The Spartan She-hound and the Merchant Mariner

The book is a meditation on the end of one world (the polis-based Hellenic civilization) and the violent, money-drenched birth of another (the Hellenistic age and its imperial aftermath). Diogeneia, the elusive Spartan she-hound, is its cipher — the silent witness who saw the catastrophe coming and tried, unsuccessfully, to prepare a new beginning.

An ancient Greek text was discovered during the 2003 looting of the Baghdad Museum at the beginning of the US invasion of Iraq. It contained the following story:

Core plot

• Cantharos, a pragmatic, money-driven merchant from Cyme (Aeolis), has been haunted for sixty years by his childhood guardian Diogeneia, a Spartan royal princess of the Agiad house (great-grandniece of Leonidas of Thermopylae). As a boy of eight he was placed in her care at the Persian court after the battle of Cunaxa (401 BCE); she raised him for six years with stern discipline, mathematical instruction, and Spartan ideals of duty and self-mastery. At fourteen she returned him to his father. Their few later meetings were brief and intense.
• The novel opens in 331 BCE at Canopus (Nile Delta), where Cantharos, now 78, has just delivered construction materials for Alexander’s new city (the future Alexandria). Exhausted, he gets drunk in a harbor tavern and reminisces about Diogeneia. Three years earlier (334 BCE), after Alexander razed Thebes, Cantharos rescued Theban relatives and smuggled them to Sparta. There he unexpectedly met the 99-year-old Diogeneia again. She was dying, still fiercely loyal to the original Lycurgan constitution (the Great Rhētra) and contemptuous of Sparta’s later militarist-imperial turn under Agesilaus and the Eurypontids. She asked him to sail her to Cape Tainaron so she could die at the Gate of Hades. She slit her veins, placed a sealed strongbox on her chest (rigged with poison for unauthorized openers), whispered “minus Spartans” (echoing Alexander’s Granicus votive inscription), and died.
• Cantharos buried her in the cavern and kept the box unopened.
• The present-day narrative follows Cantharos’s entanglement with Lysanias, a young Macedonian logistics officer under royal treasurer Harpalos (Alexander’s childhood friend). Lysanias suspects Cantharos of Spartan espionage because of his Gytheion meeting with Diogeneia. He detains Cantharos in Canopus, using him as a tool to investigate Spartan intentions amid rumors of King Agis III’s anti-Macedonian revolt (which Antipater eventually crushes at Megalopolis in 331 BCE).
• Cantharos and Lysanias eventually travel together to Sparta (disguised) seeking Diogeneia. They discover she is dead, meet her niece Helana/Laléousa (chronicler at Fort Nicocles), and learn Diogeneia’s true role: a long-term Krypteia strategist who opposed Agesilaus’s imperial wars, preserved the Rhētra’s covenant ideal, cultivated contacts with Athenian intellectuals (Plato’s circle, Phocion, Xenocrates), and worked toward a new constitutional paradigm for a post-collapse Greek world.
• In Athens they meet Phocion, who reveals Diogeneia’s late project: drafting a non-verbal, “silent” preamble to a proposed new foundational law for a refounded colony. She argued that only erotic persuasion (longing for the immortal mediated through love of the Good/Beautiful/True) could legitimately bind free mortals into an enduring community — not coercion, rhetoric, fear, or mathematics alone. She died before delivering it, leaving the task unfinished.
• Back in Egypt, Harpalos sends vast treasure (700 talents) to accelerate Alexandria’s construction while secretly preparing “options” amid Alexander’s growing paranoia and purges (Philotas, Parmenion, Cleitus, Callisthenes, Coenus, Cleander). Alexander’s daemon — his divine military genius — withers without constant war; he turns destructive, Persianizing the empire and alienating Macedonians.
• Harpalos breaks with Alexander, flees to the coast with 5,000 talents and 6,000 mercenaries, and sails to Athens seeking asylum and allies. The Athenian Assembly imprisons him and seizes the money (Demosthenes implicated in the scandal). Thibron (Diogeneia’s former adjutant, now commanding Harpalos’s troops) stages a quiet coup, kills Harpalos, and takes control.
• Thibron, Cantharos, and Elpenor sail to Crete. Cantharos finally retrieves Diogeneia’s sealed box from the Gate of Hades. Inside is her last testament: a philosophical argument that a true founding law requires a silent, exemplary deed of erotic self-sacrifice — not words, but lived eros that persuades by preserving the immortal through love, not power.
• Cantharos settles in Fair Havens (Crete), grows wealthy in shipping, funds scholarships and a small museum (the “Canthareum”), and lives out his days quietly. The novel ends with Elpenor quoting (anachronistically) 1 Corinthians 13 on love, blending pagan eros with a hint of emerging Christian agape — a final, quiet meditation on what Diogeneia sought but never fully articulated.

Main themes

• The collapse of classical Greek polis-life under Macedonian conquest and internal greed.
• The nature of real war (preservation of covenant/community through self-mastery and readiness to die) versus mere fighting (greed for fame/fortune).
• Eros as the only non-coercive foundation for lasting human community (contra power, fear, rhetoric, mathematics).
• The tragedy of genius (Alexander’s daemon) that destroys itself when deprived of its proper object (existential war).
• The contrast between Spartan austerity/preservation and Athenian/Macedonian luxury/destruction.

Abbasid Commentator’s Review

• The book includes nearly 100 pages of 53 commentaries made on various issues raised by the Greek manuscript by a 9^th century Abbasid Scholar of Baghdad’s House of Wisdom who ends up recommending to the Caliph not to allow translation of the ancient Greek manuscript.
• These commentaries offer insights into how the Classical Greek civilization was received and understood by the Islamic Renaissance.