Never mess with a Spartan. It's a decent premise for simple tales of gore and glory. It's a much tougher concept to place at the centre of a thinking war epic, but Christian Cameron pulls it off with gusto in his historical Tyrant series.
"Life is war" - from Asia's dusty battlefields to Greek gymnasiums, Alexandrian brothels, pirate-filled seas and the palace of every minor tyrant in the Hellenistic world. Philokles the fat Spartan philosopher spends his life investigating why.
As the engine of this series, Philokles is a nest of fun contradictions: a fat warrior, a drunk philosopher. He calls himself a Spartan sophist. "When I can't convince men, I kill them." His thoughtfulness graduates the Tyrant books from blood-soaked battle romance to something more meaningful, a creative treatise on why men wage war and what they can find in the brotherly bonds of military life.
Think of this collection as a well-oiled bromance with brains.
The third book, Tyrant: Funeral Games, picks up more about seven years after the death of Alexander. Philokles is now the tutor to the children of exiled Athenian and war hero Kineas (who dies before this book begins). If they can stay alive, young Satyrus and Melitta, twin 12-year-olds, will rule their father's kingdom on the Black Sea. But their chances of survival aren't good.
Their mother, the Scythian warrior-queen Sryanka, a key character in the earlier books, dies in a traitorous ambush. Soldiers torch their peaceful port, looking to kill the twins and hence control the grain trade. "You will never be safe again," their tutor tells them. Lucky for them, they have Philokles at their side.
He cuts throats and cracks skulls, but the fat Spartan philosopher is the moral compass in a hard, murderous world. Killing is wrong, but necessary, he says. "When the blood fills your lungs and the darkness comes down, all you have is what you did - who you were and what you stood for."
He is the twins' link to Plato, Socrates and Menander - his close friend - and he shepherds them through nearly 400 pages of battles, ambushes, poisoning attempts and politics. It's a lot to fit into one book, but then there's an awful lot to cover between the big fish in Alexander's empire - Ptolemy, Cassander and Antigonus the One-eyed - and all their minions.
As for the significant historical minutiae, some Tyrant characters are based on real figures, some are purely fictional - the author's website declares he is a novelist first and a historian second. Cameron's gift is for spinning out a rich setting through his obvious devotion to Classics; his website also claims he and his wife honeymooned in Sparta.
Plus, Cameron's ability to conjure up what Homer called "the battle haze" might make the ancient bard proud.
I enjoyed the careful lyricism of Cameron's Tyrant, the first in the series, more than the plot-driven narration of this latest book. The shifted tone in Funeral Games may be due to Cameron's use of the younger protagonists, who stole too many pages from Philokles. Next to the philosopher, Satyrus and Melitta aren't very exciting. They do exciting things: fight pirates, escape assassins, rescue nobles, free slaves, even fight with Ptolemy against the forces of Antigonus the One-eyed at Gaza in a spectacle of crashing elephants and infantry.
However, these two characters spend most of their time wondering how to match the legacy of their parents, minor demigods. Only the next book, promised by Cameron for next winter, will tell if they can.
Kelly McManus is a Vancouver-based journalist.