JL: Grace

Author’s Proof

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A Crackpot Book

Lynn Lockhart Publisher

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Dust Cover

From the ascension of Alexander the Great in 336 B.C., throughout his unmatched series of victories, down to his death in 323 B.C., one unit of his expedition was cited, and saw more action, than any other. These men were semi-barbarian allies of the young king from the highlands of what is now Bulgaria. These unmatched fighters who began their conquest of the known world in animal hides, were more loyal than Alexander’s own guards, of his own race. Seeing more action than any other unit of the Macedonian army, the Agrianes, whose primary town had been occupied continuously for some 7,000 years before their bloody 13 year expedition, offer a view to the greatest adventure of antiquity.

Extended Dust Cover

Ode was bundled off from Temesa, in Hellenic Italy, across the Adriatic Sea to a town he had never known existed, and there sold, along with six other youths of about 12 years. On the very advent of manhood, when boys of free men and citizens were admitted into the town guard to patrol the countryside for the community, Ode, bastard to a lame goatherd and a shamed cook, found himself on a strange pier, in an uncaring land, alongside six strange boys of far off lands, gathered for sale before a hard man.

Grace is the story of Alexander’s rise to Kingship and his invasion of Greek Persia, related from the perspective of some of the nameless youths who became men in his wake, men hardened at the keen edge of his pathological will. This account is based directly on that of Arrian’s Alexander Expedition, and is intended as a seven-volume companion to The Son of God, a history by the same author, based directly on Arrian’s seven books.

Historical Sources

Of the three extant, comprehensive accounts of Alexander, those of Arrian, Plutarch and Quintus Curtius Rufus, all are from late Antiquity as far removed from Alexander and his time as we are from Columbus and his. There are fragmentary sources on Alexander, such as Didorus and Polybius, and a few curated fragments from closer to Alexander’s time. Arrian states that he followed Aristobulus and Ptolemy, who were generals to Alexander, as primary sources, and used others, most likely of Nearchus, another officer of Alexander and of Callisthenes, the official expedition recorder, and that of his successor. Such accounts, if differing from recollections that might affront the academic class, need not be destroyed. For a book to be omitted from the historical record, a simple decision not to copy it is enough to consign it to the dustbin of ages.

Additional to these now lost primary sources, Arrian mentions a great mass of “popular tradition,” which he did not discount, and assured the reader that the nature of Alexander the person, might be clearly reflected there. This ever growing popular tradition included a mass of romances, much of which Arrian sneered at, that would have been inflations and distortions of the popular tradition. What is utterly absent is an account from a soldier. Thousands of Alexanders soldiers were literate, and hundreds of them poets, in the oral campfire sense. It was a habit, a dedicated practice of Alexander to visit every wounded soldier and listen to his story. That practice was, in the view of this novelist, the root of the “popular tradition” of the Alexander Romances.

In many ways, Arrian is a cipher. Yet, as a writer, I see his reluctant hand clearly. I my self have labored as a writer against the system we live under and have omitted and edited out more statements that I suspect are facts than most popular writers publish. I see in Arrian a writer who withheld much of what he suspected was truth from his narrative so that his work would survive the ages. Each work, to survive, had to be copied under state sanction, which meant under the approving eye of the financiers who controlled both the politicians and the priesthoods, the ranks from which Arrian and Plutarch were drawn. Ovid and Virgil were punished as exiles for their writings, Paul executed within the memory of elders that would have been known to Flacus, Plutarch and Arrian. It is my intention to faithfully exemplify Arrian’s portrait of Alexander, from the perspective of his most dependable men as they come of age. The narrative idea is not to add a single action, not to expand on any aspect of the expedition, but to flesh out the experience within the framework passed down to us.

Narrative Premise

The Agrianes were never resupplied with fresh recruits from home as were other units. Yet, seeing more action than any, their strength never reduces. I suppose, based on the after action reports of women and children being disposed of, that replacements may have been drawn from the unseen army of slaves who carried the gear and food of the soldiers. Greek armies of the period had twice as many men as listed, with a groom for each horseman and a porter for each footman. The 300 Spartans had each of them, a helot slave, who was also a soldier. Furthermore, it is well known among military historians that the highly valuable Peltast class of light infantry, were drawn from youths [Roman Republican Velites], barbarians [Agrianes] and from slaves and freedmen [manumitted slaves] throughout the Greek world. During one engagement, Alexander’s scouts found “three girls, three boys and three black rams” lying dead as sacrifices to draw a curse upon Alexander. The expenditure of youthful life that we see as innocent to sacred under modern ethics, in Antiquity typed closer to spending money or using oil to light a fire, rather than any dedication to youthful humanity.

By all accounts, Alexander was the most humanitarian, and most kind conqueror of his age. He also became a man well before age 16 when he first led an army. A problem with his loyalty among men of his race was that they were as likely or not men of his father’s age. He would later face mutiny for wanting to induct boys from conquered races into his army. Based on his extreme close moral relationship with Longarus, King of the Agrianes, and the very similar shepherd/hunter camp culture of the Agrianes and the most hardy mountaineer folk that Alexander dealt with from Albania to Afghanistan, it is the “popular tradition” premise of this novel, that such accounts that abounded in Eurasia, to number over 180 romances, were originally composed about the camp fires of the undefeated Agrianes, about their undefeated King, forever a young man who was greeted as a Savior from ethnic slavery, monetary slavery, political slavery and above all from War, which he at once embodied and affronted, never sacrificing to War, but always to the Almighty, who so detested his angel of slaughter, son of heaven though he was.

-Portland, Oregon, Saturn’s Day, War Month, Day 1

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Narrative Notes

In The Son of God, a history, my guide is Arrian, together with his own guide, Xenophon, as befits an Athenian author, [1] and Alexander’s personal guide Homer, as befits a heroic royal.

For Ode and his fellows, I have chosen as guides: Pausanius in his story of Euthymus and the demon who was a ghost of Odysseus’ marooned sailor, of Hesiod [Ode-singer] who was a shepherd and camp poet, and, like Alexander and Arrian, Xenophon, who described in finer detail much of the same sort of action over the same ground by the same means, that Arrian summarizes. Arrian wrote of battle in shorthand, one suspects, because of the vast scale of Alexander’s expedition compared to that of Xenophon.

I shall also lean on minor Greek Lyrics translated by Richmond Lattimore and of Italian Faerie Tales listened to on audio book between chapters.

I have chosen youthful characters as a means of overcoming a great short coming. I do not wish to write a novel set in a place I have not walked. I was denying Alexander’s relentless ghost knocking on the door to my muse cave when Major Wolf told me, at 7500 feet in the Laguna High Desert, that he was taking me up a box canyon and that I was following him on the spare ATV. He returned as I tried to figure out how the thing started, gave me a brief demonstration on starting and shifting, and tore off. An hour later I rolled the ATV, landed on my feet in the sage brush, and walked behind him up into the box canyon.

He stopped and peered down at me with his narrow military eyes, as we looked up at the boulder cliffs. He said, “There is a Tom Cougar up there! So, how did you like the scenery?”

“Haven’t seen a thing other than the ruts in the trail and your dust. Could have been surrounded by a herd of bison and I wouldn’t know.”

He laughed and left me in his dust again as I jogged down the trail to restart the ATV ahead of the 200 pound cat I had been assured was thirsting for my flatland blood…

This convinced me, that if I put my mind in the place of high stress, that is youth trying to keep up with men in combat, together with the adolescent male obsession with action and unconcern with the pedigree of vegetation and the color of rocks and such, that I could write an operational novel from the perspective of the slave boys hauling the blankets and barley meal and spare javelins and darts of veteran warriors. For, by the time those that survive would come of age, they would be in an alien land were many men I know have fought, the high deserts of Central Asia.

I pledge to keep the action as Arrian described, merely amplifying interior physical activity to do with combat. It is a happy fact that I have spent much time dueling with dull steel machetes of the very type the Agrianies would have used, a macheara, in fact, or cleaver, the very origin for our word machete. It is my intent to post the Areid, or war-ode or war-song or war-story [Acilleas, please rule on this linguistic subtitle] one chapter at a time on jameslafond.com and then put the book in print ASAP, just to get Alexander’s ghost out of my wan beard.

-JL, 3/2/25