Gregory Michael Nixon
Gregory Michael Nixon read Homer’s Iliad at 15 while throwing bales for the summer on his uncle’s hereford ranch in Saskatchewan, Canada. Homer’s hero, Diomedes, became wedged in his mind as a heroic ideal, but he was troubled for his story was incomplete. Ever since, he has been drawn to ancient myth and history. He put this interest aside to become a high school teacher for ten years until he left a wife and a house behind to pursue higher education. He attained a doctorate in philosophy from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and spent about a decade as a peripatetic university professor in the USA, shedding another wife and house in that time. He returned to Canada again to attend to his dying father and become a professor at a university in northern British Columbia for thirteen years. As an academic, he published a numerous research papers in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and consciousness studies. One of his more cited papers is “Myth and Mind: The Origin of Human Consciousness in the Discovery of the Sacred,” which indicates his central philosophic position. His third wife and third house slipped through his hands, so he retired to rent a cottage in the hills above scenic Okanagan Lake and live only with his grey cat, Nigel. There, he found he still had the creative imagination to at long last begin writing his mythicohistorical novels on the post-Troy adventures of Diomedes set during the Bronze Age Collapse. The Diomedeia: Diomedes, the Peoples of the Sea and the Fall of the Hittite Empire (2022) came first, and Diomedes in Kyprios (2024), set mainly on the island of Cyprus, soon followed. Will there be a trilogy that brings Diomedes back to Hellas (Greece)?
This is a historically-based novel with authentic, mythic, & fictional characters interacting across the extraordinary panorama after the Fall of Troy and the Hittite Empire during the Bronze Age Collapse. Diomedes leads his Akhaians (Achaeans) to the Isle of Kyprios (now Cyprus) to meet his lost love, Lieia, the ex-queen of the Hittites. Kyprios is where the Peoples of the Sea have gathered before their final assaults on Canaan and Aigyptos (Egypt). But Diomedes unexpectedly meets the avatar of the Goddess Aphrodite at her Temple in Paphos, the city of her birth. Will she take him from Lieia? Will his wanderings end, or will he head back to sea to seek redemption from the past in the further unknown? Aphrodite must also deal with the beautiful, impetuous youth, Adonis, who swears he would die for her.
The Bronze Age Collapse was a time of such chaos that empires fell, royalty was overthrown, palaces and temples were destroyed, and the hierarchy of the gods was doubted, yet people’s self-reliance emerged like never before, and the ancient Great Goddess of the Cycles of Time, who had been suppressed, began to regain her former dominance.
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