conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Written, York, Times with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Fire from Heaven'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about Written, York, Times.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Fire from Heaven: Pella- the opening scene of the novel, capital city of Macedon.\nPella is presented as a place of constant political struggles.\nIt is where Alexander\'s childhood is spent and where most of the central relationships are formed.\nAigi- the closing scene of the novel, the old capital of Macedon, located higher in the mountains.\nIt features a fortress near a waterfall, and is presented as the site of many important character shifts, such as loss of virginity, murder, and transformative religious experiences.\nMieza- site of a school for Alexander and the other sons of important Macedonian military leaders.\nMieza is presented as a sort of Arcadian place of refuge from the wider politics of Macedon, a place of comradeship, learning, and love.\nThrace- Macedon\'s neighbor to the northeast.\nThrace is presented as a wild, remote region which Philip\'s soldiers have occupied.\nEven more so than Macedon, Thrace remains a rough land of feuding warlords.\nIt is noted for the blue tattoos of its inhabitants.\nThrace is where Alexander first exhibits his military bravery and leadership, and where he and Hephaestion are hardened to the gruesome realities of war.\nAthens- Macedon\'s antagonistic neighbor to the south.\nAthens is represented in the novel as past its glory days and ruled by petty, squabbling demagogues.\nIt still, however, retains an aura of great respect for both Alexander and Philip as the birthplace of Greece\'s high culture.\nChaeronea- site of a massive battle which decides whether Philip\'s military hegemony will be able to spread into the more culturally advanced states of southern Greece.\nPerinthos- a former Macedonian ally to the east which wavers in its support and is invaded by Philip.\nIt is here that Alexander and Philip bond over a shared love of military tactics and Alexander saves Philip\'s life during an attempted insurrection.\nEpiros- Macedon\'s neighbor to the west.\nEpiros is presented as a well-run, prosperous region in alliance with Macedon.\nIt is the homeland of Olympias, who is daughter and sister of two of its successive kings.\nThe marriage of Olympias to Philip as his chief wife ensures that Epiros remains friendly to Macedon, so that Philip can concentrate his army on northern, southern, and eastern expansion.\nPersian Empire- though it is never visited in the novel, Persia is a looming presence affecting everything that happens in Macedon and its neighbors.\nIt is the eventual goal of both Alexander and Philip to conquer Persia and its Great King.\nPersia is the old enemy invader of Greece and a land of fabled, opulent wealth.\nPhocis- though it is never visited in the novel, Phocis serves as the pretext for Philip to become involved in the military disputes of southern Greece.\nPhocis\' sacrilegious cultivation of fields meant to be reserved as holy land (and the resulting wealth which threatens their neighbors) is the impetus for the Third Sacred War.\nAlexander- The central character of the novel, followed from the age of 4 until his taking power over Macedon.\nPhilip- King of Macedon and Alexander\'s legal father.\nAlexander and Philip have an intense love-hate relationship.\nA central theme of the novel is whether Philip, who is often portrayed as arrogant, brutish, and crass, deserves the loyalty and love of Alexander.\nThis is often tied to whether or not Philip is also Alexander\'s biological father.\nOlympias- Alexander mother and Philip\'s chief wife.\nShe is portrayed as a strong-willed survivor who uses emotional blackmail and a system of spies to protect her interests against her all-powerful husband.\nThrough the novel, Alexander\'s relationship toward his mother changes from unswerving devotion to a more restrained loyalty.\nHephaestion- Teenaged friend of Alexander who becomes his unswervingly loyal life partner.\nPausanias- Bodyguard and lover of Philip, later elevated to captain of the bodyguards as compensation for a humiliating attack by a rival.\nDemosthenes- Athenian political orator, diplomat, and soldier, portrayed as arrogant, selfish, and venal (The strongly negative portrayal of Demosthenes in the novel has been one of the main criticisms leveled against it).\nDemosthenes is the most visible antagonist against Philip\'s drive for empire.\nPhoinix- Alexander\'s pedagogue, who provides him emotional solace and imaginative inspiration.\nLeonidas- Olympias\' uncle and Alexander\'s great-uncle.\nLeonidas serves as regent of Macedon during one of Philip\'s absences and seeks to toughen Alexander into an obedient, hard soldier.\nAttalos- One of Phliip\'s generals.\nEarly in the novel he attacks Pausanias as part of a romantic quarrel of honor.\nLater in the novel, he makes a bid for power by trying to replace Olympias with his own niece as mother of the next king.\nAntipatros- Loyal regent during one of Philip\'s absences, Antipatros helps train Alexander in the civic demands of state administration.\nHe is also the father of Kassandros, who is a minor villain in the story.\nThe novel begins with the memorable opening line, "The child was wakened by the knotting of the snake\'s coils about his waist".\nAlexander is four years old and his younger sister Kleopatra is still in a cradle.\nThe snake which encircles him is a semi-tame house snake who has escaped from the room of Alexander\'s mother, Olympias.\nAlexander sneaks past his nanny, Hellanike, and into his mother\'s room to return it.\nThe relationship between Alexander and Olympias is portrayed as affectionate and intimate, but he is already aware at a young age that she lies to her husband, Alexander\'s purported father, Philip, the king of Macedon.\nPhiliip, who had been heard earlier singing and yelling drunkenly in the main hall, bursts into the cozy scene & embarrasses Alexander with his nakedness and verbal abuse of Olympias.\nOlympias responds with mockery of Philip\'s other lovers, his period as a hostage in Thebes, and the insinuation that Alexander is in fact not Philip\'s biological son.\nPhililp throws Alexander from the room, where he is comforted by a guard.\nAlexander claims he will murder his father when he\'s old enough, but the guard warns that it would be a sin, and tells Alexander that being abused will toughen him up for the aristocratic male rites of passage of murdering a wild boar and murdering a man.\nThe guard also tells Alexander the tale of Heracles killing snakes as a baby, starting a lifelong fascination with Heracles in Alexander.\nAlexander\'s family is further revealed when, three years later, he goes on a horse ride with a soldier he admires, Ptolemy.\nAlexander has heard around the barracks that Ptolemy is also the son of Philip, but Ptolemy explains to Alexander why this should not be repeated, as Ptolemy\'s mother is married to someone other than Philip.\nTo overcome Alexander\'s great disappointment, Ptolemy becomes a blood brother with him.\nReturning to the stables, Alexander sees horses dressed in the dazzling wealth of Persia.\nHe learns that two Persian satraps who rebelled against the Great King have been given pardons and will be returning from exile in Macedon.\nAlexander entertains and questions the envoys who have come to bring them back, gaining useful military information because the amused envoys tell a child more than they would an adult.\nAlexander also flirts with the handsome youth who attends the envoys, and later dreams of riding off with him to see Persepolis after murdering a group of impudent Persian envoys.\nThe final sequence of Chapter One ends with Alexander allowed to join his mother in a women\'s rite dedicated to the god Dionysus because Alexander has not yet reached puberty.\nWhen Philip goes to war against Chalkidike, he puts Olympias\' cold uncle, Leonidas of Epirus in charge as regent, and entrusts him with finding tutors for Alexander, who is now seven years old and considered ready to begin training for manhood.\nLeonidas forces Alexander into a Spartan lifestyle and the tutors try to tame Alexander\'s imagination into rote learning.\nConditions are somewhat alleviated by an old family friend, Lysimachus of Acarnania, who encourages Alexander\'s dreams by referring to Alexander as the mythical hero Achilles and himself as Phoinix.\nIn his mind, Alexander equates his father with Achilles\' military colleague but personal enemy, Agamemnon.\nAlexander has his first meeting with Hephaestion, although it is brief and they argue.\nPhilip returns from war, bringing crowds of slaves with him.\nHe also marries a woman from Thrace to seal an alliance, causing mad jealousy in Olympias.\nIn retaliation, Olympias appears on stage in a celebratory play, something which is allowed her as a priestess of Dionysos, god of theatre, but is still considered wildly shocking since only men are supposed to appear on stage.\nIn the gossiping crowd afterward, Alexander slashes the leg of a man who he hears insulting his mother.\nTo atone for attacking someone without warning, Alexander sacrifices to Zeus, and believes that the god speaks directly to him during the rite.\nAlexander is ten years old.\nGoing to meet with his father, he notes that his father\'s newest guard, Pausanias of Orestis, has the kind of looks which Philip appreciates in lovers.\nPhilip is preparing to hear envoys from Athens, who are coming to convince him against joining a war against Phocis, because they are afraid of his increasing power spreading into southern Greece.\nChief among them is Demosthenes, who attempts to molest Alexander, mistaking him for a slave.\nAlexander is revenged when he reveals himself as Philip\'s heir just as Demosthenes is about to speak.\nDemosthenes is also humiliated because his speech is plagiarized by another envoy, Aeschines.\nAlexander befriends a young Thracian, Lambaros, living at the court as a hostage, despite the snobbery which the other Macedonians display toward him.\nAlexander learns eagerly from his tutors, and bemoans the fact that he must sleep when there is so much he wants to do.\nHis music teacher, Epikrates, encourages him to perform due to his great skill on the cithara, but Philip publicly humiliates Alexander for being too good a musician.\nEpikrates resigns, and Alexander runs away from home.\nHe joins a soldier on leave in a tribal feud in the uplands of Macedon, making his first murder in battle and carrying the head of the victim back to prove his manhood to his father.\nAlexander refuses to claim the head of a second kill because the face reminds him of his father.\nReturned to the palace, Alexander is given his own retinue of young men-at-arms.\nAt a yearly horse fair, when Alexander is away from them looking at horses, the group gossips that King Philip had taken the guard Pausanias of Orestis as a lover, but then had moved on to someone else.\nPausanias had insulted the new lover in jealousy, leading the new lover to be foolishly brave in battle to try to prove himself, and resulting in his death.\nTo get back at Pausanias, the general Attalos, a friend of the dead man, had got Pausanias drunk and let the stable grooms gang rape him.\nPhilip has now promoted Pausanias to captain of the royal bodyguard to try to make it up to him, but has not punished Attalos, who is a good general.\nAlexander shows amazing courage and skill in taming the horse Bucephalus in front of the assembled chiefs at the horse fair.\nHe re-meets Hephaestion (who he had first met six years previous) and is smitten.\nAlexander realizes that while talking with Hephaestion, he had forgotten all about running to tell the news of the new horse to his mother, the first time this has happened when he had big news to tell.\nAlexander burns a great deal of Persian incense to Heracles at a rite and is told by his great-uncle Leonidas not to be so wasteful of Persian riches until he is master of the lands where they grow, a sentiment which Alexander takes to heart.\nAlexander is nearly 15 and is studying the military histories of Xenophon.\nWhen they are hiding out together on a rooftop, Alexander convinces Hephaestion to climb to a dangerously high pinnacle.\nHephaestion, who has become completely infatuated, likens Alexander to Zeus, and himself to Semele, realizing that a relationship with Alexander will always involve danger.\nPhilip leaves to install Alexandros, Olympias\' brother, as the new king of Epirus, placing the loyal Antipatros as regent of Macedon.\nAlexander receives his new tutor, Aristotle, who sets up a school for Alexander and the sons of Philip\'s generals at Mieza.\nAmong the comrades are Hephaestion, who is now accepted as Alexander\'s "shadow" by everyone, Ptolemy, Harpalos, Philotas, and Kassandros, whom Alexander does not like, but he must be included because he is the heir of the loyal regent Antipatros.\nAt one point, they watch a play about Achilles and Patroclus, which further inspires the bond between Alexander and Hephaestion.\nAfter some time at the school at Mieza, Alexander and his closest comrades are called to join Philip in besieging a fort.\nA military escort is led by Kleitos, brother of Alexander\'s former nanny, Hellanike.\nAlexander fights with great bravery, and interacts personally with the soldiers, earning their admiration.\nAfter the fall of the fort, he rescues a woman whose baby has been murdered, and whom Kassandros was attempting to rape.\nIn an ensuing fight, the woman nearly kills Kassandros, and he is packed off home in disgrace.\nAlexander visits his boyhood friend, the former Thracian hostage Lambaros, on the return trip.\nBack at school, the young men are shocked to hear of the torture and death of Hermias of Atarneus, a friend of Aristotle and loyal ally of Macedon, under arrest in Persia.\nAristotle refers to all Persians as barbarians in anger, an insult which Alexander refuses to believe.\nMeanwhile, Philip deposes Kersobelptes of Thrace.\nAlexander\'s family is reunited at the springtime Dionysia, held at the old capital at Aigai.\nHis mother is jealous that Alexander and Philip have now bonded through their common passion for war.\nCaught up in the heterosexual furor surrounding the Dionysia, Alexander flirts with a serving woman, Gorgo, but later comes upon his father having sex with her.\nOn the day of the festival, he watches the secret rites of the women on the mountaintop, although it is forbidden, and sees his mother murder Gorgo in her role as priestess of Dionysos.\nSick with shame for having watched something forbidden, Alexander reasons that his mother has the right to wage war in the way of women just as his father does in the way of men, and that Olympias has actually killed far fewer people than Philip.\nHephaestion comforts Alexander after the shock, and is relieved that Alexander did not have sex with any of the women returning from the mountain rites, as many of their friends did.\nThe next spring, Alexander and Hephaestion finally have sex.\nIt is something which Hephaestion has been longing for, but it leaves Alexander distant because, like sleep, it reminds him that he is mortal.\nWhen they return to the capital from school, the circle of men around Alexander are noticed to have taken up the southern Greek fashion of shaving, something which Philip views with distaste.\nNonetheless, he leaves Alexander as regent when he goes off to war against Perinthos and Byzantion.\nAs regent, Alexander practices military skills himself and studiously trains the soldiers left to him, making them ready when he puts down a rebellion in Thrace.\nHe is aided by his childhood friend, Lambaros, who knows the local terrain.\nUpon driving off the rebels, Alexander founds the city of Alexandropolis Maedica and then joins his father against Perinthos.\nThere, he saves his father\'s life but Philip, ashamed, pretends to have been unconscious and to not remember it, losing some of the loyalty he had earned from Alexander in their shared battle plans.\nOn his return to the capital, Alexander is pressured by his mother, who is jealous of Hephaestion\'s influence, to engage in heterosexuality.\nHe is kind to a hetaira at a party, but goes no further than kissing her gently.\nHis mother then has a young woman smuggled into his room at night.\nRealizing that the woman will be punished if she does not prove she has lost her virginity, and wanting his mother off his back, Alexander has sex with her.\nThe next morning he sends the woman back to his mother with an expensive pin which Olympias had told Alexander to save for his bride someday, and the message that from now on he will choose his own lovers.\nPhilip decides that southern Greece must be invaded.\nAlexander is put in charge of a feint against Illyria to make the southern Greeks unprepared.\nBack at Pella, he questions his mother as to who is his biological father, but the novel leaves the answer a secret.\nAthens and Thebes ally against Philip.\nSparta remains uninvolved.\nThe Athenian army and the Sacred Band of Thebes are destroyed, with Alexander\'s courage and tactical skill making him a hero to the army.\nPhilip\'s hegemony is recognized.\nAlexander represents Philip in Athens, where he is insulted when someone tries to offer him service from an enslaved sex worker.\nHis blood brother and friend Ptolemy, however, takes up with the Athenian hetaira Thaïs.\nOn the way back to Pella, Philip\'s entourage stays at the castle of Attalos, the general who had years before planned the gang rape of Pausanias of Orestis, the chief of Philip\'s bodyguard.\nAlexander is shocked that his father is insulting Pausanias by making him stay the night at the home of his former rapist, but Ptolemy points out that the king has lots of other things to think about and has probably put the event long out of mind.\nPausanias does not eat or drink the entire time they are lodged at the home of Attalos.\nAttalos gains another enemy in Olympias when it is announced that Philip will be marrying Attalos\' niece.\nThe marriage threatens Olympias even more than Philip\'s previous marriages because a son born to this wife would be completely Macedonian, and might be considered a better heir than Olympias\' own son, Alexander.\nAlexander goes along with the wedding until Attalos prays that his niece will produce a "lawful, true-born heir" which Alexander takes as an insult and threat.\nHe hurls a cup at Attalos\' head, a huge offense against a host, then goes with his mother into exile in her native Epirus.\nAlong the route of their flight, they take refuge at the house of Pausanias\' wife.\nIn Epirus, Alexander consults the oracle of Dodona, under the auspices of three priestesses reminiscent of the Moirai, and is given the answer of "yes" to two questions which the novel leaves a secret.\nThrough the mediation of Demaratos, Alexander and Olympias return to Macedon, but there is now a clear faction which supports them, and a second faction which supports Attalos.\nPhilotas, one of the young men in Alexander\'s circle, is recruited by his father, the general Parmenion, to spy on Alexander for Philip.\nOlympias\' own spies learn that Philip plans to marry Arridaios, the developmentally disabled son of a minor wife, off to the daughter of a ruler on the edge of the Persian Empire.\nConvinced that the prestigious marriage is meant as a slight to him, Alexander proposes himself to the foreign ruler as an alternate bridegroom through the secret negotiations of Thettalos, an admiring actor.\nWhen he learns that Alexander has gone behind his back, Philip exiles several of the men who helped in the plot, including Ptolemy, whom Philip acknowledges to be his biological son.\nHephaestion is not exiled, but is threatened with death if Alexander ever again commits an act seen as treasonous.\nThettalos is brought before Philip in chains, and Alexander is forced to plead for his life.\nFed up with Olympias, Philip makes plans to marry her daughter, Kleopatra, off to Olympias\' brother, the current king of Epirus.\nThis will allow Philip to divorce Olympias while still retaining a marriage bond to the king of Epirus.\nAbout the same time, captain of the bodyguard Pausanias learns that Philip has brought up mention of his former rape again, although he had promised never to do so.\nThe internal divisions of the family begin to spread out into the network of diplomats and spies working against Philip in occupied lands.\nOlympias hints at a new intrigue she has developed to bolster her position, but, fearful of Philip\'s retribution, Alexander refuses to hear it.\nAlexander and Hephaestion both look ahead to the planned invasion of Asia, reasoning that if Alexander fights well for Philip, he will get back in his good graces.\nAnd if Philip dies in battle, then the best center of power will be with the mass of the army.\nAlexander plans to murder Attalos in Asia.\nForeign agents convince Pausanias that Alexander agrees to a plot involving the captain of the guard by making a copy of one of Alexander\'s rings and using it as a token of agreement.\nMeanwhile, Philip invites dignitaries from all over Greece for the lavish wedding of his daughter Kleopatra to Alexandros of Epirus.\nHe sends for an oracle from Delphi concerning his invasion of Asia and receives the seemingly positive response, "Wreathed is the bull for the altar, the end fulfilled.\nAnd the slayer too is ready".\nLavish floats of gods and goddesses are built to parade into the theater where the wedding celebration will take place, with Philip named a god in addition to the Twelve Olympians.\nFeeling on top of the world, Philip decides to enter the stadium without his guards.\nAs Pausanias helps Philip from his horse, he stabs the king, then is cut down himself by other guardsmen.\nEveryone in the crowd, except Olympias, panics and flees the theatre.\nIt is hinted that she and Antipatros may have been privy to the assassination.\nThe float holding Aphrodite, goddess of love, is toppled in the panic.\nAlexander takes control of the guard, setting himself in position to claim the throne by the next novel in the series, The Persian Boy.