Macedon · 1990
Lion of Macedon
A despised half-Spartan grows into the finest general in Greece, while an old seeress shapes his life for a war against a dark god.
A good first Gemmell
- Series
- Macedon · Book 1 of 2
- First published
- 1990, Legend
- Setting
- Sparta, Thebes and Macedon in the fourth century BC, in a Greece where magic is real.
- Main characters
- Parmenion, Tamis, Derae, Philip of Macedon, Xenophon
The story
The novel opens in Sparta around 380 BC. Parmenion is a mothax, a boy of mixed blood, Spartan on one side and Macedonian on the other, and in a city that prizes pure descent above almost everything he is bullied from childhood and forced to fight to survive. He is a fine runner and something rarer, a natural strategist, and the exiled Athenian soldier Xenophon notices it when the boy shows his gift for tactics in a mock battle against a Spartan rival.
Parmenion does not know that his life has been shaped from the start. Tamis, an aged seeress, has looked into every possible future and found the same threat in all of them: a dark god waiting to re-enter the world by being born into it. In each of those futures the one hope is Parmenion, and Tamis sets about making him into the weapon she needs, whatever it costs him.
Sparta will not have him, and his love for Derae, a Spartan girl, makes matters worse, because in Sparta that love is dangerous. Its consequences drive him out of the city and on to Thebes, then held down by a Spartan garrison. There he falls in with men who want the Spartans gone, and his victories for Thebes against the city that raised him make his name. Years later, a famous mercenary commander, he is summoned by the young king of Macedon, Philip, whom he first knew as a hostage in Thebes. Philip wants an army that can beat anyone in Greece, and Parmenion is the man to build it. As Tamis foresaw, his fate is bound up with Philip's family, with the dark god, and with the son, Alexander, who has not yet been born.
Reading notes
Gemmell said he had originally meant to be a historical novelist, and Lion of Macedon is the closest he came to that before the Troy books. Most of its length is historical adventure: a Spartan upbringing, Theban conspiracy, and the rise of a professional soldier through the wars of the 370s BC, with the liberation of Thebes and the breaking of Spartan power at its heart. The fantasy is there from the first page, in Tamis and her visions, but it stays in the shadows for long stretches. The Times, in its obituary, described the Macedon books as set in the Greece of an alternate world, which is a fair way to put it.
Parmenion is a strong lead, proud and resentful, and never quite at home anywhere. The Spartan chapters, with their casual cruelty and obsession with blood, are the best in the book. The weaknesses are Gemmell's familiar ones, made more visible by the historical frame. The romance with Derae is thinly drawn, several women exist mainly as seers or seductresses, and one reviewer found the dialogue more melodramatic than dramatic. History purists will also wince at the liberties.
Fan chronologies put this book and Dark Prince at the start of the Stones of Power sequence, and the Sipstrassi do figure in the pair, but the connection is light and comes late. Read it as its own thing. For readers who come to Gemmell from historical fiction, it is a reasonable place to start.