Jon Edward Martin, The Shade of Artemis: A Novel of Ancient Greece and the Spartan Brasidas (2005). This is an historical novel. I gave it five stars on Amazon USA.
A terse, focussed, well-grounded, imaginative, and at times moving account of the life and times of Brasidas, the most unSpartan of the Spartans. Brasidas emerges from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesean War as larger than life but also obscure. If we know so much about the Athenian Alcibiades, what he drunk (too much), who he screwed (everyone), how he carried on (endlessly), we know next to nothing about Brasidas who nearly won the war single-handed. Martin offers a rounded picture of the complete man, his first love, his difficult relationship with a demanding father, a wife whom he did not love and children whom he did, the interaction with those lesser beings: helots, and the mutual perspective of Athenians and Spartans.
The story is drawn along several fault lines in Brasidas’s personal and political life and offers insights into the inner workings of the Spartan society and oligarchy paralleled to the all too public workings of Athenian democracy. For history buffs, the novel cuts away too soon from some of the major events like Mytilene but that is necessary to keep the focus on Brasidas.
I am going to read another of Jon Edward Martin’s books, and I hope he writes more.
It is very well written, no superfluous asides to pad the pages, no convoluted passages that cry out for that vanishing breed – the sub-editor, no unusual word choices that bespeak dictionary English rather than spoken English. It is certainly the equal of Nicholas Nicastro, Isle of Stone (2005) and Peter Carnahan, Pharnabazus sits on the ground with the Spartan Captains (2002). These two cover some of the same historical events. It fleshes out some of the information from Timothy Shutt’s A History of Ancient Sparta (Audible 2009) without the ponderous didacticism.
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