The End of Sparta: A Novel (23 page)

“Not since my beardless days, all this money. Then I used to loot both sides of Kithairon. I’d strip the high border farms below Panakton of their roof tiles. Yes, and even the woodwork in the great war. But not like this. Never such a full cart like this. At this rate, I will buy another wagon. Maybe I’ll hire this new Myron of yours, to follow me in my dust with another ox for my wares. Why, there are even Athenians who pay to ride back over the pass with me, just to look at the soil of Leuktra, to boast that they have walked on its holy ground. I’ve got my boy over there peddling clay toy Boiotian shields to the fool gawkers, with the sides notched out just like yours in the shed, and stamped on the front side with EPAMINONDAS.”

“Oh, no, you won’t take our Myron, king peddler. I’ve taken a liking to his empty head and wide shoulders. He stays here with Chiôn.” Mêlon grabbed Eurybiades by the arm, “He’s worth more than any three of them. Even his master, the whipper Hippias, won’t get him back with a chain around his ankle.”

There were to be more battle monuments for Leuktra, and victory decrees and temples from the booty. Thebes for most of the winter after Leuktra and following spring had sent its best monument builders and stonecutters up to the sanctuary at Delphi. Of course, the architect Proxenos was hired to accompany the first party to survey the site. He would barter with the holy shrine keepers over the fees for buying a spot. The Boiotians were to build their own treasury on the Sacred Way, right in front of the Athenians’ Parian marble eyesore.

Proxenos had become a court builder for the Boiotians. He traveled with scrolls stuffed with charts and lines drawn to make sense from the wild rantings of Epaminondas. Why he left his estates and horses on the Asopos, none were too sure, only that he came up to Thespiai more even than to Thebes, and to his home Plataia not at all. He was at work redesigning the walls, building clay models of vast new cities and for weeks taking trips south of the Isthmos with his packs of scrolls. Perhaps he wanted to build anew entire shrines and cities even, without the bother of old temples and the burden of poorly placed stones to hamper him—straight streets and right corners of fresh cities to rise, and not the hard work of straightening winding pathways of their fathers’ cramped and dark poleis. Maybe too Proxenos wished to bring the mind of Epaminondas to stone, so that when his words were forgotten the ramparts of Megalopolis or Messenê would not be.

Soon Proxenos designed a white marble monolith right at Leuktra itself, on the spot where King Kleombrotos had fallen. The polished stone
trophê
was shaped like a cucumber of sorts. At its base the trademark notched Theban shields ran continuously around the circumference. Mêlon visited the builders at the big monument at Leuktra four times over the winter and spring. The tall column was as high as the new pyramids outside Argos on the Tripolis road, but of better stone than the plastered Herakleion at Thebes. For all the talk of Leuktra as the beginning of a new Hellas, it now appeared to have been the end of that idea, especially since nothing much had happened after the battle. If the tenure of Epaminondas were not renewed at the winter solstice, the new Boiotarchs would end all talk of a grand march into the Peloponnesos.

Widowed Damô was slowly regaining her looks. With her glow came back her power that had once reduced Lophis to teary entreaties to win her from the other nine suitors in Thebes, who had as much land and money, but also the coveted flat black earth around Kopais. Beauty is the great leveler among men, Damô remembered after Leuktra. She knew that folk didn’t like some men because they were short, or dark, or had the barbarians’ blue eyes and red hair, or could not speak the language of Hellas or owned only a cloak, rather than bottomland along Kopais. But the unspoken prejudice was really against their ugliness. In turn, the favor and advantage went not so much to the well-born, or the male, or even the moneyed, but to the beautiful. Children had suited Damô’s look, and had widened her hips a bit only, but had added a sheen on her skin and a sway to her walk. This new Damô, hair black and skin without a blemish, with the high mountain
narkissos
of spring in her hair, went quickly through to the agora and the stalls, lest the women pelt her with roof-tiles and flower pots as she called them out.

Had she wanted, she could have robbed the mesmerized peddlers’ stalls to their own applause. In this way each six days as she went into Thespiai, Damô shamed and confused and laughed and swore at those down the hill in the town of Thespiai below the farm on the spur of Helikon. She spat at them that they had sent no hoplites to help Lophis and their fellow Boiotians at Leuktra. “Gaze out at our monument to Leuktra, built by our Proxenos, a hero of Leuktra. See it from the acropolis of Thespiai, and feel shame,” Damô barked at the Thespians as she shook her head and her black hair flew in the breeze. Without a husband, but with plenty of silver, she was bolder than ever now. All that only gave her sensible words even more credence, but it hardly stopped the rumors that Chiôn was up in her tower when the torches went out. Would that be so bad after all, the older one-toothed widows countered and hissed?

Despite the unexplained murder of Medios, the winter and spring after Leuktra on Helikon were ending in quiet—almost. After the summer solstice, Hippias, the former master of Myron, was found dragged by his horse on the mountain road to Aigosthena. His hand had strangely been caught and wound up in his reins, or so they also said, even as he boasted he was on his way with a decree from the city archon to get back his Myron from the Malgidai. No doubt, the horse bucked and bolted with Hippias trailing for a stade or two on the ground, his skull battered on the rocks. A freak accident, it was.

Or so they said.

The Fall of Mêlon

The dizziness and head shakes Mêlon had suffered after Leuktra had finally stopped by the new year. His skull cleared from the blow of Kleonymos. He was alive; Kleonymos was not. So the pain had meant nothing. Mêlon’s slaves were free. But still, he found that he missed the sharp tongue of Gorgos and the goat the two used to roast in the evening in the shed. Myron did his best at the shed talk, but he was a dense head. Even the dogs were gone. Sturax had gone into the belly of Lichas, as the Spartan had boasted, though dog-eating was usually the work of barbarians, both north and across the water. Nêto had lost Porpax along the coast. Perhaps the dog had gone wild with the wolves on Kithairon once he had tasted man-flesh, feeding among the corpses of the wounded Spartans. No doubt he too was gone for good.

The recovery of Damô, Mêlon saw, had mostly to do with Chiôn—just as the gossips said (and the slurs were spoon-fed by the neighbor hag Dirkê and her surviving Thrakian, Thrattos, who was finishing the oak cutting of the dead Medios). Damô hunted Chiôn down in the high fields and tamed him with soup and bread, and soon they talked of Pythagoras and how the spirit of Lophis was among them, awaiting both of them in the vortex, or perhaps even now in a new body—walking among the believers in Thebes with one or two more lives yet needed until perfection.

During the first winter after Leuktra, all during the month of
Prostatêrios
, it had been the neighbor gossip-monger Dirkê who reminded Mêlon of how much he had lost—hinting he might want to sell the worry of his farm to her. She went up too often as the new year approached. The shrew wanted to see whether stories were true that the harvest of Malgidai was slow and would be lost. Were the terraces of Mêlon’s crumbling and overgrown with weeds? Surely the path up there was eroded and needed gravel? Was it true there was a great march to the south in the works—and perhaps the farm of Malgis might be sold for want of upkeep? Would not the hero of Thespiai know best the mind of Epaminondas? “
Eleutheria
is not so sweet, eh, hero of Thespiai and giver of freedom? Or at least for those who are foolish enough to be tricked into doing the dirty work of your helot-loving Epaminondas?”

“Sweet enough, and sweeter to come still,” he answered.

“Boast like that when you’re spear-gutted on black Ithômê—while some helot woman, with a Spartan rope around her ankle, slits your throat. Then you’ll lie in the dirt on a hill of thistles, and with a toothless smile, no less. I know you’ll die with a spear in you in the south. It will be far from home, far in the Peloponnesos. Or so it is written.” Dirkê then trudged farther up to the vineyard and the shed, as far as her bad hips could take the climb. There was always money to be made in the aftermath of battle. She wanted to rent out her slave Thrattos as a wage-hand to help her crippled neighbors with the olive pressing—and also through him hear the gossip of the Malgidai and get someone planted on the farm of Malgis. “Even your big oil stone press is not good when you don’t have men to run it. The best oil is long past. Your fruit is black. Too long on the trees. Prance in armor all you want. It won’t get your olives picked.”

Dirkê seemed quite unconcerned about the past killing of Medios (she had even let his Thrakian corpse stay out there to rot where it was found). So she poked her head into the shed and kept on jawing. “With your Lophis gone, and Chiôn no good and free to boot, you might give us down the hill one of your second thoughts. That Myron slave, if he is even that, is a dung gatherer. He’s no field hand. I’ve been told you will hear soon from the son of his dead master Hippias. Yes, you know him, new Lord Hipponichos, will go to the courts to get him back from you soon, as his father tried. They called me to come in as juror. So Mêlon—give me two obols a day. Add in some food. Yes, yes, for the belly of my big Thrattos and a bought vote or two to keep your Myron free up here. Thrattos will be yours for the winter. At least until your oil is pressed. Or are you short of coin? They tell me at the fountain that even your gold-inlaid breastplate is gone. Godlike Lichas the killer wears it down south, or so they tell.” She kicked a few clods and then leaned on her stick. Then she spat out the seeds of a dried gourd, smiling with her one tooth over the lower lip. How had all that felt to the Malgidai? she wondered.

Mêlon liked the idea of an extra hand, but not a Thrakian. Dirkê had noticed that Chiôn was in the grove also striking the short limbs with a long reed stick from Kopais. Deftly he hit with his good right hand. She saw Zeus’s black cloud over her Thrakian whenever he got near. “No worry, master,” Chiôn yelled from the nearest olive, “I handle all of them as easily as before. Myron promises he will stay until the winter solstice to finish the picking. No need of her Thrakian; less of Dirkê. Send the no-goods away.” With that he put down his pole and started his way over.

“ ‘Master’ is it still? Small talk for such a big man—Chiôn the new lord of Hellas, hero of Thespiai.” Dirkê sneered at him and went on, since she knew it was futile to get a pass from a man like that, and she might as well play out the hand to the end. “A conniver, your quiet cripple Chiôn is. He gets the farm without a silver owl or a Boiotian gold shield upfront? Dirkê works hard to buy it—but he stumbles into it? But I’d say instead maybe that tall tower of Mêlon’s, and Damô’s big melons along with it, is what he’s got his eye on. So here we have a branded slave from Chios, with the scar on his poxy forehead. He ends up as lord and master of the estate of Malgis, swimming in the billows of a dead man’s wife. You won’t help your Dirkîkon a bit by hiring my Thrattos?” With that she hustled off down the trail in fear of a stone or kick for her venom. Being old and ugly and bent over is a better guard than a breastplate and shield.

“She is an Hekuba all right, Chiôn,” Mêlon grumbled as his slave approached, “But the hag sorts out the chaos nonetheless.” He stopped and put his lame leg on a stone and parted a few strands left back over his bald spot. They were outside the shed, around a smoky fire of green olive prunings. “Look, Chiôn, she believes in nothing, nothing at all—no love, no hate, no future, no past. Her memory is washed always by the waters of Lethe. She gets up each morning fresh without baggage or learning. She is guided only by that long nose for money and the bitterness that comes from feeling she is of lesser stock. Envy and spite, these are the twin oxen that pull men and women like her along. The
logos
of profit alone pilots her thoughts. I listen to her far more than I do to your Pythagoras.”

How strange, Mêlon went on to lecture his Chiôn, that the odious among us can teach us the most—if we only can endure their cuts and jibes and then learn from their very mouths how not to view the world about us, and yet how with just a slight shove we might become as they are. Then he paused and thought to himself that had he not inherited the
paradeisos
from Malgis, had the gods not blessed him with Lophis, had he not been the
mêlon
of prophecy, perhaps he too might have become a Dirkê—or even a Lichas had he been raised in the
agôgê
of the Spartans.

Nevertheless, after Leuktra, Mêlon explored all these forbidden ideas further, and he now started up again to Chiôn. “Dirkê was as bad and yet right as much as our Lophis was so good and so wrong—about how the oligarchs at Sparta would come even to accept Pythagoras. But thank the gods for these Dirkai. She is the voice of all the dark thoughts in the world. Chiôn, Dirkê has been a great gift to me these years, sounding out and exposing the bad that is in me. She gives me a chance to hear my dark thoughts spoken, hear it all said by another, not me. Then I redeem myself by sneering at it, and claim the high ground from it, when she turns everything so foul and has no shame to voice the evil in us that we too feel.”

Chiôn ignored his high talking and started to return to the olives—until Mêlon grabbed his rough wool cloak. “But Chiôn, she has reminded me that you were the better man at Leuktra, and one freed by the town fathers of Thespiai. So you marry Damô. Raise my son’s boys to take this farm. More if you carve out another slice of the mountain with your one arm. Damô is still not three tens. She has three or four boys more in her yet. I can’t pay you to stay on the farm. But stay you will. All that Malgis gave me will be your own to care for—at least until the boys of Lophis and your own to come are of age.”