The Third in Christian Cameron's Long War series, Poseidon's Spear picks up directly where Marathon left off, with Arimnestos of Plataea returning home after the battle of Marathon to discover his wife has died in childbirth. Despondant and suicidal, Ari throws himself off of a cliff, only to be rescued and immediately enslaved as a rower on a Carthaginian ship.
Unlike the previous two books, which both worked as coming-of-age stories, Poseidon's Spear works to show much more of the Ancient world from the view of a grown man. Without going into all the various twists and turns of the story, Ari ends up spending time in Africa, Spain, France, and Britain, and much of the book has him working as a tradesman rather than a warrior.
In the end, although the book moved away from the depiction of battles in the Persian war that the first two books focused on, it fleshed our Ari's world, introduced a number of new characters and felt like a really great break before moving back into the main thrust of the series.
Carrying forward with my journey through the Ancient world via historical novels, Christian Cameron's 2011 novel Marathon (the second in his Long War series, following Killer of Men), continues to follow the story of Arimnestos of Plataea, who begins the novel living back on his farm and working as a blacksmith, although he is quickly moved back into combat, intrigue and even some courtroom drama before the novel moves into it's second half focusing on the build-up to and eventually the actual battle of Marathon.
The novel does a really great job of painting Athens in the period (roughly 490 BCE) and in many ways I felt it actually surpassed the first novel in the series. Still following the same format, wherein an elderly Arimnestos is relaying the story to his daughter and her friends, the novel does an excellent job of painting both daily life and the daily life of soldiers in the era. In addition, naval warfare is introduced and is both exhilarating and terrifying in its intensity.
A great follow-up to the original book, and one that has ensure I'll be reading the rest of the series as soon as I can get my hands on it.
