JL: Sons of Arete

Fiction

Sons of Arete

The Acts of Fists & Furies: 480 to 367 B.C.

JUL/7/24

A Crackpot Book

Lynn Lockhart Publisher

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Dust Cover

In the years when the boldest men of Hellas battled the slavish armies of the King of Kings, at the Hot Gates where Leonidas led according to royal obligation in 480 B.C., down to the fields of Cunaxa, in 401 B.C., where Xenophon was elected general by a leaderless army, one boxer “lived to an unnatural old age.”

Sons of Arete is the story of that man and a handful of his fellows, as if written by the poet Menander 342-292 B.C. These obscure heroes where five boxers: Theogenes, Euthymus, Timocreon, Polydamas and Astyanax, and a poet: Simonides. The novel is written as if in experimental form by Menander as an ode to Simonides and Euthymus, their rivals, their cruel masters, and their defiant acts, as they fought a metaphysical battle across the face of the same world where generals, now well-remembered, battled the gross forces of the same Westward Reaping Evil, forces that these six men grappled with alone and in obscurity.

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To the Reader

All chapters of Sons of Arete are based on the author’s findings concerning the deeds of the ancient boxers for his book series The Broken Dance:

-The First Boxers

-The Gods of Boxing

-AllPowerFighting

-The Boxer Dread [unpublished]

Each chapter shall have a citation from one of the volumes above, so that the reader might check the veracity and the time line, a time line traveled by many another heroes of the Fist and the AllPowerThing, and on many a battlefield as well. Sons of Arete is only fiction in form, crafted in a manner best suited for illuminating the shadowed lives of such great men who have been relegated to history’s dustbin. These stories are intended to present a long forgotten struggle against the enslavement of the human spirit, which did take on a traceable form across nearly 120 years, most of that span of time accompanied by the man invoked some 40 years after his passing by Menander, as a figure of salvational aspect, and over half a millennia later by Pausanius in his Geography of Hellas.

Menander [an Athenian, who saw his nation fall under a foreign heel in his youth] wrote as the deepest spiritual writer of his era, a time of despair when men such as he looked back to an earlier age of heroics. It is assumed that his writing [over 100 plays, comedies and poems], along with the histories of the many authors alluded to by Herodotus, were lost in the various accidents and disasters of the library of Alexandria.

However, Oswald Spengler, in his Decline of the West, makes a convincing case, that the writings of Antiquity were passively aggressive [simply declining to copy old texts] purged by the NeoPlatonic, anti-mystic, anti-masculine literary curators of late Antiquity. For these men were also in doctrinal competition with rival Early Christian Didacts. In this volume, this author come lately, posits that Menander and other soulful, masculine-minded writers of his age, were deliberately purged by later, mass-minded writers of a subsequent fallen age.

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Dedication

For Achilleas

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Inspirational Quote

“By some way other than death.”

-Pausanius, circa A.D. 170

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Apologies

To Pindar and Dorieus, whose odes and family story deserve a book all their own, and have here been neglected, along with Timeaus of Thebes.

Episodic Contents

-1. The Tip Toe Circle: Theogenes & Euthymus