Finally – neither the Phoenicians nor the Persians were ‘bad’. The Greeks were not ‘good’. But Arimnestos is a product of his own world, and he would sound – curious – if he didn’t suffer from some of the prejudices and envies we see in his contemporaries.
At the risk of repeating what I said in the afterword to Marathon – the complex webs of human politics that ruled the tin trade and Carthage’s attempts to monopolize it – the fledgling efforts of Persia (perhaps?) to win allies in the far west to allow them to defeat the Greeks on multiple fronts – these are modern notions, and yet, to the helmsmen and ship owners of Athens and Tyre and Carthage and Syracuse, these ideas of strategy must have been as obvious as they are to armchair strategists today. The competition for tin was every day. Trade and piracy were very, very closely allied. If my novels have a particular point it is that the past wasn’t simple. In Tyre and Athens, at least, the leading pirates were also the leading political decision makers.
In the last two books, I’ve said that ‘it is all in the Iliad.’ Well – in this book, it is all in the Odyssey, and I’ve gone back to that source again and again. I have enormous respect for the modern works of many historians, classical and modern. But they weren’t there. Homer and his associates – they were there.
I have seen war at sea – never the way of the oar and ram, but war. And when I read the Iliad and the Odyssey, they cross the millennia and feel true. Not, perhaps, true about Troy. Or Harpies. But true about war. Homer did not love war. Achilles is not the best man in the Iliad. War is ugly.
Arimnestos of Plataea was a real man. I hope that I’ve done him justice.
An Orion eBook
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Orion Books
This eBook first published in 2012 by Orion Books
Copyright © Christian Cameron 2012
The moral right of Christian Cameron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication, except those already in the public domain, are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 4091 1413 0
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Table of Contents
Also by Christian Cameron
Title page
Dedication
Epigraph
Glossary
General Note on Names and Personages
Map
Contents
Prologue
Part I: Sicily
1
2
3
Part II: Alba
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Part III: Massalia
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Part IV: Illyria
21
22
Epilogue
Historical Afterword
Copyright
Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) Page 49