The End of Sparta: A Novel (22 page)

A bony hand grabbed her shoulder. “Stay here the night, pretty one? Don’t go off in the dark with killers on the road. I hear the wild man-bear is out tonight, come down from Helikon out your way to harvest some Spartans. For another three silver pieces, I can lead you to my hut up the draw over there.” But Nêto pushed Kallista away, flashed her knife, and decided to wait no longer for the marauding dog Porpax to return. She turned Xiphos around and slowly led the horse by the reins, careful that the body remained balanced on his back.

On the way back, an Athenian—or at least he sounded like one in his loud Attic—ran up to her in the darkness and grabbed the tail of Xiphos. The pony kicked hard. Nêto waved her blade in the air. She glanced back at the robber in the dirt, a boy, with two or maybe three more friends, out for easy steals in this blur between peace and war. During the trip back there were small parties of Spartans to watch for, trailing the army that by now was well past the Megarid. She remembered the warnings of her master, Mêlon, who had told her everyone has a choice in this life—a way to either live in fear or to give fear to others. So don’t be a slave to your terrors, Nêto spoke to herself. Let those robbers worry what Megalê Nêto, the Amazon warrior, will do to them with this sharp knife, not what they might do to me. At that she pulled out her blade and pointed it ahead as she rode.

She went faster on her way north, and by midmorning Nêto could see the farm’s tower in the distance on the slopes of Helikon. The Dog Star sun was warming up. She wanted to get Lophis inside the cool air of the bottom floor of the farmhouse where the water from Helikon was piped in, and she knew Mêlon would be waiting. Then she heard loud voices far in the distance, but thought at first it was only the Athenian robbers, accosting some fool without a horse and knife. It was nothing but sounds on the wind, as a hard breeze came up from south of the Isthmos.

She yelled out anyway in the direction of the noise: “I am Nêto of Helikon. Make way—or die.”

Between Peace and War

The Lizard’s Tail

Off in the distance a world away, far to the south in Messenia, maybe a thousand stadia away from Nêto on Helikon, at this very moment hawk-eyed Nikôn of the helots, would-be leader of the revolt, stared out fixed on the late summer moon. His helot rangers had backed off from their leader and let him scream in his drink on his rocky perch, as he did on occasion when they walked on the high mountain trails of Ithômê far above Messenia below. This Nikôn was a tanner and smelled of hides and lye, and he was unlettered. Yet he knew knife work and had led the fiercest of the helot rebels. Let the Messenian leaders parley with Lichas for a quarter, a half of Messenia. But he would free it all, and kill every Spartan caught on the wrong side of Taygetos. Now he was perched on a cleft on Mt. Ithômê in the land of the Messenians, and he kept repeating to the stars under the moonlight, “I am Nikôn of Messenia. Make way for me—or die.”

This same night Nikôn was on his second bag of sweet wine, and calling out to anyone under the same sky of Hellas. Did the men of Boiotia care that the
heilôtai
were whipped and killed and in the best of their moments pelted with rotten fruit, poked and lashed by the drunk Spartans at dinner in the
syssitia
? Did they know the Spartan overlords sang of “Messenê good to plow, good to plant” as if Ithômê were theirs, as if helots were but ants of their soil? Nikôn may have been the rabble-rouser of the helot rebels here on the upland. But the wine and the starry night on Mt. Ithômê had put him into a trance, as if his saviors in Boiotia, half the length of Hellas away in the north, might hear him—but only if he called out loud enough to their shared sky. He had heard voices of prophecy, of Epaminondas and Mêlon, of great armies to come, and of the Messenian woman to the north, Nêto of Helikon, who was promising a great reckoning this coming winter or next. Or so he told himself that there were real sounds and talk in his head, and not just gibberish brought on by two pouches of unmixed wine. He had no runners to send north for news, no money to visit the oracles at Delphi and Olympia for the gods’ plans. So the illiterate Nikôn yelled to the stars in hopes that an oracle, a priestess maybe in Boiotia far to the north might hear him.

“Who said who was to be free and slave? What god did this thing? The Spartans? Is their Lichas an all-powerful Zeus Sôter? Why for three hundred and fifty harvests have the Messenians been the asses of the men of Sparta, while all the rest of Hellas has been free?” But Nikôn was talking only to himself. Only his henchman Hêlos, who knew how to write the block letters and put his master’s thoughts onto scrolls, followed him on the high path on the cliffs of Ithômê. Loyal Hêlos had his own bladder bag, but one of icy spring water; and the good partner tried to get Nikôn to drink and dilute the raging heat in his head. It was also Hêlos, the finest scribe in the west of the Peloponnesos, who saw that the illiterate Nikôn alone of the rebel bands knew the mind of the Spartan, how to ambush him, how to goad the helots into killing their landlords.

The rest of the helots had taken the other path down after their nighttime patrolling. The rival Doreios yelled to them, “Join me—not this anvil-head Nikôn. His name spells defeat—not victory.” All this meant nothing to the mumbling Nikôn, who this night kept up his helot shouts at the moon. “I watched my daughters with horse tails, clipped to their butts, forced to neigh, poked by Spartans at the symposia. Or made to bellow like cows, mounted from the backside, to the strains of their bastard poet Tyrtaios. Or my son Aristomenes, flogged and kicked as he howled like a dog to the laughter of the Spartans, hit with their black olives and mushy apples and then dragged like a side of beef from his pony.”

Nikôn, in desperate appeal, thought he could plead to the female voice in his head from north in Boiotia. “Is there anything worse than for a man to pick his grapes, stomp them, filter the juice, store the amphora, and age the wine—only then to cart it over to the Spartan acropolis? To give them as
apophorai
—to be whipped for the service as the idle red-cape soldiers gulp down a year’s work, most of it ending up as piss and vomit on the floor?” Now Nikôn went on to the black night above, “Don’t forget the cleft of Kaiadas, the black abyss on Taygetos. Where we are thrown and then broken at the bottom, waiting at night for the wolves to eat our dying flesh as our tortured souls fly out from our ruined bodies.” Soon his dwindling band split off on the paths between the wild figs. They laughed at the wages of wine, for now they saw that their captain Nikôn, silhouetted on a rocky outcropping across the vale, was taken with one of his periodic manias, as he talked with voices that wafted in the air.

He was drunk. Dionysus had sneaked into his head. Or worse, he had chewed some of the wild weed with the bitter white flowers that made the horses and cattle bellow and fall over. Alone of all the leaders of the helots, Nikôn could see that an army would come, and that some men in Greece were for justice and not just plunder and their own pride when they marched to battle. He looked more to the gods above, as the late-night fog lifted, and he saw the yellow moon of the coming Dog Days, smiling at the very thought of the liberation to come.

“I am Nikôn. A Messenian. No helot. A free man. Born here in Messenia. Citizen of its Messenê to be. Messeeeniiiaaa. On free Ithooomêee.” Like the gray night wolf he yelled. He wanted his howl to reach the Spartans in their drink below and in dance behind their walls.

“Quiet, Nikôn.” From a distance across the ravine the rival helots of Doreios on their way to the villages called back. “Shut up, drunken fool. No more wine boasting—unless you want to bring back Lichas from the north and his helot henchmen to string us up. Hush, mad dog.
Siga
. Go home. Hêlos! Hit him, Hêlos, won’t you? Some leader—this fool who wobbles down a tiny path. Chew your bone alone, far off this holy mountain. Dry your gut out.” The helots sang and laughed, far away, at the fading cries of their would-be leader.

Let the others talk of revolt while only Nikôn’s men freed helots. Now Nikôn bayed at the moon all into the night. He clung to the ledge that pointed north to faraway Boiotia—as if in his sudden fit his godly Boiotians could hear him a thousand stadia away. “
Eimi Nikôn. Eleutherios gignomai
.” I am Nikôn … I am born free.

Yet for all the prophecies of Nêto and the drunken calls of Nikôn on his ledge, Epaminondas did no more marching this summer after Leuktra. Nor the next spring did he call out the Boiotians to descend on Sparta and free Nikôn’s helots. Most Boiotians instead thought that the great, the seemingly final victory at Leuktra had proved war to be the parenthesis and peace the natural, more common order of things. So in the hamlets around Thebes the yeomen hoplites went right on after the victory into their cycles of the farming year. The timeless soil cared little what its temporary human tenants thought or did. The ground mute beneath the farmers just endured and went on whether Leuktra was won or lost. War or no war, for free men or slaves, the tasks of the season—sow, weed, reap, cut, and thresh—continued day in, day out. For most of the other vineyard men on Helikon, the battle was no more to be remembered than the severed tail of the stone lizard who proudly wags his growing stub without a thought of the old one, rotting in the dirt.

After finishing the later vintages of summer, the three boys got to work on the autumn harvest of the olive trees. For all the visual splendor of the estate, there was a well-thought-out economy to it as well, as in its irrigation ditches from the pond above that meant less carrying of the water with the donkeys. The three threshing floors spaced near the grain and barley fields made the harvests far easier. The eighty
plethra
could produce twice the food of the neighbor Dirkê’s similarly sized place with about half her labor and expense. That gift—only vaguely appreciated in the past—was sensed by all in these days of loss. Mêlon had tried to let Myron go. But the awkward slave stayed on. Soon he followed Chiôn on the farm and even into the woods, like and not like him—both enormous, but Chiôn’s maimed arm impairing his stride far less than did Myron’s natural clumsiness. Myron had been freed by his presence at Leuktra according to the decree of the Thespians, and now earned his wages from the Malgidai.

Myron’s skill in the collection and spreading of dung hardly meant he knew pruning and tilling. But he met rebuke for his poorly cut spurs and his crooked furrows with a shrug. Like the Korinthian mirror glass in town, he turned the harshness back on his master. Chiôn was freed, but as a one-arm he was more unfree than he had been as a slave of two hands. He saw that a man’s body is his only master after all. Thoughts are nothing without the leg and arm, which alone turn word into deed. Yet he bore the hale newcomer Myron no grudge, praising his new henchman as he climbed high into the olives with his tree saw. “Myron is my left arm I lost at Leuktra,” Chiôn laughed to Mêlon. “This freed slave is not so bad, once his dung stink wore off and he picked up rocks in the field and quit collecting the mess of the public toilets. I wager no master ever will pry him off Helikon.”

“Yes, he’s our Sturax and Porpax come back alive,” Mêlon offered, “the new watchdog of the farm. Our lost tail has grown back longer, and the farm is as good now as can be without our Lophis.” Myron winked or twitched at that, since he knew them better than they knew themselves. So he let praise roll off his back, and looked down as they lauded him to the skies. Myron was working for different, better sorts now, and on a wage, no less—and so he no longer bore pots of dung from the city stalls to his master’s vineyard, in fear of the lash of his owner Hippias, who each summer morning galloped on his pony down the rows of the vines, hitting the backs of his slaves with his mule-tail whip. This Hippias often came by Helikon on his black horse to take back or sell off his Myron. But Mêlon’s spear and the dark look of Chiôn shooed him off, and reminded the mounted grandee that the assembly of the Thespians had freed all the slaves who had flocked to Leuktra to fight—a fact known to Hippias, who now wanted to keep the silver buyout from the polis and yet get his slave back for a double profit. No concern. Soon Hippias was no longer seen near Helikon—nor seen at all.

On a late summer morning, a year after Leuktra, it was Myron who found the rotting Medios, the Thrakian slave of Dirkê, the neighbor, hung up by his heels on a short pine tree far above the farm on Helikon—dead half a month or longer. Dirkê, Mêlon, and Chiôn soon followed Medios’s trail—he had been cutting oak for plowshares above the farm of the Malgidai, so Dirkê said—but uncovered no others tracks of his killer. Now in fear of a demon-like man-bear on Helikon, Dirkê for a while came less to the farm of the Malgidai. She certainly said no more about Medios. Dirkê told no magistrate, and wanted no talk of where Medios had been—or how he’d been hung up and sliced, and how there was a man-beast killer loose on Helikon. Otherwise, despite the warnings of endless war against the Spartans by Epaminondas, the long months after Leuktra proved among the most peaceful in recent memory in Thespiai. Soon no one missed Medios.

Meanwhile, the Spartan booty—helmets, breastplates, mess kits, swords, and even a few coins—from the battle turned up from the Attic border all the way up to Phokis. Farmers hiked often over Kithairon to Attika to buy stock and more slaves with their newfound money from the sale of plunder. The Thespian trader Eurybiades grew rich beyond his wildest boasting. His wagon full of pots and bronze creaked for days over the roads beneath Helikon to garner some of the captured Peloponnesian armor and coin in trade. At least ten thousand Spartans from the Peloponnesos, Eurybiades figured, had left most of what they had brought up. His practiced eye would find the final remnants of what they had cached in stone crevices and in cusps of trees.