Champion of the Athenian Games

By Jerrol Langford

As an adult with a family, Theseus wants to focus on being a father and a husband and believes he is finished with adventuring. Instead, the adventures just seem to find the Athenian King.The time comes for the fourth tribute to Crete and it is the king's responsibility to select fourteen highborn Athenian youths to send to Crete as slaves. Unable to choose teenagers for such a fate, Theseus volunteers to allow the Cretans to take him instead. Nine years before, he managed to escape from Crete and he is willing to gamble he can do so again.Herakles is forlorn, because he won a war, only to learn that he had fought on the wrong side. He hopes that attending the Eleusinian Mysteries will comfort his troubled soul, but he is rejected because only citizens of Eleusis may partake in the mystical experience. So, Herakles asks Theseus for assistance with his uncooperative subjects in Eleusis.The King of Argos brings ten women in black mourning robes and begs the Athenian King for his help, because he has lost a war and the Theban King has forbidden him from burying his fallen soldiers. Theseus wrestles with the decision of whether he can take an Athenian army and risk fighting a war with Thebes to allow the Argives to bury their dead.The children of Herakles and Iphikles arrive in Athens, looking very much like their fathers. The Alkides request protection from Eurystheus, the King of Tiryns, who wields the Sword of Perseus. The taskmaster of Herakles has pursued them across Hellas, intending to capture the Heraklides while they are still teenagers, because he fears they will try to take his kingdom when they become adults.Every five years the city hosts the Athenian Games and Theseus has not participated since he was seventeen, when he became the Champion of the Athenian Games. His people have consistently asked him to join in the athletic events, but he has chosen to serve as the host of the Games. At age forty-two, does he still have enough left to compete with the younger men?The descendents of Pallas are still plotting to take over the kingdom. Butes, the heir of Pallas, raises the largest army that Attika has ever seen and begins marching north. When they take the city of Sphettus, Theseus is forced to gather his own army and fight the final war against the Pallantids, to determine who will be the Athenian King. "Rumor, swiftly traveling, had spread Theseus' fame through the various cities of Argos, and the peoples of rich Achaea sought his help in their hour of peril" - Ovid, Metamorphoses "Theseus, born of the main, held aloft his Marathonian oaken shaft, whose cruel shadow as he lifted it fell upon the foe, and the spear-point flashed o'er the battle-field afar" -Statius, Thebaid

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1728969859
• ISBN13: 9781728969855
• Release Date: October 2018
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 572 Pages
• Weight: 1.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 1.4" x 5.0"