The End of Sparta: A Novel (10 page)

Finally in the year before Leuktra, Mêlon had opened his ears a little to Pythagoras. For he tired of meat, and found his left arm as strong as his right, and no longer felt himself better by birth than his slaves, all in the manner of Pythagoras. He wanted to believe that he had an eternal soul that would be judged in the hereafter by its brief entrapment and struggle within an all too human body; or so he also told the believer Chiôn, who was determined not to return as a sparrow or snake, but to free his soul forever with deeds he deemed good. And yet Mêlon had hesitated until now, worried by the rumors that Epaminondas might make the worse better and so replace the tyranny of Sparta with the chaos of freedmen.

For all their farming expertise, the Malgidai’s strongboxes were heavy with coins that had not come entirely from the soil. No one ever quite makes a living on farming alone, although all always insist that they do. Instead the money had come from Malgis’s campaigning when he once sailed for fifteen days to Sikily to join a Spartan attack on Athens. He came back a rich man with the loot of the dead at the Assinaros River. His new strongbox, with the lumps of gold beneath the coins, proved so heavy that he finally sent young Mêlon for a chain at the town forge to haul it up out of the well. No mere hemp rope would bear all the weight of his profits. War, it turned out, was a good way to make or lose money. But profit depended on what side of a war you ended up on. Always it was the wiser choice to fight on the side of the Spartans—even if that meant halfway across the ocean in Sikily or Asia. The Spartans would enrich Malgis for most of his life. At his end, they would kill him when he broke his own rule.

Mêlon remembered how Malgis, in the days after Athens had lost its great war with Sparta, liked to talk deep into the night with the big men from Thebes. Years before Mêlon came of age, the Theban friends used to walk on his farm’s paths, talking of spurning earth’s pleasures. Most of these city-folk were like Alkidamas, all self-acclaimed peripatetics who thought they were the true children and stewards of Pythagoras keeping the master’s teaching alive in the backwaters of Boiotia, as they lectured amid trees and shrubs.

The dream of Helikon continued as the sleeping Mêlon tried to make sense of this night at Leuktra. Like all who renounce wealth and the tawdry pursuit of it, the philosophers who trudged up to the farm often came to enjoy its fruits all the more. Affluence adds a veneer of authority to knowledge—if it can be displayed without the ugly scars of its acquisition. Mêlon knew that as well, and how someone else’s money had allowed him to think he could keep himself away from the mob below. He was at Leuktra this morning for yet one more reason as well: not just because of the prophecy of the apple, or to keep Spartans off his ground, or to replay the battle of Koroneia with a different ending, but also to prove, as he had at Nemea and Koroneia, that money gave him no exemption from the ordeal of the phalanx, and that he at last did believe men, even his Boiotians, could in a season or two set right the wrongs of ages.

The hoplite had thought that his senses, which had saved him so many times in the melee, had been dulled by age. They had not. Smell, hearing, even touch were all heightened this summer before Leuktra as never before. The light off Helikon had been much clearer, the hot wind of late afternoon through the shiny leaves of the olives stronger. Ever since word of Epaminondas and the failed peace at Sparta had spread and war had neared, everything had turned crisp. Nothing was as before. War was in the air. In this lull before the spearing, his touch, nose, ears, and eyes were burning and told him he alone was standing still as the world moved beneath his feet.

What was this mystery of Epaminondas, Mêlon asked in his dream? Whence came his zeal to face down the king of Sparta and then march south, down one thousand stadia into the heart of the Peloponnesos to build new cities of freedom for others finer than their own? These Pythagoreans, with no doubt, no second ideas, thought they had ushered in the new age of Hellas. All the city-states would become one state, one community of equals. All would worship the god Logos, and would teach that there are no masters, no slaves, no right hand better than left. No man would be better than woman—but all with free will to play the fool or the good man—and suffer the consequences at the blink of death. That was the power of Epaminondas to save the souls of the would-be saviors of others for the judgment to come. So these Pythagoreans had become the godfathers of Epaminondas, well before Leuktra. When Mêlon came down to fight in the year of Leuktra, he knew well enough where the fight of these men would finally lead.

This was also the arrogance of the Pythagoreans, Mêlon saw in these prebattle visions. They thought they alone knew the good and alone could implement it among the Hellenes. They taught that everything we do—eat, sleep, crap, talk—must be in measure, according to
meson
, the golden mean. Once a man knew the rhythm of living—and he could not without the help of Pythagoras—then work was not work. Money was only for independence from the mob, never to be used for indulgence. Women and slaves were to be as free men; and dumb animals, who had inside them the souls of the departed, were to be untouched. Maybe even the olives and grapes were the stopping stations of the souls seeking to reform this time around.

For most who improve their grandfather’s house or ancestral vineyard, this temptation is never distant—to destroy and start over from the beginning rather than to correct the wrongs and burdens of the long dead. Malgis the killer was given a great gift not to farm the plot of his father Antander, but to start on the wild Helikon anew. This was the creed of creation of the Pythagoreans. The restlessness was also the danger residing in an impatient Epaminondas—to tear down all the ancient good along with the old bad and start over afresh. Sparta was a tired city of crooked streets and cobbled-together plots. But Messenê, the capital of free Messenia to come? This dream of Epaminondas’s new city would be a grid. All new streets and blocks as perfect as the new vines and trees to be planted around it, their city to practice on with the newly freed helots—like the famous farm of the Malgidai, but for thousands.

After his father Malgis had terraced the hillsides, fashioned the big courtyard with a view of Boiotia below, planted the vines and trees, leveled and smoothed the wheat fields, built the pens and threshing floor, got the big press working, lined the farm’s paths with flat stones, and worshiped his god of Pythagoras—after all that, three things that no seer imagined had followed. First, he ended up not with a man’s refuge, but with the finest-looking farm in Boiotia. The orchard and vineyards proved better even than those on Sikily that he had copied so well. Malgis the founder became not just an
idiotês
—not just a recluse—but a wealthy one at that, whose wine and oil brought in gawkers and buyers alike. Then he buried his young wife, Kephesia. She died ten springs after the battle of Delion, from the stiff-jaw right after giving him a single son up in their new house on the mountain. Last of all, at sixty years still hale, Malgis himself fell.

Fell? Hardly. Malgis was gutted by the Spartans—knocked down by no less than Lord Lichas himself, at the spear clash at Koroneia, ten seasons after the great war with the Athenians—caught in the final mad Theban crash against the king Agesilaos. There the Boiotians in folly threw away the fight they had earlier almost won, losing thirty years after they and Malgis’s Thespians had won at Delion. But, of course, they were now fighting Spartans, not Athenians any longer. This last muster at his age was Malgis’s death sentence. But still at Koroneia, Malgis did all that the Theban generals wanted, as a
lochagos
leading his son Mêlon and six hundred Thespians head-on against the Spartan king Agesilaos in the battle’s bitter finale—on the Boiotians’ weak left against the choice Spartan royals on the enemy right wing. At first he was blocked from nearing the king, but he soon found a way over them, as the men from Thespiai behind pushed their front files through. These images came more quickly now to the dreaming Mêlon as sunlight neared and with it the approach of battle.

Malgis had hit the royal guard under Lichas, who stabbed better with the spear than any on either side of the battlefield. Malgis had first wounded Sphodrias. Then he took on Deinon as well, and got close to King Agesilaos, almost through the last circle of the king’s guard under Lichas. Finally, with the king’s crest in sight, Malgis in desperation had thrown his thrusting spear—and it had hit the royal thigh itself. The wound would cripple Agesilaos, but not kill him. Malgis could not withstand the fury of a stunned Lichas. No man could. The Spartan caught Malgis without his spear and stabbed him right under the chin, above his breastplate. Then Lichas called in vain for his henchmen to strip the Thespian and take the gleaming armor that had once belonged to the Spartan general Lysander.

Mêlon saw his father collapse in the dust. Now he battled his way forward to keep the murderous Spartans from desecrating the body of Malgis; somehow he carried the body away from the fray. Lichas stabbed him above the knee and almost took him down, too, but the royal guard fell back and circled Agesilaos. They carried their king out rather than go after the Theban vanguard under Mêlon. The next day Gorgos, the captured helot, packed dead Malgis back to the farm, and he wrapped the leg of Mêlon as he drove the cart to Helikon with his dead and wounded masters. The Thebans set up a small black stone hidden away on a corner of the Kadmeia in the center of town, reading just as the Boiotarchs promised:
Tode mnêma Malgidi, Antandros huiô, tô Thespiaô, hon Spartiai eidon kalon en Koroneia. Eis Hadas elthe makairpistos tôn Helikonidôn hina Boiotia pasa ê eleuthera.
(This memorial is for Malgis, son of Antander, the Thespian, whom the Spartans knew well at Koroneia. He went down to Hades, most blessed of those Helikon way, so that all of Boiotia might be free.)

The Spartan iron had bored in a palm’s width above the back of Mêlon’s knee. To the bone and deeper Lichas had driven his spear tip to roll up his tendon. If he were to meet Lichas this coming day at Leuktra, then the reckoning had been yet another reason to follow Nêto’s prophecy and come down at last from Helikon. But Lophis had filled him with talk of Epaminondas, and freedom from Sparta, and something greater still. The result was that he thought himself not so old and crippled as much as wise and experienced—and needing to settle with Lichas. But even before that for twenty years and more, he picked up his spear Bora, put on his panoply every other evening behind the shed—bronze breast-and backplate, concave round willow shield, banged-up greaves, slashing sword, and heavy helmet—and then did his ten or so jabs and set moves. Right foot forward with the spear thrust; right back to bring the enemy in off balance; the shield bash with the left foot leading; the underhand stab to the groin; the overhand thrust down into the enemy’s neck; the wild right hand cross slash with the cleaver; the sword chop down on the helmet; the crouch to one knee behind the shield; the rightwing drift; the steady walk ahead; the double-time trot. These were all the moves, the
hoplomachia
, that his Theban drill masters had once taught him before the battles at the Nemea and at Koroneia, and that he had repeated three thousand times and more these years so that perhaps one day he would come down his mountain and kill Spartans without end.

At fifty Mêlon was on the downhill course without a rock or stump in his way, with a better farm for his boy Lophis than what Malgis had given him—and with a better son in Lophis than he himself had been. Lophis riled Mêlon with new talk of helots and Epaminondas and grand marches and Lichas and how he must come down to fight the Spartans if he were to claim he was a citizen and a man of the polis. But shortly after making his decision to fight, Mêlon had begun to see black visions sent from the gods—the dream changing on alternating sleeps. He always saw two cities to the south, far beyond the Isthmos, and now at Leuktra those old dreams came back and turned his mind from Helikon.

The first one was a rising city of tall stones, with ladders of men at work, and black cut rock stacked everywhere amid the growing ramparts. Two big levers with pulleys and hooks lifted squared blocks on a temple wall. A theater was half-finished. Workers swarmed on the embrasures, singing with the oxen-team drivers in a thick Doric. An agora was crowded. Farmers in peace flocked in to sell their wares. Squabbles were settled in a large
dikastêrion
by swift-mouthed
rhêtôrs
and voting jurors. Women brought their men apples in baskets. They sang to them as they hauled stones. On a
bêma
, a tall orator lectured to his listeners, who jeered and clapped—but then voted in peace and praised their freedom as their walls always rose higher. Calm and order reigned.

On the other gloomier nights when there was no moon, Mêlon saw these same towers and walls, but unfinished, with many more black blocks ready to be stacked. This other vision of the city was longer, darker and louder. There were rotting Hellenes hanging in nooses from the gates. Dogs and birds fought over even more corpses in ditches and refuse piles, pulling on their putrid ankles. There were more bodies half-eaten outside the towers, clubbed and knifed, with their purses and packs stolen. Men were killing and raping at will, and packs of cutthroats in the chaos of the city’s license roamed over the unfinished city that was full of trash and worse, as slaves dumped their slop jars into open pits. Always upon waking Mêlon asked himself how could this same city be two different cities, and which dream was the real, which the false. Somehow he put himself in the answer: His presence in the south could ensure the good city of this Epaminondas, holy Messenê to come—while his absence would mean its failure and descent into chaos. But, he asked himself, would Gorgos, would Chiôn stay or go with him, and if they went, who would keep the farm and the family of his son Lophis safe?

A spear’s length away, Chiôn on this hard-baked ground this night now saw these same images, but he had more of his own dreams and memories before Leuktra that would not easily give way. Malgis, he knew, had roped the slow-moving pursuing helot Gorgos in the free-for-all after the Theban phalanx had broken at the Nemea and the battle lines had been crossed. The prisoner Gorgos had squirmed on the ground and whimpered that he was the prized shield carrier of a Spartan noble. Maybe the manservant to the big ephor, to Lichas himself he was. Now the Messenian slave was somewhere around six tens, maybe more, or so he claimed, though his arms seemed too hard for a man that old. On feast nights for the two meat-eaters, Chiôn saw Gorgos crush a piglet’s head like he did a squash. Gorgos said he was nearly blind—though the helot saw more than others the bad spots and crooks of the farm. Most days he shuffled about and was just worth the food to keep him going, although Gorgos talked as if he owned the estate itself. Chiôn’s dreams now stayed on Helikon.