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TheGreatKingsCurse

Marcellus
Durrell

Author of
The Elektros Saga

Seven novels of  irresistible
chaos in Ancient Hellas

Official Website

BOOKS

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Book 6

Enemy of Athens

 

Themistocles, the Hero of Salamis, is now a wanted criminal and must flee Athens--and Elektros has no choice but to go with him. They travel from town to town, trusting no one, suspecting everyone, one step ahead of a thousand drunken fools and bounty hunters--and end up in the last place they'd ever expect to go.

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Book 5

Gods & Whores

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After a falling-out with Themistocles, Elektros finds himself leading a small squad of special ops horsemen whose mission is to harass the Thebans and sabotage their supply lines. His new commander, the Spartan Pausanias, is a brilliant infantry commander but seems to prefer glorious death over ultimate victory.

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Book 4

Await Not in Silence

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Elektros returns to Athens and soon understands what most people do not: the Great King will invade again,  with the largest army in human history, accompanied by a huge war fleet. As Themistocles tries convince the Athenians that they too must have a war fleet, Elektros closely witnesses the raucous and sometimes lethal world of Athenian politics.

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BOOKS

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Book 3

Goddess of Mercy

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Elektros & Kandra are murder suspects and must leave Halicarnassus before sunup, but where can they go where they won't be followed? There is one place, Scythia, the Wild Lands, where Elektros has relatives he's never met. Their guide  Drako  knows the way but has a terrible secret of his own.

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Book 2

The Owl & the Wolf

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The island farm-boy Elektros goes to Athens to complete his military training. A natural soldier, he is heroic before the Battle of Marathon, but even this does not make him acceptably Hellenic to some powerful Athenians.

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Book 1

Elektros

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The Great King wants revenge, his army is coming, and all Hellas knows it. Elektros, born a slave on a small Aegean island, is half Scythian and an uncannily natural warrior. He gets trained by the legendary—and legendarily cruel—swordsman Xenocrates. and learns of love and loss, joy and death, as he begins to carve out a legend of his own.

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Books
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BIO

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Name an odd job and chances are Marcellus Durrell has done it. He has been a welder, chicken catcher, fruit picker, steelworker, warehouse loader, auto assembly-line worker, movie theatre janitor, junkyard labourer, musician, free-lance writer, cab driver, office clerk, art gallery security guard, postal worker and more. At one time, he refused to work for any company that would have him as an employee, although he later revised this policy because it was detrimental to his longstanding desire to live indoors. He is a recently retired librarian--a notably non-odd job & the best he ever had--and lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, with his wife and their alarmingly spoiled cats.

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With the publication of The Great King's CurseThe Elektros Saga is complete. All seven titles in the series are available from Amazon in both print and ebook formats. Julia Infinitus is his ninth novel.

Bio

Marcellus Durrell: bumps and bruises along the way

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CONTACT

Got questions? Who doesn't? marcellusdurrell@gmail.com 

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VIOLENCE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Suitable Cruelties is set in the era of the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage. The Western Mediterranean wasn't big enough for the both of them, so armed conflict was inevitable.

It was an age of everyday violence. Most judicial systems included not only gruesome executions but also legally-sanctioned punitive mutilation, such as blinding or cutting off body parts. Most such punishments were done in public. Attendance was high.

There was no notion of what we today would call war crimes. Slaughter of prisoners-of-war and civilians was routine. When an army conquered a settlement, the soldiers were often let loose to steal and rape with impunity-- this was, in fact, sometimes a promised benefit during recruitment. POWs might be enslaved, either retained by their captors or sold to slave dealers, but if it was too much trouble to arrange their sale, POWs could be killed without legal repercussions for the killers.

Slavery was practiced by all societies and there were virtually no objections to its legality anywhere. In some cases, slaves could rise in the households or businesses of their masters and end up free and financially comfortable--this was true of the Roman Emperor Claudius's freedman Narcissus--but this was by no means typical. Much depended on the ethics and whims of the slaves' masters. There were no legal requirements for masters to treat slaves with kindness, and few restrictions on whatever cruelties the masters considered suitable. There are also many documented instances of free persons kidnapped and sold to slavers. The enslaved became so through sheer wrong-place-wrong-time bad luck.

This is the world into which Marcus Torquatus Cincinnatus is thrust. While he eventually becomes hardened to the violence he sees, he never completely stops being affected by it and he remains shocked about the savagery of his captors--although to be fair, the Romans were also not particularly kind to slaves or POWs. The latter were often forced to fight each other to the death as the Romans wagered on the outcomes. This was a post-battle religious ritual that eventually evolved into gladiatorial combat.

The sacrifice of animals and the outpouring of their blood on a public altar were common rituals before community events or to elicit the will of the gods. In other words, people saw blood and death often and were less affected by it than we would be today. This helps explain why Marcus is cruel to animals when the need arises, but even then is bothered by it.

 

It is tempting to conclude from all this gore that humans are horrible. Yet if you look at this another way, it infers the opposite: yes, people did terrible things to others, but we have evolved. Executions, state-sanctioned mutilation and enslavement still occur, but most societies have outlawed them. When they do happen, they draw public outcry. Suitable Cruelties, therefore, contains an implicit message of hope. We are still far from perfect but we're actually getting better. Just give us another couple of millennia and we'll learn to be kind to everyone.

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