Novel: Soldier of Arete

Overview

Latro is a Greek mercenary whose memory resets every night; he keeps a written journal so each day can be relearned from his own hand. Soldier of Arete follows the next stretch of his wanderings through the ancient Mediterranean. The narrative continues the intimate, fragmentary voice of his diary as encounters with mortals, kings and mythic figures pile up and the boundaries between history and legend blur.
The book deepens the central mystery of Latro's condition: he perceives gods and supernatural forces with a clarity others lack, yet he cannot hold his own past. That tension, vivid contact with the numinous coupled with nearly total personal amnesia, shapes every episode and casts even ordinary events as portentous or ambiguous.

Plot and Journey

Latro moves from place to place, battlefields, courts and shrines, following hints of cures, fortune and danger. At sea and on land he falls in with a succession of companions and antagonists, and his journal records names and deeds he cannot otherwise retain. The title points to a crucial episode among the hospitable Phaeacians, where the court of Arete and her husband becomes a focal point for hospitality, negotiation and the uneasy intersection of Greek mythic memory with lived politics.
Along the way, encounters range from kindly hosts to manipulative rulers and enigmatic figures who seem to have one foot in story and one in history. Conversations and events often reverberate with Homeric echoes; sometimes Latro recognizes characters or motifs from epic tradition, sometimes he experiences the divine as literal, intervening agents. Rather than arriving at tidy explanations, the narrative accumulates impressions, clues and uncanny incidents that both illuminate and deepen his predicament.

Style and Structure

The narrative unfolds as a first‑person diary, terse, candid and often startlingly plain about strange events. Entries are written as though to preserve facts for a self that will not remember them, which makes the prose alternately pragmatic, trembling with wonder, and slyly unreliable. Wolfe plays with the gap between what Latro records and what he is able to interpret, inviting the reader to reconstruct context and motive from details the narrator cannot hold in his head.
Wolfe's prose hides complexity behind apparent simplicity: names, casual observations and slips of mythology accrue significance across entries; patterns emerge only when the reader retains what Latro cannot. The structure thus makes memory itself a narrative device, turning absence into a generator of suspense and meaning.

Themes and Significance

Memory and identity are at the heart of the book. Latro's condition raises questions about what constitutes a self when continuity is broken, and how stories, both personal and communal, sustain meaning. The novel treats myth not as mere backdrop but as living power: the gods and heroes of tradition press on the everyday world, and Latro's interactions suggest that storytelling and worship are modes of survival in a world where individual recollection falters.
Soldier of Arete also probes the ethics of hospitality and authority in a fragmented civilization, and how history and legend shape political lives. The ending leaves much unresolved, reinforcing the series' restless momentum; the book enlarges the mystery at the center of Latro's pilgrimage while offering striking, eerie episodes that linger like half‑remembered dreams.