Peutheans

The **Peutheans** were a people originating from Ganit most well-known for their practice of cetestrianism, later developing into an oceanic civilization that dominated much of the world from the 9th to 12th centuries in the Cetocracy.

## History

### Pharnean origins

The Peutheans were a branch of the Pharneans, who in the 4th century PB settled on the coast of the Calphian Sea, and absorbed various technologies from the Asaphites. By the 2nd century they had developed the first thalassostole. In the Nghyl Empire, the Peutheans were permitted to dominate sea trade and whale-rearing, and the general expertise enabling their cetestrian advances made Cousid rulers recruit biotechnologists primarily from them. In turn, this made them objects of suspicion to other Pharnean subjects. The bolist movements of the 1st century PB generally denounced them as lackeys of the Cousids and as narrow-minded engineers, focused only on instrumental utility rather than any pursuit of higher beauty. Valesius however was personally more ambiguous on the Peutheans and the attitudes they were associated with.

After the Valesian Revolution and during the Principate the Peutheans were not dislodged from any of their specializations, forming an autonomous and aloof sector of society. Culturally, their pursuit of synthetic biology was now associated with the Mesnikeqet, whose own forms had been directly altered; thus, on top of their characterization as merchants and engineers, their way of life was now seen as a gateway to aberration. Ironically, not only did they themselves enslave the Mesnikeqet, but their own philosophy that now developed under bolist influence admonished against the extension of their techniques to the human form. Despite occasional persecutions and general discrimination, that they held no interest in lection politics allowed them a favorable and often privileged position in mid-late Pharnean society, and they even acted as important scientific partners for bolists. Nevertheless, separation from the rest of society and advancements in cetestrianism made them shift to a wholly divergent lifestyle of maritime nomadism by the 3rd century MB.

### At sea

Under the Tio Empire the Peutheans made considerable leaps in their advancements. Continuing to dominate the navy and maritime merchantry of Ganit, they assisted in establishing various Tio colonies and generally extending Tio influence. They were thus exempted from harsher attempts at imposing Visity as state religion, although many adopted it themselves anyway. After the Tio's collapse in the Wars of Dissension the Peutheans faced further persecution from the Thesis-Sects, moving onto houseboats and cetoics in response. By the 6th century, Peutheans had practically become a wholly oceanic people: their communities were mainly roaming fleets or sympherons, most of their time was spent at sea and an increasing proportion of it beneath it, and while they still landed to trade, the employment of intermediaries was minimizing even this. Philobathy emerged to displace Visity as the dominant religion and philosophy, characterized by a growing thematic obsession with the abyss akin to the amad of the ancients.

From the 6th century Peutheans gained access to ports across the world, embedding themselves into every local society, and the civilized world was in some sense unified by sharing a detached yet interloping submarine elite as an organic social feature. The Peutheans generally thought of themselves as introducing a distinct language of laws, rights, and order to their clients by their form of militarized trade and later periodic peacekeeping (or terrorizing). Sympherons could expect each other to serve the same ideal largely by recognition of similar lifestyles and thus the necessarily similar minds that went into making demands on the grounded.

### Cetocracy

Main article: Cetocracy
The sympherons, however, were far from wilfully united and even more variegated as to what kinds of interventions they brought upon their clients in syntrophy. In Gamon, the Ka — Tio exiles and refugees — were introduced to establish Second Sushina, structured around servicing Peuthean trade, but also continuing the Tio state. Other sympherons simply maintained good and often very personalized relations with land rulers, and eventually abandoned marine life to join or replace them as 'Anabates' in the process known as anabasis. Gradually, different pods also evolved into divergent cultures, and the Peutheans as a single cultural group fragmented. Direct modifications of body biologies to satisfy Philobathic demands for depth-worthiness resulted in an internal divergence between the more heavily-modified tokos and still surface-like epistates.

The Great Flaying of Ganit in the late 8th century caused the sympherons in the Calphian Sea to band into the first synclet, the Zoukean League, which accepted the submission of the Toncar as its syntrophic client in a new system of maritime domination of land. By the late 9th century the Zoukeans had absorbed competitors to establish a global maritime empire. The inaugurated era of 'Cetocracy' saw most land-based societies either dictated to from sea or hemmed in by leagues and alliances that upheld a syntrophy.

## Society

The basic Peuthean social unit was the clan. As the oceanic lifestyle developed, the symploos, a 'pod' of cetestrians and later a group that co-habited a cetoic, emerged as a more mechanical kind of community, related by mere technical necessity, and in the case of cetoics often despotically governed by captains. Clans and symplooses confederated into sympherons, the main organization Peutheans presented themselves in politically and assembled their convoys or pods by, although they were also much more ephemeral, with smaller units freely forming and leaving sympherons based on their interests.

For most of Peuthean history, it was not feasible for different sympherons to act as a united force. Rather the wide-reaching presence of them manifested in the structuring of societies where as deep sea-sheltered traders, pirates, and tribute-collectors they played organic and functional roles in a local economy and polity; their land-bound clients in the early syntrophy primarily reckoned with them as a whole estate or class. Although they were often militarily dominant and politically respected, their lawgiving ideology figuring in relations with clients from the 6th century still often overstates the actual sway they had over ground affairs. Besides basic needs and commerce, land facilities and knowledge remained important for research and development needed to sustain Peuthean technological superiority. More direct supremacy was only established under the synclets, with syntrophies not just conceptualized as accountable, administrative units of extracting benefits from and bringing civilization to the surface, but also implemented in forms reshaping surface society such as permanent, exclusive military domination, the construction of state systems formally overseen by Peutheans, and the active, impactful introduction of what the resident Peutheans found to be high culture (though all of these were prefigured by experiments with Second Sushina in Gamon).

The surface and ground world was viewed as a single alien object, economically vital but either repulsively ignorant or expensive and painstaking to uplift. Anabasis was the concept of 'disembarking' from submarine life, a frequent occurence with elites enamored or tied up with ground clients. Paradoxically, once the Peutheans were technologically capable of establishing syntrophies and dealing with land only as they pleased, provided they did not ultimately give in to Anabasis they lost many of the key reasons to retain investment in clients.