Oh?

So two nights ago yhlee was talking about the Siege of Tyre. (I blame them for everything that follows.) Part of my dreams that night involved reading a classical history in which Tyre was besieged not by Alexander, but by his sister, a world-conqueror in her own right, who identified herself with a warrior goddess instead of Zeus. I jotted down more or less that sentence for LJ-posting and thought I could perhaps transpose the concept into flash. It seemed appropriately fragmentary.

It turned out slightly longer. The part that made me happy was remembering that Alexander had a sister who was trained in war: Kynnane or Kynna (Kυννάνη, Κύννα), daughter of Philip's first wife Audate—called after her marriage Eurydike, after Philip's mother—was half-Illyrian and raised according to the customs of her mother's people, where women were full participants in politics and war. Before her marriage, Kynnane famously accompanied her father on campaign against the Illyrians and herself killed their queen, Kaeria, before routing their army. Once married to Philip's nephew Amyntas (executed by Alexander in 336 BCE), she raised her daughter in the same tradition, military training included. Both of them are strange, serious contenders in the Wars of the Successors; Mary Renault in Funeral Games (1981) does not do either of them justice. Kynnane brought a mercenary army with her when she crossed into Asia to find Philip Arrhidaios and marry him to her daughter. That same daughter Adeia—who later took the name Eurydike, positioning herself as the next generation of the dynasty—twice swayed the Macedonian army to her side and only failed a third time because she was facing Olympias. She did marry Arrhidaios. They both ended up dead, but so did pretty much everyone in the Argead dynasty, so the degree to which Kynnane and Adeia succeeded in their bid for empire, starting as far from the center of power as they did, is really not unimpressive.

So the protagonist of the story is Kynnane, daughter of Philip and Audate, raised like the royal Illyrian warrior she would have been in her mother's country, and I remixed everything else. She gets some of Alexander's exploits, others are fictitious, the timeline is shuffled so that she can be married to people she wouldn't otherwise have met, it is obviously not our history because she has two wives and a husband, the goddess ‘Aštart is there because of Tyre and queerness. I hope it is not full of unnoticed cultural fail. I'll send it to you if you like. It's still relatively short.

Aww, Hestia.

She is a dangerous and excellent cat.

[edit] I am out of patience with LJ and its shiny new inability to employ other icons in comments. What the hell is causing this? Is it because I'm still not using their appalling new tablet-friendly style?