful experiences with war and strife teach him mercy at last, especially after the pivotal and brutal manumission ceremony of the Spartans near the conclusion of *Soldier of Arete*, in which the slaves are callously slaughtered.
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77As we have suggested, the manly virtues Latro embodies resonate strongly with the God of War, who goes by many names, including Pleistorus. At one point the engineer Oeobazus (a real-world character historically sacrificed to Ares - in Wolfe’s series, he actually escapes death by assuming a different identity) reveals that he once ran across a tribe “who believe that the War God’s none other than Ahura Mazda - Ahura Mazda incognito, as it were” (*Arete*, XXII 472). The glossary of the first volume lists Ahura Mazda as, “Literally, Wise God or Wise Lord; the chief force for good in a mythology in which evil occupies an equal place” (*Mist*, Glossary 625). [Traditional Zoroastrian reverence for Ahura Mazda associates him with light and fire – just as Latro’s true name, Lucius, means “light.” During the Achaemenid Persian era, which lasted from 550-330 B.C., the only representation of Ahura Mazda was found in the custom of every emperor keeping an empty chariot drawn by white horses, so that Ahura Mazda could accompany the Persian army in war. Before Latro takes back the white Horses of the Sun in *Soldier of Arete*, the Great Mother invites him to stand upon a silver chariot, and he acknowledges that he has ridden such a vehicle before (*Arete*, XVI 433). One of the symbols of Ares is also a chariot, though drawn by four fiery steeds. In many ways, the Soldier series involves synthesizing all of these divine symbols, whether they be chariots, wolves, or lions, into a unified pattern.]
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79What would it entail for the world if that powerful Persian god of goodness, the closest thing to the Judeo-Christian God the pagan world has, learns what it is to be truly human? Why would one of Wolfe’s only historical changes involve having a character sacrificed to Ares in history actually survive? The subtext of the first two volumes implies that mercy and order have come to War at last. The symbol of both Italy and Mars is the wolf, and the course of history begun in the Soldier books allows us to see that Latro signifies much more than an amnesiac Roman mercenary – what he learns through pain and conflict teaches the pagan gods that same mercy. While the Great Mother’s lions and wolves clearly manifest themselves in Latro’s journals, the Roman War God eventually appropriates those images to a more masculine end. We already see the lion as a prominent symbol of Pleistorus in Thrace in the second volume, and Latro’s Roman identity heavily implies that he is also associated with the wolf through Mars and his children. Beyond a newfound syncretic peace, the theological implications of Rome’s rise to power would eventually allow Christianity to conquer Europe, when the secular might of an Emperor brought theological unity to the many disparate pagan elements under his purview. While some might claim that the story of salvation and Christ’s life are based on earlier myths, perhaps Wolfe’s theological aim in the Soldier series was to explore how all of those earlier myths and religions prefigure and contribute to the coming of true tranquility and salvation as they collapse into a unified, monotheistic design predicated on mercy, justice, and love, when the time for war is finished at last.
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81## What are the Gods? What is Latro?
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83To Latro and those around him, the pagan gods have a real existence. Readers who dismiss them as Latro’s delusions have too many events to explain away: while his brain damage may add a layer of plausibility to the text, at its heart the novel takes the pagan pantheon seriously almost immediately, with the struggle of Persia and Greece no more important than the war of the gods raging in the background. The breech between the Triple Goddess Hecate or Tridotis (Moon, Huntress, and Dark Mother) and the Great Mother and her supporters and manifestations (including Hera, Gaea, Rhea, and Demeter as the Grain Goddess) influence the events of the novel. Though only implied in the text, the Great Mother’s subjugation at the hands of a patriarchal Olympian system also plays out in the background. The distinction between Hecate, her various manifestations, and her relationship to Demeter and Persephone is certainly complicated. Demeter and Persephone (or Kore) might be grouped together because of their significance in the true religious practices of the Greeks at Eleusis, the Eleusinian Mysteries (the myths of the gods can be considered as distinct from the actual religious practices of the Greeks – Latro confronts Kore at Eleusis in a vital scene). Aphrodite, when she makes love to Latro, reveals that she bears a grudge against Kore, but she also identifies the Triple Goddess as her rival. Are the forces allied with the Great Mother ones which stem from earthly, physical matter, like sex, the decaying bodies of the dead, and flora? That would make the Triple Goddess, distant and independent like the Moon, a figure of more abstract ideals or terrors, as her character changes from light to dark with the waxing and waning of her emblem. More likely, the rivalry actually splits three ways (perhaps echoing the competition of Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite for the Golden Apple of Discord which began the Trojan War). The reconciliation of the gods and their disparate elements might represent the possibility of a unity, perhaps even into the “Unseen God” whom a priest of Dionysus speaks of at the start of the series. However, even acknowledging that these powerful beings have a real existence and hold influence over the material world, they are discussed at times in a very monotheistic, almost angelic manner, as servants and lords of a far greater power operating off-screen (or even as the Ahuras and Daevas of Zoroastrian tradition.)
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85While Wolfe clearly pays homage to one of the fathers of history by setting Latro’s journey during Greece’s war with Persia, there might be a more symbolic reason that Latro first finds himself in the Persian army. Late in the first volume, we get a discussion of what these pagan gods might actually be: “Are you aware that [the Persians] hold there’s only a single god, whom they call Ahuramazda? [sic]”
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87Latro responds, “I know nothing of them, … At least, nothing I can remember.”
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89“And yet they sacrifice to the sun, the moon, and the earth, and to fire and water. It is possible – I speak now as a sophist, sir – that there is but one god. It is possible also that there are many. But it is not possible that there are one *and* many. You disagree?”
90
91Latro replies, “Sometimes a word is used for two things. When I loaded the regent’s mule, I tied the load with rope. …”
92
93“There’s good in the world, so there’s a good god, a wise lord. But there’s evil too, so there must be an evil lord as well. In fact, one posits the other. There can be no good without evil, no evil without good” (*Mist*, XXXIV 252). In this fashion, Latro’s story anticipates some of the theodicy of Christianity, which tries to justify the existence of evil given the reality of an all-powerful and benevolent God. In most traditional Catholic thinking (possibly distinct from strains of Calvinist pre-destination which might actually resonate with the world of antiquity more readily), without the potential for evil and disaster, choosing goodness and positive virtues is merely a sham. The possibility of evil must be real for good choices to signify anything. [Predestination and divine foreknowledge still exist as Catholic concepts, but on the day to day level, the Catholic Church emphasizes free will in regarding good and evil individual actions.] This exploration constitutes some of the subtextual drama of Latro’s position, for as an amnesiac, he is not only easily manipulated, but he must often operate without the full context of any situation. Could such a man ever behave justly? If we look at his actions and the intentions behind them, we see a portrait of a man who, while devoted to battle and manly virtues, strives to be fair to those around him and to defend the weak and helpless – even lacking a full understanding of his true role in the world. Thus, when it seems that he is a pawn of forces greater than he can possibly understand, there is still the sense that his actions make a difference. This direct examination of determinism and destiny creates yet another junction that differentiates Latro’s story from much of the classical writing which so inspired it. Latro does not have the complete picture, just as those operating within a pagan system before the birth of Christ could never gain a sense of the redemptive philosophy of a Christian worldview. Even so, they could behave justly and honorably, regardless of the mores of their societies.
94
95Latro continues the discussion above, challenging the idea that Ahura Mazda and his opposite, Angra Mainyu, must necessarily be binary opposites:
96
97>“Now I can speak for myself as well as for the magi. It doesn’t seem to me that there can’t be good without evil or evil without good. For a blind man, isn’t it always night? With no day? It seemed to me that if Ahuramazda … If Ahuramazda exists, Highness, all things serve him. The oak is his; so is the mouse that gnaws its root. … But shouldn’t he have servants greater than oaks and men? Surely he must, because the gap between Ahuramazda and men and oaks is very wide, and we see that every king has some minister whose authority’s only slightly less than his own, and that such men have ministers of their own, similarly empowered. Besides, the existence of the sun, the moon, the earth, and of fire and water are indisputable facts.” (*Mist*, XXXIV 253)
98
99The response Latro receives, in our day to day experience, is totally correct: “But the existence of Ahuramazda is not an indisputable fact” (*Mist*, XXXIV 253). For now, we will leave behind this passage, which strongly suggests that the pagan gods are merely something like angels and heavenly servants beneath a more powerful Lord, though at times capable of truly earth-shattering majesty – not quite gods even while they exercise their power under that guise, as flawed human understanding identifies and worships them. In the second volume, the engineer Oeobazus equates the War God and Ahura Mazda. Latro comes to be called by the name Pleistorus in one of the climactic scenes of that book, in which he purges a giant boar from the palace at Cobrys. The villain of this scene, Prince Thamyris of Thrace, tells him, “You are called Pleistorus in this land … By many other names in others” (*Arete*, XXIV 488). This is complicated by an earlier conversation with the Great Mother in which, though Latro calls her mother, she identifies him as the offspring of fathers suckled by a wolf, which would make him a descendent of Mars rather than Mars himself (*Mist*, XXI 228). Luckily, there is some precedent for a God being one with his Son, and we shall return to Latro’s ontology at the conclusion of this essay, after all of the narrative evidence has been presented.
100
101When we follow the chain of identity from the missing Pleistorus in his temple to Ares, Mars, and finally to Ahura Mazda, we find ourselves knocking on the door of a figure who resembles our conceptions of the monotheistic God of Judaism to a remarkable degree. There is only one thing that could make the personification of war quit “the spear-proud throng,” and that is to experience its horror from the point of view of a mortal. Latro learns the pain of war, and it is then that Mars, whose symbol is of course the wolf that fed his children Romulus and Remus, giving birth to the grand city which would come to rule Europe and also promulgate Christianity after a change of heart, will have his own change of heart, and learn that war is suffering, dissipating the vengeful wrath of the father of the gods (and perhaps of that Old Testament God who seems temperamentally distinct from the all-loving and forgiving God of the New Testament) to learn genuine mercy and redemption at last.
102
103 ## Historical and Literary Sources
104
105Dependent as it is upon historical events, *Latro in the Mist* pays homage to several sources. Obviously entrenched in Herodotus’s *Histories*, it pulls heavily from that text, even taking entire scenes and reframing them in (overt) fiction. However, one of the subtle undercurrents, beyond the narrative exploration of the divine, involves tribute to perhaps *the* father of Western Literature. Homer begins *The Iliad* with an injunction to the muses to sing of the wrath of Achilles, creating an immortal edifice that would resonate through the centuries. The Achaean paragon’s infamous wrath serves as the impetus for that epic, which became a cornerstone of literature. [Achilles is also a distinctly pre-modern model for the perfect man, more akin to an atom bomb than a character – manly affection for the fallen Patroclus might inspire him to finally pick up arms, but his capabilities and raw killing power are what make him a worthy subject for the epic – no matter how we might sympathize from a modern perspective with the more human Hector of Troy, *The Iliad’s* stated theme is the wrath of Achilles.] At times in Wolfe’s series, we are treated with subtle hints that the ghost of Achilles demands blood, unhappy with the purging of the Achaeans and the clear dominance of the Dorian Greeks (in these novels, represented by the Spartan Rope Makers). When the ghost of Odysseus appears to aid Latro near the end of *Soldier of the Mist*, he emphasizes that Achilles is *still* bloodthirsty: “I am Odysseus, son of Laertes and King of Ithaka … We need more blood, for Peleus’s son” (*Mist*, XLII 308). After the symbolic funeral of Lykaon, slain by a boar in Arcadia, his father Ortygenes quotes *The Iliad*:
106
107>Some marks of honor on my son bestow,
108
109>And pay in glory what in life you owe.
110
111>Fame is at least by heavenly promise due
112
113>To life so short, and now dishonor’d, too.
114
115>Till the proud king and all the Achaean race
116
117>Shall heap with honors him they now disgrace. (*Arete*, XXXIV 559)
118
119This is directly from Pope’s translation, in which Thetis pleads with Zeus to give her son Achilles honor and glory. In his usual coy fashion, Wolfe has taken out the penultimate couplet, which reads, “Avenge this wrong, O ever just and wise! / Let Greece be humbled, and the Trojans rise” (Homer). Knowing that Virgil would one day build *The Aeneid* on the escape of Aeneas from Troy to ultimately found Rome, this elided couplet reinforces the current of human history, set in motion so long ago. The Trojans will rise to world domination as Rome. In Wolfe’s novel, the Dorian Greeks have slaughtered the Achaeans, and even as Greece enters a period of Athenian democracy and enlightenment, the course established by the wrath of Achilles still lives on: the Trojans will rise to greater prominence than Homer could ever have intended. In many ways, this undying wrath of Achilles serves as both an homage and a metonymy for the force of immortal literary history. In providing the original theme of *The Iliad* such a prominent place in shaping human history, Wolfe emphasizes the power of tradition and the numinous, prophetic quality it attains over time.
120
121At one point in Latro’s narrative, the dead begin to wander the land of the living, and the mantis Hegisistratus relates one of the most chilling set pieces of Wolfe’s book as he describes the journey of a captain named Hubrias, who navigates the White Isle:
122
123>“Our ghosts are becoming worse, have you noticed? It used to be they were no more than lost souls who had wandered away from the Lands of the Dead, or perhaps never reached them, spirits no worse dead than they had been alive, and frequently better. … Now something evil is moving among them … have any of you heard about the things that happened to Captain Hubrias? Do you know about the White Isle?” (*Arete*, XXII 475)
124
125[At this point, a brief aside on the philosophical importance of Latro’s ally Pindaros might be relevant. In Plato’s *Meno*, Socrates and the titular character actually discuss the poet (also commonly known as Pindar) and his concepts of the soul’s immortality and reincarnation. From the Blessed Isle or the White Isle, Elysium, the spirits of the worthy might return to the world of the living. In discussing Pindaros, Socrates notes that:
126
127>[T]hey say that the soul of man is immortal, and at one time comes to an end, which is called dying, and at another is born again, but never perishes. Consequently one ought to live all one's life in the utmost holiness.
128
129>For from whomsoever Persephone shall accept requital for ancient wrong, the souls of these she restores in the ninth year to the upper sun again; from them arise glorious kings and men of splendid might and surpassing wisdom, and for all remaining time are they called holy heroes amongst mankind. (Plato, “Meno” 81-82b)
130
131Socrates here discusses adhering to the idea of reincarnation, and Pindar might have been one of the first to write of these ideas in Greece. However, Wolfe’s other primary source, Herodotus, identifies Egypt as the origin of metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls):
132
133>The Egyptians say that Demeter and Dionysus are the rulers of the underworld kingdom. The Egyptians were also the first to claim that the soul of a human being is immortal, and that each time the body dies the soul enters another creature just as it is being born. They also say that when the soul has made the round of every creature on land, in the sea, and in the air, it once more clothes itself in the body of a human being just as it is being born, and that a complete cycle takes three thousand years. This theory has been adopted by certain Greeks too – some from a long time ago, some more recently – who presented it as if it were their own. I know their names, but I will not write them down. (Herodotus 144)
134
135We should keep in mind that Latro has already traveled to Egypt during the course of his service, and will eventually return there. When he is granted a vision of his home via the dryad Elata and her mistress, the Huntress, his mother insists that everyone believed Latro to be dead. Latro can see that even as he speaks to his mother, she is sleeping in the background, dreaming of their meeting. The final section of this essay will attempt to reconcile Latro’s earliest memories with a possibly divine nature.]
136
137Returning to the tale of Hubrias, Wolfe’s presentation of the White Isles through our third-hand account reeks of a need for vengeance which intersects directly with the world of the living. From its shores, the ghost of Achilles demands that Captain Hubrias bring him a slave named Chryse from the temple of Athena Ilias, emphasizing that she be treated with honor as “the last of Priam’s line” (*Arete*, XXII 475).
138
139When Hubrias returns to the island with Chryse, he sees Achilles with an exceedingly beautiful woman. [Though she is never identified, her description as a preternaturally attractive ghost rather than a goddess strongly suggests she is Helen of Troy rather than Kore – “There was something in her that beckoned to you … There was not a man alive … who would not have laid down his life for her, and been happy to do it” (*Arete*, XXII 476). After all, Helen is still remembered by Marlowe’s hyperbolic tag line, “the face that launched a thousand ships.”] In return for leaving Priam’s descendent with Achilles, Hubrias becomes an infallible navigator. In a haunting scene, the ghost of Achilles tears Chryse apart as Hubrias leaves. Hegesistratus asserts that “No player from Thespiae could have looked as [Hubrias] did when he described the woman, or sweated as he did when he described the death of the slave girl” (*Arete*, XXII 477). King Priam of course fought against the Achaeans at Troy, and his son Paris, also known as Alexander, plays a vital role in precipitating that epic conflict after his elopement with Helen. Whether Apollo as Paris or Paris himself shot the arrow which killed Achilles, the shade of the great Greek warrior finally accomplishes the eradication of his enemy’s line. [Identifying Chryse as the last of Priam’s line slightly problematizes the myths surrounding Aeneas’s founding of Rome and even the establishment of Britain through Brutus of Troy, though the sundering of Greece into disparate and moribund tribes no doubt serves as a thematic counterpoint to the unity of Rome.]
140
141In any case, these small details suggest the displeasure of Achilles, constituting a conscious salute to the influence of Greek literature and thought as well as to the vital importance of Homer in human memory: his work influences the world long after he is dust, and placing this haunting presence driving the conflict emphasizes that literary and historical debt. In this case, Wolfe is also tracing the development of the epic (and thus, of great literature) from Greece to Rome (though Virgil is not directly referenced, he has an important place in Catholic art) by having an emergent Roman main character, from a nation which will lead to the unification of the pagan world in Christianity. If, as the words of Odysseus indicate, the anger of Achilles still operates in the land of the living to influence events, then we can infer some displeasure of the supplanting of the Achaean culture by the Dorian Spartans. Before the final training scenes of *Soldier of Arete*, Latro participates in a (second) boar hunt, undertaken in part to avenge the death of Lykaon, described as a youth born in the final days of the Achaeans. Lykaon’s poetically rendered funeral represents a passage from an old and dying Greek order to a new one, external to the Hellenes.
142
143Beyond this historical, theological, and literary discourse, in the context of Wolfe’s other work, we should examine the amnesiac Latro at the dawn of history in comparison to the dark figure of Severian, who forgets nothing, located as he is near the end of humanity’s dominion. Both seem to move toward a moral center as their narratives progress, but in Latro’s case the necessity of violence and battle in a war-torn world grants a certain nobility to conflict. Human suffering eventually blunts the sharpness of his dedication to battle.
144
145The Spartan runner Pasicrates, in discussing the battle at Thermopylae in which three hundred Spartans (and many more servants) stood against the Persian invasion, identifies Latro’s role as one of a witness for the gods: “You’ll forget, but I’ve begun to think that’s because you’re the ear of the gods; they hear, instead of you, or they take the memory of what you’ve heard from you. This is something the gods should know” (*Mist*, XXXVII 273). Whether this is true or not (and there is little reason to doubt it), there is no denying that others can see the mystical world of myth at Latro’s touch – it becomes real when he interacts with it. There is equal evidence that in order for some of these gods to affect those around Latro, he must touch the mortals as well. Early in the books, a few exchanges make this clear.
146
147The doomed helot sentry Cerdon tells Latro of his experience with the divine: “It was a god, and you saw him when none of the rest of us could. Then when you touched him, all of us could see him” (*Mist*, VI 51). Cerdon’s own fate is soon at stake, when an apparition calling itself a Daughter of Enodia appears, asking Latro, “Won't you give him to me?” 
148
149Latro asks, “Who am I … that I should say yes to you, or no?” (*Mist*, VI 52). Perhaps readers should attempt to answer that question. The focal point of Latro’s touch proves that this exchange between the invisible spirit and the physical world runs in two directions, centered around our narrator: “If you only touch him, it may be enough to make him real” (*Mist*, VI 52). In turn, Cerdon will soon beg Latro to touch the Great Mother so that they can drive the Rope Makers away. This junction between the spiritual world of “divine” beings and transitory mortals might remind us of the hypostatic union of the divine and the mortal, which will come to describe Christ’s dual nature.
150
151This daughter of Enodia promises Latro a gift in return if he sacrifices Cerdon to her: “Touch him for me then, and I will go away. The fauns bring dreams, and should I meet one, I will order him to bring you the dream you wish” (*Mist*, VI 53). Later, when Aglaus is present, this is exactly what happens, as Latro has a pivotal dream at the end of the second volume which both reconciles him with the Spartan Pasicrates and cures Latro of his suicidal depression. (Io remarks that the dryad Elata and Aglaus are similar to each other. Aglaus seems to serve the Great Mother, though Elata belongs to the Triple Goddess; Elata brings Latro a dream, too, though it involves returning to his childhood home.) With some of these details in mind, a thorough look at the events depicted in the first two Latro novels might help to contextualize the larger patterns embedded in Wolfe’s historical fantasy.
152
153## A Peculiar Translation of Ancient Scrolls: A Pedantically Detailed Summary [and Gloss]
154
155In Latro, we find evidence of a powerful, manly, and ultimately just protagonist whose unreliability stems from his inability to contextualize his surroundings, at times making him something of an easy dupe. The contemporary frame story in the introduction as a translator’s note makes a few interesting claims. It quickly progresses from a practical discussion of culture and currency to a far more mystical conclusion. Our modern transcriber, G. W., indicates that some papyrus scrolls passed through the hands of the dealer and collector “Mr. D____ A______” of Detroit, who had them X-rayed, revealing the minuscule scribbling of Latro. This collector contacted our translator, knowing his interest in “dead languages.” The text is written in archaic Latin. [For those interested in linkages between this series and Wolfe’s short stories, the narrator named Gene from “The Arimaspian Legacy” and “Slow Children at Play” has a friend he calls David Arimaspian, who collects all kinds of rare books and becomes obsessed with translating a text from the sun, which seems to be in ancient Chaldean. That book grants him mystical powers which ultimately destroy him. For those who wonder where Wolfe might have gotten the idea of the Chaldean language as something close to the divine, as it is hinted at in those stories and in “Useful Phrases,” perhaps they need look no further than the opening liturgical chant of this essay. Each of those stories, too, might perhaps be labeled as “religious fantasies.” The tension in “The Arimaspian Legacy” involves Griffins hunting after the one-eyed men (Arimaspians) to protect their gold as described in Herodotus, and it is a story repeated in Chapter XXXIV of *Soldier of the Mist*.] The introduction claims that Latro “may mean brigand, guerrilla, hired man, bodyguard, or pawn” (*Mist* 15). [He does not mention the use of Latro which might occur most often in prayer and in Catholic art: the word latro also means thief, and the repentant thief crucified next to Christ is often referred to in Latin as *latro poenitens*.]
156
157After G.W. lists many facts of Greek life, diet, and custom, he presents a far more mysterious conclusion:
158
159>“In ancient Greece, skeptics were those who thought, not those who scoffed. Modern skeptics should note that Latro reports Greece as it was reported by the Greeks themselves. The runner sent from Athens [Thought] to ask Spartan [Rope Maker] help before the battle of Marathon [Fennel Field] met the god Pan on the road and conscientiously recounted their conversation to the Athenian assembly when he returned. (The Spartans, who well knew who ruled their land, refused to march before the full of the moon.) (*Mist*, 17-8)
160
161That rather sinister last sentence refers to the personification of the Moon, a part of the Triple Goddess Hecate who sometimes calls herself the Huntress, and the full moon seems to represent Artemis at her most glorious and powerful. [This runner appears in several different versions of the story – in some sources, Philippides runs to Athens after the battle at Marathon to inform them of the outcome, breathing his last as he delivers the message of a Greek victory over the forces of Darius in 490 B.C., a decade before the events of Latro’s first scroll. In the version related by Herodotus, which Wolfe follows, the runner meets Pan on Mount Parthenium. Pan asks the runner why the Athenians paid him no attention and subsequently, the legend goes, joins the fight against the Persians. This land defeat marked a change in fortune for Darius, who then had to quell an Egyptian revolt, leaving his heir Xerxes to deal with subjugating Greece. Our story begins with two further defeats for the Persian invaders: the sea battle of Salamis [Peace] and the battle of Plataea [Clay], where Latro was wounded at the temple of Demeter and the Persian Mardonius, an important figure in the reign of both Darius and Xerxes, was killed.]
162
163While many may make much of Latro’s head wound in suggesting that perhaps the gods he sees are figments of his imagination, soon enough this pretense is dropped, and the genre becomes quite clearly historical fantasy [though Latro does speculate later that Jove may have gone mad]. Indeed, the book cannot be understood on even a surface level unless we start to take the mythology seriously. Latro’s head wound in the temple of Demeter [the Grain Goddess] destroys his ability to make long term memories, and we are left with a narrator who awakens every day with a blank slate – yet much of his journey is a sincere need to reconcile with the Great Mother.
164
165At the very start of his journal, Latro is told by an Egyptian healer (of “Riverland”) to write down what occurs every day so that it will not be forgotten. Latro is unable to remember his name or his immediate proceedings, but does recall his home: “I told him of our house and the brook that laughs over colored stones. I described Mother and Father to him, just as I see them in my mind, but when he asked their names, I could tell him only ‘Mother’ and ’Father.’ He said he thought these memories very old, perhaps from ten to twenty years past or more” (*Mist*, I 21). We shall return to Latro’s initial memories of his family, but his identity as a mercenary and his own faulty memories foreshadow that his allegiances will be difficult to pinpoint at times, though he instinctively understands that he serves “the Great King” regardless of his exterior circumstances.
166
167Soon Latro hears that he is in the Great King’s Army [Xerxes of Persia], and that his injury occurred near a shrine of the “Earth Mother, where the Great King’s army fought the army of Thought [Athens] and the Rope Makers [Sparta]” (*Mist*, 1 22). When Latro picks up his sword, the relationship he feels involves more than conscious memory: “I took up Falcata, and though I did not know her, she knew my hand” (*Mist*, I 22). Although robbed of his past, he is not without friends: “A black man is with me. He wears the skin of a spotted beast, and his spear is tipped with twisted horn” (*Mist*, I 23). He carries two bags, of white and vermilion paste. [These are the colors of Nubian war paint for battle. Their war god, Apedemak, was a lion-headed warrior, and in some depictions he had three lion heads and four arms. Much later, Latro will discover that his friend goes by the name Seven Lions. The War God of Thrace is depicted with a lion companion on his banner in Cobrys.]
168
169It is abundantly clear that Latro sees the gods of myth in his surroundings: “I saw beyond his shoulder another man, whiter than I, in the river. At first I thought him drowned, for his face was beneath the water; but he smiled and waved to me, pointing up the river, where the Great King’s army marches, before he vanished swiftly downstream.” This thickly muscled apparition of the god Asopus is “horned like a bull” (*Mist*, I 23). Soon this interlude between battles ends when the slaves of the Rope Makers [the helots] attack, and Latro misunderstands Seven Lions imprecations to flee as hostility before finally comprehending their mutual peril. After they escape, Latro rests and reveals the domestic Lars which he remembers as his familial deity:
170
171>The soldiers I can understand talk much of gods, curing them and cursing others – ourselves more than once – in their names. It seems to me I once knew gods worshiping beside Mother where the vines twined about the house of some small god. Now his name is lost. Even if I could call on him, I do not think he could come at my bidding. This land is surely far, very far from his little house. (*Mist*, I 24)
172
173[Note the verbal ambiguity of this sentence: “I once knew gods worshiping beside Mother” – a reader could either, as is natural, assume that Latro and his mother worship those gods, or that both the gods and Mother worship the speaker, which would imply that he is a greater god than they are.] Bereft of that home, Latro speaks to the river, proclaiming “I know no god but you. I die tomorrow, and I will sink into the earth with the other dead. But I pray you will give good fortune always to the black man, who has been more than a brother to me. Here is my sword, with her I would have slain him. Accept the sacrifice!” (*Mist*, I 24) The “river man” appears to him, with two girls “who might have been his daughters.” He tells Latro:
174
175>“I would mend you if I could … That lies beyond me, though steel and wood, fish, wheat, and barley all obey me. … My power is but this: that what is given to me I return manifold. Thus I cast your sickle on my shore again, new-tempered in my flood. Not wood, nor bronze, nor iron shall stand against her, and she will not fail you until you fail her.” (*Mist*, I 24-5)
176
177[The daughters of Asopus, the Asopides, are named Aegina and Thebes in Pindar’s odes – though other stories of Asopus feature more daughters, there are multiple reasons to favor the story as told by one of the prominent characters in Latro’s narrative. The daughters are abducted and separated by Zeus; the abduction of women also plays a central role in the start of the wars chronicled by Herodotus and even in the myth of Sisyphus, who will appear in the second volume and is related to Asopus. (There is another important Zoroastrian tradition that should be mentioned here, however, whether it is a coincidence or not. The principal act of worship in Zorastrianism, the *yasna* ceremony, is an offering to the waters, an act which strengthens goodness and truth so that the universe does not fall into chaos (Malandra).) On a historical level, the battle at Plataea in which Latro was wounded resulted in the Spartans and Athenians defeating Mardonius and his group of “Immortals.” The lame Hegisistratus who appears later in the story served as Mardonius’s mantis. That battle cost Persia both Boeotia and Attica. The Asopus river played a key part of the strategies of the armies, and Latro’s experience at the river with Asopus, also known as the Swift God, may or may not reflect the river’s pivotal role in the recent conflict.] Our understanding of Latro’s position amidst the troops of Persia soon disintegrates.
178
179Latro and his allies camp at Thebes [Hill], which has been fighting against the other Hellenes on the side of Persia, and he notes the animosity between the people of Athens and Thebes as well as the Spartan reputation for mercilessness. The Sacred Band of Thebes, the seven-gated city, has already been broken. There, Seven Lions manages to steal food far more subtly than Latro can manage, and they soon find themselves at the temple of the Shining God, Apollo, after Latro attracts attention by talking to a statue of Asopus, “thinking the image to be the Swift God himself” (*Mist*, II 27). The black man uses the opportunity to capitalize on the situation and ask for money from the crowd. They are sent to the House of the Sun. There, a priest indicates that no prophecy will be forthcoming until a suitable offering is made, and soon a small slave girl is presented. “[H]er owner spoke of her most highly, pointing to her comely face and swearing she could read and that she had never known a man” (*Mist*, II 28).
180
181The priest accepts the sacrifice of the slave girl Io after she reads a description of Apollo, who “Makes clear our days with golden fire, / Heals all wounds, gives hope divine, / To those who kneel at his shrine” (*Mist*, II 28). As the pythoness begins to scream and prophecy, a giant golden figure invisible to everyone but Latro emerges from an alcove. Apollo tells Latro, “For them I am not here … Only the solitary can see the gods. … For the rest, every god is the Unknown God” (*Mist*, II 29). [We shall return to the concept of the Unknown God in our conclusion.]
182
183Apollo offers a prophecy to Latro: 
184
185>“[T]hough you will wander far in search of your home, you will not find it until you are farthest from it. Once only, you will sing as men sang in the Age of Gold to the playing of the gods. Long after, you will find what you seek in the dead city.
186
187>“Though healing is mine, I cannot heal you, nor would I if I could; by the shrine of the Great Mother you fell, to a shrine of hers you must return. Then she will point the way, and in the end the wolf’s tooth will return to her who sent it. … Look beneath the sun … .” (*Mist*, II 29)
188
189[This prophecy actually does seem to describe the events which occur halfway through the first volume at Eleusis [Advent], in which the statue of Demeter points to the rooms below, where Kore waits for Latro, offering him a wolf-flower and calling him the bearer of the wolf’s tooth, which might be one of Wolfe’s most cryptic terms: a wolf tooth is actually the term for a type of horse tooth, a vestigial pre-molar. Whether this refers to Falcata, his future relationship with the lycanthropic Neurians, the young centaur Polos (who actually bears Latro, rather than vice versa), or even a metonymy for Latro (or the spirit which animates him) never truly comes into focus. It most probably refers to Latro’s conviction late in the second volume that mankind is a wolf-like predator hungry for blood, but a wolf without teeth is no longer as dangerous. Despite the scene at Eleusis, it is not until halfway through the second volume that the Great Mother, manifesting herself as Cybele, points Latro in the direction of the Temple of the War God Pleistorus (and then to her own temple) with the words: “Look under the sun” (*Arete*, XVI 434). (By the time of the Sassanid Empire, Ahura Mazda would be represented as a masculine figure standing on a horse (Boyce 686). Whether the wolf’s tooth has any true relationship with horses, the proliferation of equine figures in *Soldier of Arete* is striking. The most likely explanation for the wolf’s tooth involves the ability of the warrior to hurt and maim those who oppose or are weaker than him.)] 
190
191In the Temple of the Sun in Thebes, Latro attracts the attention of the young girl Io, who soon begins presenting herself as Latro’s slave. She says that her name means “happiness.” When Latro questions how she could belong to him, she claims, “the god gave me to you yesterday,” though later she will reveal that she lies and might have acted of her own volition (*Mist*, III 31). The poet Pindaros interrupts them, saying that he was among the group which carried Latro to the temple.
192
193[For the pedantic, matching some of Latro’s more philosophical musings with Pindaros’s poetry might prove fulfilling. Here is one such example: When Latro says, “I feel I’ve been dreaming and have just awakened; but I can’t tell you what my dream was, or what preceded it,” Pindaros says that he may borrow those ideas in his work (*Mist*, III 31-2). While not exact, some of these images might be found in his Pythian Odes:
194
195>He who is allotted some new fine thing,
196
197>buoyed by hopes at his great splendour,
198
199>takes flight
200
201>on the wings of his manly strength,
202
203>thinking of that which is greater than wealth. In a short time
204
205>the delight of mortals grows: but it falls the ground
206
207>shaken by hostile will. […]
208
209>Creatures of a day! What is someone? What is no-one? 
210
211>Man is the dream of a shadow. But whenever the radiance of Zeus comes,
212
213>a bright light and gentle life rests upon him. (Segal)
214
215A more dedicated classical scholar might attempt a closer examination of Pindaros’s work for parallels with his interaction with Latro.]
216
217Latro’s ignorance of the identity of the strategist he serves shocks Pindaros, who supposes that now Artabazus commands Mardonius’s legions. The poet asks Io to recite the god’s prophecy, since he has “a temperamental aversion to bad verse” (*Mist*, III 33). The prophecy seldom unfolds in the manner that Pindaros interprets it, so it is worth reproducing the entire verse here:
218
219>Look under the sun, if you would see!
220
221>Sing! Make Sacrifice to me!
222
223>But you must cross the narrow sea.
224
225>The wolf that howls has wrought you woe!
226
227>To that dog’s mistress you must go!
228
229>Her hearth burns in the room below.
230
231>I send you to the God Unseen!
232
233>Whose temple lies in Death’s terrene!
234
235>There you shall learn why He’s not seen.
236
237>Sing then, and make the hills resound!
238
239>King, nymph, and priest shall gather round!
240
241>Wolf, faun, and nymph, spellbound. (*Mist*, III 33) 
242
243[Though Latro will reach the hearth of the underworld midway through the first volume, the second half of the verse probably refers to events in *Soldier of Arete*. It seems most likely that the king, nymph, and priest mentioned are Sisyphus, Elata, and Hegesistratus, present at the conclusion of that book. However, when Silenus makes an appearance at the start of *Soldier of the Mist*, Pinadaros believes that this prophecy refers to Silenus, Hilaera, and himself, as a priest of poetry. In our final sections, we will examine the identities of the wolf, faun, and nymph who are spellbound by Pindaros’s song and share a dream. While the faun and nymph are certainly Aglaus and Elata, arguments can be made for Latro, Pasicrates, or Hegesistratus, who all appear in the dream, as the wolf: they are a child of Rome, a predatory warrior, and a desperate man who cut off his own foot to escape a trap, respectively. The wolf of the final line *might* be different than the howling wolf who wishes Latro ill, who seems to be the Neurian Oior; that warning could also have multiple applications, given that Oior’s name means “Man.”]
244
245Pindaros’s act of interpretation results in a responsibility: he feels he must accompany Latro to a shrine of the Great Mother. In his reading, Pindaros claims that when the word sun appears in Apollo’s prophecies, it always refers to the god, who expects a sacrifice of song. Pindaros further identifies Apollo as “an eastern god, having come to us from the Tall Cap Country … symbolized by the rising sun. Thus that’s where you’re to make your sacrifice” (*Mist*, III 34). Pindaros concludes that the Great Mother (Hera or Gaea) whose symbol is the wolf has injured Latro, and that he must visit one of her shrines in expiation. Believing that the cavern oracle at Lebadeia could be the only possible temple, Pindaros stresses that it must be their destination; he suggests they proceed without coastal roads to avoid the Athenian Navy. However, Latro’s questions about the Unseen God remain unanswered. The poet only offers, “There was a shrine to the Unknown God in Thought, and that’s surely Death’s Country now that the army’s destroyed everything again. … My guess is that when you’ve visited the Great Mother in Trophonius’s Cave, everything will be clear. Not that it’s possible for a mortal –“ (*Mist*, III 35). [Beyond its devotion to Athena, Athens featured many temples and shrines, including ones to Apollo and Ares, a Theatre of Dionysus, and the vast, majestic Temple of Olympian Zeus, whose massive columns represented the largest temple in ancient Greece. While that temple is not directly mentioned, many of Latro’s most profound visions are punctuated with the presence of huge columns. However, that vast temple might not be described as “a shrine to the Unknown God,” and Apollo would not refer to himself in that fashion. Perhaps the Cave of Pan is implied, given the Christian signification his name would eventually accrue. Milton himself presented Pan as a pagan prefiguration of Christ: a shepherd of human and divine nature.] Our speculation as to the identity of the Unknown God segues nicely back into the plot: interrupted by a procession of goats and dancers, Latro and his companions join the bacchanalia at a sufficiently interesting train of thought concerning the limited knowledge of mortals to prompt a reader’s attention. If a mortal could not achieve the perfect clarity Pindaros mentioned, could an immortal? [The journey Pindaros intends to undertake with Latro undergoes constant and abrupt shifts in direction, and the plot of the second volume reveals that his assessment of the prophecy is less than accurate.]
246
247The next day Latro awakens on the river bank by a beautiful woman later revealed to be Hilaera. He looks up to behold “the moon … like a white lamp hung to guide some virgin home, and when I looked toward the bank again I saw her, as pure as the moonlight, a bow bent like the increscent moon in her hand and arrows thrust through the cestus at her waist” (*Mist*, IV 37). [The Triple Goddess’s character vastly changes with the waxing and waning of the moon; her manifestation as the Dark Mother appears far more eldritch and sinister than this iteration under the full moon. The mention of a white lamp is explicitly connected to Aphrodite later in the book, however.]
248
249Latro soon comes across a nude priest who is curious about Latro’s origin, though Latro speaks the tongue of the Hellenes. The holy man, wearing ivy and carrying a staff tipped with a pinecone, suggests that the “God in the Tree” wipes away memories so that there will not be guilt for partaking in the Bacchic revelry. Io suggests that Latro’s injury comes from the Great Mother, “Or maybe the Earth Mother or the Pig Lady” (*Mist*, IV 38). The priest of Dionysus reveals that they are all one, and also provides the idea that just as people should be addressed by whatever role they have at the time, the gods are also addressed by their function, under different names “suitable for the tongue of each nation” (*Mist*, IV 39). [He clearly carries the thyrsus staff, associated with Dionysus or Bacchus, a fertility symbol, and the priest’s words demonstrate his allegiance even if this is not enough to spark our recognition. Since part of our argument hinges on the idea that Latro is actually intimately involved with the myths of the ancient world, it makes sense to contextualize the gods as they appear in Latro’s story.] The priest continues, “Our god was conceived when the Descender noticed in his travels a certain Semele, a princess, daughter of the king of our own seven-gated city.” [The city of Thebes plays a huge role in many of the ancient myths]. He describes how Dionysus, whom he calls the Kid, was hidden in the form of a kid to avoid the wrath of the Descender’s wife, but “Teleia, Queen of the Gods, was not deceived. With sweet herbs and clotted honey, she lured the kid away, coming at last to the isle of Naxos, where her bodyguard waited under the command of her daughter, the Lady of Thought” (*Mist*, IV 41). Of course, the goddess of Athens is Athena, and the priest’s dialogue reveals her as self-serving at all times: “[T]hough she had helped her mother, she saved the heart of the kid from the pot and carried it to the Descender” (*Mist*, IV 42). [In myth, Zeus takes that heart and uses it to regrow Dionysus, grafted onto his own body, which results in Dionysus’s designation as “twice-born.”] When Seven Lion shows up, the priest takes it as proof of Dionysus’s power, since he is also known as the King from Nysa. [Later, we will learn that Seven Lions is actually a King of Nysa, making the myths resonate with the characters populating the surface narrative. Perhaps Latro’s own infancy might have followed a parallel course to that of the Kid’s, but as the Soldier series stands it is almost impossible to determine Wolfe’s intentions regarding Latro’s origins.]
250
251The Bacchanalia in which Latro participated the night before celebrates the descent of Dionysus into the underworld to rescue his mother Semele. In addition to sleeping with Hilaera, Latro played a further part in the revelry: “There is a painted mask too; Io says the priest gave it to me yesterday, when I was a satyr” (*Mist*, IV 43). [Does this imply the pagan prefiguration of Christ in Pan, or draw some other relationship between Dionysus and Latro?] Up to this point, Latro’s allegiance to Persia remains uninterrupted, but the first of several threatening shifts occur when the “slaves” of the Spartans attack in the wake of the Bacchic festival. We receive an account of the battle much later from Hilaera:
252
253>“[W]hile Pindaros and the black man faced their first antagonists, you [Latro] killed three. But the others were going to kill Io and me, and Pindaros stepped in front of you and made you stop. For a moment I thought you were going to cut him down, and so did he, I think. Instead you dropped your sword, and they bound your hands and beat you, and made you kiss the dust before their feet” (*Mist*, VIII 72).
254
255After this capture, both Io and Hilaera are raped, and we later learn that Seven Lions paid for the lives of the slaves Latro killed. These slaves of the Rope Makers have never seen a man such as Seven Lions before. [Historically, these Spartan slaves are called helots, but in the narrative it is implied that they might be the remnants of the Minoan civilization centered near Crete or the aboriginal inhabitants of Achaea, who worshipped primarily matriarchal goddesses.] Upon the path they are forced to march, Latro soon perceives a large and dark sleeper where others only see the shadows of vines. When Latro touches the figure, begging it to awaken, it materializes to everyone else, and all gather around. The dark apparition begs for help in finding his flute and cup. When he sees Latro’s mask, he identifies Latro as “a friend of my pupils. They can't [kill you]” (*Mist*, V 45). He calls himself the King of Nysa, who is Silenus. [As drunken tutor to Dionysus and part of his retinue, Silenus was considered the oldest and wisest among Dionysus’s followers, but some depictions of his character feature him with the ears and hindquarters of a horse. There is no indication of those physical features in Wolfe’s first Soldier novel, but at the very end of the second novel, the red urn which will be the prize for the chariot race is described as follows: “[I]t is the urn from my memory palace … Black dancers with beards, and the ears and tails of horses, caper around it” (*Arete*, XLI 606). The presence of Silenus at the singing of this song and possibly dancing around the urn which represents the final triumph in the Pythian games at Delphi tie those events together. Latro’s narrative will only survive because it will be stored in that urn, though it is usually a symbol of death. (This urn might also remind us of the words the Emperor Tiberius heard in the time of Christ: “Great Pan is dead.”) In some myths, Silenus grants Midas a boon of his choice in exchange for the kindness and hospitality extended to him, though his infamous golden touch proves to be an ill-considered option.] In Wolfe’s novel, Silenus distinguishes himself from Dionysus: “I'm sure he said my pupil was the King *from* Nysa. King *of* Nysa, King *from* Nysa” (*Mist*, V 46).
256
257The slaves of the Rope Makers only agree to allow this King of Nysa to keep his flute if he plays well for them, and Silenus offers Latro wine so that he can accompany the melody with a clear throat: “I cannot write the words here, because they were in no tongue I know. Yet I understood as I sang them, and they told of the morning of the world, when the slaves of the Rope Makers had been free men serving their own king and the Earth Mother” (*Mist*, V 47). The song relates how Silenus had given Dionysus to the Earth Mother to be her foster son, and “to the Boundary Stone” (*Mist*, V 47). [At this point, it might be prudent to note a few details of thematic importance. Later, an offhand reference will make clear that the Boundary Stone is the god Hermes. In one version of the story, Hermes keeps the infant Dionysus safe by giving him to the mythical Io. In light of future events in the series, we should also keep in mind that the shape-changing Zalmoxis who appears in *Soldier of Arete*, having taken over the Temple of Pleistorus in Thrace, is syncretically associated with Dionysus by some scholars. This conjunction is between a local Greek nature deity and a more powerful Thracian god, sometimes Sabazois rather than Zalmoxis. The figure of Dionysus, like that of Jesus, has strong associations with wine and resurrection. As we will return to later, Zalmoxis, the most imposing semi-divine “threat” in the second volume, had a historical cult that foreshadowed many Christian ideas, such as an eternal resurrection of the body and a hero figure who died, descended into the earth, and rose again. Even though our first reading of this scene supposes that Latro’s “friendship” with Dionysus stems from the recent revelry, a deeper relationship might be implied. If the subtext of the Soldier series involves the appropriation, sanctification, and transformation of myths to a unified Christian monotheistic theology, the importance of Zalmoxis and Dionysus becomes quite obvious. Latro’s earliest memories, associated with his Mother’s singing (as well as vines and wolfskin), might also resonate with the song of Silenus, which tells of the “morning of the world.”] Returning to the narrative, the slaves of the Rope Makers and their own captives all dance to the song, their bonds loosened.
258
259Later, in discussing what occurred, Pindaros insists that two of the lines of Apollo’s prophecy were fulfilled. When Latro asks the difference between the Great King and the King of Nysa, Pindaros focuses on the idea that once the gods walked among men as their visible rulers: “Here the Thunderer was our king in the same way the Great King rules his empire. Men and women saw him every day, and those who did could speak to him if they dared. … In time, the gods saw that there were no thrones for their children, or for their children's children” (*Mist*, V 49). As those gods fathered children, humanity took the places of the gods for its own. Pindaros compares it to a farmer who does not punish his impish daughter for climbing into his chair, but instead kisses her.
260
261>“So it was between the gods and their children, who became the kings of men. The kings of the Silent Country [Laconia], to which we're being taken, still trace their proud lines from Alcmene's son [Heracles]. And if you were to travel east to the Empire instead, you'd find many a place where the Heraclids, the sons and daughters of Heracles, ruled not long ago; and a few where they rule yet, vassals of the Great King.”
262
263Latro asks if the farmer would “not someday wish to sit in his chair again,” metaphorically suggesting that the gods might desire to reclaim their absolute dominion over earth. Pindaros noncommittally responds, “Who can say? … The ages to come are wisest” (*Mist*, V 49). This discussion suggests a close relationship between humans and gods and hints that the divine tolerance which has left humanity to its own judgment might soon end. [The appendix of *Soldier of Arete* reveals that the titan Kronos acted to free life on earth from the interference of the gods.]
264
265Now that the relationship between humanity and the gods has been established and the presence of Silenus externally verified, the physical and spiritual worlds have intersected. When Latro’s scroll is confiscated by a guard, Latro acts by engaging the forces only he can see: “[W]hen [the guard with my scroll] left the camp to relieve himself I spoke to the serpent woman. She followed him and soon returned with my scroll in her mouth. Her teeth are long and hollow. She says she draws life through them, and she has drunk her fill” (*Mist*, V 44).
266
267Soon another helot, Cerdon, speaks to Latro about the lost nobility of what is probably Minoan culture, revealing that they once worshipped the Great Mother, who hates the Descender [Zeus] even though he overcame her and she bore him five sons and five daughters. The Spartans worship and serve Artemis, one of those daughters, but their slaves hope to return the Great Mother to her prominence. Cerdon claims:
268
269>[T]the trees are hers. … Only hers. That's why the Rope Makers make us cut them down, make us dig out their stumps and plow the fields. The whole Silent Country was covered with oaks and pine, when we were free. Now the Rope Makers say the Huntress [Artemis] rules Redface Island [Achaea] – because she's the Descender's daughter, and they want us to forget our Great Mother. We haven't forgotten. We'll never forget” (*Mist*, VI 51).
270
271Cerdon begs Latro to touch the Great Mother at a planned summoning ritual, which would make her tangible. He reveals that the Spartan slaves are only armed because of the arrival of Persian forces. He also believes that manifesting the Great Mother will give them the power to cast off the yolk of Spartan rule.
272
273Meanwhile, the serpentine figure lurking in the shadows implores Latro to touch Cerdon, so that she can claim him: “If you only touch him, it may be enough to make him real” (*Mist*, VI 52). She offers Latro whatever he desires, and he says that he only wants to sleep and dream of home. The creature, calling herself a daughter of Enodia [another name for Echidna], says, “Touch him for me then, and I will go away. The fauns bring dreams, and should I meet one, I will order him to bring you the dream you wish” (*Mist*, VI 53). [Though it isn’t quite explicit in the text, as we have already suggested, the character Aglaus featured at the end of *Soldier of Arete* in both Latro’s dreams and in the waking world is probably the faun mentioned here and in the prophecy of Apollo. However, when he appears, he seems to be more associated with the Great Mother and working the earth than with Enodia, a goddess of crossroads and gates who is explicitly identified as part of the Triple Goddess Hecate. (Of course, we just learned that the trees belong only to the Great Mother, and in that final dream sequence, the dryad Elata seems to represent the interests of the Huntress instead. Perhaps Robert Graves’s identification of the Great Mother as one fragmented goddess might be elliptically implied, though currently her aspects are clearly at war with one another.) Enodia has several monstrous offspring with Typhon, and some of them traditionally have serpentine qualities. The most likely identities of this serpentine woman are the gorgon, the Lernian Hydra, and the Colchian Dragon (because of Eurykles’s later memories of Colchis, though those memories seem to be from the point of view of Medea). At the start of *Soldier of the Mist*, she seems to resonate with the Lernian Hydra, whose ultimate fate at the hands of Heracles involved its head being buried, still alive, under a rock beyond Lerna; as Drakaina later in the novel she seems more associated with Colchis.] In any case, the creature identifies Enodia as both the Huntress [Artemis] and Selene [the Moon] before she disappears.
274
275Pindaros arrives and expresses his misgivings concerning everyone else’s fate, promising to buy and release his companions if he has the chance, as he has friends among the Athenians. He feels that Latro’s song has inspired his own poetry, even though Latro cannot replicate the experience. [Indeed, the song might have inspired the Pythian Ode which Latro recites at the end of *Soldier of Arete*.] When Latro asks him if the goddess of night might have “a body like a snake and a head like a woman’s, a woman with black hair that has never seen a comb,” Pindaros responds, “[T]hat’s no goddess – it’s a monster of some kind. Heracles was supposed to have rid this part of the world of them; but Heracles has been on the Mountain for four hundred years, and I suppose they’re creeping back” (*Mist*, VI 55). [Later, when the gender-shifting sorcerer Eurykles has changed into Drakaina, she will always be described with the same wild hair. The serpentine creature supplants the man.] After Pindaros leaves, Io sneaks up on Latro, and he tries to comfort her. She believes that she has been punished for running away from Apollo and lying. The first part of the book ends with Latro’s almost certainly ironic claim, “The gods are not at all like us, little Io” (*Mist*, VI 56).
276
277Another disjunction occurs, and only later, in discussion with Io, will we learn that “real soldiers” arrive and make the slaves of the Spartans give up Latro and his friends. They take them to Corinth [Tower Hill]. As Io says, “I don’t think the people in Tower Hill wanted to keep us – they’re afraid of the Rope Makers like everybody else, and they didn’t want to have prisoners that were taken from them. But they’re afraid of the People of Thought [Athens], too, and the soldiers from my city [Thebes] helped burn theirs. So after a while they gave us to [the Athenian] Hypereides” (*Mist*, IX 76).
278
279Latro picks up his narrative again in a tent with Seven Lions, who is busy carving a doll. While the transfer has occurred off-screen, the companions are already in the power of the Athenians rather than in the hands of the Spartan’s slaves. A Trierarch named Hypereides comes in, incredulous at Latro’s failure to remember him. He relates some recent naval engagements at Salamis [Peace] between his vessels and the Persian navy, in which the shrewd deceptions of the Athenian general Themistocles helped frustrate the superior Persian forces. As Hypereides explains, his flagship, the *Europa*, is named after a woman “carried off by the Thunderer in the shape of a bull,” relating that imagery to his leather trade (*Mist*, VII 61). He also suggests that a woman with flesh on her is easier to catch, and promises to introduce Latro to a hetaera named Kalleos when they arrive at his home. [Hetaera, while certainly a class of women paid for companionship of both the philosophical and carnal varieties, could almost be considered elite women in Ancient Greece, with a select circle of “clients.”] While Latro and Seven Lions remain unbound, Hypereides keeps the others, who are from Boeotia [Cowland], chained. Soon, they depart aboard the *Europa*, whose figurehead Latro later realizes was patterned after Kalleos.
280
281As they pass Achaea [Redface Island], Latro notices that one of the non-Athenian bowman hired by Hypereides seems interested in him. Hypereides pays Scythians to man his oars and fight when necessary, and this brings in one of the most confusing aspects of the first book to pin down. This bowman, Oior, plays a large role in the unfolding of the first volume, and he claims to be one of the Sons of Scoloti, warning Latro of a Neurian threat. [The Scythians call themselves the Scoloti, according to Herodotus. Within the course of a page in *The Histories*, we learn of a plague of snakes in Scythia (echoed in the text via the serpentine womans’s desire for some of the crew), the Amazons (who will show up as the mates of the Neurians in *Soldier of Arete*) and their theft of Scythian horses (which also feature prominently in the second volume, though the horses they seek in the novel are Horses of the Sun), and, more directly as concerns our narrative, that the name Oior means “man,” (a fact which Wolfe uses to create a sense of mystery around the defiled graves at the scene of Eurykles’s necromancy in Athens, and a larger thematic pattern of men as predators and hunters of other men). In describing the tribes near Scythia, Herodotus notes:
282
283>[105] The Neurians use Scythian customs. A generation before Darius’ campaign snakes made them completely evacuate the region. In addition to their own country producing large numbers of snakes, even more snakes surged in upon them from the empty lands to the north, until they were forced to leave their own country and began to live with the Budinians. The men may well be magicians, since the Scythians and the Greeks who live in Scythia say that once a year every Neurian becomes a wolf for a few days and then reverts to his original state. Personally I do not believe this, but they make the claim despite its implausibility, and even swear that they are telling the truth.
284
285>[106] The Cannibals are the most savage people in the world; they have no sense of right and wrong, and their life is governed by no rules or traditions. They are nomads. The clothes they wear are similar to the ones the Scythians wear, but they speak a distinct language. Theirs is the only one of these tribes to eat human flesh. …
286
287>[108] The Budinians are a large and populous tribe. … They have sanctuaries which are dedicated to the Greek gods and are equipped in the Greek manner with statues, altars, and buildings of wood; and every third year they celebrate a festival to Dionysus and become possessed by the god. This is because the inhabitants of Gelonus were originally Greeks from the trading-centres, who moved away from there and settled among the Budinians. Their language is a mixture of Scythian and Greek. …
288
289>[110] Here is a story about the Sauromatae. It is set during the war between the Greeks and the Amazons, for whom the Scythian name is Oeorpata, which, translated into Greek, means ‘killers of men’, because *oior* is ‘man’ in Scythian, and *pata* means ‘to kill’. So the story goes that after their victory over the Amazons at the battle of Thermodon, the Greeks sailed away in three ships, taking with them all the Amazons they had been able to capture alive. When they were out at sea, the women set upon the men and killed them, but they did not know anything about ships or how to use the rudders, sails, or oars; consequently, having done away with the men, they began to drift at the mercy of the waves and winds. They fetched up in Lake Maeetis, at the place called Cremini, which is in country inhabited by the free Scythians. The Amazons went ashore there and made their way to inhabited territory. The first thing they came across was a herd of horses, which they promptly seized, and then they began to ride about on these horses robbing the Scythians of their property. (Herodotus 270-1)
290
291[Herodotus goes on to describe how the conjugal relationships between the Scythians and the Amazons formed. As those who have read the second volume recognize, Wolfe plotted the Latro series with these passages firmly in mind, though his expansion of the events might have a slightly different context. Of special note, situated between all of these details relevant to the text, the section above describing possession by Dionysus might also be pertinent to our holistic look at the narrative strain in the Soldier series, as Latro’s observations hint that Thamyris of Thrace was somehow a puppet of Zalmoxis. Might the God of War manifest himself in that way, or in another?]
292
293As they approach Athens, Pindaros relates the origin of its struggle with Thebes. Originally, the rich fields of Thebes promoted envy from the Athenians, prompting the growth of trade in Athens. Eventually, the Athenians discovered a rich vein of silver, and the people of Thebes became covetous. At mention of the silver, Seven Lions reacts.
294
295The theme of Pindaros’s story involves fraternal animosity: “You forget, Latro, and so perhaps you've forgotten that brothers can be enemies more terrible than strangers. … [We] cease to hate every four years when our champions give their strength to the Descender; then we hate again, worse than ever, when the games are done” (*Mist*, VIII 71). That familial envy ensures the continued fragmentation of Greece and might also describe the divine and personal struggles around Latro, who himself seeks to reconcile with the Great Mother.
296
297As night falls, Latro sits and listens, as he describes, “to [the voices calling to each other in the waves] too, hoping to hear some mention of my home and the family and friends I must surely have there” (*Mist*, VIII 72). The flute boy on the ship inspires the sailors to sing, and Latro notes, “their song calls up the sea gods, who come to the surface to hear it, their ears like shells, their hair like sea wrack. For a long time I stood in the bow watching them and seeing the land brought ever nearer, and I felt that I myself was a god of the waters” (*Mist*, IX 73). [During the Achaemenid period, Ahura Mazda was often invoked with Mithra and Voruna, whose name seems to come from the vedic for “water-god.” Mithra himself is considered a guardian of the waters. Eventually, Ahura Mazda, too, was subsumed into a trinity. A more direct allusion within the text, however, might point to the crocodile-headed statue in Latro’s memory palace. Sobek was a god of the waters, representing the Nile, as well as of war. If these deities all have chthonic aspects, then perhaps Sobek serves as the darker aspect of Horus.] The ship approaches a city called Teuthrone, and Hypereides plans to stop there for supplies. They make land efficiently, and most go ashore. Latro observes that “the bowmen went some distance away so they might wash out of sight of the rest of us” (*Mist*, IX 76).
298
299He soon finds himself with Io, who insists that she is not the daughter of Pindar and Hilaera, but Latro’s own slave: “[T]hat’s the truth master, I swear by the club of Heracles. And if you’ll just read your book you’ll find out all about it, and about the curse the Great Mother laid on you. … when you’re free, I should be free too, to serve you” (*Mist*, IX 76). Though she struggles to take off the shackle on her ankle, Latro’s touch causes it to slip off easily. To avoid the anger of their captors, she decides to hide it in a hole near the edge of a large rock. The head-sized aperture seems to go straight underground and exudes a foul odor. After dropping the shackle in, Io leaves to find food. Oior the bowman appears, claiming to be a Scythian (*Mist*, IX 78). Oior says that his people, the Sons of Scoloti, sacrifice to the elements, and that the many gods of this land are beyond his knowledge. He offers Latro a handful of bronze coins, saying “that is how friends are made in this land,” but Latro only takes one (*Mist*, IX 78). Instructing the amnesiac to meet him on higher ground after dinner, Oior leaves as Io returns with enough food for both of them. [The idea that even the democratic Athenian Greeks are motivated by money returns quite forcefully at the end of *Soldier of Arete*, when Latro stages a slave rebellion by throwing around a little gold. This greed indicts the Athenians in the book almost as profoundly as the violence and slaughter of the Spartans.]
300
301A voice calls out in desire for the food, and Latro turns to observe, “What I had thought only a stone resting by chance upon a larger stone was in fact the head of a woman” (*Mist*, X 79). Naked, with tangled, dark hair, she wears the skin of a snake above her hips. He offers the woman all of the food, but Io cannot see her. Clearly a more anthropomorphic manifestation of the serpentine figure that requested Cerdon earlier, the woman wants Io now: “Touch her and she’s mine. Touch me, and I’m hers” (*Mist*, X 80). The sinister woman glances towards the moon as she says those final two words. [At this point it might be prudent to remember that in Argos, Io means moon, though this serpentine figure clearly serves and fears the Triple Goddess.] As Io tries to pull Latro away, the woman claims that she has come to teach him and provide a warning. After Io flees to get help, it becomes clear that the sustenance the woman wants is a human sacrifice. She acknowledges that her shape has changed since the last time they conversed, and she hopes to teach Latro that, among other mysteries. [Other mystical creatures, such as the centaur Polos and the faun Aglaus, also manifest the ability to appear human most of the time. Perhaps other gods can accomplish exactly the same effect, passing for normal people, their supernatural nature concealed. Aglaus does not even seem to be aware of his nature.] Noting that the moon wanes, the daughter of Enodia reveals that when a shadow covers it completely, the goddess will manifest herself as the dark goddess: “[S]he once showed herself to you as a bright goddess when the moon was nearly full. What she has once done, she will do again” (*Mist*, X 81).
302
303When Latro refuses to surrender Io, the apparition becomes angered, saying that she offered him valuable wisdom and knowledge. Latro dismisses it: “Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard” (*Mist*, X 81). She warns him that soon someone on the hill will die, and also tells him that someone is coming – if she asks for that man, it will result in Latro’s death. “Notice that I am your friend, merciful and just, more than fair in every dealing” (*Mist*, X 82). Her final warning involves iron, linking her to a European and Celtic fairy tradition as she drops Io’s shackles on the ground: “The women here put knives beneath their children’s cradles …. They tell one another they will keep us away; and though they do not – not always - it is true we do not like iron …. The reason we do not is to come. … Don’t let your brat dump her rubbish into my house again” (*Mist*, X 82). [Beyond the fairy tradition, it does not seem that a clear reason for the aversion to iron is ever given, though the War God of the Thracians receives sacrifices to an iron sword planted in the ground which represents him both in Herodotus and in *Soldier of Arete*, when the Amazon women perform a sacrifice to Ares. The Great Mother later refuses to drink the blood of any sacrifice which has touched iron. The iron sword represents Pleistorus in Thrace.]
304
305Oior arrives once again, saying, “I told you I do not know the gods of this land … And you do not know mine. You must believe what I say of them. A friend speaks only the truth to his friend” (*Mist*, X 83). At this point, we already have enough evidence from Herodotus to conclude that Oior must not be a simple Scythian. Though he uses the Scythian names to describe Hecate and the Great Mother, Oior’s version of events does not match *The Histories* closely. In Book Four, Herodotus examines their religious practices:
306
307>[59] So the most important natural resources are abundantly at [the Scythian’s] disposal; as for the rest, their customs are as follows. The only gods they worship are Hestia (who is their most important deity), then Zeus and Earth (whom they regard as the wife of Zeus), then Apollo, Heavenly Aphrodite, Heracles, and Ares. All Scythians worship these gods, but the Royal Scythians also worship Poseidon. The Scythian name for Hestia is Tabiti, while Zeus (perfectly appropriately, in my opinion) is called Papaeus, Earth Apia, Apollo Geotosyrus, Heavenly Aphrodite Argimpasa [Artimpasa], and Poseidon Thagimasadas. However, it is not their custom to make statues or altars or temples for any of their gods, except for Ares, they do have this custom in his case. (254)
308
309To expand upon the special place of Ares in Scythian religious practice:
310
311>[62] … [I]n Ares’ case things are different. In every district, within each province, a sanctuary has been constructed to Ares. … Bundles of sticks are piled together into a block about three stades by three stades wide, but not so high off the ground. … Each year they add a hundred and fifty cart-loads of sticks, to make up for the subsidence caused by the winter’s storms. On top of this structure the inhabitants of each district plan an ancient iron *akinakes* [a small, straight sword of Scythia and Persia], which is taken to represent Ares. The festival takes place once a year, and at it they offer this *akinakes* more domestic animals and horses as sacrificial victims than all the other gods receive. They also sacrifice prisoners of war to this *akinakes*, though the method is different from when domestic animals are the victims. One prisoner in every hundred is selected; they pour wine over the prisoners’ heads, cut their throats so that the blood spills into a jar, and then carry the jars up on to the pile of sticks and pour the blood over the *akinakes*. While the jars are being taken up there, something else is happening down below, by the side of the sanctuary: they cut off the right arms of all the slaughtered men – the whole arm, from shoulder to hand – and hurl them into the air. Then they sacrifice all the rest of the victims and leave. The arms are left lying wherever they fall, detached from the corpses. (255)
312
313[These sacrificial practices, especially concerning the removal of the right arm in dedication to Ares, might resonate with the loss Latro’s rival and sometimes ally the Spartan runner Pasicrates suffers when he attempts to humiliate and whip Latro: Latro cuts off his arm at the elbow. Unfortunately, the resonance is not perfect, for Pasicrates loses his left shield forearm. The return of this hand in a climactic dream sequence in the second volume seems to set Latro free from his depression – we shall discuss the symbolic significance of this later, but should keep in mind that it resonates with sacrifices made to Ares/Pleistorus. Later in *Soldier of Arete* it will also be noted that the goddess Hestia left the Olympians, who must always number twelve, when the wine god Dionysus joined them – interesting given her prominence in Thrace, where Latro learns this information. It is never clear if the Amazon women are associated with worship of Gaea or not outside of the sacred cave in Thrace.]
314
315Returning to the narrative, Latro and Oior share the remaining bread, at Oior’s insistence, and Oior begins an alliterative tale (perhaps meant to be an epic fragment) providing the history of the Cimmerians. In Herodotus, the Cimmerians abandoned their lands to the Scythians, but in Oior’s version, the Sons of Cimmer sacrificed “the sons of the Sons of Cimmer to the threefold Artimpasa [the Triple Goddess]” (*Mist*, X 83). According to Oior, the king’s son was an acolyte of Apia [the Great Mother, now opposed to the Triple Goddess]. “She is the Mother of Men and Monsters, but the boy’s blood burned on Artimpasa’s altar” (*Mist*, X 83). As this reveals, the king’s own son, a servant of the Great Mother, was sacrificed to the younger goddess instead. In retribution, the king forbade sorcery, but “Seven sorcerers sped to the sunrise beyond the Island Sea. Death-daunted they dwelt in the desert, cutting its cliffs for their cottages and at last counting a numerous nation, the Neuri … Silver they sold to the Sons of Scoloti, paid in moon-pale ponies and brides bought for their proud priests. So they learned from our lips, copied our clothes and our customs” (*Mist*, X 83). They inspired the Scythians to war with the Cimmerians, conquering their lands. In other words, the remnants of the Cimmerian magicians became the Neurians, who copied the Scythians in manner and dress. [Though Oior claims to be a Scythian, he is actually one of these Neurians, already described as lycanthropes in Herodotus.]
316
317Latro inquires further about the Neurians, and Oior reveals that though they live on their Island Sea:
318
319>“[T]hey live among us too, and no one can say who they are. They have our speech and our clothing. As well as we they draw the bow, and with a touch, tame horses. No one knows them, unless he sees the sign. … Apia burned her brand on the Neuri, price of the boy’s blood. Once in each year, and sometimes more than once, each changes. … Apia is earth, Artimpasa the moon.” (*Mist*, X 84)
320
321He describes the change that overcomes the Neurians, and a dog howls in the distance. He warns Latro that they drink the blood of men and eat them, “pawing the dead to wake them” (*Mist*, X 84). [The barking of dogs signals the presence of Hecate (though Oior would call her Artimpasa), but Ares is also associated with dogs. Later, barking which only some of the characters can hear appears in conjunction with the presence of the mantis Hegisistratus, but only towards the end of *Soldier of Arete*; regardless of what else it signifies, it should always be seen as a sign of the Triple Goddess in either her Huntress or Dark Mother aspect.]
322
323Oior claims to have seen Neurian eyes in the ship’s hold, which resembled Artimpasa’s crescent moon or “Apia’s black wolf” (*Mist*, X 84). He offers Latro a dagger with prayers to Apia on it to kill the Neurian, upon which he will heap stones to prevent any return from death. [This dagger might be the wolf’s tooth mentioned in the prophecy, though this is unlikely]. As Latro walks behind Oior to find the other bowmen, he feels an arm encircle his throat. He thinks that he is in the grasp of a Neurian. Oior tosses his dagger and rushes towards them, with the snap of bone signifying the death of Latro’s attacker, a bowman named Spu who had been watching over the prisoners. [In this scene, Neurian and Scythian are confused: the Scythian Spu is actually trying to kill the Neurian lycanthrope.] Oior claims that it was only a lucky throw, and that, “the goddess was in it” (*Mist*, XI 87). Refusing Latro’s offer to tell Hypereides, since to the Hellenes “the Sons of Scoloti and the Neuri are one,” Oior promises to bury the man there (*Mist*, XI 87). They swear on Oior’s bow and dagger in companionship, and he points the weapons at the moon as they make their oath: “*More than brothers … Though I die*” (*Mist*, XI 88). [The association of Latro’s lovers with a bow and daggers in the second volume are fascinating: Pharetra the Amazonian woman’s name means “bow case,” and Anysia, who reveals that another woman is masquerading as the dead Pharetra in her jealous love for Latro, is a dancer associated with daggers, a symbol of Hecate. The meaning of Anysia’s name is “complete” or “satisfaction.”]
324
325As Latro walks away, he makes the mistake of glancing back, catching a glimpse of Oior’s true nature, revealed a few pages later: Oior has “the face of a scholar of the worst kind, of the sort of man who had studied many things hidden from common men and grown wise and corrupt. … [H]e stroked the livid cheek [of the dead bowman] as a mother strokes her child” (*Mist*, XI 93). At the camp, Hypereides’s crew have discovered another man’s body in the water, ravaged by the true Neurian shapeshifter [Oior]. Pindar composes a memorial for the deceased, named Kekrops, so that Hyperiedes can recite it to Hades on a makeshift altar: “Third brother of the greater gods, / By destiny, Death’s king, / Accept for suffering Kekrops’s sake, / The food, the wine we bring. / He labored for thy brother [Poseidon], / Thy brother used him sore. / Accept a sailor cast adrift / Beached on the river’s shore” (*Mist*, XI 89). Latro hears the howling of a beast at that point, which Seven Lions seems to recognize is not merely a dog. Hypereides finishes the poem: “Yet should the old man [Charon] slacken, / You’ll find no better oar, / To row such souls as Ocean rolls / Unto Death’s bitter shore” (*Mist*, XI 90). 
326
327Though there are tears in Pindar’s eyes, he is reluctant to acknowledge that his poem has any power, and he turns away. After the gathering has dispersed, Latro beholds a tall figure with a staff [Hades] beside a shorter one, soon revealed to be the spirit of Spu, the bowman who grabbed Latro earlier. Latro hails them, and asks if the god of the underworld has come for Kekrops. The apparition points its staff, and the body rises and stumbles toward Hades. When Latro calls the bowman a murderer, Spu’s spirit shakes its head. The lord of the dead indicates, “He cannot speak … unless you first speak to him. That is my law, which I lay upon all my slaves” (*Mist*, XI 91). When Latro asks if the figure can deny murdering Kekrops, the oarman found in the water, it does so: “Spu killed only in war … Spu would kill you, Neurian, in justice for him” (*Mist*, XI 91). [A simple misunderstanding has cost Spu his life: he believed that Latro was the Neurian who killed Kekrops, who himself might have determined something about Oior’s true nature, especially if Oior’s story of a transformation in the ship’s hold actually happened, with the point of view shifted to protect his secret. Spu followed Latro to high ground, where Oior killed him, as we know.] Hades says that he must leave, but promises Latro that his “wife’s mother [Demeter the Grain Goddess] sends her [his wife Persephone or Kore] to speak with you” (*Mist*, XI 91). 
328
329As Hades departs with the shades, Latro forgives the bowman, whose spirit smiles. A kybernetes from the ship shows up and (belatedly) warns Latro that one of the bowmen plots to kill him, and gives him a guard named Lyson.
330
331When everyone falls asleep, Latro talks with Europa, who tells him that she is going to the Great Mother – for Latro’s appreciation of her beauty, she will ask the goddess to be kind to him. When Latro asks if she is merciful, he receives a definitive statement about the character of the pagan gods: “Sometimes she is kind … But we are none of us merciful” (*Mist*, XI 93). On the ship, Latro sees a woman with a high crested helmet, holding a shield writhing with serpents. Her face reminds Latro of Oior’s as he gloated over Spu’s body. [This association of Scythia, serpents, and the moon goes back to Herodotus as well, as quoted above. The helmet and the serpentine shield indicate that this is Athena. The aegis shield of Athena is sometimes depicted with the head of a gorgon. Her appearance makes sense, given their ultimate destination, but this manifestation of Athena seems chthonic in nature. The final scenes of *Soldier of Arete* reveal some of the complexity of the Athenian governmental system, not without criticism of their duplicitous and greedy motives.]
332
333They arrive at Salamis [Peace], and Hypereides instructs them that he has business ashore (which involves a rendezvous with Kalleos to return her to Athens now that the immediate Persian threat has passed, though the city has been greatly damaged). Hypereides hopes to make Piraeus [Tieup] by nightfall. As the sailors from Salamis greet some of their families from the shore, Oior once again talks with Latro and his companions. Pindaros reveals he has almost no family, and Oior offers to sell one of his daughters for a cheap price. In their discussion, he states that the Scythians are nomads who follow the grass, without houses and stable farms. Oior squints as if there is light in his eyes, and after he leaves, Io comments that his eyes were only weak when they looked at Latro. [As we have said, Lucius means “Light.” Can Man look upon divine Light without squinting?]
334
335Soon Hypereides returns with Kalleos, who is impressed with Latro: “You might pose for one of the sculptors, and perhaps you will. In fact, you’d be just about perfect if only you had money” (*Mist*, XII 99). During their exchange, Kalleos asks if Latro can box or wrestle, to which Latro only answers, “I don’t know” (*Mist*, XII 100). [Later, he will triumph in both boxing and pankration at the Pythian Games. Even though Kalleos is a Budinian, she has assimilated the Athenian love of gold.]
336
337Despite an initial prejudiced reaction to Pindaros’s accent, Kalleos soon recognizes him as a poet and invites him to her estate in Athens, even offering to lend him money until he arrives home. The Spartans, with their divisive strategies, will not allow the people of Salamis to conquer Boeotia: “It’s the Rope Makers. Our people wanted to burn Hill and take Cowland, but … [the Rope Makers] want to make sure we’ll always have an enemy in the north” (*Mist*, XII 100).
338
339Later, as they pass beyond Piraeus, Pindaros reacts to the smoke hanging over the burnt Athens. He praises their resistance to Persia: “Their city was destroyed; [Thebes] deserved it …. I studied here with Agathocles and Apollodoros, and I won’t pretend this was the justice of the gods” (*Mist*, XIII 101). Here, Seven Lions indicates that Latro and he had helped destroy Athens, but no one else notices. Kalleos, a Budinian living in Athens, has decided to purchase Latro, and despite his flattering words, he resolves that he is “no one’s slave, no matter how these people talk” (Mist, XIII 102).
340
341When Kalleos arrives at her damaged estates, she reveals another historical detail from Herodotus: after the fall of the Spartan forces at Thermopylae, the Persian advance to Athens was clear. When they consulted the Delphic oracle, the Athenians were given a message of doom:
342
343>Fools, why sit you here? Fly to the ends of the earth, / Leave your homes and the lofty heights girded by your city. … all is doomed. Fire will bring it down, / Fire and bitter War, hastening in a Syrian chariot. / Many are the strongholds he will destroy, not yours alone; Many the temples of the gods he will gift with raging fire. (Herodotus 452)
344
345In some other translations, the “War” above is more explicitly mentioned as the god of war. [Latro and Seven Lions, we should recall, were actually present at the burning of Athens. In *Soldier of Arete*, before Latro enters the Temple of Pleistorus, Cybele the Great Mother appears in a field of lions. There, Latro sees a familiar chariot, which will play a political role in the final sections of the second book to discredit the Athenian Themistocles. As we suggested earlier, it also symbolizes both Ahura Mazda and Ares.] The Athenians consulted the oracle one more time, and it suggested that their only hope was behind a wall of wood – which Themistocles believed must be the ships the Athenians had been constructing to escape. In Wolfe’s novel, Kalleos also says some believed the prophecy to refer to an old wooden palisade on the hilltop - “but the barbarians burned it with fire arrows and killed them all” (*Mist*, XIII 105).
346
347She sends Latro out to find some urns and flowers to beautify the remains of her house, and he runs into the unusual figure of Eurykles, a slender man dressed in a chlamys of pale hyacinth. Eurykles carries a staff with the figure of a woman atop it. [Readers of Wolfe should familiarize themselves with the legend of Hyacinthus and Apollo, which involves the young male lover’s accidental death and transformation into a flower.] Eurykles asks why Latro has so many flowers and urns, and invites himself to accompany Latro back to Kalleos’s house. He calls himself a necromancer.
348
349Later, as Kalleos’s party begins, Pindar waxes poetic about the ruins of Athens, noting that “her owls roost in the ruins” (*Mist*, XIV 107). [As a symbol of Athens, much of the Greek currency at the time featured an owl.] Pindar vows to make Hypereides a fit poetic companion to Achilles after initially dismissing the suggestion. Latro, serving as something of a bouncer and general aide for Kalleos, receives his sword once again to maintain order as her old entertainments resume. When she asks where he originally got it, Latro answers without conscious memory, a fragment left over from the divine touch of Asopus: “‘From the Swift God,’ I said, and only when I had spoken realized I did not know what I meant by what I had said” (*Mist*, XIV 108). As the night’s festivities ensue, Pindar steals away to reveal his anxiety at Kalleos’s purchase of Latro, especially considering the vow he made to Apollo to deliver Latro to the appropriate shrine. He considers Apollo “One of the greatest [gods]. He’s the god of music and poetry, of light, sudden death, herds and flocks, healing, and much more” (*Mist*, XIV 110). He returns to the party, and Seven Lions shows Latro that Io is sleeping in concealment in the house, having snuck from the ship to be with him. 
350
351Eventually, the party-goers play kottabos, in which the lees of a drought are thrown at a circle, and soon the loser is required to tell a tale. Latro records the tale of one of the women working for Kalleos, Phye. [This tale, that of “The Woman Who Went Out,” seems to be a strange inversion of a series of tales involving an “enchanted” pear or date tree originating in Persia but adopted by both Boccaccio in his story of Lydia and Pyrrhus and in “The Merchant’s Tale” of Chaucer – in brief, in those tales, a rich, older husband marries a young wife, who, dissatisfied with him in bed, tricks him by convincing him that a tree in their garden is magical: in most of the stories, the younger love interest of the wife (or the wife herself) ascends the tree and proclaims in disgust that he (or she) sees the husband freely fornicating below. They convince the husband to climb the tree to determine if he sees the same illusion, and actually proceed to engage their amorous desires while he is in the tree. In Chaucer’s version, the young wife uses her husband, who has gone temporarily blind, as a stepping stool to get into the tree, where her lover awaits. As the wife and her lover get to work, the husband’s vision is restored, but she convinces him that his eyes have deceived him. Wolfe’s version might also incorporate the imagery associated with Mars’s birth in Ovid’s *Metamorphosis*, in which Hera becomes impregnated by a flower, withdrawing to Thrace to give birth to the God of War. Wolfe’s tale of the birth of Spring Wind in *The Book of the New Sun* retells Ovid’s story with more carnal emphasis. “The Women Who Went Out” inverts many of these themes, making the generous husband of the source material a parsimonious one and providing a far more sinister ending.]
352
353In the tale, a woman, unhappy with the cheapness of her husband, consults her Babylonian maid, who advises her to go out and sell herself to handsome men for the funds she needs, as is the practice in Babylon, where the beautiful women make enough to provide a good dowry for their future husbands in that fashion. Unfortunately, the ugly never earn enough to marry. They plan to make her husband sick by changing the rancid cooking oil he is accustomed to for pure oil, so that he will stay the night in the temple of healing. With him gone, they will dig some soil from the garden and perform a ceremony over the mistress’s amorous cousin’s grave, mixing the wife’s fluids and hair into the clay to forge a doll.
354
355Whenever the mistress wants to leave, she must simply place the doll beside her husband in bed, and the doll will provide a warm reception. Alas, soon the intercourse between the husband and the doll causes the clay to shift downwards in pregnancy, and the maid concludes that soon there will be another doll. They bury the doll where they found the soil to create it, underneath the apple tree in the garden. 
356
357Meanwhile, the husband has become disappointed with the sudden loss of passion in his wife, as the doll was an enthusiastic lover. He ironically complains to one of his business rivals, “It’s like embracing a woman of clay” (*Mist*, XV 116). Reluctant to return his wife’s dowry, he seeks some other solution, and his skeptical acquaintance tells him of a spell which requires a blossoming tree. It reminds the husband of the apple tree. If he wants to enjoy nights of freedom, he must cut off a limb from the tree and recite an incantation before placing the stick next to his wife in bed.
358
359He orders the gardener to cut off the largest limb of the tree, but the gardener objects: “It’ll be the death of it” (*Mist*, XV 117). The order stands, and the stick and the woman become lovers, as she is attracted to its scent of apple blossoms. She notices that even though her “husband” is vital all night, he is always tired in the mornings; she tells him that he should rest. The stick responds, “I wilt not, stepmother” (*Mist*, XV 117). When she turns on the light, “she saw in her bed not the withered old husband she had expected, but a blooming youth with fair red cheeks” (Mist, XV 118). Her joy does not last, as her husband’s age and budgetary concerns soon restrict his nocturnal adventures. After a month without her stick, she finally finds the blooming youth beside her, and wishes that her husband would die, so that they could have his money.
360
361Her lover says, “Every spring I would furnish our house new, and each fall I would shower upon you the fruits of the earth.” She implores him to act that night. The next morning, the gardener finds the man and his wife hanging from the same rope. “A noose had been tied in each end and the rope thrown over the largest limb of the apple tree in the garden” (*Mist*, XV 118). The gardener and the maid are accused but not convicted, and the unhappy couple are buried beneath the tree, allowing the promise of the youthful branch to be fulfilled.
362
363In the aftermath of the tale, the crowd at Kalleos’s banquet questions the reality of Dionysus. [The plot resonance of “The Woman Who Went Out” with the greater tale might suggest children of a dual nature.] Eurykles insists that spirits can be summoned from a grave, and proposes a ten-coin bet with the party-goers that he can do so. The skeptical kybernetes [steersman] of Hypereides’s ship offers to cover three if he gets to judge, and Kalleos agrees to hold the money, emphasizing that the kybernetes will lose if he admits a ghost, runs, or faints. Soon the rest of the crowd covers the entire ten coins. Hypereides even offers to include Pindaros in the bet on credit, and the poet shrewdly asks if Latro can accompany them to the grave site to protect them from the dangers of the night.
364
365As they walk into the graveyard, Latro sees many spectral figures around them. Pindaros implores Latro to touch one if it seems attentive to Eurykles’s ceremony. When Phye sees an opened grave, she screams and clutches at Eurykles, causing him to release the fowl he intended to sacrifice. They examine the smashed and exposed coffin. When Eurykles decides to use his powers to discover what has happened, the frightened Phye insists on returning to Kalleos’s, and refuses a captain’s offer to accompany her. Latro recaptures the fowl and Eurykles begins the ritual, calling out *Thygater* as he circles the grave. [The name means “daughter,” though Latro thinks it must be the woman’s name. The word *thygater* appears in the Gospel of Matthew (whose earliest manuscripts were written in Greek): a sick woman touches Christ’s cloak, and he tells her “take heart, daughter … Your faith has saved you.”] When Latro sees the woman’s eyes open, he reaches into the grave and touches her.
366
367The dead girl sits up, and the crowd reacts. Eurykles tries to command her to tell him who disturbed her. She indicates the responsible parties are he and Latro, whom Hades insists must go as he was sent. She then says that a wolf named Man broke her coffin. [As per Herodotus, Oior means “man.” This metaphor will be repeated at the conclusion of *Soldier of Arete* when Latro realizes that “there is nothing to be found upon earth but treachery and hatred and the lust for blood and more blood. Man is a wolf to men, a vile predator that preys upon its own kind” (*Arete*, XXXIX 594).] While some of the guests want to return to Kalleos’s, Eurykles attempts to divine the future. The resurrected girl tells him that “wolves and ravens win all wars” (*Mist*, XVI 125). 
368
369While Pindaros and the others are frightened by the spectacle of the dead, Latro is concerned with the moon: “Do you see where some columns are still standing? The moon is tangled in them – some are before her, but others are behind her” (*Mist*, XVI 126). [These columns will accompany his most important interactions with divine figures, such as his meeting with the leonine form of the Great Mother before he retrieves the Horses of the Sun in Thrace. Is he seeing the Halls of Olympus or possibly remembering the great Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens?] Pindaros tells Latro, “You’re more frightening [than the dead girl]. The wonder is that she didn’t seem afraid of you. But perhaps she was” (*Mist*, XVI 125). After they return to Kalleos’s, Io reveals that Phye was beaten terribly when she returned prematurely [because of her collusion with Eurykles and Kalleos to win the bet through trickery]. 
370
371Soon enough, the companions are on the way to Eleusis [Advent], where Demeter’s cult is located, but before that journey they discuss the gods at Kalleos’s house. Latro says, “I think that even the best [gods] act in some twisted way, perhaps. There’s malice even in those who would be kind, I think even in Europa” (*Mist*, XVII 129). Io and Pindaros relate their experience with Silenus, corroborating Latro’s earlier account. Hilaera arrives with a letter from Hypereides requesting the return of Seven Lions. Kalleos wants to learn what happened with Eurykles, and Pindaros deduces their original plan. Hilaera wants to join the mysteries of Demeter at Advent. Suddenly, Pindaros comes to believe that this must be the place prophesied at Thebes, realizing that “the wolf is one of the badges of the Great Mother” (*Mist*, XVII 135). He asks to borrow Latro for a day or two while they make the pilgrimage to Eleusis, stating: 
372
373>“The Grain Goddess *is* the Great Mother, and the Great Mother is the Earth Mother, who sends up our wheat and barley. Her greatest temple’s at Advent, and it was near a temple of hers that Latro was wounded. The shining God was telling Latro to go to Advent, and when I started to lead him in the wrong direction, he made sure we’d get to the right place after all” (*Mist*, XVII 136). [The events in *Soldier of Arete* suggest that Pindaros is still misreading the prophecy.]
374
375At the temple, the priest Polyhommes encourages Hilaera to join the upcoming mysteries in a few days and for Latro to make a sacrifice. Pindaros, pondering an appropriate oblation, notes that The Lady of Cymbals is “the name under which the Great Mother’s worshipped in the Tall Cap Country. Not by the sons of Perseus or Medea, but by their slaves – Lydia’s people, and so on. They use the lion and the wolf as the Great Mother’s badges more than we do. … After one’s manhood, the sacrifice most acceptable to the Lady of Cymbals is a bullock” (*Mist*, XVIII 140-1). [Ares and Mars will take some of these symbols from the Great Mother – perhaps part of the resolution of the divine struggle involves moving away from the Great Mother and towards a masculine synthesis of her roles and signs. It seems that this is the most certain evidence we have that the Tall Cap Country might be Thrace, as the Great Mother goes by the name Cybele there, who is a strange amalgamation of Rhea and Hecate. Lydia borders Thrace. When Cybele appears in *Soldier of Arete*, she definitely seems to be a manifestation of Gaea and the Great Mother rather than the Triple Goddess. Given her resentment for Zeus, we should remember that one of his symbols is the bull.] With the features of the Lady of Cymbals in mind, the companions procure a sacrificial bull and return to the temple. After the sacrifice, Polyhommes is astonished at a change in the statue of the goddess, garlanded with a crown of poppies. She now points at the floor, seeming to demand that something be brought to her. Previously, the hand had always rested upon the stone boar beside it. [The boar imagery will later be associated with Zalmoxis in Thrace, but no hint of that deity has yet occurred in Wolfe’s text.] Polyhommes decides that Latro must spend the night there to see what the Grain Goddess desires.
376
377That night, Latro realizes that the statue is pointing to a ring which, when pulled, reveals a passage below. He enters, and descends past a pillar of flame to see a terrifying but still young woman seated upon a dais. Latro asks if she is the Great Mother, to which she responds, “I am her daughter. Because you are no friend of my mother’s it would be best for you to call me the Maiden [Persephone/Kore]” (*Mist*, XVIII 147). She tells him that her mother cannot be everywhere, and when Latro insists that he was to meet the Great Mother, she says: 
378
379>“[B]ecause you have meddled in my realm, I offered to speak with you for her. … The Wolf-Killer [Apollo] said only that you must go to a shrine of my mother’s, not that you need speak with her. As for the sibyl, her words were but a muddle of the Wolf-Killers, cast in bad verse. Here is the hearth. You stand in the room below, though it was not always thus. You wished to speak with my mother, but I am before you in her place, more beautiful than she and a greater goddess.” (*Mist*, XIX 146-7)
380
381Latro speaks flattering words, and she plucks a lupine for him from her chiton: “Here is the wolf-flower for you, who bear the wolf’s tooth. …If ten thousand others had not perished, this flower could never have been. It is the dead – trees and grasses, animals and men – who send you all you have of men, animals, trees, and grasses” (*Mist*, XIX 148). [In a probably apocryphal work attributed to the great scholar Albertus Magnus, *The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus*, one of the formulas, erroneous or not, associates the wolf’s tooth with a sacred herb in a spell to bring tranquility:
382
383>The first herb is called with the men of Chaldea, Elios, with the Greeks, Matuchiol, with the Latins, Heliotropism, with Englishmen, Marigold, whose interpretation is of helios, that is the Sun, and tropos, that is alteration, or change, because it is turned according to the Sun. The virtue of this herb is marvelous: for if it be gathered, the Sun being in the sign Leo, in August, and be wrapped in the leaf of a Laurel, or Bay tree, and a Wolf's tooth be added thereto, no man shall be able to have a word to speak against the bearer thereof, but words of peace. (Best 4)
384
385It could very well be that Latro’s identification as the bearer of the wolf’s tooth does not imply lycanthropy or any other such affliction, but rather symbolically equates him as a vital component to the coming of the peaceful order under the *Pax Romana*. The name Lucius already associates him with the light, and the laurels of victory shall also adorn his brow at the Pythian Games. In addition, right before he finally fulfills the original prophecy of Apollo by stealing the Horses of the Sun and approaches the Temple of Pleistorus, he sees the sun behind the leonine aspect of the Great Mother (Cybele), which resonates nicely with “the Sun being in the sign Leo, in August” given this quote (and the slightly atypical use of the word august as a predicate adjective by Latro): 
386
387>And though there was a lioness as well, she wore a woman’s shape … All of which was august enough; yet there was something more extraordinary still (while still more beautiful) about her appearance, a thing that in the whole time I spent with her I never dared to ask about and never fathomed: it appeared that a second sun rose behind her, between her broad back and rugged wall of the defile, a splendid light enfolding her in a mantle brighter than the purest gold. … “Come. … I have need of you … You fear my lions.” (*Arete*, XVI 432)
388
389Besides the lupine’s association with the name for wolves, they were often used to enrich the soil. From a plot perspective, the flower will identify Latro as the man depicted in the Spartan ruler Pausanias’s dream, sent by Kore. At the very depth of Latro’s depression before the end of the second volume, his thoughts of humanity as a vicious wolf might also apply.]
390
391Returning to the narrative and Latro’s confrontation with the queen of the dead, when Latro apologizes for injuring Kore’s mother, she acknowledges that he has become less stiff-necked. When she offers to convey his apology and almost sarcastically says that she will plead his case, the fury in Latro’s eyes engenders fear in her; he even reaches for Falcata, which has not been permitted in the temple. This leads to her challenge: “You threaten me. Do you not know that I cannot be harmed by a common mortal?”
392
393Latro’s response should also prompt us to actively question his nature: “No, I don’t know that. Nor that I’m a common mortal. Perhaps I am. Perhaps not” (*Mist*, XIX 149). He resolves to use his bare hands against her, and she calls Death to her side. Latro still insists that he will face Death if he must. She admits, “When you die at last, some monument will read, *Here rests one who dared the gods*. I will see to it. Yet I would rather not take such a hero in his youth” (*Mist*, XIX 149). She offers him the choice of healing, returning to his friends, or seeing his home again, but warns him that her mother “will have a finger in it” (*Mist*, XIX 149).
394
395The Maiden also tells Latro, “You stand in the magaron of King Celeos. Behold his walls, where sits Minos his overlord, painted from life when he visited Celeos here” (*Mist*, XIX 150). [Celeos was one of Demeter’s original priests. Celeos welcomed Demeter in her guise as an old woman named Doso, and in return she attempted to make his son Demophon immortal by burning his mortal spirit away in the family hearth, though she was unable to complete the task. Instead, she offered Celeos’s other son the knowledge of agriculture.]
396
397Latro chooses to rejoin his friends, and Kore warns him not to cry out to her for comfort. As she turns away, her back is revealed to be “a mass of putrefaction where worms and maggots writhed” (*Mist*, XIX 150). She also warms him of Auge, “who has stolen the south” from the Great Mother, and advises him to keep her flower. [While the appendix clearly indicates that Auge is the Huntress aspect of the Triple Goddess, in myth she was a priestess of Athena and princess of Arcadia, who bore Heracles a son. In the Latro series, either mortals freely blend with gods, Wolfe was referencing an extremely obscure goddess of the hours, or Wolfe chose the name for its meaning of “eye.” Of course, Persephone’s warning foreshadows the disappointment he will experience at the culmination of the first volume, in which Latro comes upon the remains of a Roman force, and learns from a dying ex-comrade that his name is Lucius.] Latro rolls the lupine into his scroll as he flees the underground, with apparitions of Minos and the minotaur manifesting themselves in the chamber below. [We will discuss Theseus and his influence on order at the very end of this summary, when Pindaros finally mentions that important hero by name.] 
398
399As the third part begins, some time has passed since Latro has written regularly. He continues to serve in Kalleos’s household, since she refused to sell Latro to Pindaros. Latro remembers something of his childhood: “Once there was a very large man and a very large woman who took care of me. I remember helping the woman carry cuttings away when the man pruned our vines” (*Mist*, XX 156). [This agricultural setting might also be important when we consider Ovid’s account of the vegetable conception of Mars, though Latro’s childhood memories are hard to contextualize. However, the images of his childhood home are always consistent with the domain of the virgin goddess who left the Olympians, as Hestia presided over the hearth, domesticity, and agriculture. Early Roman households featured the tutelary deities described by Latro. He names the flashing and dancing tutelary being Lar, which would have been a spirit protecting the entire household or family. When a Roman child became a man or woman, they would bequeath some of their childhood possessions to the domestic lar, including the hairs from a male’s first beard or a female’s dolls. While a child might remember his parents as “very large,” that detail could imply more, as the figure of the Great Mother when she appears is half again as tall as Latro. In addition, Mars was associated with agriculture and renewal in addition to war in Rome.]
400
401Latro learns that the Spartans are going from door to door, seeking him out for some reason. As he goes about his domestic duties, looking over the urns and flowers at the estate, he feels a hand on his shoulder, and the goddess of love Aphrodite tells him, “Come, child of war. Do that later, or never” (*Mist*, XX 158). She reveals herself by kindling “a silver lamp shaped like a dove” (*Mist*, XX 158) [In *Soldier of Sidon*, he will see a cheap clay lamp transformed into just such a lamp for a brief instant.] Latro realizes that no other woman could have been real beside Aphrodite, and she promises that he will remember her. “I am more lovely than my rival. Three faces she has, but none like mine. You have forgotten her; you will never forget me” (*Mist*, XX 158). [Whether this makes Aphrodite a part of the Great Mother or not is never clear, but the serpentine daughter of Enodia failed to procure Latro’s sexual attention. When Aphrodite calls him “child of war,” rather than “War,” it raises some interesting questions. Later, Mardonius’s one-time mantis Hegisistratus will ask the companions, “Are you – any of you – aware that divinity can be transmitted, like a disease?” (*Arete*, IV 345) Unfortunately, the method of that potential transmission is never clearly spelled out, leaving us to speculation.]
402
403Aphrodite also reveals the root of her animosity with Kore or Persephone: Myrrha was given Aphrodite’s favor, and her father assaulted the favored girl. She turned into a tree, but still gave birth to Adonis. Aphrodite tried to protect her beautiful child by locking it in a chest, but Kore stole the child, keeping it four months out of the year. “At last it died, and from its blood sprang this blood-red blossom where we lie” (*Mist*, XXI 158). Aphrodite whispers something to Latro she promises he will not forget, yet he later writes, “even as I heard her words they were lost; but perhaps they only sank into some part of me where memory does not go. She showed me an apple of gold and spun the dove to make its light play upon that apple” (*Mist*, XXI 159). 
404
405[In the myths surrounding the Golden Apple of Discord, Paris boasts that his bull can defeat anyone’s. Ares transforms himself into a bull to defeat Paris’s prize, and Paris acquiesces. Because of his reputation for upright judgment, when Eris casts the apple emblazoned with the words “for the fairest” into the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis (Achilles’s parents), Paris is selected to decide which of three goddesses should get the apple: Hera, who offers him power over the world; Athena, who says wisdom and valor in combat will be his; and Aphrodite, who promises him love. This of course begins the conflict leading to Homer’s epic, and it could very well be that this golden apple suggests there are three disparate feminine elements at work in Latro’s world, though Aphrodite still holds the apple. Perhaps, too, this image blends with the fruit which sundered humanity from paradise, if we are approaching the story of Latro with an eye for Christian resonance. As far as Adonis goes, he is often considered another deity of life, death, and rebirth. Adonis actually comes out of the myrrh tree his mother transformed into, making his story closely resemble that of Phye’s tale in “The Woman Who Went Out.”
406
407There are several versions of Adonis’s death, but most involve a wild boar (which will also prove an important figure in *Soldier of Arete*). The agents responsible for this death resonate richly with Latro’s story – one version has Ares send the boar in jealousy. Another features Artemis as the guilty party, sometimes as retribution for Aphrodite’s role in the death of Theseus’s son, Hippolytus (clearly associated with Amazon women and horses). The least interesting version for the purposes of our story involves Apollo, in retaliation for the blinding of his own son after he witnessed the copulation of Aphrodite and Adonis. Aphrodite sprinkled Adonis’s blood with nectar, and the anemone was born. Note that Aphrodite seems to be telling Latro that they are actually lying within the flower.]
408
409When Aphrodite vanishes, the moon glows high overhead. Latro still looks “among the flowers for the door to her room; when I found it, it was only a crimson anemone, half-open, before which fluttered a tiny white moth” (*Mist*, XX 159). [While Latro soon equates Kalleos with the imagery, we should recognize that Christianity appropriated the red anemone, which became associated with the blood of Christ in paintings – though the transformative power of love, the death of Adonis, and perhaps the guilt of Ares are the most immediate mythological associations. Is the small white moth the goddess of love? This would further blend myths and more contemporary fairy tales, making her a figure almost akin to Tinkerbell.]
410
411While he is “poking among the flowers with a light,” Kalleos touches his shoulder and asks him to help her to bed. Acknowledging that a woman her age looks best in the dark, a “thread of light from the silver dove” still steals into her room from a crack in the door. Her corpulence does not disgust him as it should, and he feels “that in some way Kalleos was the woman in the anemone, as a word written is the spoken word, and not just a dirty smudge upon the papyrus” (*Mist*, XX 160.) He kisses her as she requests and puts her to bed. [The woman in the anemone was Aphrodite, of course, and this passage suggests an important relationship between the ideal and the real which uses a philosophical insight from Plato’s *Phaedrus* which treats the written word as an orphan of the spoken one. In the dialogue, Socrates notes that written words might be abused and misused, removed from their context and circulated among people who simply cannot understand their origins, becoming victims of faulty understanding or even malice:
412
413>There was a tradition in the temple of Dodona that oaks first gave prophetic utterances. The men of old, unlike in their simplicity to young philosophy, deemed that if they heard the truth even from "oak or rock," it was enough for them; whereas you seem to consider not whether a thing is or is not true, but who the speaker is and from what country the tale comes. …. He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the oracles of Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters? … I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves. (Plato, *The Dialogues* 278-9)
414
415In that respect, the written word is presented as a defenseless imitation of something intrinsically more essential. In the final dream sequence of the second volume (which we will discuss in more detail at the end of this summary), several dreamers experience a similar but subtly different dream, and the roles of Pasicrates and Latro are somehow confused. This climactic moment is inspired by Pindaros’s singing and might be entrenched in Socrates’s philosophical concept: if Latro somehow embodies the concept of *arete* based on a purer spoken ideal, then the Spartans and Pasicrates can abuse those manly virtues to the point where they become practically meaningless. Pasicrates lives by *arete*, but he fails to understand its original “spoken” spirit, following only a debased and twisted “letter.” The love and physical desire he feels for Polos, while genuine, is also twisted and misplaced from Latro’s point of view (and even our contemporary mores). It should be contrasted with Latro’s constant refusal of the physical desires of the child Io, though it pains her and brings her to tears several times in the narrative.]
416
417In the next scene, Spartans sent by Pausanius enter Kalleos’s household, and Io intervenes in their fight with Latro, revealing that he has no memory of his immediate past and that he writes in a book. This prompts the Spartan Eutaktos to demand Latro’s scroll. Eurykles the Miliesian enters at that time, hoping to inform the Spartans of what their commander Eutaktos has already learned. The flower in Latro’s book, given him by Kore, seems to be the definitive sign that Latro is indeed the man the Spartans seek. Ordering Latro to go with him, Eutaktos tells Kalleos she can petition the Spartan regent Pausanius for remuneration. When Eurykles does not want to go with the Spartans, Eutaktos threatens him: “Miletos is in the Empire, the Empire’s our enemy, you’re our prisoner. Curses and witchery will get your throat cut before you finish them” (*Mist*, XXI 164). 
418
419Eurykles believes their destination will be Achaea [Redface Island], where Prince Pausanius waits. He also asserts that no one likes the Spartans, and that they don’t even seem to care much for each other. When Eurykles wants to leave, he hints he can render himself invisible and walk away. At camp that night, Latro writes that he sees, “A woman with two torches and two hounds … beckoning from the crossroads, and when I have finished writing this I will go to see what it is she wants” (*Mist*, XXI 167). This is the Dark Mother, an aspect of the Triple Goddess. The black dogs with her are a symbol of Hecate, and Latro notes that they make him think of the kind “kings use to hunt lions … their ears stood erect like the ears of wolves” (*Mist*, XXII 168). [This antagonistic leonine and lupine imagery is resolved eventually in the person of Latro.] The figure proclaims herself an enemy of the earth and calls herself Enodia: “I am the woman of poisons, Latro. Of murder, ghosts, and the spells that bring death. I am the Queen of the Neurians; and I am three” (*Mist*, XXII 169). She also reveals herself as the huntress he witnessed at the festival of Dionysus. “Once when I heard a certain one called the God in the Tree, I came while you stood in water. I sought him and found he was not He whom I sought” (*Mist*, XXII 169). [The capitalization of “He” here, and the presence of a “God in the Tree,” almost demands a Christian interpretation, though Dionysus was not the God she sought. Perhaps He was somehow present, regardless.]
420
421The Triple Goddess also reveals that Latro is only her friend insofar as they have a common enemy, and that he will soon be in a region to the South which she rules as Auge, having wrested the region from Gaea. Enodia also tells Latro that her sworn servant already accompanies him, who turns out to be Eurykles. The goddess, momentarily assuming the appearance of her Huntress aspect, gives Latro a snake which disappears in his hand, instructing him to place the serpent in her follower’s drink. On his way, Latro purges a farmhouse of strange spirits by straightening the Triple Goddess’s altar. [Her symbol, a black dog, leads Latro to ask if the owner of the house has a dog – they find it dead without a mark on it.] 
422
423When Latro leaves with the farmer’s wine in hand as a reward, he comes across Eurykles offering a black puppy to the Triple Goddess at a crossroads. In their conversation, Eurykles reveals that he desires real power: “to call back the dead and summon spirits; the knowledge of unseen things” (*Mist*, XXII 172). They return to the Spartan tents to retire, and Latro accomplishes the instructions of the Triple Goddess. The snake obviously affects Eurykles, whose gender and personality begin to change afterwards, eventually prompting him to identify as the female Drakaina.
424
425At the village of Acharnae, Eurykles seeks to repay Latro for the wine, accompanied by Io and their Spartan guard, Basias. In their conversation, Eurykles says, “Possibly a dream with a goddess in it is more real than a day without one. The goddess makes it so. That’s what I’d like to be” (*Mist*, XXIII 175). [Given the serpentine apparition’s earlier promise to send Latro a faun for his dreams and Aglaus’s later effects on improving Latro’s memory, in a way Latro’s earlier life (or perhaps his current one) becomes equated with just such a dream. When Latro thinks about his childhood, he usually does so in conjunction with thoughts of “Mother’s singing.” When Pindaros induces the healing dream at the end of *Soldier of Arete*, he does so by singing.]
426
427Eurykles and Latro discuss the Neurians, noting once again their Scythian customs, save that the Neurians can turn into wolves. The innkeeper, overhearing their talk, mentions the disturbances of the previous nights, featuring voices and spirits. “People talk about Sabaktes and Mormo and all that, kind of like they was a joke. These wasn’t, though they didn’t write their names on the walls” (*Mist*, XXIII 176). [Sabaktes, “the destroyer,” was one of five malicious spirits mentioned in Homer’s Epigrams, plaguing potters. Mormo, one of Hecate’s servants, was a vampiric being used to scare children, reputed to bite them.] 
428
429During their talk, Eurykles brings up the symbolic beauty of currency: “Money’s lovely stuff – just look at this. … On one side the owl: the male principle. On the other, the Lady of Thought: the female principle.” He spins the coin, no doubt representative of his own dualistic gender through possession (*Mist*, XXIII 177). [In this scene, Eurykles foreshadows the corruption of the government of Athens hinted at in *Soldier of Arete*, concerned primarily with material advancement and glory under the guise of democracy. He also mentions that Mardonius’s real name was Marduniya, meaning “the warrior.” The name of Mardonius’s legion, the Immortals, might also have some bearing on the willingness of a god like Ares to be present, especially given Mardonius’s name and his practices as he conquered Ionian cities: he replaced Greek tyrants with small republics in the name of Persia. The devotion of Darius to Ahura Mazda and these efforts towards more just representation for conquered people might explain the spiritual and ethical reasons for Latro’s Persian employment at the start of the series. To reiterate, the Achaemenid Persian Empire represented their great god Ahura Mazda in the form of an empty chariot drawn by white horses kept by the emperor, so that he could accompany them into battle. It should also be noted that Latro’s own name is the root for the word *latrocinium* – a Roman concept denoting a war not formally declared, which could include slave revolts or any anti-authoritarian war. At the conclusion of the second volume, Latro escapes the Pythian Games and his service to Sparta by rousing the slaves of the Argives to rebellion – in no small part thanks to the power of currency.]
430
431When Eurykles goes to relieve himself and Basias wonders what really lies under his robes, the topic of wrestling comes up. Basias takes Latro off his feet twice easily: “My eyes were wet with the tears of shame, and I wiped them on the back of my arm” (*Mist*, XXIII 179). When Io offers to extend a bet on Latro, a nearby lounger agrees, insisting she would be foolish even if Latro were Heracles – at which point Latro actually sees Heracles, holding his oaken club. The legendary hero instructs Latro, who wins the next two throws, before ordering Latro to “let [Basias] win” (*Mist*, XXIII 179). [This action will probably prevent the loss of Latro’s scroll later. Latro has all of the innate ability to execute the techniques Heracles advises without certain knowledge of those skills.]
432
433In conversation after the match, Io reveals that Latro once wore a kind of armor with front and back plates, and Basis recognizes its description from the battle at Plataea [Clay]. He describes the fight, and mentions Argiopium, the village around the temple of the Grain Goddess. Latro was present at that battle, and he is overcome with memories of the encounter, reliving the attempt to keep his hundred together after glimpsing Mardonius on horseback as they pressed across the battlefield. As he haltingly describes his experiences at the battle of Plataea, he notes losing his sword after the shield wall of the Medes broke. “I told them Marcus was dead, and I could not find Umeri, that we should not have gone to Riverland.” [While Marcus’s name means “dedicated to Mars” or “warrior,” Umeri would seem to indicate a shoulder, related to the word humerus. As far as references, these do not seem to be historical figures. Latro might be referring to the Persian push into Egypt under Darius to subdue the rebellion, a decade before Latro writes, following the emperor’s defeat at Marathon (in which Pan supposedly aided the Athenians and the Spartans against their invaders).] 
434
435When next Latro sees Eurykles, he thinks the sorcerer a “tall, ugly woman” (*Mist*, XXIV 182). Eurykles realizes the extent of Latro’s disorientation and suggests that it involves the “malice of someone on the Mountain [Olympus],” proposing “a sacrifice to the War God” (*Mist*, XXIV 183). Finally, Eurykles decides that Aesculapius might best fit their needs, and they plan to make a sacrifice for Latro at a makeshift altar. 
436
437Eurykles writes the next chapter on their way to the isle of Pelops, revealing details of his childhood in Melitos which includes a vision of the Triple Goddess and poisoning a bully who took his confection. His self-descriptions are flattering, as “a true son of Ion, far taller than the ruck of men and blessed with a dancer’s frame, hardy and graceful rather than muscular” (*Mist*, XXV 187). He also describes a charm he makes for Latro, including a white stone for the Moon, an arrowhead from the Huntress, and a hair from his own head for “the Dark.” [These three elements obviously resonate with the aspects of the Triple Goddess. They might also represent the competition between the dancer Anysia, Hippostizein, and Io at the culmination of *Soldier of Arete*.] “With a thorn of the white-flowered briar dipped in my own blood, I wrote upon a scrap of cypress bark my plea for you to the goddess. All these I bound in a circle of deerskin and with mighty invocations hung about your neck on a thong” (*Mist*, XXV 188).
438
439Eurykles also describes Latro’s experiences with the invisible figure of Aesculapius, who denies Latro healing since he was sent by the “murderess of his mother,” Artemis. The chapter recounts the myth of Aesculapius, the son of Apollo with the mortal Coronis. Coronis’s infidelity leads Apollo’s sister to kill her, but Apollo saves the child from the funeral pyre and gives him to the talented centaur healer, Chiron. Eutaktos is enraged by the thought that Aesculapius would refuse healing because of the Spartan goddess and denies Latro his journal. However, the good feeling engendered between Basias and Latro prompts Basias to allow Eurykles and Io access to the scroll. Eurykles expects to meet the Spartan regent Pausanius at Megara soon. This non-Latro chapter also introduces the Spartan runner Pasicrates for the first time. Pasicrates is a special servant of the Triple Goddess, scourged in a ceremonial gauntlet to determine the strongest of her adherents. The positive impression Pasicrates makes upon Eurykles certainly indicates sexual interest. [The name Pasicrates means, “he who dominates everyone,” and along with Io, Latro, and Seven Lions, he is one of the few non-historical major figures in the text – which implies that his name could have some deeper significance for the plot.] Pasicrates returns Latro’s scroll to him after they have a friendly race.
440
441In conversation with Basias and Latro, Pasicrates discusses the Dorian tradition of “each older man [having] a younger friend” and the benefits of such a system (*Mist*, XXVI 194). The Spartan thinks that Eurykles is different; the sorcerer perturbs him. Basias advises Pasicrates to simply hit the necromancer, but Pasicrates insists something else bothers him. As Pasicrates discusses the love between an older and younger man, Latro watches a scarlet wildflower nod in the breeze which “seem[s] charged with meaning.” Pasicrates notes that Eurykles reminds him of “a man with a daughter. Except that the daughter’s the man himself” (*Mist*, XXVI 194). [Kalleos, too, seems to personify a type of flower as a servant of love (or sex), but it is difficult to tie this scarlet flower to anything concrete beyond the broad thematic implications of transformations implicit to floral references in the classical world via Ovid – the most pertinent of these stories, involving male lovers of different stations and given the hyacinth chlamys worn by the sorcerer, involves the creation of the Hyacinth flower, which springs from Hyacinthus’s blood when his lover Apollo accidentally strikes him down with a discus. The scarlet flower could also very easily be the crimson anemone mentioned earlier in the text, representing the goddess of love, though Hyacinths can also be red. The reading of this flower in light of the final dream sequence of the novel and the reconciliation of Latro and Pasicrates involves the idealization of love between a dominant and a submissive party and its disturbing manifestation in the form of the relationship between Pasicrates and the boy Polos.] In keeping with his name, Pasicrates acknowledges that many are interested in him, but that he wishes Eurykles were a slave [further emphasizing his need to dominate]. 
442
443Soon Eurykles shows up to return the scroll, jealous of the freedom Latro’s memory loss affords him: he could merely forge a new identity by asking his friends to call him by a different name and become a new man. Latro suggests that Eurykles go by Drakaina. (At this point, Latro cannot recognize that Eurykles still seems to be a male to others. [We should also note that the python which once served Gaea at Delphi, the chthonic foe of Apollo, was also known as Drakaina and clearly haunts the oracle at the end of the second volume.]) 
444
445When they behold Salamis, Pasicrates sternly reprimands Io’s failure to acknowledge the Spartan contribution to the Persian naval defeat there at the hands of the Spartan Eurybiades. As Pasicrates runs ahead to inform Pausanias of their coming, Latro notes, “he runs so well I think only the finest horse could overtake him” (*Mist*, XXVI 196). [The later relationship between a centaur youth and Pasicrates might be foreshadowed in this comment; the literal nature of many of these offhand statements contributes to the rich feeling of re-reading Wolfe’s more complex stories.]
446
447When Latro comes to the Spartan regent’s tent, he overhears Pasicrates speaking with his master inside. Pasicrates identifies someone as “a spy of the Great King’s,” and the narrative soon reveals that this must be Eurykles (*Mist*, XXVI 196). Pausanias indicates that such a stone might be thrown back. As Latro waits for an audience, he peruses his scroll and wonders what Aphrodite, the Lady of the Doves, might have wanted from him. [Aphrodite and Ares are of course infamous lovers in mythology as well as siblings.]
448
449When Pausanias receives Latro, the Spartan regent reveals that he had a vision of a man resembling Latro who wore a chaplet of withered blossoms. In the dream, Latro did not have the visible head scar “but no doubt the chaplet covered it” (*Mist*, XXVII 199). In gratitude for the many men he has killed, Kore promised to show Pausanias a secret known only to the gods. In his dream, Nike stood behind Latro in the shadows. [Of course, the goddess Nike symbolizes victory, and Hegesistratus will later confirm that Nike stands behind Latro always, even if the Roman mercenary can never glimpse her save in chance reflections. A chaplet of blossoms will be placed upon Latro’s head during the disastrous manumission ceremony at Sparta in the second volume, another pivotal moment in the text which contributes to Latro’s depression. Pausanias’s dream also suggests that Latro himself is part of a divine secret.]
450
451Pausanias attempts to learn how Latro was injured. The runner Pasicrates becomes vocal when he finds out that Latro once served the Persians, and Pausanias warns him, “You’re a handsome boy … But if you want to stay where you are, you’d better learn to think. To whom did the Maiden appear? Who has her favor?” (*Mist*, XXVII 200) Pausanias declares that the Spartans and the Thebans are now allies, even though they fought, then addresses Basias: “An idiot, a child, and a spy won’t be too much for you, will they, ouragos?” (*Mist*, XXVII 201) 
452
453When Eurykles, whom we shall hereafter refer to as Drakaina and by the female pronoun, denies being a spy, the tension escalates. Pausanias (who still perceives Drakaina as a man) demands to know who received the sorcerer’s report, and when no answer is forthcoming, Basias grabs Drakaina. She claws at his face, but is struck in return, and Latro considers interfering, admitting, “If it weren’t for the sentries, I would have killed all of you, or tried to” (*Mist*, XXVII 202). Drakaina finally reveals that she supplied Artabazus, the second in command to Mardonius, with information. She told the influential Persian that the passage of a few months and the granting of small gifts would eliminate the need for further conflict. 
454
455Basias appears to have been poisoned in their brief exchange, and his hand swells. He is sent to a healer. Pausanias insists that he desires honorable peace and a union of the Greek cities under Sparta, as well as an arrangement with the Persians that would let them save face. Latro acknowledges that he is himself a soldier of the Great King: “I’ve always known that, even when I did not know my name” (*Mist*, XXVII 205). [The thematic importance of seeking peace cannot be overstated in situating actions in a moral continuum throughout these novels. In the pagan world, good and evil remain somewhat ambiguous. Both the Triple Goddess and the Great Mother display some rather disturbing traits.]
456
457Soon, Latro has the opportunity to retrieve his sword from Basias’s belongings, noting: “I put it on and felt better at once; a man without weapons is a slave” (*Mist*, XXVIII 207). Basias returns to his tent in a delirium. The healer Kichesippos diagnoses the problem as the bite of a viper, and also hints that while the viper lives, its existence reinforces the effects of the poison. He appraises Latro and determines that a bone splinter or arrow might have caused the head wound, advising prayer. Latro reveals that sometimes he feels that his scroll might contain lies, but Kicheseppos asserts that “Lying is a habit, you see, like drinking too much. You told the truth as you saw it, which is all any man can do. … You must remember that in every life there occur events so extraordinary that only the most talented and ingenious liar could have conceived them” (*Mist*, XXVIII 209). [We should note that Ahura Mazda embodies truth, order, and justice, denoted by the term *asa*, which is used to combat druj – “falsehood” or “deceit” (Kellens). Of all Wolfe’s narrators, Latro is the least likely to lie; he is unreliable for other reasons, and even criticizes himself for failures in clarity at times.] Kicheseppos goes on to describe the Greek triumph at Mycale, in which one hundred ships burnt three hundred Persian ones.
458
459Drakaina soon reveals she has been staying with Pasicrates, though his servants refuse to obey her. Latro uses force to procure their cooperation, and Drakaina says they are heading to Sparta and to Acheron, where her skills at necromancy will come in handy. She borrows a comb from Io, and Latro notes that her hair “could not have been more disordered if it were never combed at all” (*Mist*, XXVIII 211). [Of course, this bears a strong resemblance to the medusa; it also matches the description of the serpentine apparition Latro faced earlier.] Drakaina indicates that those who have been calling her by a masculine name have not divined her true nature.
460
461On the way to Sparta, Latro finds several abandoned buildings before coming upon a village smithy alone. He wants to know why Laconia is called the Silent Country. Becoming hostile, the smith catches Latro’s wrist and threatens him with a hammer, but a slave of the Spartans from the same village, Cerdon, saves Latro with a javelin cast from behind. Cerdon says the smith made the weapon that took his life: “He thought you would [kill him], and it would have been his death if he had been seen talking with a foreigner. As it will be mine if I am seen with you” (*Mist*, XXIX 214). [This scene might also be emblematic of the struggle between Ares and Hephaestus the Smith. At one point, Hephaestus learns that his wife Aphrodite has been tarrying with the God of War, and he forges an unbreakable net, trapping Ares and exposing him to the other gods.]
462
463Cerdan tells Latro to come to the Great Mother’s shrine that night, and Latro hears “the whisper of a woman’s skirt, or the dry slithering of a serpent” (*Mist*, XXIX 215). [Clearly, this sound comes from Drakaina and the forces of the Triple Goddess in opposition to the Great Mother.] Latro informs the ailing Basias that a nearby bridge has been burned. Basias insists that the slaves of the Rope Makers on the other side of the river did it. It is the time of plowing, and Basias seems certain that there will always be another war to occupy them even when this one has ended. Basias reminds Latro that once he defeated him at wrestling, though now he would certainly lose. Sitting outside, Latro reads of Eurykles raising the dead, and Drakaina comes to sit by him, telling him that a goddess promised him he would find his friends. He kisses the necromancer in joy, and she invites him to Pasicrates’s tent, where she takes off her clothes, revealing hips and breasts. [Latro’s kiss may have finished the transformation.] A snakeskin is knotted around her waist, and though Latro desires her “as a dying man for water, a starving man for bread, a weak man for a crown,” it is not “as a man for a woman” (*Mist*, XXIX 219). Her mockery leads him to throttle her, but the power leaves his hand, and she promises to return when the moon is up and his strength grows. [The charm Eurykles made earlier might have some effect on him here, but it goes by and large without remark throughout the rest of the text.]
464
465That night, Cerdon comes for Latro, criticizing the Spartan system, which allows two kings to make war while relying upon the authority of five judges, who meet each year “to make a war that’s outside the law” against the slaves (*Mist*, XXX 220). Cerdon warns Latro against the Silent Ones who serve Auge, identifying Pasicrates as such an agent. These Silent Ones enjoy special influence over the judges and can kill the slaves as they desire. He instructs Latro not to take Falcata. As they leave, Cerdon cries out, suffering a bite [from the hidden serpentine form of Drakaina]. Io hears the cry and joins them. Cerdon ails rapidly, making Latro promise to follow the river to a white stone and a path to an uncut wood. He says that if Latro touches the Great Mother, he will be repaid.
466
467Latro follows the path into the forest, noting that brushing against the trunks of the trees “was like caressing some vast beast” (*Mist*, XXX 223). He sees a lion step from the darkness between the trees and stare at him before it vanishes into the shadows. He soon hears the singing of children. [The lion and the wolf are symbols of the Great Mother, but Pleistorus is also often depicted with a lion in Thrace in the second volume.] Latro comes upon dancing children near a stone altar, though other figures lurk in the shadows of the trees. A blind priestess takes one of the girls onto the altar and, before Latro can intervene, smashes her head with a hammer. 
468
469>That was when I saw the Great Mother, an old woman half again as tall as I, leaning over her priestess and dabbling her fingers in the blood. A goddess indeed, but aged and crazed, her gown torn and gray with dirt. For all I owed Cerdon, I would not have touched her if I could. I turned to flee instead; something struck my head, and I lay stretched upon the ground. (*Mist*, XXX 224)
470
471The slaves descend upon Latro, but they flee before another surprise: the arrival of Spartans from the forest. After Latro slays a helot slave who would have killed him, he realizes that no one but he can see the Great Mother. As if his action were an offering to her, she says, “I drink no blood that has wet iron” (*Mist*, XXX 224). [This does not fully explain the aversion to iron evinced by the serpentine woman.] Drakaina finds Latro, telling him that she brought the Spartans. Eutaktos leads them, but he does not seem to realize that Drakaina and Eurykles were ever the same person. As they leave the area, they are assaulted by stones. Drakaina and Latro run into the forest, where they are attacked by a woman and child. Drakaina disappears after Latro slays them. He returns to the Spartans and helps them fight on until the battle abates. The voice of the Great Mother calls her followers in the oak wood, and a roaring lion and howling wolf indicate another attack is coming. 
472
473The slaves soon overcome some of the Spartans, leaving Latro to feel as if he is standing alone against their charge, but the goddess instructs her servants to wait. “Long strides carried her to the fires; the spilling of so much blood must have restored her vigor, if not her youth. The lion and the wolf frisked around her like dogs, and though the slaves of the Rope Makers could not see her, they saw them and drew away in terror” (*Mist*, XXXI 227).
474
475The Great Mother, Gaea or Ge, speaks to Latro, saying that she received Europa’s message and heard of his meeting with Kore. Latro reassures her, “If I were to kill you, Mother, who would heal me?” (*Mist*, XXXI 228) She tells him that he is learning wisdom, “by the wolf that gave your fathers suck” (*Mist*, XXXI 228). [This of course refers to the founding of Rome and the myth of Romulus and Remus, the sons of Mars, suckled by a wolf. However, it slightly complicates the idea that Latro is somehow actually Ares, even though he calls her Mother. To get around this conundrum, we propose a dual nature.] Latro touches her, and the slaves respond emotionally to the appearance of their goddess. They beseech her to free them from the Spartans after five hundred years of slavery, and she belittles them for allowing themselves to be subjugated, though they outnumber their oppressors seven to one. She demands a sacrifice, and a man castrates himself for her. She tells them:
476
477>“This man is sacred to me as long as he lives. In payment, I will fight for you, striving to make his master, Prince Pausanias, king of this land.  … You think him your greatest foe, but I tell you he will be your greatest friend and perhaps your king, turning his back upon his own kindred. Still he, and I, may fail. If so, I shall destroy Rope … - then you must rise against the Rope Makers.” (*Mist*, XXXI 229) 
478
479[Here, the Great Mother ironically promises a Spartan triumph, but her vow to support Pausanias might make more sense from a historical perspective. Within two years of the battles already described in the first volume, Pausanias would be accused of conspiring with Xerxes of Persia in the hopes of marrying his daughter. He reputedly adopted Persian customs, and his arrogance created a strong alliance around Athens in opposition to the Spartans. Eventually, when proof of his collusion with Persia was provided several years later, he was starved out of the temple of Athena where he attempted to take refuge. More directly, Thucydides reports that Pausanias promised to grant the slaves their freedom and citizenship if they would aid his own insurrection. His agitation prompted the first attempt at a helot revolt against their Spartan masters, but Pausanias was betrayed by the slaves and his plans came to nothing.]
480
481Soon the slaves of the Spartans leave. Latro buries some of the dead, trying to recall the face of Eutaktos, before returning to the Spartan camp. There, Io shows him Cerdon, who has passed away. 
482
483Latro’s narrative next describes their visit to Rope, where the disdain of the slaves is apparent. Drakaina and Io discuss the reality of the Amazon women, and the necromancer suggests that the Amazon women breed with the Sons of Scoloti. Their female children’s breasts are seared away for the use of a bow and their male children are used to buy “the favor of their goddess” (*Mist*, XXXII 232). The companions are greeted at the temple of Orthia in the name of Heracles’s House by Queen Gorgo, Leonidas’s widow. [He perished quite famously at Thermopylae, and Latro’s fragmentary impressions reveal that he himself fought Leonidas. We will return to the possible significance of this confrontation at the conclusion of the essay, given the lion imagery associated with Heracles, Leonidas, the War God Pleistorus, and Latro himself. This temple of Artemis resides within a natural basin located near Limnai, one of the four villages which comprised Sparta.] 
484
485Queen Gorgo takes them to the representation of her goddess, known as Orthia, where she explains that “the snake in her right hand is the empyreal serpent, the one in her left the chthonic serpent. She holds both and stands between them, the only god who unites heaven to earth and the lower world. When she appears here, it is most often as a snake” (*Mist*, XXXII 233). Latro realizes that the goddess is angry, asking if others cannot see the way she glares at Drakaina. [Lycurgus stopped the human sacrifice practiced at the altar until the 9th century B.C.. Instead, the whipping Pasicrates underwent to consecrate him to the Spartan goddess was instituted. While Gorgo claims that this goddess might be the only one with empyreal and chthonic attributes, most of the gods seem to display these polarities. Even Ahura Mazda has Ahriman or Angra Mainyu as a counterpart.]
486
487When they leave the temple, Pasicrates awaits them, and he threateningly proposes taking Drakaina to a magical well which changes men to women. When Io quips that everyone is turning against the necromancer, Pasicrates learns that Latro can sometimes see the gods and talk to them. “I should have asked you more about him when we met. Foolishly, I wasted my time with one Eurykles. … Orthia sends sudden death to women. What a pity you’re not a man, Drakaina” (*Mist*, XXXII 235). [Hegesistratus will repeat this detail in the second volume; the abrupt death of female characters (like the passing of Pharetra) should be attributed to the influence of the Triple Goddess.]
488
489At the well, Io sees skeletons below, but Latro perceives the form of black bearded men in miscellaneous poses of agony. [After some difficulty in subduing Greece, Darius had sent ambassadors to the Greek cities demanding tributes of earth and water. Both Athens and Sparta refused, and purportedly Sparta tossed the emissary into a well to seek the earth and water he requested.] Pasicrates reveals that the Persian King’s ambassadors were “bold men when they came, but frightened women when we threw them in” (*Mist*, XXXII 236). Drakaina brags that Pasicrates is jealous of the attention she has received from Pausanias. This scene also presents the possibility that Eurykles has been supplanted: “I feel I’ve lived a long, long time … And that I’ve been what I am since the first stars took shape” (*Mist*, XXXII 236). [The incarnation of whatever serpentine primordial force first spoke to Latro, demanding that he touch Cerdon to make him “real” enough to devour, also reflects on the possibility that other pre-existing forces might come to inhabit a mortal body, perhaps (though not necessarily) less invasively. Latro notes, “Drakaina remarked that I had given her a slave some time ago. When I asked what had become of him, she said he was dead” (*Mist*, XXXII 236). This certainly refers to Cerdon.]
490
491Latro begins the fourth part of his journal describing the entrance to Acheron, the Lands of the Dead. He has a dream of a ship with a white swan at its stern, and when he descends below deck, he remembers, “a cavern, where a lovely queen [Kore] and a grim king [Hades] sat thrones of black stone amid the smell of death. Three dogs barked [Cerberus], and the queen said, ‘He passes. His message fulfills …’” (*Mist*, XXXIII 241). When he awakens, Io tells him that the swan decorated ship took them from Sparta. Pausanias makes a sacrifice there, beseeching the Royal Agids to let him know if he should make peace or war. As Drakaina chants, “At once the rocks behind her split, and there came forth a king in armor, with a bloodstained knife in his hand, bleeding limbs, and a lolling head” (*Mist*, XXXIII 242). He drinks the vapors from the pit, and his wounds heal. He speaks, and his voice proceeds from Drakaina, who falls in a fit. In verse, the figure advises his nephew to seek peace instead of death and asks, “[W]ho will make the fortress yield, / To those that fought at Fennel Field [Marathon]” (*Mist*, XXXII 242). [The dream Latro had of the conversation between Kore and Hades might have referred to the shade Cleomenes’s passage from the realm of the dead to that of the living to deliver a message. The fragmentary discussion of this ghostly message fulfilling something portentous no doubt relates to the need for peace.]
492
493“At the final word Drakaina gave a great cry; and the stone, which had closed, opened again to receive the dead king. In his train now walked an attendant, a lean, fantastically dressed man with disordered hair” (*Mist*, XXXII 242). [Pausanias is King Leonidas’s nephew, but Pasicrates identifies the royal spirit as Cleomenes I, who eventually plotted against his co-king and was imprisoned for insanity in 490 B.C.. He was found dead in prison, supposedly from self-inflicted wounds. Whatever remains of Eurykles leaves with Cleomenes here, though Drakaina survives.] Pausanias decrees that his uncle’s death resulted from his desecration of the sacred lands of the Great Goddess in marching to Eleusis [Advent].
494
495Pasicrates and Pausanius interpret the verse they heard as a warning against wine and a recommendation to approach the Athenians besieging Persian-ruled Sestos in friendship rather than in war. Pasicrates suggests sending a token force to Sestos to test the dream of the gods – if it does not fall, it will reflect badly on the Athenians rather than the Spartans. This prophecy controls the action for the rest of the first volume. [Historically, the siege of Sestos in 479-8 B.C. represented a crushing defeat for the Persians, cutting off their entrance to the Greek mainland and restoring Athenian trade in the area.] In assessing Pasicrates’s motives, Pausanius says, “Xanthippos commands … And you wouldn’t exactly object to leading a hundred of my heroes on a new Trojan War, would you Pasicrates? Or should I say, swift-footed Achilles? It will be a glorious adventure, one in which a man might win considerable reputation” (*Mist*, XXXIII 243).
496
497Pausanius musters his bodyguard and admonishes them to besiege Sestos with him, mentioning their lateness at Marathon and the Athenian’s success at Salamis. Pasicrates selects a hundred men; it would not be glorious to let Athens claim sole responsibility for taking Sestos from the Persians. When Drakaina recovers without memory of the prophecy, she and Io disagree about Pasicrates’s interpretation. Io maintains that Cleomenes wanted real peace, not for Pausanias to send troops to Sestos, while Drakaina believes that no one will take Sestos, the strongest place on earth. “As for seeking peace, Cleomenes knows that Demaratus, the true heir to the younger crown of Rope, is one of the Great King’s advisers. He naturally hopes for an agreement that will leave the Agids the elder crown and give Demaratus the younger. If such an agreement had been struck two years ago, the whole war might have been prevented” (*Mist*, XXXIII 245). [The thematic importance of choosing peace rather than war lurks everywhere. While Demaratus is mentioned here, there does not seem to be any trace of him in *Soldier of Arete*; historically, he has already been exiled from Sparta and is helping Xerxes I invade Greece at this time. In Herodotus, Demaratus advises Xerxes that even if all of the other Greek cities accept Persia, Sparta will continue to fight against them and refuse terms tantamount to slavery.] Drakaina hopes to attain the captain’s cabin on the ship from Pasicrates. Io tells Latro, “I didn’t like Eurykles much, but I liked him a whole lot better than Drakaina. And if you ask me *she* changed him into her, somehow” (*Mist*, XXXIII 246).
498
499Pausanias’s mantis Tisamenus arrives by ship, and Latro is summoned to meet him. [During his meeting, Tisamenus discusses a representation of a griffin in the tent, claiming that they live northwest of the Issedonians, hoarding gold. As we have mentioned, the portions of Herodotus dealing with this legend are explored in Wolfe’s story, “The Arimaspian Legacy.” Tisamenus believes Latro somehow remembers the griffin, and Latro calls them “the Clawed Ones.”] Latro notices that Tisamenus calls him “sir” while Pausanius still refers to him as a slave. Tisamenus asks Latro, “What makes you a talisman of victory?” (*Mist*, XXXIV 250)
500
501Pausanius says that while he has heard the question, “Who understands the ways of the gods?” many times, Latro actually does, and that Latro would win every event in the pentathlon and the chariot race as well. [This foreshadows the Pythian Games and the final chariot race in the second volume, in which Latro rides for Pausanias, though his path to victory is somewhat unexpected.] Latro is told, “You know things you don’t know you know. You didn’t remember the name of the winged monsters until you were asked, did you?” (*Mist*, XXXIV 251) Tisamenus believes it is so with the council of the gods. He asks if Latro would reveal them if they came to mind. Latro’s reply highlights the double irony of Wolfe’s dialogue: “But though Io says I once swept floors for a woman in Thought, I don’t believe I ever swept the hall of Olympus” (*Mist*, XXXIV 251-2). [One of the twelve Olympian gods would not be sweeping the halls.] At this point, Tisamenus and Latro begin the discussion of the nature of good, evil, polytheism, and Ahura Mazda which introduces this essay and contextualizes the reality of the pagan gods. Latro concludes this discussion with an analogy of a beggar boy outside a mighty palace, who sees the servants and the steward as powerful lords of the palace. Pausanius says that the steward is in fact a powerful lord to the beggar boy, “though not to himself, perhaps” (*Mist*, XXXIV 254).
502
503The theological discussion concluded, Captain Nepos of the *Nausicaa* arrives and accepts Pausanias’s commission to take his special forces to Sestos. While Pausanias and Latro go to observe the sea and the ship, the mantis disappears. Pausanias, lost in thought, says, “What if the beggar boy – Let’s not call him Latro; his name is Pausanias. What if Pausanias the beggar boy could become known to the king? You must help me, and I’ll help you. I’ll give you your freedom and much more. … You know the servants, Latro. Perhaps you can persuade them to allow me to enter the palace” (*Mist*, XXXIV 255). 
504
505Latro thinks, “How is a man, even a prince and a regent, to enter a palace no man has seen? To befriend a monarch whose minions are gods?” (*Mist*, XXXIV 255). [A normal man might not be able to do so.] As he enters the tent, he catches an echo of Tisamenus’s power, hearing the words, “*Kill the man with the wooden foot!*” (*Mist*, XXXIV 255). [As will become clear later, Tisamenus has attempted to compel Latro to defeat his foe, the mantis of Mardonius known as Hegesistratus, who was once captured by the Spartans and, to escape, cut his own foot out of the bonds. The compulsion would normally have erased all memory of its details, but Hegesistratus later concludes that Latro’s own damaged memory and difficulty with the language prevent Tisamenus’s spell from having its full effect – though there could be at least one other reason that the spell worked imperfectly, for though Latro is fully human, it seems that he is not simply a man.]
506
507After leaving with the companions, the *Nausicaa* pauses at Corinth [Tower Hill]. There, Drakaina uses her charms to procure coins. She trades information about their destination to the Corinthian strategist Corustas, telling him that the Queen Below [Kore] revealed the fall of Sestos to Pausanias in a dream. As Latro notes, Corustas wears “a cuirass of boiled leather molded with lions’ heads. The snarling faces woke some faint fear in me, and I seemed for an instant to see a lion rear and threaten a mob in rags with its claws and fangs” (*Mist*, XXXIV 260). Corustas wonders why the vision did not come from the Warrior [Ares] or the Sun [Apollo or Helios], though Drakaina reminds him that the fall of a city involves little drill and light, but plenty of death. As they leave to regard the gulf below Corinth, “A jeweled and scented woman with golden bells in her hair passed us, jingling as she turned her head to smile at Drakaina; she carried two live hares by the ears” (*Mist*, XXXIV 263). [This matches the traditional depiction of the Spartan Auge, or Arthemis Orthia, who seemed most displeased with Drakaina for some reason when Latro was at her temple earlier. Representations of the goddess hold two animals in their hands, not always serpents. We should not forget the Triple Goddess’s association in this form with human sacrifice and the sudden death of women. It is unclear whether the vision of the lion reminds Latro of the sacrificial ceremony to the Great Mother or some other event (such as the death of Leonidas), though the rags suggest slaves and the forest encounter (which also featured the sacrifice of a child).]
508
509On their way to Sestos, Pasicrates wants to stop at Thermopylae [the Hot Gates, where the Persians defeated the outnumbered Spartans] so that he can make a sacrifice. On the ship deck, Pasicrates proposes wrestling. As the crew gathers to assemble, they make place for Drakaina, who smells crocodiles in the river. Pasicrates tosses Latro into the water in their exchange, where the Roman mercenary meets the sea nymph Thoe. Thoe tells him, “I have forty-nine sisters, all older than myself. We are permitted to show ourselves to those who are soon to die. … No, you are not really going to drown” (*Mist*, XXXVI 267). Thoe also suggests that children too young to remember often see them as well. [Latro’s inability to form new long-term memories might not be the definitive reason for his special vision, however. At the culmination of the series, when Latro seeks to gain entrance to the Pythian Games, Pasicrates will challenge him, and Latro will see statues of two Egyptian gods in his memory palace: the crocodile headed Sobek and the falcon-headed Horus, both Egyptian gods of war. The fact that Drakaina scents crocodiles in the river when Pasicrates and Latro wrestle suggest that Pasicrates is somehow associated with Sobek, though we should also note that Pasicrates is not always accompanied by the scent of crocodiles. This scene actually becomes one of the metaphysical moments in Wolfe when narrative events help delineate more abstract symbols. As we shall stress at the end of this essay, Pasicrates represents the quintessential Spartan: fast, violent, and dominating. As the most warlike people on earth, the Spartans influence the very concept of war and *arete*. When Pasicrates first throws Latro into the water, it represents the eventual effect of Sparta on war: its excesses cause Latro to doubt the purpose of life, and their twisted version of manly excellence and *arete* risks permanently transforming war into the sinister and devouring Sobek, a water-god, cutting off the connotations of the empyreal Horus. When Latro returns from the water, the light of the sacrificial fire will reveal, even as he triumphs over Pasicrates, a lion in his eyes – a solar symbol. Perhaps coincidentally, since we have already discussed the importance of an offering to water in the rituals of Persian worship, we should also mention that the story of Romulus and Remus features a river god who saves them and presents them to the wolf which will raise them after they are left on the bank of the Tiber River to die. In addition, Zoroastrian worshippers held great reverence for the purity of fire, by which Pasicrates will see the lion in Latro’s eyes.]
510
511Returning to Latro’s submerged conversation, Thoe informs him that at times she and her sisters sing to warn sailors of reefs, though they are just as likely to call them back to lie with them (and die) if they survive the wreck. When Latro realizes that he must escape “below” to the surface of the water and the ship, she grabs at him, telling him “You need not fear … We bear your children beneath the sea, so they drown” (*Mist*, XXXVI 268). When she steals a kiss from him, he is overcome with a sensation of coolness and breaks the surface of the water. He guides his course by Polaris and the Great Bear in the sky [odd knowledge for an amnesiac to have, surely, unless we consider an unrecorded conversation with the captain held that day as the source of this practical wisdom. This might also resonate with the celestial story of the winter solstice told in “The Old Woman Whose Rolling Pin Is the Sun,” which we shall return to later. The Great Bear is being pursued by the Hounds of the Hunter as the sun approaches the point of Capricorn in that tale. A youth mounted on the Capricorn goat allows the sun to reverse its course towards longer days and warmth.]
512
513When Latro comes to shore, he loses sight of Thoe, who had until then followed him across the waves. He finds a brook from which to drink, and recalls asking Drakaina which god shaped the world. “She said it had been made by Phanes, the four-winged and four-headed, who is male and female together.” [The exotic, multifoliate gender of the possessed Eurykles might stray to Orphic rather than Homeric sources for a preferred creation story, and Phanes is generally considered to have been born from the silver egg of the universe created by Aion or Time. Phanes name indicates a shining or bright light, as does the name Lucius, and he is also associated with Dionysus as a god of resurrection and death. It is difficult to rationalize all of these disparate myths into one cohesive narrative framework, though many of them seem to tie into Ares and Dionysus eventually. In this case, it seems that the ambiguously gendered Drakaina’s answer illustrates that humanity attempts to shape its gods according to its own priorities – thus the Spartan risk to any goodness in War. However, it could just as easily indicate that these male and female spiritual forces can all be reconciled into one being greater than the sum of its parts.]
514
515Latro comes upon Pasicrates about to sacrifice a bull, asking for Leonidas and his men to “intercede for us, all you heroes, when we must recount what befell the slave, Latro. For you know there was no true victory upon him, nor did he carry the favor of any god” (*Mist*, XXXVI 269). Latro selects this moment to reveal himself, stepping out from the shadows and proclaiming that the gods declare otherwise. Latro says that he was only thrown in order to speak with the Nereid Thoe, and that it is time to finish their match. A lion roars on Kallindromos, and the two men are “locked more tightly than any lovers.” Latro has the strength to kill his foe, but opts to throw him instead. At their break, another Spartan asks about the interrupted sacrifice, which must constitute sacrilege, and Pasicrates responds, “We give our might to Leonidas, just as might was offered to Patroklos. The winner will complete the sacrifice” (*Mist*, XXXVI 270).
516
517When they wrestle again, Pasicrates seems much stronger, but after an intense and lengthy struggle the lion roars again, and Pasicrates declares, “There’s a lion in your eyes.” Latro responds, “And a boy in yours.” He lifts Pasicrates and casts him into the sea as the lion roars a third and final time (*Mist*, XXXVI 270). [Here, Pasicrates proves himself a worthy foe, but his understanding of *arete* is flawed as a child’s. One could read the lion in Latro’s eyes in several ways. Later, it will be strongly suggested that Latro actually killed Leonidas at the battle of Thermopylae with a javelin in the back. Unfortunately, when Hegesistratus suggested that divinity might be transmitted, he did not fully explain whether killing a warrior blessed by the gods might transmit those blessings to the killer or not. The leonine symbols associated with the war god Pleistorus are definitely referenced, as are their overwhelming solar significance. Pasicrates mentions an event in *The Iliad* in which the Achaeans are being defeated by the Trojans according to the will of Achilles, who refuses to take his Myrmidons into battle. His squire Patroklos is moved by the sight and begs to fight for the Greeks, at which point Achilles beseeches Zeus to grant Patroklos strength and for his safe return – though Zeus only accedes to half of his request. Leonidas might have been similarly strengthened rather than representing a true avatar of Ares. In the final analysis, however, the lion is a symbol of Christ.]
518
519Latro completes the sacrifice to Leonidas, and Io tells him that Pasicrates has imprisoned Drakaina, whom he claims cast a spell on Latro to keep him from surfacing after the throw. Latro requests that she be freed, and Pasicrates consents. Amid the sulfurous stench of the springs, Pasicrates takes him to the ruined wall, where he declares that Latro must be the ears of the gods: “[T]hey hear, instead of you, or they take the memory of what you’ve heard from you” (*Mist*, XXXVII 273). He wants the gods to know about what happened at Thermopylae. Pasicrates describes the insurmountable odds faced by the few Spartan warriors and slaves in the pass, and how Leonidas held it for three days. Latro sees a naked man fixing his hair “with a comb of pale shell” and another exercising with a discus, and Pasicrates thinks these must be spirits of the Spartans who died there. [However, the figures may possibly resonate with Adonis and Hyacinthus].
520
521Latro sheds a tear, and when Pasicrates demands a reason for his emotion, says, “I must have taken part in it. And I have forgotten it” (*Mist*, XXXVII 273). [The Battle of Thermopylae was a response to the Athenian defeat of Persia at Marathon.] Latro sees a one-eyed figure emerge from the gate in the wall, and his description allows Pasicrates to identify it as Leonidas’s mantis, Megistias, “who spoke the tongues of all beasts” (*Mist*, XXXVII 274). [The conclusion of the plotlines in *Soldier of Arete* feature strong thematic overlap with the prayer of St. Francis, who was also purported to speak to animals. Here, however, Megistias only grants Latro a vision from his past.] The apparition waves a hand in front of Latro and speaks to him in a language he does not recognize, and Latro relives the battle held there. He rallies his own allies in the absence of the Immortals (Mardonius’s legion). As they engage a small group of enemies, someone screams out “Cassius!” (*Mist*, XXXVII 274) In Latro’s vision, he engages a warrior who must be Leonidas, determined to reach the Persian King on his hilltop throne. Latro loses his blade in the battle, but hurtles his shield at Leonidas’s back as he runs by. Latro comes to himself as if awakening and sees the army of the Great King disappear into the hills. He speaks to Drakaina before writing of his match with Pasicrates and his experiences at Thermopylae. She tells him his sword is actually a kopis and not a falcata. [Images of a kopis and a falcata reveal that they are almost identical, if not exactly the same. Wolfe’s thematic point might simply be that the same thing can evolve independently in two different cultures. The kopis was utilized in Greece and Eqypt while the falcata was used in Pre-Roman Iberia and Lusitania. The mythology of these locales might also be symbolically invoked in this strange case of convergence: two different names can be used to describe the same thing.]
522
523They soon see Simonides’s verse commemorating the effort of the Spartans and their slaves in resisting the superior Persian forces: “Redface Isle, four thousand bred; / Three million scorned till all were dead” (*Mist*, XXXVII 275). Another verse memorializes the prescient Megistias, and the third, asking the reader to report the bravery of the dead to Laconia, reads, “Speak to the Silent City, / Saying that in her cause, / We begged no tyrant’s pity, / And fell obedient to her laws” (*Mist*, XXXVII 276). [These are certainly stylized historical verses composed by Simonides, who will appear as a character in *Soldier of Arete* and aid Latro’s memory with the introduction of his memory palace.]
524
525On the way to the climactic battle of the first volume at Sestos, much of the crew falls ill, leaving Latro to work as best he can. At one point, the violently heaving ship casts him off into the water, but a wave returns him to deck, where he lands on his feet. The captain tells Latro the story of Polycrates of Samos, whose luck in battle always held. In this version of the story, he is a friend of the ruler of Egypt, “who was in those times the most powerful monarch in the world” (*Mist*, XXXVIII 278). The King of Riverland advises his friend to cast his most valued possession, an emerald ring inherited from his father that lends him an aura of authority, into the sea. When Polycrates returns to his city, his people give him many gifts, and one fisherman offers all that he can: a fine catch. Polycrates offers to eat it with the man in his own hall, and when the man cuts the fish open, the ring rolls out. The people cheer, but Polycrates knows that it spells his doom. [Wolfe’s version differs from that of Herodotus in that *The Histories* offers us the name of Polycrates’s friend, Amasis II, and Polycrates does not seem to realize that the return of his gift signifies the end of his good fortune. When Polycrates boasts of his good fortune, Amasis calls an end to their friendship, believing that such a lucky man must come to a bad end, though it is more likely that Polycrates’s temporary alliance with Persia cost him his Egyptian ties, and later his life.]
526
527As they arrive at the beach encampment near Sestos, the captain tries to buy Latro from Pasicrates as “the best sailor I’ve ever seen and a favorite of the gods to boot” (*Mist*, XXXVIII 279). [Perhaps this section might be fruitfully compared to Christ’s experience crossing the Sea of Galilee, when he was able to exercise a calming effect on the storm and the winds, in light of some later details.] As Io and Latro travel onwards, they discuss some of his past, and he mentions a few facts which make Io suspect that he is beginning to remember; he explains why the Spartan slaves are not required to carry all of their master’s belongings as they were at Achaea: “This is the Empire, and they know we might be charged by the Great King’s cavalry” (*Mist*, XXXVIII 281). [Latro’s innate understanding of combat situation actually provides this insight, not any conscious memory.]
528
529That night, Latro thinks of his earliest memories:
530
531>When I was a child, we saved the prunings from our vines to burn - I remember that. I remember my mother’s singing as she crouched by the fire to stir a little black pot, and how she watched me as she sang to see whether I enjoyed her song. When my father was there, he would cut a pipe from reeds, and then the reeds sang her song with her. Our god – I have just remembered this – was Lar. My father said Mother’s song made Lar happy. I remember thinking I understood more than he, and being proud and secretive (as little boys are) because I knew Lar was the song, and not something apart from it. I remember lying under the wolfskin and seeing Lar flash from wall to wall, singing and teasing me. I tried to catch him and woke rubbing my eyes, with Mother singing beside the fire” (*Mist*, XXXVIII 282).
532
533[The capitalization in this section is interesting, as Mother is always associated with song, and father never gets the benefit of capitalization at all, though he does seem to play the pipes and be associated with vines, as would be consistent with the followers of Dionysus or Faunus. The wolfskin under which Latro reposes should remind us of the story of Romulus and Remus. The tutelary Lars, an aspect of ancient Roman ancestor worship, was a spirit protecting the household. The dream which Latro has at the end of the second volume is prompted by Pindaros’s song. This memory might also be something like a divinely inspired dream. We should consider what implication Lar being the song might have.] 
534
535Sestos is the key to the coast for Xerxes, and Latro soon joins the siege under the Athenian strategist Xanthippos. [While Latro only translates place names into the meanings that he understands, the Persians translate personal names as well. Xanthippos would be called “Yellow Horse” by a Mede or Persian in Latro’s narrative.] The small Spartan retinue surprises Xanthippos, and his interactions with Pasicrates are charged with tension. Though Xanthippos anticipates a siege that will last until winter, Pasicrates is more boastfully optimistic, estimating less than five days: “We brought only a few days’ supplies. You would not want to strain our ancient friendship, I think. For a bite of bread and a handful of olives we will lead your assault. You need only follow us” (*Mist*, XXXIX 285).
536
537After the meeting with the Athenian, Pasicrates takes Latro and Drakaina to survey the walls. Io joins them, and says something to Latro which might aggravate the Spartan runner: “[The city will fall in five days] because you’re here” (*Mist*, XXXIX 286). Io says that she already knows how to get inside the city, and emphasizes that Kore sent Latro to Sestos, where he will find his friends. As they look at the strait, Pasicrates mentions the story of Leander, who swam from shore to shore to visit his beloved Hero. When he drowned, she cast herself from her tower. Pasicrates ponders how Xanthippos gets his information. [The Greeks inside the city are still somewhat divided in their allegiances, and many consider Athens kindly, leaking information beyond the city walls.]
538
539Still on the Hellespont, Io asks for the full story of the Golden Ram when Drakaina mentions that the river is named for Helle, who fell from its back and drowned. The sorceress says:
540
541>”[The Golden Ram] belongs to the Warrior, and it lives in the sky between the Bull and the Fish. … Once, long ago, it came to earth to interfere in the matter of two children, Phrixos and Helle, who had become a burden to their stepmother, Ino. No doubt the Warrior had planned to make Phrixos a hero, or something of that kind. Ino’s called the White Goddess now, by the way, and she’s an aspect of the Triple Goddess.” (*Mist*, XXXIX 287-8)
542
543While Helle drowned when she fell from its back, “The Ram carried [her brother] to Aea, at the east end of the Euxine, thinking he’d be safe there. After putting in a good word for him with the king, it hung its golden coat in a tree and returned to the sky. I was a princess in Aea –“ (*Mist*, XXXIX 287-8).
544
545[This dialogue reveals that the serpentine figure which has come to possess Eurykles has lived before. In the story of Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece, a serpent guarded the fleece, but Drakaina’s claim of being a princess in Aea could suggest that she was Medea or her sister Chalciope. While Phrixus was killed by King Aeëtes of Colchis, he was also married to Chalciope. The serpent guarding the fleece was known as the Drakon Kholkikos, a child of Typhon and Echidna/Enodia. The ability of mortals such as Auge and Ino to become aspects of the gods is suggestive, as are Drakaina’s next revelations.]
546
547Drakaina continues, “We live many different lives ... in many different bodies. Or at least some of us do. I was a princess in Aea, and a priestess of Enodia just as I am now. I told my father quite truthfully that the goddess said he would be killed by a stranger. Since Phrixos was the only stranger around, that did for *him*. And I set my pet python to guard the golden fleece” (*Mist*, XXXIX 288).
548
549Pasicrates declares that one of the siege ramps is childish, and when Latro thinks it could be used soundly with the strategic employment of shield bearers and archers, it makes the Spartan even more laconic. Those working on the siege wagons are impressed with Latro’s contributions, and they direct him to Hypereides at a nearby siege tower after recognizing the amnesiac’s name. They reveal, “[Hypereides] traded [Latro] to a hetaera for a series of dinners – mostly, I think, to keep him away from the fighting” (*Mist*, XXXIX 290).
550
551Latro is reunited with Seven Lions, embracing him as a brother. Drakaina can speak with him in the “tongue of Aram” (*Mist*, XL 291). He describes his travels through Egypt and Phoenicia with the Persian army. When asked how he met Latro, Seven Lion responds, “I saw a god had touched him. Such people are holy, someone must care for them” (*Mist*, XL 292). Pasicrates wants to use Seven Lions to send a message into Sestos, ignoring Io’s indignation. Seven Lions says that if he is sent without Latro and Io, he will only lie. Drakaina, in her translation, reminds Pasicrates, “I am the person sent by your regent to the barbarians – not this black man. Not even you” (*Mist*, XL 292-3).
552
553Pasicrates demands that Latro explain how the siege tower Seven Lion is stationed at will work, since Latro somehow knows “everything about siegecraft” (*Mist*, XL 293). [Given our thesis, that knowledge should come quite naturally to Latro.] Hypereides arrives, happy to see Latro and Io, and Pasicrates introduces himself boastfully as a representative of Prince Pausanias, while Hypereides calls himself a “son of Ion” (*Mist*, XL 294). [Spartans are Dorian Greeks; Hyperiedes is Ionian.] Hypereides shows Pasicrates how he measured the walls of the city, using geometry and a bowman (who happens to be the Neurian Oior). By shooting to the wall with an arrow attached to a thread and then placing a sword into the ground, Hypereides was able to calculate the height of the wall when its shadow touched where Oior had fired the arrow, scaling it to the shadow of the sword against the sword itself at that time. 
554
555Throughout these engagements, Pasicrates grows increasingly abrupt, and later, when he returns to his tent, he sends Drakaina and Io away. He asks Latro to give up his sword, but the tone of his voice warns the Roman that Pasicrates intends violence. When Latro hesitates, Pasicrates whistles, and Latro surmises, “he must have decided I required correction before we left to make our circuit of the walls and perhaps even before we called upon Xanthippos, because his slaves appeared at once, one carrying two javelins and the other a whip, a scorpion of three tales” (*Mist*, XL 295). [Our final reading of Pasicrates’s motivations here, beyond plot related envy, incorporates these characters as symbolic representations, just as the pagan gods seem to be. Latro embodies *arete* and manly valor in and out of combat; the Spartans have taken that excellence and twisted it to their own ends, ignoring its spirit. Here, Pasicrates attempts to dominate, as is his nature, forcing *arete* to acquiesce to his personal desires – alas, it is too powerful for his grasp to contain. On a basic plot level, this attack seems motivated by his jealousy over Latro as a sign of victory favored by Pausanias and by the wrestling loss he suffered. In his mind, some form of redress is necessary to reestablish who is truly in charge.]
556
557Latro engages them, berating Pasicrates if he should die. The Spartan merely says he will tell his lord “The truth … Sestos did not fall, you were lazy and insolent, I tried to discipline you, and you resisted” (*Mist*, XL 296). However, Pasicrates advises his men not to kill Latro. When one of the men is impaled accidentally on his ally’s javelin, Pasicrates enters the fray. Despite his speed, Latro’s strength cuts through his hoplon and removes his left forearm near the elbow. Latro grabs his scroll and escapes, stopping long enough afterwards to write again when no signs of pursuit remain, afraid that he will forget what he flees. [The loss of Pasicrates hand somehow forms a pivotal moment in the text for Latro’s character – one of the final sequences of *Soldier of Arete* involves Latro returning the spectral hand to Pasicrates, which reconciles them even as Pasicrates fails at the Pythian games. It might be useful to view Pasicrates as the excellent but problematic manifestation of Spartan philosophy and action, while Latro embodies a pure and just masculine ideology not based on domination.]
558
559After his flight, Latro has another dream: “of love. The woman was raven-haired … with eyes that flashed with desire. … A lake, dark and still, mirrored silver stars; all along the shore men in horned and leering masks capered with women crowned with the vine, to the thudding of timbrels and the rattle of crotali” (*Mist*, XLI 298). [This seems to be a memory of Hileara and the Bacchic ritual at the start of the book, after which Latro fell into the hands of the helots, who worship the Earth Mother while their masters support the Triple Goddess. The vision at this point in the narrative comes as Latro is about to return to the Persian side of the conflict, if only temporarily.] When Latro awakes, he thinks that the wind seems to be the thought of Jove, “the god who rules the gods and cares little for men. It seemed to me that he was mad, black thoughts repeating one or two words again and again as they brooded upon revenge” (*Mist*, XLI 298). [The presence of Jove or Zeus in Wolfe’s novels is never clear. We never truly learn if Zeus undergoes synthesis with Kronos and Ahura Mazda in Latro’s scrolls, or if he has himself somehow been fractured into all of the various gods.]
560
561Latro notes that he is near an abyss, and soon the Maiden Kore comes to talk to him, telling him she will keep his scroll. The dialogue they exchange features an abrupt cut, typical of Wolfe’s elisions:
562
563>“And you’re a goddess? I didn’t think –”
564
565>She smiled sourly. “We still meddled in the wars of Men? Not often now, but the Unseen God wanes, and we are no longer lost in his light. We will never be wholly gone. …
566
567>“I act for my mother, and not for you. You owe me no thanks. Nor do I owe you any. If you had accepted your beating like any other slave, my task would have been easy.”
568
569>“I am not a slave,” I said.
570
571>She smiled again. “What Latro? Not even mine?”
572
573>“Your worshipper, Maiden.”
574
575>“Smooth tongued as ever. No man outreaches his gods, Latro, not even in falsehood.” (*Mist*, XLI 300)
576
577[Kore’s comments on the waning of the Unseen God might resonate with the breaking of Persian power and the fragmentation of Ahura Mazda’s might into the disparate pagan Greek and Roman elements that would dominate Europe. Her final line, involving falsehood and a man outreaching his gods, might also reflect back on her identification of Latro as a slave, which he intuitively rejects. Oddly, she says that her job would have been easy if Pasicrates, a servant of Artemis Orthia, had administered his punishment. Just as at the conclusion of *Soldier of Arete*, this muddles the actual individuality of the different gods and confuses their motives, though she clearly desires Latro’s acceptance of a subservient role.]
578
579In return for reuniting him with his comrades, Kore demands a sacrifice. When he agrees to whatever she wants, even Io, she settles upon a wolf. “The wolf is sacred to my mother, as you would know had you not forgotten it” (*Mist*, XLI 300). She orders him to slit the wolf’s throat, and to give his sword to a child he will soon see walking with a woman. Their exchange concluded, Latro runs towards the walls of Sestos, where Drakaina and Io huddle. Pasicrates notices him and gives chase, though his bandaged stump is still bright with blood. The archers from the wall attack as the Spartans drag the runner back to safety, and Latro quickly gives Io his sword. Hellene shield men emerge from the wall and take them inside the city, and Latro is placed in a cell.
580
581Later, Io reveals that she witnessed a bejeweled man of Parsa staring at Drakaina in lust from the wall; she surmised that if Drakaina went near the wall, his men would act to bring her inside. When they are brought before the Persian Satrap of Susa, Artaÿctes, Drakaina’s boasting on Latro’s behalf results in a fight with three guardsmen, without weapons. The satrap orders them to kill Latro quickly, but the Roman begs the Maiden’s aid as he prepares. At his request, an older man and a perfectly formed young one enter unnoticed. The older man soon reveals that he is the shade of Odysseus. Latro injures one of his assailants and the ancient hero pounces upon the man, “his mouth crimson with blood” (*Mist*, XLII 308). [Though the young, handsome man with Odysseus is never named, it seems likely that he is actually Achilles, to whom Odysseus refers as the son of Peleus when he calls out for more blood. Another possibility involves the young general who besieged Troy, the warrior Diomedes, the “next best thing” to Achilles – of strange note here is that Diomedes once wounded Ares in battle with a spear, and was granted a gift of divine vision to identify immortals, eventually becoming a god in sources after Homer. The animosity between Diomedes and Ares might not make him the best fit for this particular scene, but Diomedes and Odysseus worked closely together in several memorable events, including the theft of the Palladium from Troy. We shall return to some of these ideas, but will assume for now that the handsome naked figure is actually that of Achilles.]
582
583After the fight, Drakaina reveals that Artaÿctes plans on fleeing the city and leaving the Greeks to their own devices – his reinforcements never arrived and his supplies are limited. He knows that the people of the city are leaking information to Xanthippos, and says that he plans to escape at night with Latro protecting Drakaina, to the northeast of Sestos rather than the more obvious southwest. Latro chooses armor and weapons from the armory, selecting a helmet from the Tall Cap Country so that he is not confused for a Hellene. [The Phrygian or Thracian helmet actually does feature a tall protuberance like the caps favored in Thrace, confirming our earlier suspicion that the Tall Cap Country is indeed Thrace. In mythology, the quintessential Thracian, Thrax, was a son of Ares. While some sources definitely suggest that the Thracians are Hellene, Herodotus, Wolfe’s primary source, seems to treat them distinctly.] During Latro’s survey of the landscape from inside Sestos, he notices that the satrap has housed his concubines in a tomb. For this sacrilege, Io comments, “I wouldn’t like to be Artaÿctes when he dies” (*Mist*, XLII 311). She explains the underground country of ghosts ruled by Kore and the Receiver of Many as Chthonios to Latro. That night Latro realizes that he will leave Io behind in the city.
584
585The next day Latro is roused by Drakaina and a spearman, and Artaÿctes proclaims his instructions to the men:
586
587>“In the most holy, most sacred name of the Sun! … When next the Sun, the divine promise of Ahura Mazda, mounts his throne, we shall be free, every one of us, and once more in the Empire.
588
589>“So it shall be if we act like men. Those who fight must press ever forward as they fight. Those who need not fight must turn back and fight to aid their brothers.” (*Mist*, XLIII 312-3) 
590
591As they escape the city on horseback, Latro catches sight of an eagle on a staff, the symbol of Rome, and his heart is filled with emotion. At the same instant, Drakaina realizes that Artaÿctes did not trust her, and has opted to leave the city some other way, as the Hellenes within Sestos block retreat back inside. Latro engages the foes, and after a heated battle comes to himself near Falcata, buried in the mud. Amidst the bodies, he finds Drakaina being ravaged by a wolf, who weakly turns towards Latro 
592
593It has already been paralyzed, its back broken, and Latro realizes that the wolf is somehow the bowman Oior as well: “[T]he paws that held the woman were hands even while they were paws.” Latro fends off the wolf’s weak attacks while it implores him: “More than a brother … The woman would have robbed me … She had a dagger for the dead. I hoped she would kill me. Now you must. Remember, Latro? More than brothers, though I die” (*Mist*, XLIII 315). Latro slits Oior’s throat as an apparition of the Maiden watches. When he goes to the body of Drakaina, he notices, “What I had thought the woman’s tongue was a snake with gleaming scales. … My blade bit at its back, but it seemed harder than brass.” While the snake which possessed Eurykles flees into the battlefield, at this point, the “woman” declares, “Mother, it’s Eurykles!” and expires (*Mist*, XLIII 315). During his sacrifice of Oior, Latro also hears a name being called out to him from someone on the battlefield: “Lucius.” 
594
595Now free to seek out the call’s source, he finds a dying man dressed in lion’s skin beside the broken eagle standard.
596
597>The lion was dying. “Lucius …” He used my own speech. “Lucius, is it really you?”
598
599>I could only nod, not knowing what to say; as gently as I could, I took his hand.
600
601>“How strange are the ways of the gods!” he gasped. “How cruel.” (*Mist*, XLIII 316)
602
603As Kore promised, Latro is reunited with his defeated and dying comrades, and we learn his name at last at the close of the first volume. [Beyond the association of the eagle with the banner of Roman legions, lion images were usually associated with kingship in ancient Rome. The name Lucius has been associated with the Greek term for wolf, λύκος, and while he is clearly the bearer of the “wolf’s tooth” and the lupine, our thesis depends more heavily on its direct Roman meaning: “light.” [The most obvious Christian reference outside of Persian Zoroastrianism comes from John 8:12: “I am the light of the world.”] 
604
605The introduction to the second scroll details three gaps in the narrative: one after Latro leaves Pactye, another when the Europa arrives at Piraeus, and a third following the manumission ceremony at Sparta, which truly sinks Latro into despair. It also discusses horse and mounted warfare in the ancient and contemporary worlds and asserts the historicity of the Amazon women. The importance of horses in this volume cannot be overstated, given the presence of centaurs who appear human such as Polos and the theft of the Horses of the Sun [as well as the classical representation of Ahura Mazda as a man standing on a horse.]
606
607Latro writes on a new scroll in the aftermath of the siege at Sestos, noting the long dark hair of Io as she explains why the city fell. Artaÿctes rallied his men for an assault before attempting to escape elsewhere by lowering himself down the wall. He and his men were captured, and the city is now under the control of the Aeolian Greeks. Latro finds himself once again in the service of Hypereides, who takes him to visit Artaÿctes and his young son Artembares in the tower in which they are imprisoned. Hypereides greets the former ruler of Sestos as a friend, and wants to know about the bridge of boats which the Persians used to cross into Greece. While he acknowledges that Xanthippos pleases whomever he speaks to at the moment, Hypereides seeks the whereabouts of an engineer named Oeobazus. Artaÿctes confirms that Oeobazus must have made his escape by now. As Latro and Hypereides hurry away with the promise of wine for the important prisoner lingering in the air, Latro sees the sun from the corner of his eye: “[I]n place of the usual sphere of fire, a chariot of gold drawn by four horses. I knew then that I had glimpsed a god [Helios], just as – according to my old scroll – I had seen a goddess before the death of the man who called me Lucius” (*Arete*, I 328).
608
609His vision of the horses leads him to conclude that their unbroken stride continues beyond the horizon, bringing the sun around the world to reappear in the east “just as we should see a runner dash behind some building and reappear on the opposite side” (*Arete*, I 329). This leads him to a question which is perhaps more thematically poignant than it first appears, if we take “beneath the world” as a metaphor for the land of the dead: “Are there those living beneath the world who have need of the sun, even as we? This is something I must consider at more length when I have the leisure to do so” (*Arete*, I 329).
610
611When Latro returns with wine, Artaÿctes begs his assistance, and reassures him that the Greeks need never learn that once he served the Persians. Latro agrees to try and free him. Hypereides returns with six pilchards, laying the fish on a brazier in the guardroom. At this point, Latro relates an event he calls unbelievable: One of the salted pilchards moves, and soon all six of the dead fish are flopping around (*Arete*, I 330). Artaÿctes reassures Hypereides that the message is for him: “This prodigy has no reference to you, my friend. It is meant for me – Protesilaos of Elaeus is telling me that though he is as dead as a dried fish, yet he has authority from the gods to punish the man who wronged him” (*Arete*, I 330). The people demand Artaÿctes’s death for stealing Protesilaos’s offerings and plowing his sacred soil. The Persian offers a hundred talents to restore the shrine, and promises further wealth if the soldiers will spare him. He even proposes his son as hostage, swearing by Ahura Mazda that he will pay in full. [Much later in the volume, we learn that Latro actually attempts to stage an escape, but that Artaÿctes refuses to leave, mistakenly believing that Xanthippos will hunt him down from the loss of the ransom he promised. Perhaps the pleas to Ahura Mazda move Latro.]
612
613The escape of the deposed ruler of Sestos matches Herodotus’s account at the very close of his chronicle:
614
615>[118] … When there were not even any straps left [to boil and eat], the Persians, including Artayctes [sic] and Oeobazus, escaped from the town under cover of darkness by climbing down the most remote wall, where there were hardly any enemy troops. The next day the Chersonesites in the town signaled to the Athenians from the towers to let them know what had happened, and then opened the gates. Most of the Athenians went after the fugitives, while the rest occupied the town.
616
617>[119] Oeobazus got as far as Thrace, but the Apsinthian Thracians caught him and sacrificed him, after their own fashion, to a local god called Pleistorus; they also killed all his companions, but not by sacrificing them. … The prisoners, who included Artayctes and his son, were bound by the Greeks and taken back to Sestus [sic].
618
619>[120] There is a story told by the people of the Chersonese of a miracle that happened when one of the men guarding these prisoners was roasting his salt fish: the fish were lying in the fire when they suddenly started flopping about and wriggling, like newly caught fish. The people grouped around the fire were puzzled by the phenomenon, but when Artayctes noticed it he called out to the man who was cooking the fish and said: ‘You needn’t be alarmed by this omen, my Athenian friend. It has nothing to do with you. It is Protesilaus [sic] from Elaeus telling me that even though he is dead and mummified like salt fish, the gods still grant him the power to punish a criminal. Under these circumstances I shall impose the following penalty on myself: in compensation for the property I took from the sanctuary, I’ll pay the god a hundred talents, and I’ll give two hundred talents to the Athenians for the life of myself and my son, if I am allowed to live.  … [T]he Athenians took him down to the shore on which Xerxes’ bridge across the straits had ended (or, in another version, to the hill which overlooks the town of Madytus), where they nailed him to a plank of wood and suspended him from it, and then stoned his son to death before his eyes. (Herodotus 588-9)
620
621While Wolfe changes some of the scenes in Herodotus, especially concerning the fate of Oeobazus, the end of Artaÿctes proceeds much according to *The Histories*. In the morning a herald declares that Artaÿctes is to die, and Hypereides asks if Latro wants to see them killed. As Hypereides, Latro, and Seven Lions go to watch the spectacle, the sharp wind reminds Hypereides that they need new cloaks. Hypereides supposes that fish might be made to move by the sudden heating of all that oil and fat. [Normally, this would be a mystery to puzzle over in a Wolfe text, but its precise historical origin leads us to consider that it is indeed a manifestation of Protesilaos’s displeasure, as well as perhaps a physical event caused by the combustible properties of suddenly heating the pilchards. However, Wolfe’s description of the crucifixion and the manner in which Xanthippos allows the crowd to choose the fate of Artembares resonate so strongly with the crucifixion of Christ that we are tempted to suggest the fish accrue something of their Christian significance. The primary mystery of Christ involves a death, a descent into hell, and an escape, providing the spiritual possibility of redemption and deliverance from those damning fires. In early Christian history, the fish symbol was designed to help avoid Roman persecution.] Hypereides regrets the wanton waste of the fortune Artaÿctes promised for his freedom. [Once again reinforcing the Athenian interest in money.] The speech of Xanthippos reveals that the Spartans left before the city was freed and promises a return to liberty for the Greeks living in Sestos. His rhetoric indicts Thebes for its assistance to Persia at Plataea and elsewhere, and he promises Athenian support no matter what. 
622
623Turning to the execution at hand, he declares an election: the people of Sestos are to decide if the boy Artembares lives or dies by casting votes with stones: “*If you will that he lives, move aside and let him flee. But if instead it is your will that he die, stop him, and cast a stone. The choice is yours!*” (*Arete*, II 335)
624
625Artembares flees toward the coast instead of through the crowd, and the stones strike him down. Latro hopes that he died quickly.
626
627>As for his father, after he had watched his son die, he was laid on his back upon the timber and pikes were driven through both his ankles and both wrists into the wood; when it was done, the timber was set upright in the hole that had been dug for it and rocks and sand piled around it to keep it so. (*Arete*, II 336)
628
629[The crucifixion of a man who swore by Ahura Mazda, whom Latro promised to help release if he could, even though it is historical, might also resonate with Christian history, especially considering the death of an innocent son in this scene. The waning of the Unseen God which Kore spoke of at the end of the first volume might involve the loss of Persia and the decreasing influence of Ahura Mazda in favor of the more splintered faiths of the Greeks and Romans. Later, the spirit of Artembares will be confused for Ares’s grandson Itys by Hegesistratus – further tying together these patterns that foreshadow the pivotal moment in Christian history, if Ahura Mazda is somehow related to Ares.]
630
631Returning to the plot, Hypereides reveals that Xanthippos wants Oeobazus the engineer, who was in charge of producing the giant cables which held the giant Persian bridge of boats together, so that he can show off both the cables and their innovator in Athens. Latro and his companions will soon follow the engineer north. When Latro and Seven Lions attempt to retrieve Io, they cannot find her, so they proceed to purchase the cloaks for their master. Latro realizes that the shops will lower their prices if they think the Athenians are leaving. Even though Hypereides had told them not to get him a red or yellow cloak (the Spartans wear red), Latro accidentally discovers that Hypereides had recently purchased a larger red cloak. [This is for the leader of his hoplites, Acetes, who will pose as a Spartan of importance to intimidate the Thracians much later in the novel, when Hypereides’s crew comes to Cobrys.]
632
633Later, both Seven Lions and Latro go to search for Io, though Latro admits he hopes to free Artaÿctes as well. [He must have forgotten overcoming the guards and attempting to free the satrap already, which he only learns from the shade of the boy Artembares much later.] Latro hears that the satrap has died: “[T]he soldiers had pricked him with their spears without result, and at last one had driven the head of his spear into his belly to determine whether his blood would spurt; it had only leaked away like water from a sponge, so it was certain that the action of the heart had ceased” (*Arete*, III 341). [This, too, foreshadows the death of Christ, whose pierced side leaked blood and water, and whose death scene even involved a taunting sponge dipped in vinegar.]
634
635The bystanders mention that a half-grown girl and a lame man remain behind at the body, and though Latro doubts it could be Io, he soon finds her near “a boy, the soldiers, and the man the idler had mentioned … with the corpse of Artaÿctes” (*Arete*, III 341). The lame man has lost his right foot, and wears a wooden socket and a peg instead. Io comforts him as he weeps. This is the mantis Hegesistratus, a historical Hellene who advised the Persians. The mantis claims that he is from the Isle of Zakunthios and that Artaÿctes was an excellent friend to him, his last ally in the region. [The boy only Latro can see is actually the spirit of Artembares, who accompanies them on their journey.] Latro invites Hegesistratus to the house Hypereides has been using, and soon the mantis speaks to Seven Lions in “the speech of Aram,” finally revealing his name to Latro. [Up to this point, he has only been referred to as the black man in the text. Aramaic, the language of Jesus, evolved from the Phoenician alphabet and by the time of the events depicted in these novels would have become the lingua franca of the Achaemenid Empire (Persia).] Hegesistratus requests to stop by his own lodgings to rest his leg for a bit. Latro urges him to rest as long as he requires, and quite ominously seeks “his opinion of my sword” (*Arete*, III 343). [Tisamenus, Pausanias’s sorcerer, placed a murderous compulsion on Latro in Chapter XXXIV of *Soldier of the Mist*.]
636
637As Hegesistratus and Latro sit to drink wine, Latro becomes more obsessed with his sword, and soon he rises to get it. Latro writes, “I was about to give it to him when he struck my wrist with his crutch and it fell from my hand; the black man jumped up brandishing his stool, and Io screamed” (*Arete*, IV 344). Somehow, the point of Latro’s blade becomes stuck in the floor, and Latro feels as if he has awakened from a dream. When Latro cannot explain his actions, only insisting that he wanted the mantis to examine his sword, Hegesistratus takes a look at it. He declares, “Are you - any of you- aware that divinity can be transmitted, like a disease?"(*Arete*, IV 345)
638
639Hegesistratus compares divinity to leprosy, transmitted by touch, and concludes that he “thinks” the sword has been touched by a minor deity. He asks if Latro has killed with it, and Io blurts that he killed several Spartan slaves [at the start of *Soldier of the Mist* after the Bacchanalia. Though it is not certain (and not with Falcata), Latro might also have slain the Spartan leader Leonidas.] Hegesistratus warns that “the dead may walk. Particularly those slain with this blade” (*Arete*, IV 346). 
640
641When Hypereides returns, he recognizes his guest as Hegesistratus of Elis, the mantis who advised Mardonius not to advance at Plataea. Here, Hypereides reveals some of his animosity for the Assembly, which wanted to turn Boeotia over to the Phoenicians – a move which would be disastrous for his leather trade after the war ends, but which was prevented by the Spartans. Hegesistratus already knows that Hypereides plans to chase after Oeobazus, claiming that Artaÿctes told him of Hypereides’s inquiries before his death. He describes the Mede Oeobazus to them, and asks why Hypereides has spent so much time in Sestos, when his ship’s needs should have been quite easy to meet. Hypereides needs someone who will speak the languages of the lands to which they will travel, and Hegesistratus volunteers himself.
642
643Io is convinced that Latro planned to kill the mantis, though he denies it. Later, Hegesistratus consults the flight of birds for signs and asks Latro about his experiences with Pausanias, mentioning his servant, Tisamenus of Elis, a distant cousin of Hegesistratus. He says, “both our families are of the Iamidae; but they have been rivals since the Golden Age, when the gods dwelled among men” (*Arete*, IV 349). Latro ironically [if our thesis is accurate] wishes that it were still the golden age and says, “then I might go to some god, and he might make me as others are.” Hegesistratus, utilizing the infamous ambiguous pronoun reference that allows Wolfe to create so many double meanings, says: “You are less different from them than you believe, nor is it easy for men to earn the gratitude of the gods; and they are not much prone to it. … Io has told me that you see the gods already. So do I, at times” (*Arete*, IV 349). [In this case, “them” could either be other mortals with memories or the gods themselves; if Latro is at all divine, then Hegesistratus is indeed seeing the gods as he boasts of his abilities.]
644
645Hegesistratus asks if he might remove the charm of Tisamenus from Latro, and afterwards Latro comes to himself finding the mantis gone, with, as he notes, “the small knife I brought to sharpen my stylus … smeared with blood” (*Arete*, IX 350). [While this scene might be somewhat disorienting at first, Hegesistratus is implanting a “false” explanation for any lameness Latro might identify in the future. Latro succeeds in stabbing him in the side regardless. We later learn that Hegesistratus went to consult a friend after Latro’s attack, whom he insists remain nameless. Supposedly, the only ally Hegesistratus had in the region has just been crucified. Given Hegesistratus’s ability to convincingly fake his own death later with illusion, do we have enough information by the end of the novel to advance the idea that Xanthippos actually was interested in the gold offered by Artaÿctes and agreed to fake his death?]
646
647When they depart from Sestos on the *Europa*, Hegesistratus falls ill [though he is merely wounded], and Io indicates she is nursing him. Latro and Seven Lions row, and at one point the Nubian disappears for a time, refusing to acknowledge why.
648
649On the trip to Pactye, they make camp ashore, and Latro has a vision of a beautiful woman (Elata) watching the camp while the new moon is in the sky. The shieldmen on guard do not seem to notice her, and when Latro approaches, she claims to be “the bride of this tree,” pointing to the tallest pine. [In myth, Pitys attempted to escape the affections of Pan and was transformed into a mountain pine. This nymph, Elata, has a name which means “glorified.”] Most who come into the wood sacrifice to her (*Arete*, V 353). Latro presents her cake, wine, and honey. While she cannot return the Roman mercenary to the fields he owns, she can show him a vision of them. Latro sees a bright daylight world, with new turned-earth and a grizzled worker who cannot hear him. “I wanted to ask her then whether these fields were indeed mine, and if so why the old man plowed them; yet I knew they were, and that the garden, vineyard, and house were mine as well. I even guessed that it was my father who plowed” (*Arete*, V 355).
650
651The dryad promises that the harvest will be good, since she is there, but indicates that since the sun is almost at the horizon, Latro cannot stay long in this place. They pass to the house on the property, and at the doorstep Latro sees something he describes as neither ape nor bear:
652
653>[H]airy and uncouth, yet possessing an air of friendship and goodwill, like an old dog that greets its master. Its eyes held golden sparks, and when I saw them I remembered (just as I remember now) how I had seen them dance about the room once when I was small. This hairy being did not move as we approached it, though its golden eyes followed us as we passed. (*Arete*, V 355)
654
655[This being seems to be a manifestation of the dancing golden light that Latro perceived as his tutelary deity, whom he calls Lar. Notice that the god is but a pet in the house. Inside, his mother recognizes him, calling him by the name Lucius and declaring that they believed him dead. Later, when Latro sits on the Hill of the Muses with Simonides and constructs his Memory Palace, the flickering golden lights of Cimon’s residence will resonate strongly with the description of this beast’s eyes, tying it to a myth of divine inception, as the place where the muses were conceived by Zeus and Mnemosyne.] Latro observes, “And all that time, although my mother held me in her arms as she had when I was a child, I could see across her shoulder that she slept still, her head cradled in her arms” (*Arete*, V 355).
656
657His mother declares that it is not her house but his, she and asks the nymph who has revealed this vision if she can stay. As the sun sets and the field and house fade back into the night shore on which Latro rests, the nymph reclines with him, though a passing rabbit calls out her name: Elata. At this point, Latro hears the sounds of dogs coursing deer, and he becomes concerned that they might be injured by the pack. A stag interrupts Latro and Elata, and she prophecies that another man from the ship is coming to visit her. [As we have already said, dogs howling indicate the presence of Hecate, and the stag is associated with one of her aspects, Artemis or the Huntress.] In the next chapter, Latro reveals that Elata saves him from the dogs, who fawn upon her, and that he receives words from a young goddess, the Huntress, who follows the hounds. Hegesistratus and a shieldman from the ship also have intercourse with Elata.
658
659When the Huntress touches Latro with her bow, he remembers their encounter at the crossroads, though he acknowledges that then her manifestation was quite distinct, and she was flanked by different types of dogs. The approaching Hegesistratus does not seem to notice the Huntress until he reaches out and grabs Latro’s hand, at which point he bows his head in acknowledgment, calling her Cynthia [another epithet for Artemis].
660
661Artemis leaves them a prophecy:
662
663>“Latro named me a queen. Soon you’ll meet another …. She has a strong protector, and I intend to make use of him to flush a boar; all of you must aid, and not oppose, her. But when the moment comes, the slut must lose. It will be at my brother’s house – you know it, mantis – and thus you should be on friendly soil. … The queen will save you, if you don’t turn south. … Latro has all the qualifications of a hero save one – he forgets instructions. You [Hegesistratus] must see to those. My queen must win in order that the prince may be destroyed – and thus this queen must not win.” (*Arete*, VI 360)
664
665[Here, Artemis first speaks of the Amazon Hippephode, who is under the protection of Pleistorus the War God and Latro, whom she hopes to use to flush the boar (which might be Zalmoxis) from the temple. Her brother, Apollo, has a famous oracle at Delphi, where the Pythian Games will be held at the end of the volume. The horses which the Amazons seek in Thrace are intended to ensure their victory in the final chariot race at those games, in which they ride for the Athenian Themistocles. The confusion comes in the final line, in distinguishing the difference between “my queen” and “this queen.” It seems that the Spartan Queen Gorgo, who serves the Triple Goddess, might be “my queen,” while Hippephode of the Amazons is relegated to “this queen.” Is the prince who might be destroyed Pausanias? Judging from Gaea’s words in *Soldier of the Mist*, she desires his success for the helots, while the Huntress wants him to fail. Therefore, it seems that the Huntress desires that the Amazons lose the race so that Gorgo and Pausanias can triumph, though in winning, she wants to guarantee Pausanias’s destruction so that the plans of Gaea might be frustrated, and Sparta might remain unchanged.]
666
667She indicates that Latro brings victory, so he must drive for her prince. [Latro will represent Pausanias in the chariot races at the end of the volume. On further reflection, the difference between “the prince” and “my prince” is also somewhat confounding. In all likelihood, Pausanias is the prince intended in both cases, even though the judge Cyklos is even referred to as a prince at one point in Sparta.] In return, the goddess promises to return Latro to living friends. [Though she says that she has no interest in the dead, Hegesistratus whispers that she is responsible for the sudden death of women – the later injury and sudden death of Latro’s Amazon love interest Pharetra might be foreshadowed in this statement, placing responsibility at the feet of the Huntress, especially since she is slain with an arrow.] She also indicates that Latro will be punished for deflowering her maid Elata, “Losing for a while at least what you’re pleased to call your manhood” (*Arete*, VI 361). She gives Elata to Hegesistratus, calling his longings “filthy.” The goddess disappears and Latro and his companions leave the forest.
668
669Hegesistratus asks if Latro knows of the Destroyer, claiming that many things, including wolves, lions, and even mice need to be destroyed. [Apollo is often associated with mice – one of his epithets is “Lord of Mice,” but wolves and lions are clearly symbols of the Great Mother.] A memory stirs in Latro, who responds that “though there might be no harm and even some good in the destruction of mice, I was far from sure I would wish to see all the wolves and lions dead” (*Arete*, VI 362). Hegesistratus identifies Elata as a dryad or nymph and tells Latro that the Huntress once asked her father Zeus to make her full-grown at the age of three, like her parthenogenetic sister Athena: “[I]t is sometimes said that because of it she has never grown up in truth” (*Arete*, VI 364).
670
671Io reports a large animal moving among the trees, though no convincing explanation is offered. [Referring to Wolfe’s solar bed-time story “The Old Woman Whose Rolling Pin Is the Sun” might help clarify what the Hounds are pursuing. We shall expand on this in the final dream sequence of the novel.] Latro suggests that the boy on the ship might help protect Elata, though both Hegesistratus and Io insist that there is no such boy on the ship. [The shade of Artembares has accompanied them from Sestos after he was stoned.]
672
673At Pactye, Latro surmises that the narrow sea from the prophecy of Apollo must be Helle’s Sea, and that the lines “*Look under the sun if you would see!*” must refer to the past. Latro also notes that when he polished his armor, he noticed that it might possess a spirit: “[I]t seemed a tall woman with a shining face stood behind me, though when I looked, she was not there” (*Arete*, VII 366). [This is the victory Nike, who stands behind Latro rather than in the armor.]
674
675At Pactye, they learn that Oeobazus is among the Apsinthians, and the captain recommends that Hegesistratus consult the gods. Hegesistratus resolves to do so at a sacred grove dedicated to Itys. [This leads to the story of Procne and Philomela. When Procne learns that her sister Philomela has been raped by her husband Tereus, she kills her son Itys and serves him as a meal to her husband. The gods turn Procne, Philomela, and Tereus into birds. More importantly for our thesis, Tereus was the son of the God of War, Ares, making Itys his grandson. Children killed for the sins of the father are featured in many myths, such as those surrounding Jason and Medea, also referenced in the Soldier series, but the Christian version of this emphasizes that the innocent Son is offered not for the sins of the Father but for all].
676
677Io informs Latro that there are Phoenicians [Crimson Men] in the city. [They will ultimately take Latro back to his home at the conclusion of the novel, fulfilling the Huntress’s promises, even though the outcome she desired does not come to fruition.] When Latro meets them, he is able to speak their language. The spirit of the young Artembares, in a colored cloak, continues to follow them through the streets, though no one else can see him and he remains unidentified by Latro. Hegesistratus indicates that he plans on using Latro to consult the gods, even though he purchases birds to sacrifice.
678
679When Latro goes to get material to produce a fire, an aging woman indicates that very few people visit the shrine. She asks Latro if he is “the one that’s lost [his] child,” telling him that Itys had been eaten by his father and revealing the purpose of the shrine (*Arete*, VII 370). [In some fashion, Latro might very well have lost Itys, and Tereus as well. Later, it will be revealed that the King of Cobrys in Thrace, Kotys, is also a descendent of Tereus and the War God.] The tale of Philomela and Procne concludes in the traditional fashion, with Tereus changed “to a black vulture, Procne to a nightingale, and pretty Philomela to a swallow … thus it is that the one sings only when it cannot be seen, while the other flies too swiftly to be caught; for their foe pursues them always.
680
681“And so it is also that Itys, slain by his mother to avenge the crime of his father, brings help to children, who suffer for reasons they are too young to understand” (*Arete*, VIII 373).
682
683At the sacrifice, Hegesistratus reveals that Tereus was an enemy of Thrace who supported Athens in their war, and further details the story of Procne and Philomela. In Hegesistratus’s version, Tereus cuts out Philomela’s tongue so that his lawful heir Prince Itys will have no succession problems, in case Philomela bore a son. Latro wonders how, even without letters, she might be kept from revealing the story, but concludes: “[H]ow many women who have tongues, similarly wronged, have held their peace from shame! Doubtless Philomela, cruelly forced to silence, felt as they did” (*Arete*, VIII 372).
684
685During the ceremony, Hegesistratus attempts to probe Latro to learn if his counter-charm is still in place. Latro sees the strangely dressed boy [Artembares] clearly (as does Elata) and Hegesistratus instructs him to inquire of Oeobazus’s fate. The boy emphasizes that Oeobazus is a Mede, and therefore not completely trustworthy. He also indicates that Oeobazus is currently on a horse, amidst tall warriors with lances. “A hairless man who looks very strong holds the noose about his neck” (*Arete*, VIII 374).
686
687When Hypereides interrupts the ceremony, Hegesistratus promises that the portents were favorable, so long as the advice of Itys is followed. [Here, he mistakenly attributes the words of Artembares to Itys, though the identity of the spectral boy is not made clear until much later in the novel.] Also, he seems to embellish the advice of the scrying: “We – Itys specifically indicated the four of us here, and your black slave – must track Oeobazus in Thrace” (*Arete*, VIII 275). Hypereides accepts his words, but when he reveals that Hegesistratus actually has a wooden foot, Latro reacts: “(It was only then that I saw that Hegesistratus’s right foot, which I had supposed booted, was indeed no more than a wooden peg; and I resolved to kill him when I can.)” (*Arete*, VIII 375) That night Io weeps, fearing her return to Thebes after failing to get Latro to sleep with her. Latro resolves to avoid putting her into more danger than necessary and to “travel the world until I find a place where the people know me and tell me I am of their blood” (*Arete*, VIII 376).
688
689The first gap in the narrative in *Soldier of Arete* occurs before the start of Part Two. Latro resumes by describing Elata and several river nymphs dancing at the boundary of Apsinthia. [This dance seems to be intended to bring rain – later, his showdown with the intimidating King Kotys of Thrace is interrupted by a strong downpour.] Latro also reveals an innate dislike of Athens and a sympathy for Oeobazus, the man they have been seeking. As they bathe in the river, Latro tells his companion that he saw someone in the woods who seemed to be accompanied by a lion: “a big man with a lance on a big horse” (*Arete*, IX 380). [This matches the image on the banner of Pleistorus in his Thracian temple, but that banner was originally supposed to feature Zalmoxis in the form of a boar as well. This “unseen” god might be active in the plot, however, and, though he is an enemy of Pleistorus, somehow the Thracians maintain a relationship between them in their representations.]
690
691When Latro looks at the tracks of the creature accompanying the mounted figure, he notes a sure identification cannot be made by size alone “for the great hounds of Molossis leave imprints as big as a small lion’s” (*Arete*, IX 382). [Molossis dogs, an extinct breed, had some features of modern mastiff breeds and were used in war by the Romans, though some speculate that the Greeks used them as well.] The steps of the rider’s horse remain invisible, but Latro finds the pug markings of a lion in the tracks on the ground. [Here we shall delve into some problematic symbols. From the lionized warrior goddess Sekhmet to the lion in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the association between solar deities and the figure of the majestic cat is fairly well established. In Greek mythology, the lion is associated with Hecate, but if part of the subtext of the Latro series involves the appropriation of symbols, a re-ordering of the divine, then the most archetypal association of the lion, as a solar symbol and the light of the world, might also resonate with the name Lucius. Unfortunately, the presence of this large mounted figure and his accompanying lion problematize our identification of Latro as Ares: if this large man is not the God of War, then who is he? If he is indeed Ares or Pleistorus, then what of all the other associations between Ares and Latro? We shall return to this vitally important chain of symbols and the lion, though we should note that in Rome the wolf was associated with the cult of Mars while the lion was related to Hercules. While the shadowy figure who appears in this scene never interacts by name with Latro, Hercules actually does in *Soldier of the Mist*, offering him wrestling advice. If this insubstantial figure is indeed the War God, he never speaks to Latro, and is never named.]
692
693Hegesistratus believes the figure must have been an Apsinthian, and soon the small party is accosted by nine mounted Thracians wielding lances. When wine fails to placate them, their leader requests that Elata step closer to the fire. This induces a painful scream from the nymph; a fight breaks out. [Wood and fire don’t mix well.] Amazon women on horseback suddenly arrive and route the Thracian warriors.
694
695In the aftermath of the skirmish, Hegesistratus communicates with the warrior women. (He also claims to speak every human language.) Latro finds it strange. One of the Amazon warriors, Pharetra, was wounded in the lungs, and the group carries her on a litter as they travel onwards. [The Amazon women have come to buy four of the Horses of the Sun from Cobrys and King Kotys, so that they can ultimately compete at the chariot races at the Pythian Games in Delphi.] Latro notes that Pharetra’s hair is similar in color to his, though featuring more red, and that the Amazons have only one breast. He writes that her name is close to a word for “bowcase” (*Arete*, X 386). [Once again, the use of symbols to denote larger movements behind the text would suggest that when Artemis touched Latro with her bow a few chapters before, she was foreshadowing the effect of Pharetra on Latro, even as she prophesied that he would lose his manhood for a time. The Amazon women are called the Daughters of Ares several times in the text, so perhaps the similar hair color is no coincidence.] In any case, the bowcase of the injured Amazon woman features a griffin killing a man. [The griffin has the body of a lion and the head of an eagle – an auspicious combination which might also describe some of the imagery around the Roman Latro. In Greek and Roman tradition, griffins are guardians of prized possessions and gold. In antiquity they were considered both guardians of the divine and symbols of divine power (von Volborth, 45).]
696
697The companions eventually come to the city of Cobrys under King Kotys. The Thracians there are interested in presenting the Amazon women to their king. [Kotys is actually the name of a Thracian goddess, an aspect of Persephone, and the name means “war, slaughter.” However, there is clear precedent for a line of Thracian kings named Cotys, though it seems to begin more than a hundred years after the action of Latro’s scroll. Details elsewhere in the novel suggest the name Kotys is a royal tradition.] The Thracians set up a small guard around their visitors.
698
699Latro asks Hegesistratus to determine his fate, and the mantis agrees to read Io’s future as well. Using a salt-polished mirror (under the auspice of the Goddess of Love), Hegesistratus beholds the night sky. He sees swords and danger for Latro. Gods linger near him, some offering favorable influences: “Nike accompanies you always. The Destroyer [Apollo] smiles upon you-” (*Arete*, IX 388). Hegesistratus pauses when he catches a glimpse of his own death. He continues: “I saw the Boundary Stone beckon, and he is the patron of travelers. The Lady of Thought and the Huntress were playing draughts, which means that each will use you in the game if she can” (*Arete*, IX 389). [This interchange confirms that Hermes is indeed known as the Boundary Stone in Latro’s narrative. During the reading, Queen Hippephode asks the mantis about Ares. While the Triple Goddess appears multiple times in the text, there are few verifiable manifestations of Athena after her appearance in *Soldier of the Mist*. However, the subtle conflict between Athens and Sparta is overt in the text.] In response to Hippephode’s query, Hegesistratus says that he did not see the War God in his divination. He explains to Latro, “She said that you possess his virtues - *arete*, as we would say. She felt he might be inclined to defend you and it may well be true, I did not see everything.” Hegesistratus also advises Latro to go to Dolphins [to visit the Oracle at Delphi] and to “Beware of women, and of the learned, whether women or men” (*Arete*, IX 389). [The admission that he does not see everything and his inability to tell the difference between Itys and Artembares earlier suggests that his interpretation of these visions could also be incomplete: perhaps he merely did not recognize the War God before him.]
700
701At night, Latro notes, “Another rider has joined our guards, a larger man than the rest. That is bad, the dog very bad, perhaps” (*Arete*, IX 391). [This might be one of the key subtextual plot moments of the text – does this figure who joins the Thracians do anything during the night? If not, why the omen of evil for Latro’s companions? It becomes clear that Elata has influenced Hegesistratus to serve the Triple Goddess’s interests by the end of the novel, but is she the only influence on the mantis? Has Zalmoxis, who will appear as an oversized boar and seems to have subverted the will of Prince Thamyris of Thrace, also taken an active interest in Latro and his companions?]
702
703Latro sneaks into Cobrys later under the cover of darkness to see if he can ascertain the location of Oeobazus, and awakens a Greek named Cleton, who soon offers him wine and asks about the number of his companions. When Latro says that there are thirteen of them, Cleton responds, “That’s an unlucky number, don’t you know that? There are twelve Olympians, and they never permit a thirteenth. When the wine god came, the hearth goddess resigned to make room for him. It’s not pleasing to him to make a face at your host’s wine, by the way” (*Arete*, XI 394). [Here we learn that there is a fixed number of Olympians, of whom Ares was once a part. Latro obviously reacts to this information. Zeus’s sister, Hestia, was the goddess of the hearth, domesticity, agriculture, and family. Oddly, she remained an eternal virgin. Latro’s earliest memories might be fruitfully examined with the figure of Hestia in mind. The story of Dionysus’s childhood has already been related in fragments in Latro’s scroll. Conversely, we might consider Robert Graves’s claim that that all of the goddesses are actually Hestia.]
704
705When Cleton learns that Latro serves Hypereides and seeks aid in procuring freedom from their Thracian guards, he recognizes the Athenian’s name. At the mention of Hegesistratus, Cleton blurts out, “The man with the wooden foot? … You’re traveling in fast company, son” (*Arete*, IX 395). Latro learns that the large temple on the hill belongs to the War God Pleistorus. As Latro tries to make his way towards the temple in the dark, he comes across Elata and a procession of four dancing nymphs, invisible to others who hope to watch the main procession. Elata tells him he is headed the wrong way, towards the other great temple, dedicated to the Mother of the Gods. A larger assembly passes, led by a young and powerful figure who captivates Latro:
706
707>His eyes caught mine, and I could not look away. Nor, I think, could he.
708
709>He was youthful and tall, broad of shoulder, mounted upon a milk-white stallion. Mail that shone like gold covered him from neck to sole, save for a breastplate in the likeness of a lion, and greaves terminating in the features of a woman, tranquil and grave; but it is his own face that I remember most clearly, its thick brows, piercing eyes, and heavy jaw. It was the face of such a man, I think, as might lead entire armies to the edge of the world and beyond.
710
711>When the last of [the procession] had passed, I asked Elata whether the first rider had been the war god. She laughed at me just as she had at the womanish priest, assured me he was not, and told me that her friends had called him King Kotys. (*Arete*, XI 397)
712
713[Elata’s ability to see the supernatural forces at work in the text indicate that her denial can be trusted. As will be revealed later in the text, Kotys is a descendant of Ares.] Latro abandons his plans to get to the Temple of Pleistorus because of a sudden urge to get back to the camp before Hegesistratus wakes up. [Cleton’s words have re-awakened the murderous geas Tisamanus placed upon Latro.]
714
715Latro later writes: “Hegesistratus was still in this tent, rolled in his cloak. I plunged Falcata into his back” (*Arete*, XI 398). Hippephode and the black man seize him. Latro later notes:
716
717>Hegesistratus has told them to keep me here, and not allow me to go outside. … When I think back upon the night, I cannot understand why I desired so greatly to take the life of Hegesistratus the mantis. It was out of friendship for him … that I sought Oeobazus. … Yet I wished with all my heart for the death of Hegesistratus, and I saw no contradiction in that.
718
719>Although I no longer desire the life of Hegesistratus, it seems to me that what I learned concerning Oeobazus, King Kotys, Ares, and the others may be of importance in the future. (*Arete*, XI 398)
720
721 [The title of Chapter XI, “Ares and Others,” gives us a strong indication that the War God should have appeared in the chapter, but if we take Elata’s identification of Kotys at face value, he does not seem to have shown up. What has Latro actually learned of Ares in this chapter? In the next chapter, Latro reveals that he had only stabbed a blanket, believing it to be Hegesistratus. Later details in the final chapter indicate that this was not the death that Hegesistratus foresaw. While the surface narrative indicates that Hegesistratus fully expects to be killed soon after the conclusion of the second novel, the sinister presence of the large figure accompanied by a dog and the howling of hounds Hegesistratus hears late in the novel also seem highly suggestive of something sinister.]
722
723To determine whether the danger has passed now that Latro has “killed” him, Hegesistratus speaks to Latro alone, relating how he lost his foot. He claims that his family, primarily from Elis even though he dwelt on the Isle of Zakunthios, has always “been closer than most to the unseen” (*Arete*, XII 401). When Hegesistratus was younger, the Fates warned him not to visit Elis, despite constant invitations. Finally tempted by the promise of familial inheritance and the blessings of an elder, Hegesistratus consulted the Oracle at Delphi: “Though those most feared lay hold of thee, / Thy own strong hand shall set thee free” (*Arete*, XII 402). Hegesistratus went, and at the request of the people of Elis foretold that they were threatened from the south. That very night, Spartans took the city without resistance and captured Hegesistratus, taking him to their own city. His legs were bound in iron stocks and he underwent questioning, for the Spartans believed that his prophecy was instigated by an enemy of their people. Promised a painful execution, Hegesistratus received a dagger from one of his captors so that he might kill himself. Instead, he sawed off his foot to escape, fulfilling the god’s prophecy. “So many sacrifices and the examination of so many victims have taught me something about the way an animal is put together; and despite all our boasts, man is only a featherless animal on two legs … I tied off the major blood vessels, trimmed away flesh I knew could not live, and bandaged the stump as well as I could with my filthy chiton” (*Arete*, XII 405). [Here, Hegesistratus uses Plato’s infamous definition of a human as a featherless biped, commonly considered to be an unsatisfactory definition – one of the enduring stories of Diogenes involves him removing the feathers from a chicken and presenting it to Plato: “Behold! I’ve brought you a man.” One suspects that Wolfe might posit a slightly more involved definition of humanity that Plato and Hegesistratus espouse. Herodotus offers the Spartans better reason to hate Hegesistratus: “Hegesistratus had once been arrested and imprisoned by the Spartiates to await execution for the terrible and horrific treatment they had suffered at his hands” (Herodotus 556). Herodotus also described his bravery in cutting off his foot, but stressed that the animosity he harbored for the Spartans destroyed him: “[E]ventually the permanence of his hatred for the Lacedaemonians proved to be his undoing, because he was captured by them while serving as a diviner at Zacynthos [sic] and put to death” (557). The account Latro receives later from Tisamenus seems to agree with the tenor of Herodotus’s “terrible and horrific treatment” rather than Hegesistratus’s claim that he merely warned of danger from the south, though Tisamenus is no doubt one of these learned men whom Latro should not trust.]
724
725As Hegesistratus continues the story of his escape, riders from King Kotys arrive and demand that they surrender their horses and weapons by the end of the day. They must come before the king or face death. Hegesistratus tells the Thracians they will fight for Kotys however he desires, but they must be able to keep their weapons. He also demands Oeobazus and the horses the Amazons want to buy. The mantis translates Queen Hippephode’s words:
726
727>“We Amazons are the daughters of the War God; and though we love him, he is a strict father, laying upon us laws we dare not break. One is that we never lay down our arms, lest we become as the daughters of men. We may make peace, but only with one who trusts our pledge, and if he will not trust it and demands that we break our bows, we must fight until we die. To the present day, no Amazon has ever violated this law, which was not made by women or by men, but by the god who is our father.” (*Arete*, XII 406)
728
729Somehow, Latro knows that Oeobazus is in the war god’s temple. [In their earlier discussion, Cleton brought up the Temple of Pleistorus but never directly said that Oeobazus was being held there.] Hegesistratus considers what kind of offers would tempt King Kotys. Continuing his personal history, the mantis stresses how he has warned everyone he could against the Spartans and even served the Persians and Mardonius. He also relates that his quarrel with Tisamenus began with the struggle between the sons of Tellias and Clytias, “who betrayed him” (*Arete*, XIII 409). [Tellias was a seer who served the Phocians, sometimes in a military capacity.] Tisamenus was promised five great victories by the Oracle at Dephi, and, assuming that they would occur at the Olympic games, he enrolled. Hegesistratus was pressured into consulting the gods, and predicted that Tisamenus would lose every event he entered. Afterwards, Tisamenus joined Pausanias. Hegesistratus says, “Presumably the battles of Peace and Clay were two of the victories the god promised him, for Eurybiades, who commanded the fleets at Peace, is a subordinate of Pausanias’s, while the regent himself directed the allied armies at Clay” (*Arete*, XIII 409). [Herodotus lists Tisamenus’s five great military victories after describing his close failure at the Olympic games in Book Nine of *The Histories*. He also stresses the hard bargain Tisamenus drove before he would agree to serve the Spartans, demanding citizenship not only for himself but for his brother as well (Herodotus 555-6).]
730
731Hegesistratus claims that magi can force others to do their will, and that he learned it in the service of Persia. When they peruse Latro’s scroll, Hegesistratus speculates that Latro’s faulty memory might have somehow helped him to record Tisamenus’s phantom command after their meeting. He believes several oddities influenced the efficacy of the compulsion:
732
733>”It is difficult to force any man to act against his essential nature, you see. …. Latro, however, has been a soldier, and indeed from what you and the black man have told me, he was in the Great King’s army when it marched down from Horseland [Thessaly]. It is probable that he has killed a good many sons of Hellen; I was only one more. …
734
735>“Your tongue. Tisamenus did not know it, and so had to cast his spell in one not your own, which is extremely difficult; I was surprised to find that he had succeeded as well as he clearly had.
736
737>“After I had reviewed everything I knew of the subject, and consulted with a certain friend who was hiding in Sestos – do not speak about this man to others, please – I returned, intending to remove the spell if I could.” (*Arete*, XIII 412)
738
739[While we know that Hegesistratus considered himself a friend to the crucified satrap Artaÿctes and also says that the man was his last ally there, it is never clear who *this* friend hiding in Sestos might be. Everyone already knows that they are seeking out Oeobazus, so keeping his name a secret would do little good; he had already left Sestos regardless, and has not yet received a “new” name and identity as he will by the end of the book. This is scarcely enough evidence to create a scenario in which Hegesistratus used his magic to preserve Artaÿctes’s life, though he clearly has some skill as an illusionist. Does he truly have the power to communicate with the dead without Latro? Or should we infer that Xanthippos the Athenian took the gold and employed the powers of Hegesistratus to maintain the illusion of a crucifixion? Given the definite fate of Artembares, this would cast the Athenian in a duplicitous and avaricious light, perhaps justifying the chthonic appearance of Athena in *Soldier of the Mist*. If his friend is not the satrap, then the comment might lead nowhere.]
740
741Hegistratus reveals that Latro stabbed him in the side and concludes that there are powers far greater than Tisamenus at work; if Latro had succeeded in his assassination, his own companions might have killed him. Cleton arrives with news of his talk with Kotys. He has tried to convince the Thracian ruler, who is the high priest of Pleistorus, that Latro’s companions are traders or pilgrims. He indicates that he saw Oeobazus at the temple of Pleistorus afterwards. Cleton also describes an embroidered curtain from Sidon in the temple: it features “the god riding his horse. His lion’s running alongside, and he’s got his lance in one hand and his wine horn in the other. They wanted to do Zalmoxis as a boar down in one corner, but there wasn’t room enough for that, and besides it would be mostly in back of the statue down there” (*Arete*, XIV 416).
742
743[The figure on horseback from Chapter IX seems to match this description very well, which problematizes our identification of Latro as Ares (though it lacked the wine horn which seems to be a symbol of power in Thrace). Luckily, as we have already said, the imagery on this banner was supposed to feature another threatening figure: Zalmoxis, who was left off the representation. Given that the Huntress’s instructions for Latro demanded the flushing of a boar, Zalmoxis’s intended representation on the banner not only links him to that boar, but also to the War God. As the statue at Eleusis showed, swine are sacred to Demeter. The appendix lists Zalmoxis as a shape-shifting shaman, which conveniently offers an explanation for the appearance of a figure who looks like Ares but is never named, as well as the ill-feeling Latro experiences when a large figure joined the Thracian guards during the night of Hegesistratus’s divination. Let’s take a quick look at Herodotus’s account of the practices surrounding the figure of Zalmoxis, who seems to promise a permanent corporeal life that transcends death. His promises share more than a few similarities with the story of Christ. Zalmoxis seems to have become the supreme deity or mystery god of the Thracians, though he was once a mortal slave:
744
745>[94] … [The Getae’s] belief in their immortality takes the following form. Rather than dying, they believe that on death a person goes to a deity called Salmoxis (or Gebeleïzis, as some of them call him). At five-year intervals, they cast lots to choose someone to send to Salmoxis as their messenger, with instructions as to what favours they want him to grant on that occasion. This is how they send the messenger. They arrange three lances, with men to hold them, and then others grab the hands and feet of the one being sent to Salmoxis and throw him up into the air and on to the points of the lances. If he dies from being impaled, they regard this as a sign that the god will look favourably on their requests. If he does not die, however, they blame this failure on the messenger himself, call him a bad man, and then find someone else to send. They tell him the message they want him to take to Salmoxis while he is still alive. Another thing these Thracians do is fire arrows up into the sky, when thunder and lightning occur, and hurl threats at the god, because they recognize no god other than their own.
746
747>[95] I am told by the Greeks who live around the Hellespont and the Euxine Sea that this Salmoxis was a human being – a slave on Samos; in fact, he belonged to Pythagoras the son of Mnesarchus. When he gained his freedom, he amassed a considerable fortune there, and then returned to his native land. Now, Salmoxis had experienced life in Ionia and was familiar with Ionian customs, which are more profound than those of the Thracians, who are an uncivilized and rather naïve people; after all, he had associated with Greeks, and in particular with Pythagoras, who was hardly the weakest intellect in Greece. So they say he furnished a dining-room, where he entertained his most eminent countrymen, and taught them, while he wined and dined them, that he would not die, and neither would they, his guests, and neither would any of their descendants. Instead, he explained, they would go to the kind of place where they would live forever in possession of every blessing. But all the time, while he was holding these meetings and teaching this doctrine, he was building an underground chamber. When this chamber was finished, he disappeared, as far as the Thracians were concerned; he descended into his underground chamber and lived there for three years. The Thracians missed him and mourned him as if he were dead, but after three years he reappeared, and so validated what he had been teaching them. That is what I am told he did.
748
749>[96] Personally, I am not entirely convinced by this story about Salmoxis and his underground chamber, but I do not entirely disbelieve it either. However, I do think that Salmoxis lived a long time before Pythagoras. There might have been a human being called Salmoxis, or he might be a local Getan deity – but I am not going to pursue the matter further, beyond saying what I have said about Getan practices. Anyway, once the Getae had been defeated by the Persians, they were conscripted into his army. (Herodotus 266-7)
750
751Plato’s *Charmides* features an explicitly dualistic treatment of both Zalmoxis and healing that also criticizes the limited knowledge of the Greeks:
752
753>Then I, on hearing his approval, regained my courage; and little by little I began to muster up my confidence again, and my spirit began to rekindle. So I said, -Such, then, Charmides, is the nature of this charm. I learnt it on campaign over there, from one of the Thracian physicians of Zalmoxis, who are said even to make one immortal. This Thracian said that the Greeks were right in advising as I told you just now: “but Zalmoxis,” he said, “our king, who is a god, says that as you ought not to attempt to cure eyes without head, or head without body, so you should not treat body without soul”; and this was the reason why most maladies evaded the physicians of Greece—that they neglected the whole, on which they ought to spend their pains, for if this were out of order it was impossible for the part to be in order. For all that was good and evil, he said, in the body and in man altogether was sprung from the soul, and flowed along from thence as it did from the head into the eyes. Wherefore that part was to be treated first and foremost, if all was to be well with the head and the rest of the body. And the treatment of the soul, so he said, my wonderful friend, is by means of certain charms, and these charms are words of the right sort: by the use of such words is temperance engendered in our souls, and as soon as it is engendered and present we may easily secure health to the head and to the rest of the body also. (Plato, “Charmides”)]
754
755Returning to our story, Cleton indicates that King Kotys plans to sacrifice Oeobazus, though only kings sacrifice men instead of animals:
756
757>“You’ve got to take into account that the king isn’t just a regular man. … The king’s descended from Tereus – lots of them are named for him – and *he* was the son of Pleistorus himself. Pleistorus is the son of Kotytto – that’s our Rhea – and sometimes he’s her lover, too. So when the king stands up there at the altar with his sacred regalia on and chops the head off a *human being* you know he’s something more.” (*Arete*, XIV 416)
758
759[It is worth noting that the Titaness Rhea is the daughter of Gaea and the sister and wife of Kronos. While there is little mention of him in the text, the glossary indicates that Kronos “prevented the heavens from further influencing the development of life on earth” (*Arete*, Glossary 637). This syncretic conflation between daughter and mother might also have afflicted Gaea and Persephone in the text, as the Kotytto Cleton mentions seems to be the goddess Kotys as well. Latro will soon encounter the Great Mother in the form of Cybele, who is also associated with Rhea and Gaea. If Pleistorus is sometimes the lover of Kotytto, and he is also, as Oeobazus indicates, Ahura Mazda incognito, does this equate Ahura Mazda and Kronos? If so, then this strange amalgamation might very well be the Unseen God whose waning power has allowed the Greek gods to manifest themselves more clearly. In any case, both Rhea and Cybele are strongly associated with lions.]
760
761Cleton believes the sacrifice has been motivated by an oracle from Orpheus’s still “living” head inside a vault at Lesbos, which Hegesistratus translates as follows:
762
763>“Ill fare the strong when god, god smites, 
764
765>Then howl the hounds and wheel the kites.
766
767>Doves stoop like hawks, and oxen gore,
768
769>The child rides armed, and maids to war.
770
771>Then Bendis seeks to halt the sun,
772
773>But see how swift the lions run!
774
775>The Lord of Battles, battle brings,
776
777>And battle drinks the blood of kings.” (*Arete*, XIV 417)
778
779[The importance of Orpheus in mythology establishes him as one of the central figures of the mystery religions which were exceptionally popular in ancient Rome. In the stories surrounding him, his lyre and music could charm anything, and he visited and returned from the underworld. He was also a prophet of Dionysus, who also eventually became a figure of death and resurrection. The first line here indicates a struggle between gods – and overtly indicates at least one has been smitten. Bendis is the Thracian name for the Triple Goddess – Hecate, Artemis, and Selene, but more interestingly, she also might be the same as the goddess Kotys, which vastly confuses the separation between the Triple Goddess and the Great Mother. For the sake of our sanity, we shall ignore this and assume that they are still distinct forces, and that in Latro’s narrative Kotytto/Rhea and Bendis/Tridotis are rivals rather than identical – though the blending of the gods into a unified force might be the entire thematic promise of the novels. The halting of the sun might refer to the theft of the Horses of the Sun, though other readings relying on homophones (sun/son) are conceivable.
780
781Some of this solar imagery might be further explained in Wolfe’s later short story, “The Old Woman Whose Rolling Pin Is the Sun.” That story is heavily invested in the myths behind the constellations. Soon, Latro will discover that the baying of hounds will continually follow the boar Zalmoxis and that at times he is a bear, though he never seems to manifest himself in that fashion in the text. This only makes sense in light of the narrative which explains the approaching winter solstice in Wolfe’s later short story: hounds pursue the Great Bear before they abscond with the sun, at which point they run to the south with it in their mouths. (This explains the movement of the sun over the southern hemisphere at the approach of the Winter Solstice.) The narrator of Wolfe’s short story indicates that in the south, the golden sun is small and cold, and that wolves, emboldened by the hound’s absence, come to desecrate the camps of the north and endanger children. Latro, too, was warned about traveling to the south by the Huntress at the start of this novel. Finally, a child-mounted goat (Capricorn) scares the hounds away, allowing the sun to travel north once again. Capricorn covers birth dates from December 22nd to January 19th, and that should make the identity of the child riding the goat’s back fairly obvious. (Some renditions of Capricorn feature a goat-fish hybrid.) Later, when Latro dreams of a faun, the faun tells him, “I bring you.” This, too, might be a more transparent statement in light of the constellations involved in passing through the winter solstice so that the power of the sun might wax once again. The coming of Christ, too, is tied to a similar promise of renewal even though all must pass through the death of winter before the warmth of summer can return.]
782
783Latro fails to see what the words might have to do with Oeobazus, and Io almost certainly ironically asserts that it also has little to do with them. [Clearly, the Amazon maidens are mentioned, as is a battle which will at the very least destroy King Kotys (if not some other king). In our reading, one of the Olympians has also fallen to a more mortal state, and as the Lord of Battles, he will fight the Thracians and their king.]
784
785From Cleton’s report, Latro understands that the Thracians are planning to attack them when the moon is high, led by King Kotys himself. After Cleton leaves, Hegesistratus suggests that a horse would make a suitable sacrifice to the Amazon’s father, and that it must be the worst they have. He stresses, “I believe the god – this god particularly – will understand” (*Arete*, XIV 418). 
786
787As the Amazons plunge a short sword into the ground (the *akinakes* mentioned in the worship of Pleistorus in Herodotus, no doubt), Latro notes, “I had washed the worst of the horses (which I thought still a very good horse indeed)” (*Arete*, XIV 419). [This could be textual evidence that Ares does indeed find the sacrifice to be good.] Hegesistratus reads the entrails: “There is bad news … but good news, too. We will not escape every danger threatening us unscathed; but it appears that in the end we shall obtain what we wish. … Both groups …. Ares, at least, is pleased to grant his daughters’ request” (*Arete*, XIV 419). 
788
789Hegesistratus offers a line by line explication of the earlier prophecy from Lesbos. “It is not at all uncommon for oracles such as this to set a riddle in the first line which is solved in the final line, and I believe that to be the case here; ‘the strong’ are the kings referred to in the last line.” (*Arete*, XV 420). He indicates that the three gods involved are the Lord of Battles [Ares], the Huntress, and her brother Apollo. The hounds and kites indicate pursuit and death. When he explains doves swooping and oxen goring, he suggests that “the orderly operation of nature will be suspended … I think that we are being told here as well that specific individuals or groups whom we do not expect to fight will do so. Doves are of course birds sacred to the Goddess of Love, and when they appear in prophecy they most frequently represent fair young women.” He mentions the story of Philomela and Procne again, and also suggests that the oxen represent peasants, who might finally arm themselves. [At the very end of the novel, Latro will succeed in starting a slave revolt to cover his escape. A slender woman with a bow stands at his side, though at first it is difficult to believe that it is Artemis. Since Latro forfeits the field and the Amazons win the chariot race, her wishes for Pausanias are frustrated. Hegesistratus claims that he has failed the Huntress in that same chapter. We shall return to the implication of Artemis at Latro’s side in our conclusion.] Hegesistratus offers an unlikely reading of the line involving the armed child riding as the God of Love [Cupid], then concludes that the child must be someone with whom they are currently unacquainted, such as a prince from a neighboring state. [He is probably incorrect in this reading, unless future volumes might have expanded upon this possibility. Io’s actions are motivated by selfless, unrequited love for Latro in the closing sections of the narrative.] While he suggests that the maids driven to war might be nymphs, the more obvious identification with the Amazon women must also have occurred to King Kotys. Given the appearance of these women and the prominence of the prophecy, Hegesistratus asks Latro to consider: “[Y]ou are King Kotys. What will you do next?” (*Arete*, XV 422)
790
791Hegesistratus even suggests that in hastening the combat, Kotys might be questioning the applicability of the oracle to his own person: “The Bright God is said to spoil the oracles of Orpheus from time to time, and as we have already seen, he is certainly involved in all this, acting in opposition to his twin sister” (*Arete*, XV 422). Io realizes that Kotys has moved up sacrificing Oeobazus “to get on the good side of the Lord of Battles” (*Arete*, XV 422). Hegesistratus explains that he has been gifted with the ability to speak the tongues of all men, though others, such as the mantis Megistias who advised the Spartan King Leonidas, have different gifts, such as the ability to speak with birds and beasts. “I – who sometimes talk with gods – cannot converse with birds” (*Arete*, XV 424). [Once again, we are reminded of the famous story of St. Francis preaching to a flock of birds.] He advises Latro to read the portions of his scrolls dealing with the Huntress’s earlier words to him [in Chapter VI of *Soldier of Arete*] and of the compulsion placed on him by Tisamenus [in Chapter XXXIV of *Soldier of the Mist*, which also deals at great length with the nature of the gods and the existence of Ahura Mazda].
792
793Latro and the Amazon women mount their horses for a preemptive strike in the night. During the battle, Latro seizes King Kotys and struggles with him atop his own horse, noting the great strength of his foe. When he is surrounded by Thracians, he throws the king before the lances to escape and soon finds himself in a “sacred cave” with his companions. [Here, he learns that Io has ridden into battle as well, fulfilling Orpheus’s prophecy, wielding a sword given to her by Queen Hippephode: “It belonged to an Amazon who got killed before they met us. That’s what she said … I guess she still feels bad about her friend that died. … because she was crying when she gave it to me. I didn’t think they cried” (*Arete*, XV 427).] The priest who had previously tended the sacred cave (and was killed by Seven Lions) seems to have been castrated [indicating that the cave is sacred to Gaea.]
794
795Before dawn, the Thracians attack again, but Latro easily holds them off in the narrow confines of the cave. Afterwards, they plan on using Hegesistratus to present a truce, “since the War God was plainly on our side, and had in fact favored his daughters so greatly in the battle that no one had received a serious wound” (*Arete*, XVI 429). 
796
797While Hegesistratus bargains and the dead Thracians are brought to the mouth of the cave, Latro slips away, determined to rescue Oeobazus by stealth rather than force. Deep in the hills, he hears the roar of lions and prepares to meet them (by sitting down and reading from his scroll, oddly enough – in his reading he notes that the oracles of the ox and the child had been fulfilled.) 
798
799He encounters what he calls an illusion: a giant pillar of pearl, probably like a stalactite or stalagmite, though it seems not a natural object at all, but one forged by hands, as are “often seen in the houses men build for the gods, columns of white marble or wood painted white” (*Arete*, XVI 431). [Similar columns punctuated the appearance of the moon at certain times in his scroll and might also match descriptions of the large columns he will see in his memory palace.] He soon feels that he does not travel through a cave, but through a broken landscape mixed of artificial and natural elements. “The sharp stone teeth of the cave seemed simultaneously a forest of columns and a thicket of spears, all echoing to the roaring of the lions who waited for me outside.”
800
801Doubting their reality, he sees a large black maned lion near the cave mouth just as the sun rises. [We have already noted that the lion is a solar symbol.] He is astonished to find, instead of a normal pride, a group of four large and seemingly identical males. There is a lioness, who “wore a woman’s shape” and regards the cave “from the elevation of a silver chariot no horses drew” (*Arete*, XVI 432). [While it is tempting to assign some definite Christian or mythical significance to the four identical lions, only one of the four gospel writers is traditionally associated with the lion, and the Great Mother is usually accompanied by only one or two lions. The symbols associated with these scriptural authors from the Book of Revelations are a human face, a winged lion, a winged ox, and the eagle. It might be more pertinent to note that the Descender begat five sons and five daughters on the Great Mother – in this case, perhaps Latro makes the fifth male lion in her field, though the daughters are not here represented. However, perhaps the best reading of these four lions involves the four horses which will pull the chariot – or at least, using the Platonic metaphor, the lions are the spoken word of which the horses are merely the written manifestation. Though Cybele is definitely a manifestation of the Great Mother, the silver chariot is usually a symbol of Artemis. This mixing of symbols might suggest that these forces could be unified.]
802
803Latro notes that the eyes of this leonine woman are capable of adoration and viciousness. He beholds a second sun rising behind her, “enfolding her in a mantle brighter than the purest gold” (*Arete*, XVI 432). [We have already discussed this imagery in light of the spell of Albertus Magnus – a spell for peace employing the wolf’s tooth, which must be undertaken when the sun is in the sign of Leo.] She says she has need of him and identifies herself as Cybele. She asks, “Do you not kneel even to a goddess?”
804
805Latro responds, “Not when there are lions present, Cybele.” The goddess assures him that to both of them the lions are less than kittens, though she claims that it is because she extends her protection to him. She invites him to the chariot, which feels familiar to him. [We should once again consider that during this time period, the only representation of Ahura Mazda was an empty chariot kept by the ruler of Persia, so that the god might accompany them into battle.] She also tells Latro that if he continues as planned, he will be killed: “I can show it to you if you like – how you’ll be found out near my son’s temple, your flight, the lance through your back, and all the rest. It will seem as real as this to you. Do you wish to see it? … All deaths before death are for cowards – let them have them” (*Arete*, XVI 433).
806
807She indicates that if Latro returns her favor, which saved his life, the Mede Oeobazus will fall into his hands. He realizes that the Amazons must be her granddaughters. Latro says, “They’re the children of the War God, and he’s your son” (*Arete*, XVI 434). Latro understands that the Amazons had hoped to purchase sacred horses from the Temple of the Sun. The goddess insists that King Kotys would never sell them, though they can force him to do as they wish. She instructs Latro to look under the sun to find the temple. The horses graze in the Meadow of the Sun before it, and she instructs Latro to lead the horses around the War God’s temple and follow the processional road to her own temple to turn the horses over to the queen.
808
809When he says that the horses must be guarded, she displays love, sorrow, and rage: “Why do you imagine I have chosen you? … If a child might do it, would I not send a child? Nor shall you be without assistance. The three whom you meet first will be your auxiliaries, worthy of your trust because they come from me” (*Arete*, XVI 435). [Cybele, a more empyreal iteration of the Great Mother than the chthonic deity who received the sacrifice of the young girl at the helot forest ceremony, instructs Latro to turn the horses over to the Amazon queen. This suggests that the victory of the Amazons in the silver chariot at the Pythian Games might serve her purposes and catapult Pausanias to glory, as she promised the helots earlier, even though he loses the race.]
810
811
812Latro proceeds, and meets a lion who follows him like a dog, the Amazon Pharetra, and Elata mounted on a bay colt. [Since Elata serves the Huntress, the true third individual who will aid Latro is probably the colt she rides, the equine form of the young centaur Polos, who will soon appear as a boy in the text - snorting, trotting, and galloping even though he looks human most of the time.] Latro mounts the horse and defeats the Thracians guarding the White Horses of the Sun. Mounting the largest of the white stallions, he takes the rest of the horses to Cybele’s cavern.
813
814>When the Thracians came [to demand the return of the horses], Hegesistratus discovered that the noble herdsmen who fled reported that Pleistorus took the sacred herd. (I wish we had Cybele’s lion still so we could deceive them in the same way again.) Hegesistratus told them he did it because he desires that Oeobazus be given to us, and that he is angered with King Kotys because the king wants to sacrifice him to overawe the people, and not for the glory of Pleistorus. I asked Hegesistratus whether the Thracians had believed it, and he told me he thought they had. (*Arete*, XVII 439)
815
816[Finally, Latro is actually “mistaken” for Pleistorus directly in the text, displaying the narrative irony for which Gene Wolfe has become infamous: a supposedly mistaken impression actually represents the truth. While Cybele did not acknowledge Latro as her son, the confidence she held in him, mixed with love and rage, seems atypical. Later, in Latro’s memory palace, the representation of the Great Mother will actually identify herself as his mother (and his mother’s mother).]
817
818Cleton manages to smuggle arrows into the cave with a note mentioning Hypereides: “May the Stone favor him who does this! These cost-two owls. Europa’s man may repay me” (*Arete*, XVII 440). At this point, Latro does not believe that Io is his slave, for he feels a love for her too strong not to have freed her. Io fears that Elata will betray them to Kotys, though Latro insists that Elata is one of the three trustworthy agents of the Great Mother. Inspired by jealousy, Io asks if Latro desires Elata. He writes, “I could not help feeling that lies, though told from the kindest motives, do more harm than truth” (*Arete*, XVII 441). Io suggests that the black man has also had Elata, but Latro will not speak of such a thing to Hegesistratus unless he witnesses it himself. Io says that she is so concerned with Elata because just a few days ago the Amazon woman Pharetra was badly wounded. During the battle with Kotys, “Hippephode didn’t want Pharetra to fight, but she did. And today she was well enough to help you steal all those white horses” (*Arete*, XVII 442). [Elata mentioned that she has the power to cure, though she could not heal Latro. Perhaps Io’s words suggest that the unnatural recovery of Pharetra stems from the dryad and therefore the Triple Goddess – unless something more sinister is somehow implied.] Hegesistratus negotiates with King Kotys, and both sides make a sacrifice. Oeobazus and four horses will leave with the companions.
819
820When next Latro writes, he describes waking by the sleeping Pharetra and strapping on his sword before leaving the cave, where he takes up guard duty. The ground still wet from the rain, Latro eventually hears a howling dog in the distance and feels that something awful “stirred in the darkness” (*Arete*, XVIII 443). Hegesistratus steps outside, and Latro notes, “I did not see him again for a long time” (*Arete*, XVIII 444). Soon Latro encounters the tall Amazon Hippostizein and his lover Pharetra. Hippostizein and Latro enter the cave, where Hegesistratus is mixing wine, and as Seven Lions hands Latro a cup, an arrow takes Pharetra in the throat.
821
822[When Hegesistratus leaves the cave in the dark early morning, Latro notes that Hegesistratus’s name means “Leader of the Host,” but when his guard duty is finished, he refers to Hegesistratus only as “the lame man mixing wine in a crater.” Much later, when they have left Thrace behind and returned to Athens, Io warns him of Hegesistratus, in an exchange which must have occurred during the mantis’s long absence:
823
824>“We were all in Thrace … in Kotytto’s sacred cave, where there was the big painted statue of her that got burned up later the same day. A lot of Thracians were outside and you were guarding the way in for us. You told me you heard a dog outside, and Hegesistratus went out, and the Thracians didn’t try and stop him. You and me and the black man talked about that, but we didn’t really decide anything. I don’t know if you asked him about it later … Did you hear the dogs last night? … I did, and so I thought you should know and write it down, just in case you should meet Hegesistratus again when I’m not with you” (*Arete*, IIIX 521-2).
825
826While Hegesistratus hates the Spartans, the presence of dogs either suggests that he has somehow become an agent of the Triple Goddess or that they are attempting to course him as they would a boar – which, could imply that he has aligned himself with the Thracians or that he is no longer the original mantis, perhaps even replaced by Zalmoxis himself. The final chapter of the book, written in the dense prose of Pindaros, indicates that Hegesistratus has chosen to serve the goddess of his enemies [Artemis, the patroness of Sparta], no doubt due to Elata’s importance to him; perhaps he can only hear the hounds baying as a consequence of his service to her. Another explanation for Io’s warning involves casting her in an untrustworthy light, since she questions Elata’s motives and suggests that the black man has been sleeping with her after Latro retrieves the Horses of the Sun. However, there is little reason to suspect Io of anything but genuine desire for Latro.]
827
828In the chaos of the attack, Latro drops the cup of wine, spilling it on himself, and takes Pharetra’s dead body back into the cave at the Great Mother’s sacred altar. “[T]he image of the Mother had fallen over onto the sacred earth, its ancient, dry, paint-daubed wood burning fiercely and making too much smoke for the wind from the earth to carry away” (*Arete*, XVIII 444). Something has interfered with the Great Mother’s plans, and perhaps broken her power.
829
830When Hegesistratus negotiates with the Thracians again, they claim that the peltasts who attacked the cave acted on their own out of hatred, though they are angered by the burning of Kotytto’s image. Two of the sacred horses were wounded in the chaos of the attack and had to be killed. The Amazon women take one of the Thracian’s hostage and release the other to seek word from King Kotys.
831
832Later, Polos shows Latro eighteen golden coins which he has taken from a man killed by Latro in the battle. Latro splits the coins between Io and the young boy, and asks how many attackers there might have been. When Io thinks there might have been twenty or thirty, Latro asks if there might have been eighteen. [This implies that the man carried a coin for each of the attackers, to pay them afterwards, indicating that the attack was mercenary and planned rather than inspired by hatred, as the Thracians claimed.] According to Io, Latro killed seven. When they go to count the bodies, they find eleven. Latro notes, “The man who had carried the coins wore a helmet, and had worn a ring until someone took it. He saw me, even as I saw him, but there was no hatred in his stare” (*Arete*, XVIII 447). [We are definitely meant to infer that the attack was not motivated by hatred and was planned by the Thracians, but does the presence of only eleven bodies imply that the others escaped, or that those slain by Latro have actually gotten up? Given the lingering shade of the man who held the money to pay the peltasts and the words of the Thracian lords, not all of the attackers were killed.]
833
834Io suggests that they can definitely trust Seven Lions, but that they cannot have complete confidence in Elata and Hegesistratus. At this point, Io thinks Latro ought to be making the decisions for them, rather than Queen Hippephode or Hegesistratus. The Thracians fear Latro, calling him “the hero” – which means that Pleistorus dwells within him (*Arete*, XVIII 448). She also describes her experience at a play, in which the actors wore masks, and mentions that Latro’s touch reveals the gods to others.
835
836Latro’s journal jumps to his encounter with King Kotys. On their mounted procession to meet the Thracians, the presence of female heads on lances angers Latro.
837
838>“We thought you warriors … but warriors would never boast of killing women – warriors kill men, and bring their women home to warm their own beds. Do you trim your lances with infants’ heads, also? Or do you believe it more manly to impale the whole infant upon the lance head? …When a boy hunts … he kills a bear cub and says he has killed a bear, never thinking that the day will come when he will meet a bear. Then he will have need of his little spear.” (*Arete*, XIX 450-1)
839
840The Thracians agree to give them the heads when they reach the Temple of Pleistorus, where they will be burnt on the sacred hearth. King Kotys awaits them there with the elderly and ambitious Thamyris. Hippephode prays to the War God. When the heads are burned, King Kotys makes his declaration: “*We have sworn that they shall go in peace. No one shall so much as offer them insult – though our charge would scatter them like chaff. There shall be no war!*” (*Arete*, XIX 451)
841
842Oeobazus is released, and Hippephode chooses four horses in the drizzle outside the temple. Kotys receives the queen’s payment, and in the mounting tension he declares that if one of Latro’s companions desires a battle, then the Thracian pledge will not be violated. Hegesistratus insists that they have chosen peace, and Thamyris also seems to advise Kotys towards a non-violent conclusion, but Kotys remains steadfast: “This does not concern you … nor any of your party save one. … [I]f he desires to meet us with arms – as one hero meets another – he need only tell us” (*Arete*, XIX 453). [Io has already revealed that the term “hero” means that Pleistorus dwells inside one, and Kotys is purportedly a descendant of the War God himself.]
843
844Latro attempts to refuse the challenge, but the interference of the Thracians prompts him to accept the lance thrust at him. He says, “Only a fool fights a hero, unless he must. … What sort of fool are you, who tell your people that we are to go in peace, and break your word with the next breath? Don’t you know that it is thus that kings lose their thrones?” (*Arete*, XIX 453) Hegesistratus offers Kotys a final warning to let them go in peace and reconcile with his god, “before battle drinks the blood of a king” (*Arete*, XIX 454).
845
846Kotys forces a duel of lances. While Latro admits he has no idea how to use one, he thinks it cannot be hard. He mounts Hippephode’s white stallion, “the holy steed of the sun” (*Arete*, XIX 454). Kotys tells him that no quarter will be given; Latro responds, “I did not think I could kill a man who begged me for his life, but I would try” (*Arete*, XIX 454). When he wheels his stallion around, a lion roars out, followed by the roar of other lions. [We have already mentioned that the lions are associated with the Great Mother and Pleistorus, but the four horses selected by Hippephode resonate with the four horses who drive the sun in its course. The four lions in the clearing, as solar symbols, might, as we previously suggested, bear some relationship with those horses.] As Latro charges amidst the thunder of hoofbeats and the roaring of lions, a violent rain obscures the king from his vision, and when Latro catches sight of the Thracian ruler again, he is charging towards his own men. [It is conceivable that this rain was brought by the river nymphs Latro spoke to when they first arrived in Thrace.] A larger battle ensues, and some of the Thracians seem to be fighting each other as well. [Later he learns that the Thracians have killed Kotys for fleeing him in battle.] After the chaos of the struggle, Latro catches up with the mounted figure of Io, and they find themselves at a farmhouse, where she offers the owners a gold coin for food, lodging, and silence. 
847
848Polos soon shows up with other horses, and a wagon bearing Cleton arrives. When Io calls out to him, he reveals that Thamyris now rules, though a Spartan warship with many soldiers has also landed. [This is actually Hypereides’s ship; he is using the cloak purchased so long ago at Sestos to have his officer Acetes pose as a Spartan to intimidate the Thracians.]
849
850During the night, an armed figure calling itself Raskos knocks on the door of the farmhouse, and the farmer invites the apparition to sit by the fire. Polos is spooked. He can understand the mumbling of Raskos, who claims to have been lost in the night’s snow. Not long afterwards, several people bearing a burden in the street show up. Though Latro does not realize it immediately, they carry Raskos’s body – his lost spirit has returned home. Still unaware of this ghostly interruption, Latro considers that they should seek out Hegesistratus to warn him of the Spartan presence. Io says, “[A] few days ago Hegesistratus was trying to read the future for you and saw his own death. It sounded as if it was pretty close” (*Arete*, XX 458).
851
852When Raskos’s weeping widow materializes, the farmer points to the fireplace, though no one is there. His denials are silenced by the unveiling of Raskos’s body. Latro goes to examine the horses, and Polos tells him that the god who governs them is the Sea God and Earth Shaker, Poseidon. Polos calms the horses with a touch. During their discussion of Kotys, Polos reveals that he knows about “horses and goats and dogs – all kinds of animals. And the weather. I’m a wonderful weather prophet” (*Arete*, XX 460).
853
854Back in the house, there comes another knock on the door, and when Latro opens it, there is no one there. He tells Polos to warn the woman of the house that Raskos may return, but that she must not open the door. She must tell him that he is dead and the location of his buried body. As they ride away, Polos wonders how Latro’s skill with a sword can be so pronounced, noting that he killed four attackers during the battle. After some practical advice about finding the right sword and how to treat it, Latro says, “[Y]ou must always remember that it isn’t the best sword that wins, but the best swordsman” (*Arete*, XX 463). Latro sees a man [a shade] carrying two javelins and walking ahead, leaving no tracks, and he asks Polos about horses to distract him.
855
856Latro soon reunites with an Amazon woman named Badizoe and Elata, then learns that Thamyris has barricaded himself in the palace with his loyal Thracians, and that the “Spartans” are demanding that any foreigners be turned over to them. Latro and Elata both drink, and he finds himself wanting her beyond the point of reason. When he tries to caress her, he notices that her movements make “the hills uneasy” and hears the “horses speaking as one man speaks to another.” He writes, “though I lose so much, I have not forgotten that horses cannot speak; and so I let Elata sleep on, and began to read, as I have said” (*Arete*, XXI 465-6). [Perhaps the attraction Latro feels for Elata and the allegiance which Hegesistratus has begun to feel for the goddess he called Cynthia has literally made the hills uneasy in agitating Gaea. Whether Latro hears the Horses of the Sun or the centaurs speaking is never clear.]
857
858When Latro reads of Pharetra in his scroll, he cannot consciously remember her, but feels the love he must have held – even describing her hair as “fiery” (*Arete*, XXI 465). He writes:
859
860>The gods own this world, not we. We are but landless men, even the most powerful king. The gods permit us to till their fields, then take our crop. We meet and love, someone builds a tomb for us, perhaps. It does not matter – someone else will rob it, and the winds puff away our dust; then we shall be forgotten. For me it is no different, only faster; but I have written in my scroll how Pharetra smiled at me. For as long as the papyrus is preserved she will be here, though even little Io is only brown dust sobbing down the night wind with all the rest” (*Arete*, XXI 465).
861
862[This touching paragraph aches for a true immortality to give value to ethereal and fleeting life. As the conflicts in *Soldier of Arete* are resolved, we begin to see that sometimes it is necessary to lose so that a final and lasting triumph might be achieved.] After Latro chops up some firewood from a dead tree and moves Elata so that she will not burn, the shade of Artembares appears once again. [Whether that dead wood has any implications given Elata’s dryad nature is unclear, but her importance in the final dream vision which cures Latro would seem to indicate that she is indeed the genuine nymph whom the Huntress bequeathed to Hegesistratus for a time.] Latro notes: “Everyone is asleep save for the boy from Susa. All fire is holy to him; often he prays to this one, but at times he wanders beyond the firelight searching for a place to rest. … I think that Polos knows what is wrong, but Polos will not tell me” (*Arete*, XXI 465). [The Zoroastrianism on display here greatly influenced Christianity, from the emphasis on dualism and free will to monotheism. The fire represents purity and the light of God – we have already discussed that Latro’s name is actually Lucius, but we should also reiterate that the later representations of Ahura Mazda featured him standing on a horse. On the surface level, somehow Latro has tuned in to Polos’s ability to speak with the horses in this same scene.]
863
864Artembares and Latro discuss the mercenary’s attitude towards other religious beliefs. Latro says, “I know that you people pray to Ahura Mazda by building fires on your mountaintops, and I have no objection to that” (*Arete*, XXI 466). During their conversation, Artembares reveals that once Latro asked him about the location of Oeobazus (at the shrine of Itys, for whom Hegesistratus mistook the boy from Susa). The dead boy also remembers how Latro tried to free him and his father in Sestos, though his father refused to leave out of fear that Xanthippos would hunt them down for the promised ransom. The boy does not seem to remember his own death. He calls Elata a peri. [Peri are beings between angels and evil spirits in Persian mythology. In the most ancient traditions, peri are malevolent until sufficient penance wins them paradise.]
865
866Polos awakens and refuses to look at Artembares, asking if Latro called him. The centaur inquires if the spirit spoke to Latro first, seeming to understand the rules governing the interaction between the living and the dead. Artembares reiterates that Latro spoke to him when he originally asked about Oeobazus. Polos runs out to get a drink from the stream.
867
868After Latro sleeps (and Polos in the form of the red-brown colt leads the companions to Oeobazus), Oeobazus assures Latro of his gratitude. When Latro asks Oeobazus about Artembares, Io posits that the reality Latro experiences might be subjective: “Sometimes people think [Latro’s visions] aren’t real, but once I saw the same thing he saw. I think it depends on what each person means by real” (*Arete*, XXI 469). Soon, Seven Lions enters and lets them know that a chariot is coming, followed by the rest of the Amazon women. The chariot bears Hypereides’s man Acetes, dressed as a Spartan. 
869
870When Latro writes again, the Amazon women have left with the horses and a (spurious) letter which indicates they are under the protection of the Spartan rulers. Polos leaves with them. Io says that she must speak with Latro about Acetes and Hegesistratus. [One assumes that she is going to tell Latro they have both slept with Elata and are therefore subject to manipulation by the Triple Goddess.] Acetes tells Latro that Hypereides is also staying in Cobrys. Hegesistratus describes their recent adventures to the Spartan impersonator: “We met the Amazons by the favor of a certain goddess [the Triple Goddess in her Huntress aspect]. They were on an errand for the War God, but we could have accomplished nothing without them (*Arete*, XXII 472).
871
872At the mention of the War God, Oeobazus says the he once met a tribe who believed Pleistorus was Ahura Mazda incognito [forming the most important connection in our thesis]. He reveals that after his escape from Sestos he intended to travel to Athens, and tells of his disturbing experiences with the Persian King Xerxes. A great engineer, Oeobazus was offered a reward by Xerxes for his service in designing storage for an ill-conceived siege. The engineer asked that one of his sons might remain behind with him rather than march with the army. The next day, all three of his sons were left dead in Susa. [Herodotus also relates this story, but it is not clear that the Oeobazus sacrificed to Pleistorus in Thrace and the Oeobazus who lost his sons are the same man in *The Histories*.] After relating the story, Oeobazus abruptly leaves. Polos volunteers to follow him and runs out (with a clatter of hooves evident as he gallops away).
873
874Hegesistratus says it is a fine time for ghost stories. [As we have noted, many of those who are killed by Latro’s sword in *Soldier of Arete*, and perhaps many people killed in general during the conflicts, are not descending into the underworld and are instead left to wander the world of the living.] Hegesistratus believes that something evil is moving among the spirits, and relates the story of Captain Hubrias, the shade of Achilles, and the White Isle, included in the introduction to this essay. As Acetes begins to relate the story of Eurykles’s necromancy in Athens, a pounding at the door announces the return of Polos and Oeobazus with the wounded Cleton.
875
876Cleton’s head wound was administered by the Thracians still loyal to Thamyris. Although he has been a friend to Hypereides and Oeobazus, Cleton also spoke freely with (and, as Io says, spied for) the nobility of Cobrys. He advised Thamyris that Hypereides was in town. When Thamyris sent his young relatives and their retainers to retrieve Hypereides, his resistance prompted a violent abduction, in which Cleton was also wounded. Cleton says that Thamyris did not want the Mede Oeobazus killed. He also wanted to let the Amazons leave with the horses without further trouble. It seems that the rulership of Cobrys will descend either to Kotys’s three-year-old son or the aged Prince Thamyris. Thamyris apparently hopes to threaten the other Thracians by using Hypereides as leverage to gain the support of “phantom armies from Hellas,” so that he will be appointed regent (*Arete*, XXIII 481).
877
878Acetes believes that Thamyris must be desperate to risk killing his own agent. Latro instructs Acetes to arm the four largest sailors with the gear that Cleton has, and to take Hegesistratus, Oeobazus, and Seven Lions with him to the palace of Cobrys and demand entrance. Latro plans to sneak inside, so Cleton informs him of the palace’s structure. Latro rushes out into the streets alone to put his plan in motion. Elata stops him, saying, “My tree is old already, yet it and I will live for a great many seasons after Hypereides is dead and forgotten. You must guard your seed, Latro. Tonight you’re risking it for nothing. Why?” (*Arete*, XXIII 482) [Yet again the supernatural forces at work are taking a special interest in Latro’s destiny. What will the progeny of Rome accomplish? Of course, we are in a position to know that.]
879
880Latro says he is acting so that he will not be as Cleton is, whose ill-conceived actions might have doomed a friend. As Latro continues, he notices that “A man rode past. He stared, and I saw he wore a helmet and bore a lance; I was glad that he did not stop. I hurried on and had nearly reached the palace when Io overtook me” (*Arete*, XXIII 482-3). [It is not clear if this is the uneasy shade of Kotys or a figure which resembles the War God Pleistorus. If indeed this figure is intended to denote the God of War, our alternative explanation involves Zalmoxis, who is about to appear at the palace.] Latro berates Io as he takes her back to safety, but she tells him that the sheer number of Thracians with Thamyris would guarantee his death. She suggests he stay at the house or go with Acetes and Seven Lions, but Latro responds, “I can’t do that … [T]hey’d know, Io, what I had set out to do, and that I had not done it – had not actually tried. While I myself would not know. I would see how they pitied me, as at times I’ve seen it today; and I would not know why” (*Arete*, XXIII 483). Latro later notes, “Quite suddenly there was a rush of moisture to my eyes, as if some veering wind had carried smoke to them. I did not weep, since men do not do such things; yet my eyes streamed, no matter how quickly I blinked. Today I must guard myself against this self-love, for surely it and wine were what unmanned me” (*Arete*, XXIII 483). [Latro certainly embodies the manly concepts of *arete*, treating them as seriously as they might possibly be taken.] When they return to the safety of the house, Latro finally acknowledges that Io is a woman and kisses her. He later writes, “Recalling the man with the lance, I chose not to follow the dark street I had walked down before” (*Arete*, XXIII 484).
881
882Latro comes upon men standing around a fire near the palace. Seven Lions arrives, hoping to stop Latro, and they dispatch the men together before Latro scales the wall. As he remembers his forced entry, Latro writes, “If I were to talk to Polos of swords and fighting now, as he wishes, I would tell him how important it is to stand for a time in the place of your enemy; I do not believe any man can win who does not do that, save by the favor of a god” (*Arete*, XXIV 486). [In this obviously important chapter, Latro encounters both Thamyris and a preternaturally enormous boar. We soon learn, “[I]n Thracian arts a boar is the foe of Pleistorus; this foe is called Zalmoxis, and is often shown as a bear instead” (*Arete*, XXV 494). In the index of characters, Zalmoxis is identified as “a shape-changing shaman deified” (*Arete*, Glossary 639). One possible explanation for the sinister presence of a Pleistorus-like figure involves his enemy standing in his place, also suggested by the curtain from Sidon in the Temple, which was supposed to feature both Pleistorus and Zalmoxis, but only shows the figure of the God of War. To complicate matters further, however, Robert Graves insists that one of the most essential symbols of Ares was the boar: “‘Hephaestus’ seems to have been a title of the sacred king as solar demi-god; ‘Ares’, a title of his warchief, or tanist, whose emblem was the wild boar. Both became divine names when the Olympian cult was established and they were chosen to fill the roles, respectively, of War-god and Smith-god.” [Whether Graves is in error on matters of mythology, his use of “respectively” seems suspicious in this case.] In Greek culture, the animals associated with warriors and their qualities are first and foremost the lion, followed by the boar, then birds of prey. The marriage of boar imagery in Wolfe’s novel to the enemy of Pleistorus indicates either primal associations which have been left behind as the spirit of war evolves or posits an even more complicated synthesis over time, when the qualities of Zalmoxis (some of them explicitly Christian-seeming) are assimilated. We have already attempted to explain the bear in light of the constellations involved as the sun reaches its weakest point (at least from the point of view of the northern hemisphere).]
883
884To produce a distraction, Latro positions a Thracian he has just killed with a piece of wood, stabbing it with the man’s blade, then waits for someone to discover “that this man had (as it would appear) fought with a log and died” (*Arete*, XXIII 486). The disturbance it produces allows Latro to enter the palace. He stumbles upon an armory, where he procures a shield, helmet, and two javelins. When he leaves the storeroom, Thamyris is there, beckoning to him.
885
886Retreating quickly to his throne, Thamyris identifies himself and Latro asks for Hypereides’s freedom. Something huge lurks in the darkness behind Thamyris as he addresses Latro: “You are called Pleistorus in this land … By many other names in others. As for your Hellene, I care nothing for him – he was the bait that hooked you, nothing more” (*Arete*, XXIII 488). [This gloss is hopefully unnecessary by now: Thamyris’s words explain Latro’s significance to the spiritual forces at work in the text. While rumors of Pleistorus stealing the Horses of the Sun were voiced, and Wolfe’s fiction allows for flexibility in surface interpretations, these mistaken impressions are often true in a deeper and more meaningful sense.] Thamyris addresses one of his underlings to retrieve Hypereides. As Thamyris talks, Latro can only focus on the name he has been called. He later writes, “I have since asked Io, who says that it is only the name of some Thracian god” (*Arete*, XXIII 489). [Nothing to see here; this happens to me all the time.]
887
888Thamyris reveals his ambitions to be King of all Thrace as Hypereides arrives. Latro cuts the Athenian free. Thamyris subsequent laugh contains “the wild mirth of those who have felt the hand of a god” (*Arete*, XXIII 489). [Whether Thamyris is possessed by Zalmoxis or not, he certainly has been influenced by him.] Thamyris indicates that the Thracians could rule the world, though the people of India are more numerous and only the Spartans are more warlike. [Latro’s journeys in Thrace and Sparta make sense when Thamyris phrases it this way. If Latro is a manifestation of war, then the Spartans and their practices will no doubt begin to influence him profoundly, as the most warlike people on earth.]
889
890Thamyris threatens Hypereides: “I shall have you gutted with your own weapon as [my nephew] Deloptes returns with it. Disemboweled by Pleistorus, if I can arrange that, and I imagine I can” (*Arete*, XXIII 490). He tells Latro, “You are reputed to be overlord of every battlefield. You are not. After so many years, I – we – have found him … If you were what you say, you would slay this foreigner for me with his own sword, the moment that it was brought to your hand. You know *he* would, but you do not know I know it. Learn that I do” (*Arete*, XXIII 490). [This is a frustrating passage: is Thamyris saying that the true overlord of battlefields is Zalmoxis, is he talking of the Unseen God, or, despite calling Latro Pleistorus, is he suggesting that Latro is a mere imposter? It is also unclear whether the italicized *he* refers to the *true* Pleistorus or to some other more violent deity. In any event, Thamyris is probably mistaken here, since he does not truly understand *arete*.] At that moment, a peltast shows up to tell Thamyris that the Spartans are at the gate. The Thracians argue, and something grunts from the shadows, causing Thamyris to tremble. They decide to admit Acetes and Latro’s companions. The ambitious Thracian presents Latro with an option: “Take [Hypereides’s] sword, Pleistorus, and take his life. Or lose your own” (*Arete*, XXIII 491). Identifying the pungent stench which fills the room, Latro exclaims, “*It’s a boar*!” He can then see the giant beast behind the dais watching them. 
891
892Latro approaches it and learns that it is not chained. The Thracians attack, driving Latro and Hypereides toward the boar. Latro cuts the side of the boar’s neck as he passes, imploring Hypereides to run as well. As the fight continues, the great doors open and a pack of piebald hounds enters, attacking the boar. It flees to the sound of their baying. Latro later thinks that the sight of the boar prompted someone to throw open the gates, and the Thracians opposing Thamyris rushed inside, slaying most of his followers.
893
894Afterwards, Latro and his companions leave Thrace almost immediately. Latro takes the helmet he found in the armory. Polos is curious about the boar, and Hegesistratus reveals that it represents the foe of Pleistorus, though he cannot explain why Thamyris kept one there. Latro asks him privately about the hounds, which no one seems to mention. The mantis never saw them and only heard their baying, but he knows they belong to the Huntress, whom he calls Cynthia. Elata challenges them to a swim, and when Hegesistratus takes off his clothes, Latro sees many fresh wounds. “[H]e says he received those when he and I fought alongside the Amazons” (*Arete*, XXV 495). He points to his oldest wound and said it was from an assassin in Sestos. [The presence of that wound and Hegesistratus’s devotion to Cynthia implies that he is still the original mantis; in that case the fresh injuries would signify nothing beyond their obvious import, though there still seems to be some lingering portent in these sections, given a shape-changing villain who seems to survive.]
895
896At Samothrace, they stay at the house of a man named Kroxinas and tell him that they visited Thrace to put Kotys’s son, also named Kotys, on the throne. “Hypereides said that now that the Empire is crumbling, it is the task of Thought to bring the rule of law to the islands of the Water and the lands along its coasts. His talk has made me think that the Great King must need me now more than ever” (*Arete*, XXV 496). In relating his experiences, Hypereides notes, “Thamyris had a pet boar. It’s one of the shapes Zalmoxis is supposed to take, so I imagine it was a sacred animal of some kind. I don’t suppose you’ve ever been to Riverland, Kroxinas, but believe me, the country’s full of them” (*Arete*, XXV 497). Hypereides claims to have killed Thamyris and tells of his head being mounted on a lance. Latro seems preoccupied with the fact that no one ever killed the boar, according to Hegesistratus. Kroxinas’s wife asks if the boar could have been Zalmoxis, and guesses that Thamyris would not have tried to usurp power if it hadn’t been promised by a god.
897
898Io says, “Pleistorus doesn’t like Zalmoxis. In Thrace we saw pictures of him sticking Zalmoxis with his spear” (*Arete*, XXV 498). This section of Soldier of Arete ends with the certainly ironic comment from Hypereides: “Well, Pleistorus didn’t come around to help us. I wish he had – we could have used him” (*Arete*, XXV 498).
899
900Part Three of *Soldier of Arete* resumes in Athens, as Hypereides and Latro meet with the important men who are attempting to reconstruct the city. Soon the scheming and posturing of the politicians becomes evident. At General Cimon’s garden, they discuss the death of Oeobazus, who is actually present. [Wolfe seems to be showing that mortal sacrifices made to Ares/Pleistorus are being somehow refused or transformed, and he is actually altering history by having Oeobazus survive. Perhaps the return of Pasicrates’s arm represents a similarly rejected sacrifice at the end of this volume.] The politician Themistocles and Xanthippos desire to have Oeobazus return to Persia in their service. He chooses the name Zihrun, which means “Life chose me.” They discuss the government of Athens, indicating that influence is divided between “the shieldmen’s party [of Cimon] and the naval mob,” associated with Themistocles (*Arete*, XXVI 503). Cimon says that “the craftsmen, the skilled artisans, the worthy merchants, and the independent freeholders” he represents are where “true *arete* is found. *They* are the defenders of the city, and even Themistocles cannot deny that they are ours” (*Arete*, XXVI 504). He wants the land defended, rather than all of the focus diverted to the ships. [It seems likely that the conclusion of the novel suggests that humans cannot define what *arete* truly is, and that the Athenians are just as culpable as the Spartans in this regard, though their methods are extremely different.]
901
902Themistocles asks what education consists of to a Mede, and Oeobazus responds, “One learns how to honor the gods … most of all, how to honor Ahura Mazda, who is the god of gods; and to ride, to shoot with the bow, and to tell the truth” (*Arete*, XXVI 505). The Athenian politicians emphasize that the secret of Zihrun’s identity must be kept, and reiterate that the purpose of Hypereides’s trip to Thrace was to assure King Kotys of the friendship of Athens. The conversation turns to Latro’s legal status in Greece. They were able to procure the freedom of Seven Lions more easily, but since Pausanius of Sparta still claims Latro, the situation is more complicated. Xanthippos assures Latro that Pausanias is not a typical Spartan, but rather of the “old Lacedaemonian aristocracy” (*Arete*, XXVII 509). Cimon, who serves under Aristides in representing the shieldmen of Athens, has connections in Sparta with at least one of its powerful judges, Cyklos. Themistocles will be honored in Sparta soon for his role in the war, and they plan for Latro and Io to accompany him so that Pausanias can free them and declare Latro a resident of Rope. Hegesistratus advises Latro against going. However, he admits that Latro’s scroll suggests Pausanias views him as a friend rather than a slave. When Seven Lions insists on accompanying Latro so that the Roman mercenary’s freedom can be clearly established, Latro subsequently agrees to go to Sparta. Hegesistratus notes that this “leaves no one but Elata and me to be disposed of” (*Arete*, XXVII 510). Themistocles informs him that the mantis’s connections with Persia would damage his political party, giving Xanthippos and Aristides ammunition against him. Hegesistratus refuses further remuneration and plans to take ship to Zakunthios, perhaps afterwards traveling to Delphi.
903
904Cimon comes to Latro and thanks him for agreeing to go to Sparta. “We had men standing by to overpower you if necessary – Themistocles insisted on it – but how would it have looked, when I’d persuaded the prince to free you? And Themistocles’ gang might have used the entire business against me; they were my men. If he were to report that we had stolen the slave of a citizen, that slippery trader would back him to the hilt” (*Arete*, XXVII 511). [Here, the true nature of the Athenian government is revealed.] Cimon suggests that a case can be made for Latro already being free, since the influential poet Pindaros has been claiming that Latro was actually working for him when he was captured. Cimon cautions Latro against Themistocles. [Themistocles, like Pausanius, would eventually be ostracized by the Greeks. Wolfe casts some suspicion on his character when Cimon notes: “Do you remember how [Themistocles] asked the mantis about the Thracian god? … His mother was a Thracian, just as mine was. He knows the country backward and forward; he even speaks a little Thracian to the ambassadors sent by their kings. If you lie to him about Thrace, or try to hide anything, he’ll know it” (*Arete*, XXVII 512).] Cimon sends a letter with Latro begging Cyklos to shield Latro from every harm at the risk of their own disgrace. When Io hears that Latro is headed for Sparta, she weeps, citing that they are cruel and untrustworthy men. Latro closes the chapter by relating that Cimon’s wall is being torn down so that the stones can help support a wall around Athens. Latro is curious how Cimon will keep travelers from taking his fruit, but the laborers say he will let them take it, finally showing some evidence of selflessness in Athens.
905
906The poet Simonides has dinner with Latro, Themistocles, Xanthippos, and others. Latro spends quite a bit of time discussing the seating of the dinner party. [The historical Simonides of Ceos was famous for his memory: while at a feast, he was supposedly called outside by two young men, but when he stepped outside they were nowhere to be found (the myth identifies them as Castor and Pollux, pleased with the attention he gave them in his verses). The banquet hall collapsed and the people inside were horribly disfigured. Only by remembering who was sitting where was Simonides able to identify the dead. His mnemonic system is built upon associating certain memories with locations.] The companions sing at the table, then dancers come. “There was one who brought five daggers she made stand upright on their pommels. She danced among them with great skill, and when we thought she could do no more, leaped from the center of the circle into the air,” landing on her hands (*Arete*, XXVIII 515). [This is Anysia, who will feature in Latro’s memory palace and in the love triangle which occupies Latro amidst his depression. The daggers are both her trademark and a symbol of Hecate.]
907
908Hegesistratus takes Latro aside with Simonides. The poet asks if Latro remembers a story told by their host Cimon, in which Zeus fathered the muses on the very estate they stand upon. Latro recognizes neither the reference to the Thunderer nor the muses. When Simonides names the Thunderer as the father of the gods, Zeus Maimaktes, Latro recognizes him as the god his father “called the bright-sky father” (*Arete*, XXVIII 515). [Maimaktes is the name of the chthonic, blustery, and blood-thirsty Zeus. Zeus’s name comes from a root meaning “bright sky,” but we will assume Latro remembers the Roman archaic name of Jupiter, Dis-pater.] Simonides hopes to offer a sacrifice to Mnemosyne to aid Latro in remembering more. [By the fifth century B.C. this was a common practice for those seeking healing, in addition to offerings to Aesculapius, so that the supplicant might remember any visions received during the healing process.] Hegesistratus gets a kid goat to sacrifice, and Latro notes, “From the cleft rock where the small altar top lay upon three half-embedded stones as though by chance, Cimon’s big house had dwindled to a few golden sparks” (*Arete*, XXVIII 516). [In his text, whether this is intentional or not, the tutelary deity Lar from Latro’s early memories is associated with dancing golden sparks and singing via the beast which sat near Latro’s door; here, Cimon’s home, the birthplace of the Muses, is described in similar terms.] Simonides sacrifices the kid and instructs Latro to think of a large building. He says that each stone and ornament must stand distinct, and Latro feels the hill tremble beneath him, “as if a creature larger than any wild ox had risen to its feet” (*Arete*, XVIII 516).
909
910Latro opens his eyes and beholds an enormous woman come from the depths of the cleft, her face “racked with grief, her gaze upon far-off things” (*Arete*, XVIII 516). Simonides instructs him to keep his eyes closed. [Mnemosyne was one of the titans in mythology. Zeus was her nephew, and the muses were born at Pieri at the foot of Olympos. Cimon’s residence must be on the Hill of the Muses near Athens, where Theseus’s Amazon wife Antiope died of an arrow wound.]
911
912Latro imagines starting the building of his memory palace where the desert begins. To the north he sees desert of yellow and red stone, to the east are rocky hills punctuated by the rising sun, to the south lies yellow sand and a man with three camels in the distance, and to the west “fields of barley and millet, and the mud huts of peasants. Beyond is the river and beyond the river the setting sun” (*Arete*, XXVIII 517). Latro sees four huts with people who till the field living in them, and Simonides says that they might meet some of those people soon. Simonides instructs him how to build his foundation and floor, of smooth marble, with glyphs cut into each slab. He walks west to a wide river, where there is only black mud. At his palace, he sees pillars, “each towering colonnade thrusting a hundred carved capitals above the last” (*Arete*, XXVIII 519). He also sees fields of grain and statues which appear to be lions with the face of men, though Simonides tells him that only the nearest is actually a lion with the face of a man.
913
914Latro describes it as “a winged lion, with the head and breasts of a woman” (*Arete*, XXVIII 519). Behind this lies “a winged bull with the head of a bearded man. Facing it across the avenue stood the image of a powerful man with the head of a bull” (*Arete*, XXVIII 519). Latro wonders how he can even hear the ghostly presence of Simonides, noting that the poet seems to be, unlike Latro and his palace, “north of the sea. I decided that he was surely dead now, and it was only his ghost I heard, somehow separated from his tomb and searching for it” (*Arete*, XXVIII 519). [Earlier, the temptation to ascribe the gospel writers to the four lions near Cybele was strong, but here the imagery becomes an explicit marriage of Christian and pagan symbols. The winged lion is traditionally a symbol of St. Mark, and St. Luke is similarly portrayed by a winged bull or ox. The presence of both of these, with three camels from the south, strongly suggests the birth of Christ. In Christian iconography, the three magi seeking out the Christ child at his birth, usually identified as Zoroastrian Persians, are almost always associated with camels. While at first this might seem like Egypt, Jerusalem and Bethlehem are south of Athens, and Simonides would have been dead over four centuries by the time of Christ’s birth. The golden sparks which Latro equates with his own childhood are here related to the divine birth of the Muses, and Latro’s memory palace represents another combination of the divine and the mortal in the birth of Christ. To the east, where the sun rises, is the metaphorical past, with its barren pagan desert, and to the west the future, where fecund fields and the four huts, populated by peasants who till and care for the land, produce a more fertile environment, clearly representing the four gospels. By now the implication of Pleistorus’s equation with Ahura Mazda should be clear, as well as the relationship of Latro’s story with the chant proclaiming the Nativity of Christ which opens this essay. This sublime and symbolic synthesis typifies Wolfe’s ability as a writer: the winged lion can at one and the same time be Gaea, the Sphinx, and St. Mark, whose name means “dedicated to Mars or war,” which has been successfully personified in Latro, and each of those significations are entirely true and valid for the text. The symbol of John, who presents a vision of Christ in keeping with his ascendant and divine nature as well as his identity as the Word of God or the Logos, is the Eagle, and Latro is intrinsically related to this symbol through his Roman heritage. Those four peasant huts tilling the field are still centuries in the future, but the redemption of all of these pagan images is surely imminent. Even though Simonides implies that they might meet these figures soon, we cannot expect that they will actually appear within Latro’s narrative at any point, as they are theological and historical figures.]
915
916Simonides tells Latro that the man-faced lion will be the “conservator” of his name and instructs him to carve the name Latro in its right foreleg. The winged lion spreads her wings and says, “Surely you known *me*, Latro … I am your mother, and your mother’s mother. For me and by me you stole the horses of the sun, that they might be returned to him. I am she who asks what walks upon four legs at sunrise, upon two at noon, and upon three at evening. And all who cannot answer me, at evening die” (*Arete*, XXVIII 520). [This combination of Cybele and the Sphinx also collapses a few generations of Greek deities into one, but Cybele’s relationship to Gaea and Rhea can in some way explain how she can be mother and grandmother to Latro at the same time: Gaea’s daughter Rhea gave birth to Zeus, and Zeus’s sister Hera bore him Ares. Alas, the Triple Goddess who seems to be the daughter of Gaea in Wolfe’s book has multiple paternities, muddling the generational distinctions even further. It is almost easier to make Latro fill the traditional role of Zeus here, as he would be the grandson of Gaea and the son of Rhea, though Hera and Rhea are also definitely combined in this scheme.]
917
918Returning to the riddle of the Sphinx, Latro answers that it is a traveler, who begins his journey on horse, walks for himself, and then, being footsore, relies upon a staff. She notes that it is “a good reply,” even though he lacks “the advantage of lameness” that Swollenfoot [Oedipus] had (*Arete*, XXIX 522). [Gaea as Sphinx reveals that she is Mnemosyne’s mother, and retells the story of Oedipus, noting that those who relate the tale focus on her casting herself down to her death in despair: “You’ll observe that I’m winged” (*Arete*, XXIX 523). She says she merely returned to her element, and asks if he is bothered by the idea that earth has wings. After considering that water must fall to the earth or rest upon it, he continues:
919
920>“One who observes the sun at evening sees that it moves no more slowly at the horizon than it did when crossing the sky at noon. … Plainly it does not halt, but circles and recircles the earth without cease, as do the moon and the stars, of which the same things might be said.  … As for the sea on which we sail, it’s supported by the earth, and not the contrary. … What supports the earth? What supports these birds? The earth flies; Gaea is winged.” (*Arete*, XXIX 524)
921
922She tells him that she does not devour those who understand her question. “Isn’t your traveler upon the journey of life? Say yes, or I’ll devour you at the end of your days” (*Arete*, XXIX 524).
923
924Latro poignantly responds, “in the morning of life … a young man goes forth as though mounted, because he is carried upon the shoulders of his parents. By midday their support has vanished, and he must walk for himself. In the evening of life, he can hold up his head only because he is supported by the memory what once he was” (*Arete*, XXIX 524-5). This final statement is illustrated dramatically:
925
926>As I spoke the final word, Gaea’s vast wings roared behind me and I felt a wind as violent as a storm at sea; by the time I turned, she was already very far above me. Higher she rose, and higher still as I watched openmouthed, until she was little more than a dark speck against the overarching azure dome, and I felt certain she would soon disappear into the cloudless sky. But at last she settled upon a cornice of the topmost battlement, where she remained motionless and appeared to have become again a mere figure carved from the reddish stone. (*Arete*, XXIX 525)
927
928[To emphasize this symbolic flight, Latro speaks of how a man is only supported by the memory of what he once was, a memory that he does not have, and the Sphinx ascends to the heavens portentously, before returning to her element and becoming a part of his memory palace, strongly suggesting that perhaps the memory that would sustain Latro is far more transcendent than he can recall – both celestial and divine.] After this, he notes that the rooms of his palace are filled only with “light and air” (*Arete*, XXIX 525). He sees an urn with capering satyrs and a beetle rolling a golden sun; he wonders why the Sphinx deserted him as he was about to enter the palace. [This scarab beetle rolling the golden sun shall appear in *Soldier of Sidon*, and the urn shall be sacrificed to Apollo with both of his scrolls inside it at the Pythian Games, preserving his memories. It is here that he learns his most valuable lesson: the urn is a symbol of death, but it somehow serves to preserve his immortality. Though the Great Pan dies, something else is born into the world that might promise the defeat of death. Thus is death transformed into its opposite, eternal life, and the importance of the urn clear at last.]
929
930Eventually, he comes upon the statue of a young woman dancing “naked among daggers, her marble limbs so delicately poised that I hesitated to touch her for fear she might fall. At length I did, and she fell, shattering upon the many-figured floor” (*Arete*, XXIX 525). [This is represented in the waking world by the dancer Anysia, but her association with the Huntress might also imply that Latro will shatter that goddess as well with nothing but a touch.]
931
932He comes to himself staring into the face of Simonides back in Greece, but notes that the palace seemed far more real that the hilltop on which they sit. Latro remember the palace afterwards, and when Hegesistratus and Zihrun depart, Io reminds him that once when he was standing guard in Thrace Hegesistratus left without Thracian interference amidst the howling of dogs. Io says that even though Latro did not hear the dogs in the night, she did. Latro beholds Artembares again, who seems to indicate that he will be going with them to Sparta. [The baying of the hounds might truly indicate the despair of winter as well. After Latro finally shakes off his depression at the end of the novel, it is the doomed Hegesistratus who can still hear them baying, though Latro no longer does.]
933
934In the morning, the dancing girl comes to tell him that she dreamed of him: he watched her dancing in an empty hall. At the end of the dance, when she stood on one hand, Latro pushed her onto one of her daggers and she died. Latro thinks of another answer to the riddle of the Sphinx: A young man hurries forward on horseback, then realizes as he grows older “that it is but a pilgrimage to the grave and walks more slowly, looking about him. When he is old, he may take up his stylus and begin to write of what he has seen; if so, unlike other men, he is not devoured by the earth in which his body lies when life’s journey is done, for though dead he still speaks to the living, just as it seemed the shade of Simonides still spoke to me outside that vast building in the desert” (*Arete*, XXIX 526). [Here, the immortality of the writer seems to overturn some of the weight of Socrates’s argument from *Phaedrus*, which so heavily favored the spoken over the written word. Of course, the idea that death is not the end permeates many religious philosophies, though it is perhaps not the least consequential reason to start writing.]
935
936Traveling to Corinth [Tower Hill], they stop to visit Adeimantus, who led the ships of his city against Egypt at the battle of Salamis. Adeimantus has kept many Egyptian weapons, shields, and even ship mastheads as souvenirs. Seven Lions shows by signs that once the Nubians ruled in Egypt. He has also been there, though he did not know Latro then. Pasicrates arrives to speak with Themistocles. Pasicrates embraces Latro, saying that they are “old friends as well as old foes” (*Arete*, XXX 529). Pasicrates reveals that Pausanius wants him for the Pythian Games held at Delphi. The runner has advised Pausanias that Latro will excel at “Boxing, wrestling, and the pankration” (*Arete*, XXX 529). [These are all fighting arts, of course. The Pankration competition allows punches, kicks, chokes, throws, and locks and only forbids biting and eye-gouging.] Latro agrees to go when Io expresses great interest in doing so. Pasicrates and Simonides prepare for the theater. Io advises Latro that Pasicrates hates him and warns Polos that he is the type to hit boys. While Io describes how Pasicrates tried to whip Latro at Sestos and the ensuing battle, Artembares enters. Polos “rolled his eyes and shied” away from the Median boy’s shade (*Arete*, XXX 530). He can sense the spirit, but does not want to see it fully. Artembares tells Latro that there are many angry soldiers from Kemet in the house. [While neither Io nor Polos understands that Kemet is where Latro calls Riverland, Latro cuts the word into “the chest of the hawk-headed man” in his memory palace (*Arete*, XXX 530). These Egyptians were the ones killed by Adeimantus, who lives amongst their pillaged gear. As we have already said, the hawk-headed man is the representation of the God of the Sky and War in Egypt, Horus.] As Latro tries to describe to Polos how someone can triumph with a sword, he hears the sound of a syrinx outside. Three small boys dance down the street, though only one of them plays. Io notes that they are playing “Pan-and-satyrs” (*Arete*, XXX 531). Latro compares their dance to a sword fight, and they discuss that the one playing the pipes will win because he has foreknowledge of the music he plays. Latro says that it is always good to have something at both hands in a fight, demonstrating how Polos might wrap a cloak around his left hand for protection. [While the relationship between agriculture, renewal, Pan, Dionysus, Zalmoxis, Mars, Sobek, Horus, and Jesus is complicated, now is as good a time as any to mention, given a cloak and three dancers, one of whom (playing Pan) seems superior to the others, that in the Crucifixion of Christ at Golgotha, he was flanked by two thieves. In the gospel of Luke, the penitent thief, in Latin referred to in prayers and in illustrations as *latro poenitens*, begs the crucified Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus promises him paradise, and gives a final plea for those who operate out of ignorance, asking his father to forgive those who know not what they do. The pagan world might be considered to be operating in just such a fashion, without the full picture of divine revelation – should that ignorance be held against them? Will they all be truly forgotten? In the gospel of Matthew, the Roman soldiers then gamble for Christ’s cloak. In many ways, the Soldier books represent a thoughtful examination of goodness and how it might operate in a more violent world. The very next chapter in *Soldier of Arete* is titled “From the Tomb.” *Soldier of Arete* began with a crucifixion, with Xanthippos playing Pontius Pilate in asking the crowd to decide the fate of Artembares, and with a spear revealing watery blood from a crucified man. All of these images, conjoined with the symbols of the gospel writers in Latro’s memory palace, are not accidental.]
937
938As they sit at the theater, watching actors with masks, Latro looks at the sky to behold “the Ram, the Hunter and his Dogs, the Seven Maids toward whom so many temples look … The cold moon-virgin appeared to warn me it was to her land we were bound” (*Arete*, XXXI 534). [Sparta is the Triple Goddess’s land. The Seven Maids Latro refers to are the Pleiades, which are in Taurus. According to Robert Graves in *The Greek Myths*, these were not actually maids: “three of them had lain with Zeus, two with Poseidon, one with Ares, and the seventh married Sisyphus of Corinth.” Sisyphus appears in this very chapter. The Ram is of course Aries (a different one), the creature whose Golden Fleece formed the backbone of Jason and Medea’s meeting. The Hunter is Orion (who is supposedly responsible for the shape of Sicily, and was something of a miraculous birth for his father, who sacrificed a bull, buried it in his wife’s grave, and waited for it to sprout his son.)] Io says that the drama made her feel as if she has seen a re-enactment of the tale they heard of the White Isle (in which Achilles devoured Chryse, where the dead harbor ill-intentions for the living). Latro wonders what the gods think of humans: “What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight” (*Arete*, XXXI 535).
939
940After the play, Seven Lions drags Latro aside so that they can go to see some of the night life in Corinth. He pays for a Babylonian woman in a wineshop, and Latro follows them from a distance. As Latro turns a corner, he faces an unexpected descent to the land of the dead:
941
942 >It seemed then that a great wave overwhelmed the city, and I was tossed with many another among rushing waters. I could not breathe this dark water, and indeed I could scarcely breathe the air of the strand on which it left me at last; but it seemed I had no need to. I got to my feet, my body hardly heavier than a child’s, and stared about with unbelieving eyes at the immense cavern in which I stood. (*Arete*, XXXI 536)
943
944[Here, watery imagery is associated with the land of the dead.] Solitary and naked human figures lurk there, and he finally accosts one, asking the elderly man his name. The shade says, “I am myself, … just as you are yourself. Go. Leave me in peace” (*Arete*, XXXI 536). Latro realizes that he cannot come up with his own name, though he finally manages to give a translation: “I’m called the mercenary … There’s a statue – a lion with a man’s face – that knows my name” (*Arete*, XXXI 536). This softens the demeanor of the shade: “When I lived, I was called Gortys. That is how we speak here, though it was not truly I that lived. The part of me which lived is now dead, and what you see is the part that never lived, hence cannot die” (*Arete*, XXXI 537). Looking upon the figure of a man wrestling a huge stone, Gortys tells Latro, “He is a king … Sisyphus must roll his stone to the summit and leave it there. While it remains in place, he will be released from his torment.” When Latro asks who could release him, Gortys responds, “The god who condemned him” (*Arete*, XXXI 537).
945
946[Gortys is a rather obscure character, but he is probably the founder of a city named Gortys or Gortyn/a, an ancient city dating back thousands of years. It avoided the fate of much of Crete because it allied itself with Rome, enjoying a period of renewed prosperity under Roman rule. In myth, it was the city to which Zeus took Europa, where she was wedded to the ruler of Crete. The king of Crete raised the divine children of Zeus as his own. Later, Sisyphus provides further details of his condemnation. He tells Latro that the river god Asopus (who returned Latro’s sword to him) “had ever been his friend. He is not a great god like the Twelve upon the mountain, and the king himself is – or so he says – a son of the storm king by a nymph whose father is Asopus; thus [Sisyphus] and the god are related, and differ less in the respect due them than gods and mortals commonly do” (*Arete*, XXXI 539). According to his own words, it seems that Sisyphus was punished for asking Asopus for a spring so that his men might never lack water after telling the river god where his daughter Aegina had been taken. He does not, however, tell the whole story. Sisyphus was known for his cleverness and amorality, and Zeus was actually responsible for taking Aegina. Zeus commanded Death to chain Sisyphus in anger, but Sisyphus asked how Death’s chains worked, and trapped him. As a result, no one died on Earth, and this greatly upset Ares, whose battles were no longer fun. Ares then unchained Death or Thanatos and handed Sisyphus over to be punished. To cheat death, Sisyphus had one final ploy: he told his wife to leave his naked body exposed in the public square so that he could con Persephone into letting him return to upbraid her. While it was ultimately Zeus who punished Sisyphus, Ares is definitely involved in his story. In addition, the uneasy spirits which are proliferating around Corinth are an echo of those who could not die in the stories surrounding Sisyphus, igniting Ares’s grievance. Sisyphus was the king of Ephyra, which became Corinth.]
947
948In any case, Latro takes a hold of the boulder, offering his assistance, and soon, when it slips from the king’s grasp, holds it aloft himself and slams it atop the spring at the hill top. “For a moment it trembled there, like an egg about to hatch; then it split. The report was deafening, the flush of light from it blinding” (*Arete*, XXXI 538). [The image of a boulder rolled aside after a descent into the underworld also seems to resonate with the essential Christian story – and here, the boulder is compared to an egg, which has become associated with Easter imagery – renewal and resurrection.] Lying in the mud, Latro sees Seven Lions and the Babylonian woman known as Bittusilma. Sisyphus has crossed over into Corinth with Latro: “I helped the king rise, and together we clambered up and into the narrow, fetid alley I recalled” (*Arete*, XXXI 538). When Latro drops Bittusilma’s torch into the hole from which he has arisen, he sees “age-blackened masonry, bones, a green sword, and armor rotten with verdigris; but soil from the alley was already sliding into the hold” (*Arete*, XXXI 538). The wall above the hole splits and collapses.
949
950Bittusilma has agreed to go with Seven Lions in the hopes of eventually returning to Babylon. As Sisyphus relates his history with Asopus, believing that perhaps Latro is the help that the river god has sent, he also stresses his own mercenary nature when he was alive. When Bittusilma glances back at them, Sisyphus warns Latro: “I know my own breed. If she plays you false, I’ll ask them for leave to make her suffer for it” (*Arete*, XXXI 540).
951
952The breaking of this wall and the power of Sisyphus allows the spirits of the Egyptians and of Artembares to depart the land of the living [as we learn at the start of the chapter, in Latro’s usual disorganized fashion: “Now the men from Riverland have gone, and so has the Median boy” (*Arete*, XXXI 534)]. During the night, the ghosts appear to many of Adeimantus’s guests. Pasicrates even engages one of them in combat, as he describes later: “I sprang from my bed and found myself face-to-face with a tall man who had a barbed spear and a big shield. I remember thinking – even then – that it was exactly like the one on the wall; it had the same horizontal stripe. The man thrust at me …” After pausing to look at the stump of his hand, Pasicrates continues, “Then spear and shield dropped to the floor. … But there may be more to it than appears – again, like the birds” (*Arete*, XXXII 542). (Pausanias relates the story at Stymphalia, where Themistocles and his retinue have journeyed, and Simonides identifies it as the location where Heracles killed many monstrous birds. [In myth, the Stymphalian Birds had bronze beaks and poisonous dung.]) Pasicrates reveals that he is related to the Agid line and Heracles. When he relates his ghostly story, Io wonders why the ghost disappears, and Bittusilma concludes that Sisyphus took them away after asking Latro if it was what he desired. [Latro has here managed to put the uneasy dead to rest with his influence.]
953
954Latro describes his return with Sisyphus to Adeimantus’s house, and Simonides reveals that some claim that tremors shook the entire region. The poet says, “A great stone rolled into the sacred spring at the summit of the Acrocorinth and split. It’s clearly an omen” (*Arete*, XXXII 543). Pasicrates sees it as a sign that Greece will be split in twain when Corinth is vanquished, and only then can the town flourish. Simonides says that the Earth Shaker or “any of the chthonic deities” might have sent the sign (*Arete*, XXXII 544). Themistocles suggests that these ghosts are a punishment, much like the loss of Sestos after all of the grave robbing and defiling that has occurred. [Of course, Sestos is where the crucifixion imagery began in *Soldier of Arete*, as Artaÿctes was put to death.] Later, in a private discussion with Latro, Io asserts that Pasicrates was so affected by the encounter because “when he fought [the ghost], he had a left hand” (*Arete*, XXXII 546). Io reveals that Hegesistratus “knew a whole lot about ghosts and gods, and right after we met him he said that people who’d been killed with your sword might be particularly likely to come back. It was you that cut off Pasicrates’s hand, master. With your sword” (*Arete*, XXXII 546).
955
956At Pasicrates’s suggestion, Latro tells Polos to obey the Spartan runner out of guilt for his missing hand. Later, Polos returns, silent and trembling. When Latro confronts Pasicrates, he sees the hatred and fear the Spartan bears for the Roman, and has pity. Latro warns him that if he hurts the boy, he will be killed. That night, Latro hears piping, and when he closes his eyes he sees capering figures around a red urn in his memory palace. [This is the urn in which Latro’s scrolls will be preserved, the reward for the chariot race at the Pythian games. At least one ancient story of Ares in *The Iliad* involves him being trapped in a bronze urn for over a year, but here the urn serves to connect the concepts of death and immortality] Under a high moon, Latro reads of Hegesistratus and Pharetra and cries.
957
958The next chapter, “Bull Killer,” begins with a bit of a *non-sequitur*: “The goat man named him - *Kain-tauros*. Now I fear him, though he is only a boy, and smaller than Io” (*Arete*, XXXIII 549). [This opening will only make sense on a second or third look: in this chapter, Latro meets a man who offers to guide them on their way after a landslide deters them from the path Pasicrates knows. The guide is a “ditcher” named Aglaus. Aglaus will recognize that Polos is a centaur, and name him *kentauros*. Latro mishears it, in part thanks to Aglaus’s countryside drawl. The fear “Bull Killer” engenders in Latro should remind us that the symbol of Zeus is the bull, though that mighty animal is also associated with solar imagery. Latro might never realize that Aglaus is a faun, and later Latro asks him quite ironically who the goat man he wrote about might be. Aglaus supposes that it is Pan, whom he claims to have seen (and who was also probably piping in the night, before the appearance of this particular faun).] Returning to the chronological narrative, after Latro reads of Pharetra, it seems that he does not write for a day. The companions come to Arcadia [Bearland], made up of small gardens and herds of sheep and goats. A landslip blocks their way south and they have to find a different path. [Either Gaea or Poseidon can be credited with this interference, and Gaea is almost certainly to blame.] They become lost and eventually meet Aglaus, who agrees to guide them for food and a spit a day. Aglaus is described quite fittingly as “muddied to the hips” (*Arete*, XXXIII 550).
959
960As they travel, Aglaus speaks with Latro of bandits in the area, who will not accost them if Pasicrates is truly a Spartan. He asks if they know any more Spartans, and Io recounts Basias and Eutaktos, saying that both were better men than Pasicrates. Latro remarks that Eutaktos was a brave soldier. “I said that I remembered the sacrifice of the girl, and how Eutaktos had encouraged his men until he died” (*Arete*, XXXIII 552). Latro does not recall Cerdon’s snake bite, but he does remember the Great Mother and her promises to the helots. [The presence of the faun has stirred Latro’s memories of his contact with the Great Mother.]
961
962The book then enters another symbolic set-piece: they come across men carrying the body of a country youth named Lykaon, killed by a boar. They express their grief to Lykaon’s father Ortygenes, and they agree to help with the funeral after spending the night at his house. [In myth, Lykaon was the name of the King of Arcadia who was transformed into a wolf. Much as Oior had many children, Ortygenes is said to have eight living sons and many daughters in *Soldier of Arete*. Here, the implication is that the people of Greece have become increasingly predatory. The wolf’s tooth is probably the ability to damage and destroy enemies, and the Spartans have used their teeth to subjugate and destroy other Hellenes.] Pasicrates, Seven Lions, and Latro join the sons in hunting the boar which killed their brother, and Latro knows its presence by the sounds of the pursuing hounds [which might also be reflected in the greater narrative concerning the presence of Zalmoxis and the hounds of the Huntress, though burgeoning despair is just as likely]. Pasicrates and Seven Lions outrun Latro, but he happens to find a bay colt that “trotted over … as if he had known me all his life” (*Arete*, XXXIII 553). [Of course, this is the horse form of Polos.]
963
964The boar has taken up hiding “in an old wolf den” (*Arete*, XXXIII 553). [The imagery is quite compelling, and we shall put it together in the commentary which follows Latro’s dream of Pasicrates. The atavistic danger of embracing the predatory behaviors typified by the Spartans might be crippling.] Though the hounds cannot get at the boar in the den, Pasicrates boldly enters and faces it alone, where he is wounded in the thigh. The boar bolts out past Seven Lions, and Latro finally throws the cast which kills it. In the aftermath of the boar’s death, “the colt wandered away, though I would have caught and kept him if I had known of the injury to Pasicrates then” (*Arete*, XXXIII 554). Pasicrates congratulates Latro for killing the boar, though he is not pleased, and Latro admits “I do not think I can ever have been very fond of him, but I came near to loving him at that moment” (*Arete*, XXXIII 554). Latro offers to stay, but Pasicrates refuses. As Latro follows the men bearing the body of the boar, he notes that Polos is truly a centaur: “That was when I glimpsed him trotting through the trees, Polos to the waist” (*Arete*, XXXIII 554).
965
966After drinking too much at the feast, Latro awakens and wonders who the goat-man might be, writing, “How I wish now that I had said plainly what it was I saw!” (*Arete*, XXXIV 555). [Many Wolfe readers might frequently echo this wish.] The funeral is prepared at great lengths, featuring an olivewood bed, olive leaves for Lykaon’s crown, and a gold coin for his mouth. Each of his brothers speaks of some aspect of Lykaon’s great qualities. “Themistocles began by speaking of the friendship of Thought for both Bearland and Rope. It was in those places, and only in them, he said, that the ancient virtues of the Hellenes had been preserved” (*Arete*, XXXIV 556). He says that it is their duty to remind everyone of the ideals of the ancient Hellenes. Themistocles also mentions that though Latro forgets every day, the training he received in his youth remains, making him honorable, just, and brave. The ceremony continues with much mourning, and Lykaon’s body is set aflame. A bull, three rams, and three black goats are sacrificed to “the chthonian gods” (*Arete*, XXXIV 557). The boar is also roasted, but Seven Lions tells Latro that no one had succeeded in killing the larger boar they saw in Thrace. [Themistocles’s speech must be seen as ironic, given the extermination of the Achaeans by the Dorians.]
967
968Latro describes speaking with Aglaus, and ironically asks him who the goat-man might have been in his scroll. “He thought that the goat man was a certain god who lives in the mountains of Bearland. His name is All” (*Arete*, XXXIV 558). Aglaus admits that he has seen Pan, to whom this physical fourth world of earth belongs, though the other gods do not recognize it. Latro asks Io about the letter she put on Lykaon’s breast, intended for the land of the dead. She says it was for her parents, though she does not know their fate. “[S]he told them she was well and happy and has a fine man, but that she misses them both very much. I wanted to ask her who this man is, but she was crying, so I comforted her instead” (*Arete*, XXXIV 558). Latro finds Ortygenes, and they discuss his son.
969
970“The old blood ran true in [Lykaon] … Our line fought on the windy plain of Ilion ... but in his entire life my poor boy never saw anything beyond these mountains” (*Arete*, XXXIV 558). The passage from *The Iliad* Ortygenes recites explicitly identifies them as the Achaeans: “Fame is at least by heavenly promise due / To life so short, and now dishonor’d, too. / Till the proud king and all the Achaean race / Shall heap with honors him they now disgrace” (*Arete*, XXXIV 559). [We have already explored the implication of this verse in the introductory passages to this essay, given the missing couplet which proclaims the humbling of Greece and the exaltation of Troy. This long-term prophecy of course grounds the funeral of young Lykaon as a racial elegy for the Achaean Greeks, destroyed by the Dorians, and promises the ordained rise of Rome with the blessings of Zeus. Often in Wolfe, what is left out confirms important thematic strains, and here the missing passage implies the rise of Rome at the expense of Greece.] Ortygenes asks Latro, “Know who the Achaeans are? … We are. … and I’m a king in hiding. You think we’ll ever win our country back? We won’t. Nations are like men – growing old, never young. My son had the misfortune to be a young man of an old nation. So did I, once. Yours is young still, whatever it is. Give thanks” (*Arete*, XXXIV 559).
971
972When they reach Lacedaemonia, Aglaus insists on continuing his service to Latro. When the Arcadian faun arrives at their meal, Latro recalls a silver chariot: “Perhaps it is only an imagined object in my memory palace, but I do not think so; it seems to me that it stands among rocks, not walls. If having Aglaus near helps me remember, I would pay him much more than a spit” (*Arete*, XXXIV 560) [This chariot echoes the one he first envisioned near the Temple of Pleistorus. In Greek iconography, Ares is associated with a chariot drawn by four fire breathing steeds. As we have said, Ahura Mazda is also represented by a chariot drawn by four white steeds. Finally, the Spartans plan to gift Themistocles a chariot which will destroy his reputation in Athens – in true Wolfe fashion, it is all of these at once, and the presence of Aglaus allows him to remember it.] In the night, he asks Pasicrates if the Arcadians were Achaeans. “He said that they were not, the Achaeans having been destroyed by the Dorians, his own tribe, who had slaughtered all their men and seized their women” (*Arete*, XXXIV 560).
973
974Pasicrates runs ahead and they are welcomed with great ceremony at Sparta. Queen Gorgo and the boy King Pleistarchos greet Latro, asking about Drakaina, whose death Gorgo foresaw. Latro writes: “I must remember to ask Io more about this woman; I place this wish among the shattered fragments of the dancer” (*Arete*, XXXV 562). [Eurykles indicated that he had a dancer’s body and always wanted to be a goddess. The dancer Anysia, tied as she is to daggers, is here even more strongly linked to the Triple Goddess by this association in Latro’s memory palace.]
975
976The ceremony to “free” the helots and honor Themistocles will occur at the rising of the full moon, for obvious reasons. In his memory palace, Latro notes, “I lay between the paws of the panther: *Everyone must be in place before twilight brings the rising of the moon.*” (*Arete*, XXXV 562). [In Greek mythology, the panther was believed to be one of the mounts of Dionysus. However, in *Soldier of Sidon* the panther seems to take on potentially more sinister connotation in its association with Angra Mainyu.] The two thousand slaves who are to be honored are each accompanied by a Spartan sponsor. When Latro says that his sponsor will have a difficult job, the young Spartan assures him, “No, it’s the rest who drew the tough jobs” (*Arete*, XXXV 563). [This is building up to the most infamous scene in *Soldier of Arete*: the sponsors slaughter the slaves they are manumitting, sacrificing them to the Triple Goddess, though Latro is not an intended victim.] Latro describes the events, including the speeches which will be addressed to Themistocles and his own words honoring the Spartans and their allies. After a crown is placed on Themistocles heads by the two kings of Sparta, he will sacrifice a white bull to the King of the Gods. Afterwards “those who will be freed and made residents of Rope” will throw aside their clothing and bathe in the Eurotas. (*Arete*, XXXV 564). They will then travel through the temples of the city, and at the final temple of Orthia, Latro will make his offering and be crowned with wildflowers. After thanking the Spartans, Latro will throw his torch into the river. [This detail, of a light being thrown into the water, also resonates with his earlier wrestling match with Pasicrates and might represent the risk of the light and goodness of Lucius being snuffed out.] In his memory palace, Latro cuts the order of the final events into a statue of the Hydra, starting with the first sacrifices and ending with the drowning of the torches.
977
978Io shows Latro a room with a repaired wall, clearly the one where Hegistratus cut off his foot and escaped. She is anxious to leave Sparta. Later, he listens to his host Cyklos speak of Cyrus of Persia, who enquires how the soft and fertile land of Sparta did not breed soft men. This comes from the very last paragraphs in Herodotus’s *Histories*, which also mention the crucifixion which began *Soldier of Arete*:
979
980>[122] This Artayctes [sic], the one who was crucified, was the descendant of Artembares, who was the author of a certain proposal which the Persians passed on to Cyrus for ratification. The proposal went like this: ‘Since Zeus has given sovereignty to the Persians and to you in particular, Cyrus, now that you have done away with Astyages, let’s emigrate from the country we currently own, which is small and rugged, and take over somewhere better. There are plenty of countries on our borders, and plenty further away, too, any one of which, in our hands, will make us even more remarkable to even more people. This is a perfectly reasonable thing for people with power to do. Will we ever have a better opportunity than now, when we rule over so many people and the whole of Asia?’
981
982>Cyrus was not impressed with the proposal. He told them to go ahead – but he also advised them to be prepared, in that case, to become subjects instead of rulers, on the grounds that soft lands tend to breed soft men. It is impossible, he said, for one and the same country to produce remarkable crops and good fighting men. So the Persians admitted the truth of his arguments and took their leave. Cyrus’ point of view had proved more convincing than their own, and they chose to live in a harsh land and rule rather than to cultivate fertile plains and be others’ slaves. (589-90).
983
984In discussion with Latro, Cyklos brings up that Pasicrates thinks the Roman mercenary is uncanny. When Latro declares himself ordinary, his Spartan host says, “Then you’re not – ordinary men never think of themselves that way” (*Arete*, XXXV 567). Cyklos tests his combat reflexes and Latro easily throws him down. Latro explains how he does not forget what he knows of the sword: “Words written remember, a seed knows” (*Arete*, XXXV 567). Cyklos asks if Latro can drive a chariot with four horses, hinting at Pausanias’s plans for Latro at the Pythian games. [Both Ahura Mazda and Ares have some experience in chariots with four horses]. The Spartan also reveals that they have lost much prestige at the recent battles, “But we’ll soon sweep Themistocles from the board, which should help enormously. Then if we dominate the Pythic Games – we *must* win the chariot race – and move boldly against some city of the Great King’s –” (*Arete*, XXXV 567). [They plan to ruin Themistocles reputation by giving him full honors, including a silver chariot, to break Athenian confidence in him. Though perhaps Wolfe accelerates the historical loss of Themistocles’s good name, he would still be historically implicated and disgraced through his associations with the Spartan Pausanias.]
985
986Before the manumission ceremony is held, Latro speaks with Prince Pausanias’s son, Pleistonax. They examine the set of armor worn by Leonidas at his death. Pleistonax wants to emulate him and die facing his enemies. Latro reveals that Leonidas was struck from behind by a javelin. He justifies his statement through rational conclusions based on the state of the chiton. [While the deductions may be convincing, the chapter is titled “Bloodstained,” and as Latro walks with Io he will not hold her hand and keeps his closed so that “she will not see the blood smeared on my fingers” (*Arete*, XXXVI 572). The obvious reason for his knowledge and for the spiritually fresh blood on his hands is that he himself slew Leonidas with a javelin in the back, given his certainty:
987
988>”[T]he javelin had not in fact been thrown – that the man who had killed Leonidas had stood above him with the javelin in his hands and driven it through the king’s armor and into his back. (I do not understand how I have come to know this, and yet I am absolutely certain it is true.) … Something makes us hold back, if only a little, when we strike another man. To strike hard at the back of one who has already been knocked down is particularly difficult.”
989
990>Although the blood appears fresh, it cannot be wiped away, ever on the papyrus. (*Arete*, XXXVI 572)]
991
992They meet with Pausanias and his mantis Tisamenus and speak of his plans for the games at Delphi. The tension between the Spartans and Athenians is explored through banter, with Pausanias saying that Simonides owes him a verse for the victory at Plataea, while Simonides hints that the Spartans might owe the Athenians for Themistocles’s true command at Salamis (Peace) under a nominal Spartan figurehead: “I’d have to call Peace your greatest victory, because it was the first” (*Arete*, XXXVI 570). [This is exactly why the Spartans plan to discredit Themistocles.]
993
994Even though the Spartans do not engage in trade, it seems that Pausanias has been working with the rulers of Corinth to turn a profit. In a letter from Agis of Corinth, Pausanias reads, “*The spoils of war you entrusted to me I have entrusted to the honest Muslak Byblou upon the following highly favorable terms. … Of what your goods bring, he is to retain every tenth coin, and no more. The other nine he shall render in a year*” (*Arete*, XXXVI 571). [Here, Pausanias is trading with people who are the allies of Persia and the enemies of Greece, the Phoenicians, whom Latro always calls the Crimson Men. Historically, suspicion of his adoption of decadent Persian ways and the failed helot rebellion will result in Pausanias’s death.]
995
996It is agreed that Latro will drive the chariot representing Pausanias at the race, and he sits to read and write in a peaceful pastoral clearing as he waits for Queen Gorgo’s own chariot to arrive so that he can practice against her. He hears a piping only to find that it is Io, using pipes made by Aglaus. When he asks if she is bothered by the servant’s missing teeth, she tells him that Polos’s “milk teeth are coming out” also. [While this may be innocuous, we might keep in mind that the first pre-molar teeth in a horse are called wolf teeth and be reminded of the prophecy of Apollo.] She says that she likes Aglaus, though “there was something about him that reminded her of Elata” (*Arete*, XXXVI 573). [Both are of course the sexualized figures of the forest, faun and dryad, with a primeval pagan power that seems to enable Latro’s memory.] When the Spartan Queen arrives, she notes that Latro reminds her of Leonidas: “[Y]ou’re a plain fighting man. You’ve something of his energy, too, I suspect. It’s a good thing for Rope that there are such men as you, but not for your wives and mothers” (*Arete*, XXXVII 574). Polos tells Latro that the team of horses he is to ride has been driven too hard from the start in their usual practice, and Latro instructs Polos to let them know he won’t ask for their best until the last stretch, when the race is almost over. Latro triumphs in that final stretch, and Gorgo’s driver demands a second race. Latro tells Polos to apologize to his team, but they actually want to ride again. In the second race, the horses run freely, and as Gorgo’s chariot pulls ahead, a wheel comes off and the driver is dragged across the field. “I thought him dead; but before we left, he stood and walked” (*Arete*, XXXVII 576).
997
998As Latro returns to rest before the manumission ceremony, he learns from Bittusilma that Seven Lions has been planning for trouble and will bring Falcata with him just in case. The Babylonian woman insists that Polos and Io will be safer with Aglaus, “and [Seven Lions would] kill me if he found Aglaus with me” (*Arete*, XXXVII 577). [The sexual energy of the satyrs is well known.]
999
1000When the full moon comes at last, Latro notes that the shield upon her arm is transcendently beautiful. King Leotychides sacrifices two bulls to the moon, and during the speech of Themistocles, Latro bumps against a Spartan sponsor, feeling a dagger beneath his cloak. “I thought then that he had been warned as I had, and had felt it wise to bring a weapon, though he risked the displeasure of the gods” (*Arete*, XXXVII 578).
1001
1002Themistocles is crowned and receives a silver chariot with the horses Latro raced to victory. Latro recognizes the chariot [either from his memory palace, from his meeting with Cybele, or from both.] The ceremony proceeds much as Latro described earlier, with a bathing in the river and a procession. Latro presents a silver image of the goddess at the end of the procession and throws his torch into the water. “Mine depicted the goddess winged; wearing a tall headdress, she stood before her sacred tree” (*Arete*, XXXVII 579). [Very few representations of Artemis are winged, but the ancient cult of Orthia, which survived at Sparta, did have such a depiction. Both Hecate and Artemis are associated with the cypress tree, symbolic of death and the underworld, which is sacred to many chthonic deities. Clearly, this is a hint of what the freedom of the manumission ceremony actually entails.]
1003
1004Prince Pausanias places the crown of blossoms on Latro’s head, beseeching his sponsor to ensure that nothing evil befalls Latro several times. Latro notes that as Queen Gorgo looks upon him her eyes are bright with tears. [Clearly, something about Latro reminds her of her husband.] As the festival continues, Latro forgets the warning of Seven Lions, but eventually he hears the sounds of “a hundred hounds or more” coursing deer with a haunting sound (*Arete*, XXXVII 579). [The calamity of this event represents his lowest point.] Later, Latro learns that Pasicrates made Seven Lions, Aglaus, Polos, and Io leave the feast, and soon enough chaos erupts when a helot slave takes one of the knives from a priestess and kills Latro’s sponsor, Hippoxleas, before being cut down. As Latro fruitlessly searches for his friends in the chaos, he eventually comes across “the expiring slave” (*Arete*, XXXVII 580). [This seems to be the helot who slew Hippoxleas, but it is never completely clear. He is certainly Gorgo’s driver, who tries to speak to Latro, and then whose shade will not let him sleep as he writes of what transpired.] Latro concludes this portion of his journal: “I am in a place besieged” (*Arete*, XXXVII 580). [The Spartans have decided to take the expedient route in getting rid of the helots whom they have armed: sacrificing them *en masse* to their gods. The sight of so many slaves slaughtered sinks Latro into a depression which lingers for much of the remainder of the book, even though he cannot consciously remember why he has been so affected. The drenching of his torch in the water symbolizes this depression.]
1005
1006Latro stops writing until they reach Delphi, where Pausanias’s healer has been consulted to treat his psychological maladies. The healer instructs him to write, saying, “When we hear ourselves … the gods hear us (*Arete*, XXXVIII 584). The Delphic Oracle is consulted.
1007
1008Io instructs him to write what he remembers, but Latro claims to only remember:
1009
1010>[M]y mother’s kiss before I slept. In my sleep I died and was swept into the Lands of the Dead, the dark kingdoms beneath the mountains. Long I wandered through the caverns where the nights to come are stored. There was much stone there, water, and mud; but nothing more. I heard the neighing of the horse of He Who Gathers, and the roaring of lions. At length I walked once more in the lands of the living, here in the pavilion of the prince; yet I know they come for me” (*Arete*, XXXVIII 583). [The nights to come are of course the future, but there is no clear reference in He Who Gathers unless we are willing to guess that it is Hades (who is not associated with horses), Poseidon, or the Unseen God, whose temple, after all, lies in death’s terrene. While eventually Latro will walk in the Lands of the Dead, this particular memory might be metaphor for his current state.]
1011
1012Latro also notes that he has confused Io with his sister even though she is his lover. Pausanias is greatly concerned with the mental health of the man who was to bring him victory, so he takes Latro to the holy cave which houses the oracle. The Oracle at Delphi proclaims in Pausanias’s own voice, amidst the rustling scales of a phantom snake which coils around her, “*[T]hou art royal, royal be.*” The priest Apollonius recites the rest later: “Not gems nor spears can forge a crown, / What gods raise up, men drag not down. / Though queens in rags, they queens remain, / Gracious in aid, their favor gain” (*Arete*, XXXVIII 585). [The glossary of *Soldier of Arete* indicates that the python was once Gaea’s creature, slain by Apollo. These words might actually represent the interests of Gaea, who probably here suggests that the Amazon women will provide their aid even if they do not look like figures of royalty, though whether the imprecation to act royally refers to Pausanias or Latro is also unclear. While the Amazon women will ride for an Athenian and win, the outcome of the races will favor Pausanias’s reputation. Latro’s scrolls are preserved because of the actions of the Amazons, and enlisting their aid in arming the Argive slaves secures Latro’s freedom at last. In this case, Pausanias’s royal bearing and decisions might serve to change Sparta. The greed of the Athenians (gems) and the battle lust of the Spartans (spears) cannot overcome something which has been ordained by divinity.] Pausanias demands that Latro interpret for him, for he knows “the servants of him who stands behind all gods” (*Arete*, XXXVIII 585). When Latro refuses, Pausanias slaps him, demanding that he act like a man. [This action might explain the reason the oracle spoke in Pausanias’s voice.]
1013
1014Polos rides up on a horse supposedly belonging to his uncle, Amyklos, and they decide that a ride alone will do Latro good. Latro mounts the horse, who takes off, leaving Polos behind, though soon enough a bay colt joins them; Latro lets the “horses” have their head. They come to the temple of a maiden with a bow, Artemis. The live woman there [Elata] orders Aglaus to look to the comfort of their guests. She says that when everyone who needs to be is present, they shall speak of high matters. “I drink too much, my husband [Hegesistratus] says, but then I drink to forget” (*Arete*, XXXVIII 587). Latro is slightly cheered by her, and she admits that they were lovers, though they cannot be as Latro currently is. Conveniently, Polos and Amyklos show up. Here, Polos reveals that Latro rode him when he stole the horses of the sun and when he killed the boar in Arcadia. Elata says that she can show Latro scenes from his past: “You stole the horses of the sun, with the help of Polos, a lion, and a woman called Pharetra.” Polos looks away to avoid what must be Latro’s tears. His Uncle Amyklos comforts him: “You believe great warriors shouldn’t weep. Can’t you understand that the greatest must?” (*Arete*, XXXVIII 587) Amyklos continues, “Latro can’t think highly of [strength]; he’s strong, and so he’s learned how little strength can do. You see, a boy can look up to a hero – in fact it’s only natural at your age. But if that hero were to look up to himself in the same way, he’d be a monster, and not a hero at all” (*Arete*, XXXVIII 587). Polos tells Latro that he only remembers Pharetra because Aglaus is there. The centaur Amyklos says, “Gaea did it, as even young Io understands, and Aglaus is sacred to her” (*Arete*, XXXVIII 588). He says that Aglaus has been her lover since he was a boy, though he does not realize it. Aglaus reveals how Io told him to accompany Elata. The dryad tells Latro, “[T]his is a sanctuary of my mistress’s. You call her a goddess, and I’m her servant … Amyklos, Polos, and Aglaus are here for her foe, Gaea, who took away your memory” (*Arete*, XXXVIII 588). [In this scene, someone finally admits that perhaps the powers at work are only being called by the names of gods and goddesses by humans who do not fully understand their natures.]
1015
1016Sisyphus arrives suddenly, claiming that he has come only because he is a friend of Latro’s: “I doubt you remember me, but Sisyphus is the name. A driver you beat told me about this, and I thought I’d like a hand in it. … You won’t see the joke, but it *is* funny.” (*Arete*, XXXVIII 589). [At this point, the final two lines of Apollo’s oracle seem to be coming true: “King, nymph, and priest shall gather round! / Wolf, faun, and nymph, spellbound” (Mist, III 33). The king is Sisyphus, the first nymph Elata, and the faun Aglaus. We shall discuss the figure of the wolf below. When Sisyphus says he would like a hand in it, he is probably referring to Pasicrates’s left hand, though he might also be referring back to the aid Latro gave him in the underworld.]
1017
1018On his way back, Latro passes through the market in town, and a slave there calls him brother. [He is a Phoenician, later revealed to be Muslak, who was supposed to trade with Pausanias’s goods. His ship has been captured by Argos and docked at Cyparissa, to be sold with his men as slaves.] Latro begins his training with a gymnastes named Diokles for the games, where he will compete in both boxing and pankration. Diokles is also training Pasicrates for several running events, and the trainer swears, “By the twins, I believe he’s got a chance in all of them. … He says the girl’s yours, but you and him are partners in the boy” (*Arete*, XXXIX 592). [The twins could be Castor and Pollux or Artemis and Apollo – in this case, we will assume the latter, given the power structure at Delphi.]
1019
1020Afterwards, in an attempt to cheer Latro, Io leads him to a grove where Elata waits, who attempts to mate with Latro. [Here, the women are under the mistaken impression that it is only the death of Pharetra and lovesickness which has precipitated Latro’s depression. Io is trying whatever she can to bring him love and fulfillment, even though it hurts her; Latro will not touch her because of her age.]
1021
1022When Latro trains with Diokles again, the athlete stresses, “the most important thing is what’s in a man’s heart – whether he wants to win so much that he’ll do whatever winning takes” (*Arete*, XXXIX 593). Latro’s thoughts become suicidal, and he considers throwing himself upon his sword or from a great height. Diokles insists that in Latro’s current state, no god will look on him with favor for his heart and determination. Here, the philosophical root of Latro’s despair at human nature becomes apparent:
1023
1024>[I]t seems to me that there is nothing to be found upon earth but treachery and hatred and the lust for blood and more blood. Man is a wolf to men, a vile predator that preys upon its own kind. I know that it is true of me, however much I detest it. I know, as well, that it is true of everyone else, without exception; and that most of them do not even detest it as I do. (*Arete*, XXXIX 594)
1025
1026[Finally, the wolf imagery comes into focus. When Apollo first spoke to Latro, he indicated that “in the end the wolf’s tooth will return to her who sent it” (*Mist*, II 29). Kore identified Latro as the bearer of the wolf’s tooth, and we have seen one symbolic expression of humanity as that violent wolf in Oior the Neurian, whose name means man, and in Latro’s depression, wherein he realizes that true evil and predation stem from human nature. As the most warlike people on earth, the habits of the Spartan have affected this paragon of battle and *arete*, and he has begun to question the entire purpose of struggle against a fate which makes no difference at all, if people still remain cruel and animalistic. The wolf’s tooth, then, might represent the ability of humanity to harm their own. Perhaps the hatred of Pasicrates and Sparta is so strong that it has poisoned Latro.]
1027
1028Latro shuts his sword away in his chest. [Later, he will return Pasicrates arm in the runner’s dream from this same trunk – though in Latro’s vision, Pasicrates actually reaches into Latro’s breast to retrieve his arm.] Latro goes for a walk alone, and soon Sisyphus materializes beside him, permitted to appear because of the assistance Latro provided him. He tells Latro the story of convincing his wife Merope to leave his body unburied and of his return to the world of the living, where he hid from the forces of the underworld. He points at the stars [the Seven Maids or the Pleiades, though it is unnamed] and says of his wife, “You don’t see *her* … She’s the one you can’t see – the family’s never forgiven her” (*Arete*, XXXIX 595). Sisyphus also says, “[W]e’ve been looking into killing Pasicrates. … Most of us agree it’s an awfully attractive idea, but our seers tell us that it doesn’t look as if it would be of any help to you until you’re dead yourself” (*Arete*, XXXIX 595). [Pasicrates puissance has given him some control over *arete*, and the Spartan philosophies risk spreading over the world through their military might, though the narrative makes this a uniquely personal struggle between Latro and Pasicrates.] Sisyphus says that they will try to force Pasicrates to “let go.”
1029
1030Sisyphus notes that “Elata’s a nice girl, by the way. She reminds me a lot of Merope, and she’s on your side for old times’ sake, as well as your having promised the Huntress that you’d fix the race” (*Arete*, XXXIX 595). [At the very start of *Soldier of Arete*, the Huntress said that the companions would meet a queen [Hippephode, most likely, though a more divine personage is possible] with a strong protector [Ares or Latro], who she would use to flush a boar [Xalmoxis]. She also said that when the moment comes, “the slut must lose. It will be at my brother’s house [Delphi is the city of Apollo]. … The queen will save you, if you don’t turn south. … My queen must win in order that the prince may be destroyed – and thus this queen must not win. … You bring victory, Latro, so you must drive for my prince. If you succeed you’ll be rewarded” (*Arete*, VI 360). The difficulty here involves determining if “the slut” refers to an Amazon woman or someone else in Latro’s life, perhaps even Aphrodite (it makes no sense to call Athena “the slut”). In history, before Pausanias dies he takes refuge in the temple of Athena of the Brazen House. It seems that the Amazon women save Latro and his friends in Thrace, but are expected to lose the chariot race so that Pausanias’s reputation might somehow falter even in triumph. The final lines are the most confusing. Gaea promised to raise Pausanias up in the interest of the helots in *Soldier of the Mist*. Perhaps his triumph in the chariot race would permanently damage his reputation. It might even be that the Triple Goddess wars with aspects inside herself and the entirety of her wish does not concern the race: is Anysia “the slut” who must lose? Could it be Hippostizein, or even Io as a manifestation of purer love? In any case, even here, the idea of “losing to win” can be placed into a Christian context concerning the fate of the human person of Christ, who died to defeat death.]
1031
1032When Latro returns to his sleeping place, he finds a woman there who says she will kiss his tears away, and he is able to be “a man again” (*Arete*, XXXIX 596). They walk hand in hand under the moonlight, and she recognizes him: “I know you … No wonder I had that dream! I’m in love with you” (*Arete*, XXXIX 596). It is Anysia, the dancer with the daggers, who has been hired by Diokles to cheer up his pupil. She gives Latro the coins that Diokles paid her, saying he can keep them or return them to his trainer.
1033
1034Later, Io realizes that something is improving Latro’s mood and that he is writing more. While he is waiting for Diokles to enter his name at the rolls for the Pythian Games, he reads over his scroll and sees a description of Pharetra, which causes his heart to leap. Tisamenus tells Latro that he consulted the Triple Goddess, who told him, “The queen must win … and thus the queen must lose” (*Arete*, XL 598). Tisamenus feels certain that the queen who must win is Queen Gorgo, whom Latro will also be riding for when he champions Pausanias. [He might be wrong, of course, but judging from Hegesistratus’s final words, he is correct: the queen who must lose for the Huntress’s plans to reach fruition seems to be the Amazon queen.] Tisamenus also mentions that his relative Hegesistratus has been consumed by malice and has sworn to destroy Sparta or be destroyed trying. Here Tisamenus stresses that Latro has been adopted by Sparta, and implies that he owes it a great debt, as Tisamenus himself does: “[T]he noble Pasicrates desires to marry in order that he may adopt the little barbarian called Polos. Tell me, sir, who owes the greater loyalty to his father? Is it the son of his body, or one he has adopted?” (*Arete*, XL 599) Tisamenus justifies his reason for notifying Cyklos and the Spartans of Hegesistratus’s behavior. He claims that Cyklos honored the mantis as a guest, and then tries to blame Hegesistratus for Latro’s affliction: “I think it likely that my cousin is responsible for the sorrow that oppresses you. It is more than possible that he has charmed you in some way” (*Arete*, XL 600).
1035
1036When Latro goes with Diokles to enroll, he is asked if he is truly a Hellene. While his trainer and Tisamenus vouch for him, Pasicrates declares that he is not, though he is a resident of Sparta. The hellanodikas [judge] in charge of the rolls asks Latro to recite poetry to prove that he is indeed a Greek and quotes Homer’s *Odyssey*:
1037
1038>“For thee, my son, I wept my life away;
1039
1040>For thee through Hell’s eternal dungeons stray;
1041
1042>Nor came my fate by lingering pains and slow,
1043
1044>Nor bent the silver-shafted queen her bow;
1045
1046>No dire disease bereaved me of my breath;
1047
1048>Though, thou, my son, wert my disease and death;
1049
1050>Unkindly with my love my son conspired,
1051
1052>For thee I lived, for absent thee expired.” (*Arete*, XL 602) 
1053
1054[This verse from Book IX of Pope’s translation of *The Odyssey* involves Odysseus’s journey to the underworld to seek out the seer Tiresias, but his mother Anticlea approaches and lets him know her fate: she died of grief while he was away at war. Once again, we see a pathetic vision of war’s true consequence.]
1055
1056Latro responds viscerally to the verse: “Sorrow swept me away – a moaning wind. My eyes filled with tears; I could only shake my head” (*Arete*, XL 602). [A reflective personification of war might recognize some culpability for Anticlea’s death, and Latro never glories in the death of women and children.] At this point, Latro resorts to his memory palace to find a verse. Images of Sobek and Horus occur to him, and he later writes, “I tried to repeat what he had said about the silver-shafted queen [Artemis], though I did not know then – and do not know now – what it meant. For an instant, I seemed to glimpse her behind him, her smooth, fair face aglow above his black hair” (*Arete*, XL 602). Only then do the words to Pindaros’s Pythian Ode come to his mind, whose concluding line forms the title of this essay. He begins by invoking the golden lyre of Apollo and the muses: “Your tune commands the dance, your tone he uses, / When master of the warbling choir, / He lifts the crystal voices higher” (*Arete*, XL 602). This song produces peace: the bolts of Zeus cease, the eagle rests though his wings are not tired, and Ares leaves behind his lust for war and battle. [In traditional Greek mythology, Athena was the rational, strategic and effective god of battle, while Ares was motivated by violence and bloodshed.] At that moment, Pindaros himself appears, recognizing the man he has sought to aid by the words of his own verse, and Latro is enrolled in the games.
1057
1058Pindaros describes his efforts to free Latro, and the Roman mercenary delineates the schedule of the Pythian Games, which include singing and musical events. Themistocles arrives in his silver chariot, as do the Amazons. The tallest of them embraces Latro, and he notes, “this Pharetra was my lover in Thrax” (*Arete*, XLI 606). [This is of course a subterfuge: the tallest of the Amazon women was Hippostizein, who was present at Pharetra’s death. Her impersonation of Pharetra was inspired by previous agreement with Io in the hopes that it would continue to alleviate Latro’s despair.
1059
1060When Latro sees the prize for the chariot races, a tall red urn, he realizes that it is the urn from his memory palace, where “Black dancers with beards, and the ears and tails of horses, caper around it” (*Arete*, XLI 606). [These figures match the description of Dionysus’s retinue, especially traditional depictions of Silenus, whose song might have inspired the ode which earned Latro the right to compete in the Pythian Games. The juxtaposition of a symbol of death and the concept of immortality also probably suggest the relationship between Pan and Christ.] The hellanodikai do not believe that they can permit the women to participate, but Hegesistratus arrives and assures them, “a very great god, the god of war, had sent these women” (*Arete*, XLI 607). Themistocles uses rhetorical flourish to convince the judges that he will enter the race, and that the Amazon woman “Pharetra” will ride for him.
1061
1062As Latro trains, Diokles admits that he is better, but suicidal thoughts still linger. In the evening, Latro experiences a “dream” which finally changes his mood: “I will write here of what actually happened first; then if there is time, recount the dream; then if there is still time, how I feel now. That is most important of all, but I do not think it apt to change again, so I may write of it whenever I choose” (*Arete*, XLI 608). The poet Pindaros sings for Io and Latro at his inn, and during his singing Latro seems to experience his dream, after which Latro says, “I felt myself a hero who might raze cities or raise new ones” (*Arete*, XLI 608). [Of course, this is exactly the nature of our proposal: the bounteous flourishing of Rome after the recession of Greece from the world scene.] Pindaros says that Latro’s ear for poetry has allowed the Shining God to influence him through song. As Latro walks from the inn with Io, he wishes he had his sword. They meet Hegesistratus, Elata, and the Amazon pretending to be Pharetra. They go to examine the horses of the sun, which look fine. In this scene, Hegesistratus reveals that he feels Themistocles must be discredited for his friendship with the Spartans, who must be destroyed. Hippostizein departs with Latro, and when he arrives at his bed, Anysia is waiting there. “Pharetra” knocks the dagger from the smaller woman’s hand and throws her in a ditch. During the night, the Amazon woman asks if Latro recalls Hippostizein, “who died in the north” (*Arete*, XLI 610). She says she is afraid that if she loses “her queen will surely offer her to appease their god” (*Arete*, XLI 610). [There is some irony in this situation, if she is intended to serve as an offering to Ares.]
1063
1064Latro then relates the dream that Pindaros’s singing inspired in him. A faun appeared next to his bed, beckoning him to the slopes outside. He recalls that he had heard somewhere that fauns bring dreams. [He heard it from the serpentine woman in *Soldier of the Mist* who asked for both Io and Cerdon with Latro’s touch.] The faun says, “I bring you” (*Arete*, XLI 610). [If the faun is at all related to the figure of Capricorn, then this line has an especially Christian significance.] He sees Elata, as well as Polos and Amyklos in their full centaur forms. Latro, still depressed, expresses that he wishes to die. “Tisamenus and Pasicrates came, attended by my servant and conducted by a strange, sly man who grinned when he caught sight of me. Hounds bayed. Later, when we admired the Amazons’ white horses, the lame man asked whether I heard hounds. I did not, as I told him. I did not tell him I had heard them earlier in my dream.” [In his dream, it seems that the sly man must be Sisyphus rather than Hegesistratus. This vision, inspired by the song of Pindaros, finally seems to fulfill the last line of Apollo’s prophecy, with wolf, faun, and nymph spellbound. Perhaps the lifting of his despair silences the hounds.] Elata instructs Pasicrates to take back his hand if he wants rest, but Pasicrates says, “He took it from me; let him keep it” (*Arete*, XLI 611). Tisamenus realizes that Pasicrates is responsible for Latro’s condition, and thinks he can break the charm. Amyklos stresses that there is no charm: “Only hate.” Here, Tisamenus reveals that Cyklos is already considering the death of Pasicrates, because of his relationship with Polos: “He’s not one of them. Such loves are dangerous” (*Arete*, XLI 611). [In this case, either the fay nature of the centaur or, more realistically, his non-Spartan identity serve as impediments.] Suddenly, Aglaus (who was not previously mentioned by name in the dream) says, “If you’re harming my master –” before being silenced with a strike to the throat by Pasicrates. [The sudden appearance of Aglaus indicates he is either the faun or the strange, sly man – and there is enough evidence to suppose that he must be the former. We should keep in mind that in Roman tradition, the god Faunus, associated with Pan, was a legendary king of the Latins who came from Arcadia, where Latro met Aglaus. Faunus was one of the oldest Roman deities. He revealed the future in dreams and visions. The name Faunus also denotes “wolf” and “strangler.” In some traditions, he is the figure who fights off wolves and protects cattle. Later, Aglaus says that in his dream, Latro struck him in the throat rather than Pasicrates.]
1065
1066Amyklos bears down upon Pasicrates, telling him, “You preen yourself upon strength, swiftness, and courage. Look at me! Old, but stronger and faster than you are – or will ever be. And braver, too. What are all your boasted qualities compared to any charger’s?” (*Arete*, XLI 611) Elata warns Pasicrates that death in the dream is death in the waking world. Polos says that he truly does want to love the Spartan, and that he has tried to. Latro notes, “Something stirred in me, like a spider on its web” (*Arete*, XLI 611). Pasicrates reaches towards Latro’s chest, and when he withdraws his hand it is whole. Then the voice of Pindaros cuts through the vision, saying that he has sung enough for the night and does not wish to strain his voice. After the sun rises the next day, Latro writes that human life is short, but that death gives value to life, which can be filled with honor and joy. He stresses that the divine must decide whether a man’s life was lived for good or bad. “The god he meets must rule upon a man’s life, never the man himself” (*Arete*, XLI 612).
1067
1068That day, Pausanias rages when he learns that the Phoenician ship with his goods has been captured by Argos. Tisamenus suggests that Themistocles and Simonides can be used to urge the Hellenes to return Pausanias’s losses discretely. Latro goes and speaks to Muslak in the market, who greets him as *Lewqys*. In this chapter, Latro sets in motion the steps for a rebellion to free the Phoenicians so that they might return him to his home. As Latro completes his final training with Diokles, he learns of Aglaus’s and Pasicrates’s versions of their shared dream. Aglaus says, “You knocked me down, then helped me up” (*Arete*, XLII 615). Rather than reaching into his breast, Pasicrates remembers going with Latro to a trunk, where his arm was kept underneath Latro’s sword and other possessions. He says, “I felt that if you returned it, I would have to end our quarrel, you see. … all day I’ve felt as if I really had it back: like a complete man again. I can do anything that anybody with two hands can, after all – except play the lyre, perhaps” (*Arete*, XLII 615). [We should not forget the transcendent power to induce these dreams and stop even the wrath of Ares that the lyre has in Pindaros’s verse.]
1069
1070Pindaros wins the poetry event, but Pasicrates does not succeed in his first run. That night, Latro speaks with Pharetra about buying weapons from a merchant she knows and offers to pay for them. Anysia comes again and screams at Pharetra, “calling her a wild cow and many other names; she roused everyone” (*Arete*, XLII 617). Latro leaves amidst the ensuing laughter and consults Hegesistratus, who tells him that he will do well in the games and achieve his greatest triumph in the chariot race.
1071
1072The next day, Pasicrates seems to have won the race which is two circuits long, but the judges rule against him. He also loses the dolichos, which involves 24 turns. Latro writes, “It was terrible to hear the blows and see Pasicrates’s face afterward; I should have knocked the mantis and the old physician aside and stopped it. When it was over, he called Polos to him and kissed him, and embraced me as a brother” (*Arete*, XLII 617). [It seems that Pasicrates is being beaten for his failures here, though no direct mention is made of Pausanias, who might be the only man with the authority to do so.] Pasicrates limps from the boar wound when no one is looking, and Pausanias sends him to Corinth, telling him not to return without gold.
1073
1074The day of the five trials, Latro gets a stall for Aglaus in which to conceal the weapons to arm the slaves he plans to free. He runs into Anysia, who tells him that she is his true love and reveals Hippostizein’s imposture of Pharetra.
1075
1076>“Seeing how you grieved and knowing you forget, your slave told you this woman was Pharetra, after she volunteered to play the part. … They laugh about it behind your back, no doubt, and think themselves clever; but your slave girl, at least, has exchanged her happiness for yours. Or so I’m told.” (*Arete*, XLII 618)
1077
1078Following Aglaus’s piping the night before, Anysia had come across Elata, who told her everything. Latro notes that in the glow of the torches, “how like a goddess [Anysia] appeared!” (*Arete*, XLII 617). [Her association with Hecate through the daggers is no doubt intended. Latro’s memory palace even links Eurykles, who wanted to be a dancer and serve the Dark Mother, with the image of Anysia. However, it is not entirely clear if this love quadrangle signifies the continuing rivalry between the Triple Goddess, Gaea, and Aphrodite or simply involves competing aspects of the Triple Goddess. The Amazon women are most associated with Ares, but they will ultimately be racing for Athena (and they seem to embody the qualities of the Huntress). However, Cybele did send Latro Pharetra as a trustworthy companion in Thrace. In any case, the struggle for Latro’s affections definitely illustrate a divine pattern, even if it is not immediately obvious. Io resonates with either Aphrodite or Selene, while Anysia’s symbolic association is the clearest of all.] Anysia stresses that she truly loves Latro and does not desire his property. [She also mentions being pushed into the water by Hippostizein, which seems to represent chthonic danger throughout the series. In this case, the love all three women bear for Latro lead them to sacrifice something of themselves or their well-being for him, and this redemptive sacrifice might ultimately transform even the Triple Goddess.]
1079
1080Latro decides to say nothing to Hippostizein so that she will still work to free the Phoenicians and he can return home. Later, Polos asks Latro how running can possibly be a part of *arete*, and Latro explains that sometimes men must run: “When they do, you’d like to see them escape so they can fight again, on better terms or from a better position” (*Arete*, XLII 620). Diokles emphasizes that Ares is a plain man who wants to get home to Aphrodite rather than a monster.
1081
1082Latro travels to Cyparissa to see the ship he plans to take back for the Phoenicians and plans on concealing his sword beneath his chariot. Latro believes that the market will be empty during the events, allowing his agent Aglaus to act with less impediment. When Latro wins the boxing competition, he is able to draw up a deed which gives Polos and Io to Pindaros. Latro writes his final words in the scroll: “They say the Amazons will drive the horses of the sun, but it is I who will drive like the sun himself. When I cut the harness, we will have four riders; the rest must fight on foot” (*Arete*, XLII 620).
1083
1084Pindaros of Thebes provides prose more purple than Latro ever could for the final chapter. The pythia asked Pindaros to write as an offering to Apollo so that the god’s will might be known. He describes how the Amazon queen brought the Horses of the Sun to Apollo’s own games, “headed like bulls, with fiery eyes” (*Arete*, XLIII 621). They drew the silver chariot of Themistocles. On the second turn, the chariot driven by Latro, laurel leaves adorning his brow, is still even with the Amazons. Pindaros says that the “dark spearman’s daughter” [Hippostizein, daughter of Ares] restrains her team, and Latro shoots past them. Pindaros calls his horses “speechless slaves of Heracles’s heir, best in battle” (*Arete*, XLIII 621). [Latro has won both the boxing and the pankration, and here pulls ahead of Themistocles’s silver chariot.] “So drove Diomedes, when heroes mourned the son of Menoetius – but drove a straight road.” [Here, Pindaros references the funeral games of Patroclus, Achilles’s squire. According to myth, Diomedes, like Aeneas, also founded Italian cities. In Homer’s *Iliad*, the virtues Diomedes embodies are praised at great length, including leadership, bravery, humility, and tactical understanding. Latro seems to be driving even better than Diomedes on a turn in this scene.]
1085
1086Latro actually “quits the spear-proud throng” in this event: he steers his chariot into the audience, where they scatter before him “like the sad Asteria before the earthshaking steed of Poseidon, parting as the wave before the prow of *Argo*. None pursue the flying Latros, for none can.” (*Arete*, XLIII 621). None of the remaining chariots can challenge the Amazon chariot “of the gray-eyed Athena” (*Arete*, XLIII 622). The virgin queen Hippephode receives the urn as her reward and “thus is peace forged between Thesues’s foes and Theseus’s city” (*Arete*, XLIII 622). [Mention of Theseus is important not only because of his status as a great ordering force and founder of Athens, but because of his strange double nature: his father King Aegeus was childless, and a fellow king’s daughter, Aethra, followed the instructions of Athena in a dream to become possessed by Poseidon, conceiving Aegeus a son in Theseus. While aiding Heracles in fighting the Amazon women, Theseus fell in love with their queen, a daughter of Ares, and abducted her. The Amazons warred against Athens as a result. The queen, Antiope, fell in love with Theseus and fought against her Amazons. She died of an arrow wound on the Hill of the Muses.]
1087
1088Hippephode sacrifices the urn to Apollo on the advice of Hegesistratus, and Pindaros notes, “Scarcely had the daughter of war spoken than the voice of war sounds. Dull is he whose lips malign the line of Heracles, whose strength lingers even in fostered sons. Like his mighty club, speeding Latros has struck the sacred city” (*Arete*, XLIII 622). [Heracles founded the Dorian line which is currently represented by the Spartans, who have accepted Latro as a resident. Latro has gathered together the slaves he freed from the market with the help of Aglaus and attacked Delphi.]
1089
1090>In freezing Colchis, Jason sowed the dragon’s teeth, brought forth from the furrow hundreds armed and fierce for battle. So was it with him who was once my charge. He from tumbled apples and pomegranates in the marketplace brought forth sharp swords, loud-voiced bows, and quivers rich in arrows. And from the slaves of the Argives, soldiers. (*Arete*, XLIII 622)
1091
1092[With gold, Latro has successfully engineered a slave rebellion.] The soldiers of Argos, foes to the Spartans, ask for their aid in fighting the Phoenicians led by Latro. Because Pausanias lost so much money on the race, he is trusted to help the Argives. Pindaros continues, “No man dare say the immortal gods have had no hand in this” (*Arete*, XLIII 622). Io leads Pindaros to Hegesistratus, grieving Elata’s loss. [This is never fully explained, but it seems that she has returned to the forest.] Hegesistratus says, “I have failed Cynthia … Before you, you see a corpse, foul already with the stench of death. The silver chariot would be over-heavy, and Latros bore the victory always. Nor would the woman who had desired him so long dare to defeat him, now that she had his love. Bribed, I swore to serve the deity of my enemies, but could not serve her well” (*Arete*, XLIII 622). [From the words of the mantis, it seems that he has failed the Huntress in her plans.] He accepts that death is coming to him, when the slaves of the Triple Goddess pull him from his island home and execute him.
1093
1094Tisamenus gives Pindaros Latro’s scrolls, and Hippephode insists that they be placed inside the urn she offers to Apollo. Pindaros reveals that Themistocles’s reputation has been damaged and he will not be welcomed in Athens. “The Spartan regent is cried up for his sagacity everywhere, and talks of marching against the Sons of Perseus [Persia]” (*Arete*, XLIII 623). Everyone realizes that the ship Latro took held Pausanias’s cargo, and people believe that the Spartans hesitated in fighting the Phoenicians at his command, “by their well-considered hesitancy obstructing the narrow way so that others could not join the battle” (*Arete*, XLIII 623). The rumor insists that Pausanias has gained many times more than he lost. [The implication here is that while he looks like a hero and has unified Sparta and Argos, Pausanias might still get to keep the cargo that belonged to him by preventing it from being retaken, with Latro acting as his agent, though this does not seem to be the case. Since the Huntress desired that a prince be destroyed, and Gaea that Pausanias be triumphant for the good of the helots, it seems that Gaea has triumphed. If Pausanias had won the race, it seems he might have been somehow destroyed, if we trust the words of the Triple Goddess.]
1095
1096Pindaros gives a final vision of Latro on the ship, claiming that “a slender woman with a bow stood at his side. These do not scruple to name her Artemis, the argent twin; that it was a chariot of silver that triumphed no one can deny” (*Arete*, XLIII 623). [While we have certainly spent a lot of effort in asserting that the chariot represented Ares and Ahura Mazda, Artemis is definitely associated with a silver chariot. However, Athena and Aphrodite seem to have won more than Artemis on this day. In defeating her, Latro has reconciled her to a more empyreal nature, and now their purpose is united.] Even though he seems to have lost the race, Pausanias has won, and his family *is* associated with the worship of the Triple Goddess.
1097
1098Pindaros plans to return to Thebes but keeps open the possibility of traveling to Sicily “as the grave emissaries of glorious Hieron, splendid in victory, importune.” [Syracuse was a prosperous city state at the time of Latro’s narrative, and though it was settled by Greeks, it would obviously become a part of the Roman Republic. The tyrant Hieron ruled from 478 to 467 B.C., and greatly increased the power of Syracuse.] Pindaros begs the blessings of Ino if he is to undertake the voyage to Syracuse, “the precinct of Ares” (*Arete*, XLIII 623).
1099
1100## Dreamsongs: The Hand of Pasicrates and the Memories of Childhood
1101
1102When Pindaros sings for Latro, the dream Latro experiences actually serves to lift the mercenary from his debilitating depression: he subsequently triumphs in every combat event at the Pythian Games. Latro would also have won the chariot race if he had not had other plans. He escapes Greece at last by starting a small *latrocinium* of his own against the Argives by inspiring a slave uprising. The shared dream nurtured by Pindaros’s song does not seem to contain any earth-shattering revelations, but Latro, Pasicrates, and Aglaus each experience it slightly differently. While Latro clearly sees that Pasicrates strikes Aglaus in the throat, and Pasicrates admits hitting him as well, Aglaus believes that it is Latro himself who strikes him. This synthesis between Pasicrates and Latro remains one of the most difficult moments in the entire series to contextualize. To make sense of it, we almost have to accept that the characters represent ideologies. When Thamyris calls Latro Pleistorus, he also acknowledges that the Spartans are the most warlike people on earth. The nature of the gods seems to be influenced by their worshippers to some degree, even though their provinces generally remain static. As an embodiment of *arete* and the excellent manly virtues of war, Latro would of course be affected by the most warlike people on Earth. Pasicrates, therefore, represents the twisted Spartan ideal: dominating, aggressive, but not without some human characteristics, though they are dreadfully misplaced. The manumission ceremony in which the helots are slain affects Latro profoundly, and just as Latro seems to represent *arete*, Pasicrates embodies an unforgiving and merciless Spartan approach to war and love.
1103
1104Pasicrates attempts to twist excellence and manly striving to his own ends, thus when he hits Aglaus in the throat, he is misusing the strength and power he has. His philosophy is still one of *arete*, and thus it is somehow Latro acting as well: the principles of manly virtue are perverted to domination rather than protection and justice. As Latro says immediately after the dream, it is not the place of humanity to try to dictate the parameters of greatness:
1105
1106>Let [a man] fill each day with honor and joy. Let him not condemn himself or another, for he does not know the laws of his existence or theirs. If he sleeps in death, let him sleep. If while sleeping he should meet a god, he must let the god decide how well or ill he lived.
1107
1108>The god he meets must rule upon a man’s life, never the man himself. (*Arete*, XLI 612)
1109
1110Pasicrates and the Spartans have been attempting to take the place of the gods, believing in the rightness of their might. Indeed, though it is not mentioned in the text, they historically kept a representation of Ares chained so that the spirit of war would never leave them. How would a god judge them? The contrasting of these dualistic Platonic ideals against reality represent a consistent pattern in the text. When Latro realizes that Kalleos represents the written word whose spoken word is the goddess of love Aphrodite, he might very well be voicing a concept which applies to him: the letter of *arete* is being twisted by the Spartans in their quest for excellence, for they have missed the original essence. Thus, when Pasicrates acts out of his misunderstood *arete*, Latro metaphorically (and metaphysically) strikes as well. In order for war to be redeemed from the evil of the Spartans, either they must change or lose their power. The dream seems to accomplish both ends: Pasicrates embraces Latro like a true brother before the games, and comes close but fails in every event, bearing his wounds with dignity. He hides the leg injury that he suffered when he faced down the boar which killed Lykaon, another symbolic moment echoing the rise of a lame and broken (but extremely brave and competent) Spartan philosophy in the wake of the Achaean loss of power in Greece. It does not seem that Pasicrates actually has magic, save for his influence with the Triple Goddess in her most chthonic form. The young warrior is merely emblematic of everything that is wrong with Sparta: promise and discipline turned to evil and destructive ends, the product of a war-like society entirely devoid of moral fiber and justice. His redemption lies in the fact that he still seeks love, though it is misplaced. If Latro is indeed an avatar of war and violence, seeing the twisted results of a life dedicated to the pursuit of domination and pain might have crippled Latro’s ability to see the nobility of the warrior: human strength is only useful insofar as it can defend the weak. If Latro personifies *arete*, then Pasicrates and the Spartan’s misuse of its precepts have been poisoning him. At the end, when we see Latro escape with the silver figure of Artemis beside him (though she seems to have been defeated), perhaps he has purified war once again, and the patroness representing Sparta now stands unified with him. As Diokles’s description of Ares asserts, he is not a monstrous figure of cruelty and violence, but rather a figure closer to the ideology of Mars, whose symbol is the wolf.
1111
1112One other association that strikes twice in the novels involves crocodiles: when Pasicrates first throws Latro into the waters during their wrestling match, Drakaina senses crocodiles. Later, when he challenges Latro’s right to compete at the Pythian Games, Latro’s memory palace reveals two figures: the crocodile headed statue which must be Sobek, and the hawk headed one which is certainly the War God Horus. This does not mean that Pasicrates is literally the god Sobek, but there are some mythological echoes which are worth exploring.
1113
1114Sobek began as a sinister figure and a god of the waters of the Nile. While we have emphasized that Ahura Mazda would eventually be joined to a water god, Latro’s impression of being a watery deity might actually stem from Egyptian mythology instead. Sobek controlled the waters, but he is also intimately involved in the story of Horus, eventually becoming synthesized into him, also a god of armies and war. At one point, Sobek is even tasked with retrieving the severed hands of Horus from the water. Some sects even believed that Sobek created the world and gave it order. When Horus retrieved parts of Osiris’s body, he took the form of a crocodile, further strengthening the association between Horus and Sobek. Sobek began as a dark god to be appeased, but eventually became a figure of protection. The Spartans and their representative Pasicrates risk turning the embodiment of war into a caricature of what he once was, perhaps forcing a reversion into the atavistic and chthonic violence Sobek originally represented. However, when Latro returns Pasicrates’s hand, the ill-will dissipates. Flaws and mistakes can be redeemed, and the noble virtues of justice and order can sanctify the profane.
1115
1116It could very well be that if Wolfe had written the series as he intended, we might have a more concrete glimpse at both Pasicrates’s fate and Latro’s earliest memories, but we must end on an uncertain note. The song of Pindaros and the song of Latro’s Mother might both produce dreams. The childhood visions of pruned vines, simple worship, and the dancing luminous tutelary god Lar, whom Latro identifies as the song itself, could be phantasmagorical and symbolic or literally realistic, but there are enough hints and innuendos to suppose that Latro somehow marries those realms in one person. Indeed, the golden lights Latro views on the Hill of the Muses resonate with the flashing lights of Lar and his childhood memories. On that hill, Zeus conceived the muses, and that golden song both heals Latro and accompanies his earliest memories. Thematically, Latro’s character arc came to a fitting end in the second volume, but perhaps a few of the more enduring mysteries of the series might have been addressed at greater length if further books were written in the late 1980s and early 1990s as Wolfe originally intended.
1117
1118## From the Hypostatic Union to *Latro Poenitens*
1119
1120While the text strongly suggests that Latro bears the favor of the gods, his ability to complete the task of the demigod Sisyphus and to intimidate and wound other gods such as Zalmoxis indicate that he is not merely mortal. However, the efficacy of the compulsion which seems to circumvent his own will for a time would also suggest that Latro remains very far from all powerful, and that he suffers all the limitations of humans: can one being be fully human and fully divine? If so, what is the mechanism that brought a being who seems to be the War God into reality?
1121
1122Herodotus notes that certain Scythian beliefs held that Dionysus could possess his followers. Later Manichaean conceptions of Ahura Mazda would portray his sons as garments that could be worn in the fight against evil, but that theology had not yet appeared in history. If anyone besides Latro once served as a vessel for the God of War, it was certainly Leonidas, whose widow described him as a plain fighting man, just like Latro. Diokles describes Ares almost identically. Hegesistratus asks Latro if the sword Falcata has been used to kill, and in the same conversation indicates that divinity can be transmitted like a disease. The final chapter of the second book compares Latro’s chariot race to that of the Greek hero Diomedes – whose valor was so great that he actually once injured both Ares and Aphrodite and was granted the ability to see and battle the gods themselves. Diomedes ultimately (and appropriately) became an Italian deity. Latro’s own experiences before the start of his scroll suggest that he once fought the Spartan King Leonidas, and possibly even killed him with a javelin thrust in the back. The lion imagery associated with Latro and Pleistorus could perhaps suggest that Leonidas himself held something of the divine in him, and that his death transmitted it to Latro, but we seem to lack enough information to truly assert that with any confidence. More than likely, the words of Pasicrates suggest that Leonidas played at being the lion-decorated God of War just as Patroklos imitated Achilles, having heroic strength for a time but ultimately, while achieving feats of epic heroism, faltering in death.
1123
1124The other possibility involves a true physical birth. The story of Dionysus emphasizes that Hermes gave him to the human woman Io to raise. We know from details in the text that the goddess of the hearth, Hestia, has left the Olympians, and more importantly, her association with eternal virginity follows a very specific tradition that would further link this incarnation of Ahura Mazda with that of the Judeo-Christian God. Perhaps a child was given to the virgin goddess of the hearth to raise – an event which would be repeated in less than five centuries in traditional Catholic theology. In any case, Mars’s appropriation of the wolf as well as the similarity of the promises made to his adherents by Zalmoxis to those voiced by Christ suggest that the Unseen God has begun to wax once again, rebuilding himself from the fragments left after Persia’s loss, when a monotheistic ideology fractured into the pagan multiplicity of the classical world under Greece and early Rome. While Latro’s amnesia on a plot level certainly involves the Great Mother, perhaps metaphysically it represents the silencing of monotheism on a global level: the battles at Plataea and elsewhere broke Persian control just as surely as they wounded Latro.
1125
1126One final possibility exists: given that Kotys, a descendant of Ares, dies, and leaves his empire to a child, also named Kotys, perhaps this implies that when Aphrodite calls Latro a child of War, and when the Great Mother calls herself his mother and his mother’s mother, Pleistorus has somehow conceived a child of the same name. This, too, could be paralleled with the Christian theology which treats God the Father and God the Son as distinct but unified entities, though it is far easier to believe that the sinister figure of Pleistorus which seems to appear but is never named is actually the usurper Zalmoxis, whose philosophy merely looks like that of Christ. Luckily, the banner of Pleistorus offers a symbolic parallel: only one figure appears on it, that of the War God, even though Zalmoxis was supposed to feature prominently on it. Instead, he remains invisible. This offers a symbolic explanation for the figure who stalks Latro in Thrace: we see the image of Pleistorus, but perhaps Zalmoxis is truly there, translating the curtain which features Pleistorus in his temple into a feature of the plot. The rider with a lance is even headed for the palace of Thamyris at the same time that Latro is, before the boar appears there. It could be that Zalmoxis has been following Latro’s advice: “to stand for a time in the place of your enemy” (*Arete*, IIIV 486). Zalmoxis may have been standing in Pleistorus’s place throughout the entire second volume, but ultimately his creed will also be purified and appropriated in the resurrection of the body and the promise of eternal life which Christ offers to his followers, just as the agricultural association of Dionysus and the symbols of the Great Mother and the Triple Goddess will be assimilated into Mars in Rome.
1127
1128While we have argued that Latro is Ares, it might be more accurate to assess him in light of his Roman heritage as Mars, a far more noble and important God to Rome than to Greece, for in that devotion, he is part of the holy “archaic triad” with Jupiter and Quirinus. Indeed, the renewal through death which Mars signifies makes him closer to Apollo than to Greek representations of Ares, justifying the copious sun and light imagery associated with the man formerly known as Lucius. This Roman version of the God of War was also a deity of agriculture and the earth. His dual nature included the active principles of the spear and the passive aegis of the shield. In addition, Juno is said to have given birth to Mars without Jupiter in Ovid’s account, when the goddess Flora impregnated her by touching her stomach with a flower after testing it on a heifer. (This connection of Mars with plant life and vegetation will re-emerge in our assessment of Wolfe’s Solar Cycle. One of the most fascinating theological developments involves the eventual assimilation of Quirinus into the two-headed Janus-Quirinus at the time of Augustus, linking that deity to the Chthonic Mars.) When it is suggested that Pleistorus is at times Kotytto’s lover, identified with Rhea, we need look no further than Mars’s relationship with Rhea Silvia, who bore him Romulus and Remus, to find a parallel in Rome. The infiltration of solar qualities to the province of Mars might also link him to Dionysus or Bacchus, the god of the vine and sun-driven vegetative growth. Clearly, the deity that the Huntress seeks at the Bacchanalia bears some of those same traits, but Dionysus, like Zalmoxis, is something of a false alarm. The promise of renewal through death strikes a powerful chord that resonates with the Christian narrative.
1129
1130Indeed, the crucifixion elements at work in the second volume, from Artaÿctes’s death and pierced side to the descent into the underworld at Corinth and the rolling aside of a boulder to pierce the veil between life and death, indicate that all of the symbolic pieces are in place to actualize the redemption and salvation of humanity. Perhaps the fish jumping out of the frying pan before Artaÿctes’s crucifixion attain some of the transcendent symbolic power of later Christianity – facing the persecution of Rome, the early Christians used the fish symbol to identify friends and safe gathering spaces, coming to represent hope and deliverance from the fires of unjust suffering and hopelessness. We should recall, even though it is not obvious until almost the entire book has passed, when Artaÿctes prays to Ahura Mazda for deliverance, Latro actually incapacitates the guards and offers him a chance to escape. For fear of retribution from Xanthippos, who plays the role of Pontius Pilate with the fate of his son, Artaÿctes refuses to go of his own will. The identification of the repentant thief crucified with Christ as *latro poenitens* should indicate that this crucifixion imagery throughout the second volume is a feature of conscious design.
1131
1132The primary importance of Latro’s experiences, whether he is literally Mars and Ahura Mazda or not, is that the gods (or the powerful servants of a higher, Unseen God who are called gods by humanity) learn and change from them. The state of the world and the human suffering Latro experiences demand justice and peace, to transform the terrible and distant cruelty of both the heavens and humanity into mercy, kindness, and love. Most importantly, the plot lines of *Soldier of Arete* reveal that often the greatest triumph can only be achieved through loss. To save Latro, Io is willing to give him up. Pasicrates forgives Latro and gets his hand back spiritually, though he loses at the games. Pausanias will only be exalted and placed in a position to benefit the helots and change Sparta after he loses. Anysia only wants what is best for Latro even though he will not truly love her in return. Artemis must lose so that Sparta can be purified and she can reach empyreal heights. Latro must quit the chariot race so that he can achieve true glory. Pan and the pagan world must die for Christ to reign. As Diokles says, Ares whistles when he loses as well as when he wins. The Triple Goddess and Anysia are redeemed by loss and love - and this is something Latro takes with him, just as he ultimately takes the wolf and lion of the great mother for "his" own symbols and incorporates the personal resurrection of Zalmoxis as well.
1133
1134All of these plot lines might readily be contextualized by the Peace Prayer of St. Francis. In light of the contradictions and ironies on display, it would only seem natural that the channel Wolfe chose for peace was War. Indeed, its final line might represent Latro’s ultimate lesson and triumph.
1135
1136>Make me a channel of your peace.
1137
1138>Where there is hatred let me bring your love.
1139
1140>Where there is injury, your pardon, Lord
1141
1142>And where there's doubt, true faith in you.
1143
1144>Make me a channel of your peace
1145
1146>Where there's despair in life, let me bring hope
1147
1148>Where there is darkness, only light
1149
1150>And where there's sadness, ever joy.
1151
1152>Oh, Master grant that I may never seek
1153
1154>So much to be consoled as to console
1155
1156>To be understood as to understand
1157
1158>To be loved as to love with all my soul. 
1159
1160>Make me a channel of your peace
1161
1162>It is in pardoning that we are pardoned
1163
1164>In giving to all men that we receive
1165
1166>And in dying that we're born to eternal life.
1167
1168## Resources
1169
1170- Best, Michael R, and Frank H. Brightman, eds. *The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus: Of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones, and Certain Beasts, Also a Book of the Marvels of the World.* Boston: Weister Books, 1999. Print.
1171
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