The story of the coming of Alexander the Great of Macedon
In
the ancient world of Alexander, it
was believed that gods and goddesses
mated with humans, resulting in children
like those who became the heroes,
Achilles and Herakles. How natural
that Alexander, descended
from both Achilles by his mother,
Olympias, and Herakles by his father,
Philip II, might himself have been
sired by Zeus. For a population who
rarely ventured more than twenty
miles from their birthplaces by land,
intervention by the gods was the
accepted rationale for such an extraordinary
man as Alexander the Great, who rose
from the obscure city state of Makedon
to conquer the known world. Attributing changes in their environment and behavior to games played by the gods existed in time and place with structures that mystify contemporary thinkers. In an era when architects designed structures by techniques only guessed at by modern builders, when physicists invented intricate mechanisms that showed no obvious hand in its action, when astronomers foreknew the coming of eclipses and predicted the changing of the seasons, even the most unscholarly farmer knew husbandry. Can today's scholar persist in the belief that the ancients would not have known how to breed superior humans from selective genetic lines? Does it not also follow that such a science could have been used to bring such a man as Alexander the Great into being?
A
contemporary mindset in the typical,
historical fiction reader, is that the understanding
of ancient mankind is far exceeded by modern
knowledge and science, even of intellectual
genius. This is a misconception born of
differences in culture. In
ancient worlds, fathers taught special skills
only to sons and relatives. Family knowledge
was protected from theft behind a veil of
secrecy so secure that any not born or adopted
into such circles were excluded. The
gaps grew long and deep between skilled
and unskilled, trained and untrained. Professional
classes based on family protected their heritage.
Families with a common knowledge of special
skills banded together into guilds, wielding
power and gaining wealth. In
the ancient world just as today, knowledge
was power. It is from such a setting
that the structured premise for Son of
the Bracelet grew.
The Success of Alexander's Campaigns across the continents of the ancient world leave scholars and military analysts scratching their heads in wonder. Could this man have been other than the god some claimed him to have been that he could, undefeated, bring the world to its knees before he was thirty-four years of age and give birth to legends that have persisted to this day, more than 2300 years later? Not a god, no, but perhaps the result of specially selected blood lines?
Logic insists that, despite the formidable armies who answered his call, including those gathered and trained by Philip, his father, Alexander must have garnered support and information from sources not mentioned, perhaps not known, by Curtius, Arrian and Plutarch. I believe he did not work alone. Son of the Bracelet paints the beginning of such support, drawing a picture of key figures who witness and participate in these events, playing a major part in their execution. I have threaded through records, tying seemingly unrelated events together piece by piece. From many characters a single man emerges - a man known by many different names, all involved in some manner with the house of the Argeads, with Olympias, the mother of Alexander, and with Alexander himself throughout his life. The only confirming link between these varying men is that they are frequently mentioned as being men of Akarnania. I have called the man who emerges, Daneion Pelos, or more familiarly, Wallis.
The series, Son of the Bracelet introduces the reader to a world just prior to the birth of Alexander. A third book is planned of the years of Alexander's youth and early manhood. The book reads as a journal of Wallis' activities, seeing the world as he sees it - ancient Peloponnesus, Athens, Macedonia, Illyria and the regions of the People of the Trees from north of the River Danube, and the Greek colonies along the coasts of the Adriatic and Aegean Seas. See through Wallis' eyes as he tells of a behind-the-scenes struggle between two powerful factions to control Alexander, even as a third group of contenders for the throne within Philip's own council seek the same ends. As proposed in Son of the Bracelet, the phenomenon known as Alexander the Great almost didn't happen.