The End of Sparta: A Novel (27 page)

Even Arkadians from Mantineia were marching northward to Boiotia in twos and threes. All heading now for Thebes, all going over the gulf road near Aigosthena along the water and up through Kreusis. Five hundred Messenians had come east along the coast from Naupaktos. These were the children of the helot refugees in the north freed at Pylos during the Athenian war. Thirty years later they swore to deliver their kin from the Spartan yoke. Most still had their Doric talk. Mêlon tried for a time to race against this great shaking up in Boiotia and finish the olive harvest in his own world on Helikon.

As the family team worked in the shortening days of late autumn during the month of Boukatios, Chiôn proved the natural father all along to Mêlon’s grandsons. The dead Lophis for all his spirit had had no heart in either the land or its sons. He too often swore when the deep mud caked inside his long fingernails, and the boys tried to mount his sleek charger Xiphos and pile on behind their father. “We are not all men of the soil,” Malgis once had warned his grandson Lophis. “You find keeping this farm for your sons hard, but keep it nonetheless you must. A farm is the stored work of a man’s life. Lose it, and the rope snaps, with you, the weak weave. Then the boys will not have what you were given. You inherit, and see to it that you add to it—so others get more than you did. We Malgidai, we will buy the soil of others, or cut out more from the mountain, but we will not sell, not now, not ever.”

Mêlon suddenly thought of all that now. How had the gods accomplished that the farm would be saved by a slave that his father had bought in Chios, land that otherwise might have been lost had his own son, who thought of town more than a hillside of olives, lived? Still, he missed his Lophis in the morning. No more did his son climb up bleary-eyed and full of talk from his nighttime rides at the marshes and beyond. When sons die before fathers, it is soon time for fathers to follow. Even if their hair is not all white and their joints are not yet frozen with the swelling and stiffness; and even if their son proved a worse sort than the father, himself a worse sort than his own father Malgis. Lophis had proved just the opposite; as good as Mêlon or better still. He had a year, or maybe two left, and that was perhaps all Mêlon deserved. No need to be greedy and take more than your son had—and so this thought too began to make the Thespian think Leuktra had not been enough and he might go down the mountain to talk to these growing hordes of hoplites who were camping in the orchards and vineyards of Boiotia and do yet one more big thing before the end. Slowly all thought of town soured him. And he felt shame that he had spent even a single afternoon in the Thespian agora rather than with a ladder in the orchard.

Only out on Helikon did his head clear and could he think again. Wars were not just won by hands like himself and Chiôn, the killers and gray-heads that hold firm in the spear crossing and don’t flinch when iron tips rattle off their nose. There is need of young zealots such as Lophis who could ride head-on into the Spartan horse, with no foreknowledge of the gore of battle and no fear of Hades. Without young men who know it not, there could be no war brought to the land of others. So war is a sort of madness. It requires young men in their pride and recklessness who have no wisdom about how thin the threads of all of us hang—and so are willing to confront evil. Hoplites not yet much beyond their twentieth year believe their fate is a hardened iron chain that can’t be cut by anyone or anything. So they fight even to get into the first bloody rank of the phalanx.

In the long nights in the shed behind the farmhouse Mêlon grasped how sorely he missed Nêto, whom he now regretted having driven off the mountain—though of course he really had not driven her off. Indeed, only by deluding himself that his words had banished her could he accept that he feared she had tired of him and the farm and the neglect which he had shown for both her and the crops after Leuktra. He was afraid this Nikôn or Doreios—or worse still, the wealthy and landed Proxenos—had stolen his Nêto. Alkidamas had “taught” Nêto, but Mêlon scarcely knew what had been the nature of his lessons. That she had left for her helots, he knew; that she had left to raise her own station, and in that way at last to win her Mêlon, he had not even a small sign.

Almost as a revelation during the olive harvest, Mêlon now saw the broken terraces, cracked clay pipes, and trellises that had gone unrepaired in the vineyard in his absences down the mountain in the long months since Leuktra. How mad to have played the hero in Phrynê’s house and left his own to decay. Just a year of neglect and nature gets the upper hand. Nature never rests as man sleeps or dawdles in town. Nature gives us mold, rust, and wrinkles as occasional evidence of her silent, ceaseless work—the poisonous mushrooms that sprout out of nowhere after the rain. The farm fights the wild daily, but without man to stem the tide, feral nature reclaims its own in one season of weeds, and insects, and floods. Mêlon rediscovered himself as the land slowly began to heal him and bring him back to what he had once been. Yes, he was a
geôrgos
of Helikon, a farmer of civilization. He was no wild bacchant on Kithairon. His were not the maenads who danced on Mt. Ida in worship with her cymbals to Kybele. Those fools liked nature in the raw and laughed at the hard work of bringing culture out of savagery. Instead, his gods were the sober makers of things, divine Athena and the bitter Hephaistos. They were not wild and untamed Dionysos of Asia. They were not the Spartans’ huntress Artemis. Yet he was not a townsman either, who in softness had forgotten how to read the south breeze and the storm warning of birds and hoppers in the air. He was not to be a gawker or lay about in the halls of Phrynê, the seductress who had taught him so well that it was the land, not his own character, that kept him at work and away from the idle and slothful.

No, Mêlon son of Malgis was a
mesos
, a middle-man, neither feral nor tamed. From now on in these last days before the muster of the army, he would stay up on Helikon and tend to what he had neglected. He would go back to farming, and grow food from scrub and wait for a call from Epaminondas. The way to be ready for another battle was to ignore the talk of it in town, and instead ensure that his right arm was hard from pruning and he was once more used to sleeping on boards rather than reclining on the couches of Phrynê. Yes, that was the key, to be ready for the moment when it arrives even if that rendezvous be distant and unsure. If he wished to see beauty, it would have been far wiser to have gazed at Nêto for a blink between olive pickings than to have stared at Phrynê all day in her house of sloth.

So Mêlon was no longer hero of Leuktra, big man of Thespiai, but now cured once more and back to bald, lame Mêlon of Helikon, shorn of his slaves, and a mere tiller of the soil. As he stayed up on Helikon one evening about dusk the new dogs of Damô, Phylax and Hormê, began yapping at noises. But theirs was a different sort of bark. It was the rarer sort of yelp on lonely Helikon that most always foretold the scent of man, and strangers at that. Mêlon stopped the pressing to walk a bit out of the back room of the shed. What would the dog noise augur this time? Dirkê’s new Thrakians, or those left-handed conspirators of Pythagoras? Was the man-bear lurking near? And were the old myths even true, that man-bears still roamed like the half-gods Agrios and Oreios, whose mothers had mated with wild beasts in the high mountains? Were they again sweeping down from the north—now human in appearance, now in their fits assuming the shapes of half-bears with the cunning of men but the claws, fangs, strength, and savagery of animals?

From the crossbeam of the shed Mêlon grabbed his new Bora, the replacement spear that he had turned out from a log of cornel, with its iron head resharpened. He made ready outside the pressing room to stand his ground. Then to his surprise he met both Proxenos the Plataian and Ainias of Stymphalos—the first he had seen recently in town, the second not so often since the long day at Leuktra. The dogs ceased their barks as they saw the master put away his weapon. The one was well-groomed with his ink-black beard, combed hair, and clean tunic. But Ainias not so. The mercenary’s face was of stubble, and he had stitches and patches all over his leather jerkin.

Mêlon himself was covered with oil and pith. The king-killer was worn out at his twentieth straight day in the pressroom, having often worked the evenings alone to catch up to the picking of one-armed Chiôn and the boys. The two visitors came through the shed to the backside in the flickering torchlight. Both were shifting baskets of overripe olives to find room to sit on the slippery stone floor. Proxenos the builder stared in amazement at the elaborate machine that Mêlon had built. With the help of Chiôn and the tutelage of the peddler Eurybiades, Mêlon had spent years improving it—finally perfecting the original design of Malgis.

Murmex, the dog peddler and henchman of Eurybiades, had brought in parts for the press from Athens as well. The peddler knew more about such levers and stones than he let on, since he spent time boating along the islands off Argolis where his own folk proved clever with such machines. There was nothing quite like this press in all of Boiotia, the entire floor of the room finished in shiny hydraulic plaster. The surface was waterproofed like the fountain bottom in the square in Thespiai—as well done, Eurybiades claimed, as the famous public pools of Megara. Mêlon had cut channels that led to giant
pithoi
. Receptacles were set into the floor at the corners of the room. These cuttings seemed to run slightly downhill from the center, where rested a large round polished limestone drum. It was a smasher of sorts. It was set atop a stone casing, where crushed half-black olives were piled. A fifteen-foot oaken beam held the stone. On one end it was attached to the wall on a heavy axle, resting on bricks of the building.

The other end of the beam near the opposite wall was anchored by heavy ropes on a pulley to the ceiling and cranked further by a windlass. That machine forced the beam downward. With it, the attached stone smasher in its middle pressed the olives. It had taken Mêlon three seasons to build, and a lot of talk with the peddlers to learn of the strange design. Proxenos, the architect of walls and gates, gazed at the ingenuity of the press. He would have liked to stay here on the farm, and have built one like it, only better, since he already saw ways to improve it. “Mêlon, you should be in charge of the walls of Thespiai and those rising to the south. I have not seen anything like this. Well, once maybe at Haleis. There a fellow I know on the coast of the Argolis, a Diôn, son of Diophanes, has built such things—before in jealousy his neighbors broke it up with mallets. The envious were slave-dealers, of course, who wanted no such machines.”

Before Mêlon could reply, an impatient Ainias got up and probed the press. He stroked his stubble beard, and wondered whether it were not salvaged from one of the belly-bows, or maybe parts of a catapult frame that killed men from two stadia. He hit the beam with his shoulder. He pulled at the lever a bit. “Show us how this thing of your gods works. I have no notion of it. It looks like the funny machines they play with at Athens that keep our time and chart the heavens. Is it a toy? A weapon perhaps? One of Homer’s automatons? Clearly it works. How else would your jars be overflowing with oil?”

Mêlon kept quiet. He leaned back and cranked the windlass on the beam’s end two more notches. Then he put a foot-long wooden peg in the holes of the gear. That held taut the ropes. The beam could not spring back up from the resistance of the pile of olives. A thud followed. The heavy ropes had pulled down the end of the beam. In turn, it forced the stone press weight at its middle farther down on the pile of olives in the receptacle. As Mêlon relaxed, the two observers clapped as a fresh stream of oil spurted out through a small cutting beneath the stone and into the channels on their way to the jars. “Before Malgis died,” Mêlon spoke as he rose back up, “he had brighter ideas still. We were to put this entire business on a high foundation, with three steps up to the floor of our new room. That way we would not have to ladle out the oil from the storage jars. The ducts instead would lead to pipes that would go through the wall. All onto a cart with jars outside. Clever?”

Proxenos frowned. “Perhaps. But you are the smarter one. You work with what you have rather than dream and idle about something you haven’t. Why, you can turn out more oil with this beam than four or five of the old-style rollers and hand-pressers in town. Still, your neighbors will gossip. They hiss that you’ll have no need of slaves with this machine. Without work, what will slaves do—set up a democracy with Epaminondas and walk as free as us?”

Ainias likewise teased his host. “You are no longer our friend—but instead act like some god who lives here on your Olympos with his henchman Chiôn. First a recluse, then a town-monger, and now what are you, my Proteus?”

Mêlon laughed. “A little of both. At least I know you are not another muster officer here to take us down to battle. Every time some stranger from the flatlands hikes up, one of the Malgidai dies.”

“Or goes into song.”

“Or rather you mean into Hades.”

Ainias turned from the fire, got up, and kicked the press, “We come to say good-bye. Our year after Leuktra here in Thespiai is over. The archons of the city are glad we are finished with their tiny walls—and the townsfolk won’t carry the stones any longer. Phrynê bade us hike up here. She never sees you in town as before—and wondered whether you had taken sick with the fever of the highland swamps, or had grown tired of her yapping. Or was it that you thought this toad’s big breasts had sagged to near her belly and were no longer worth the hike down?”

“Oh no, it’s the olives. Even this short crop proved too much. Now that Chiôn has one arm only, I have to pull the lever as I used to. I must finish before the muster.” He ignored the question of Phrynê below in Thespiai, whose breasts hardly sagged and which he, in fact, had never felt. Instead, she had turned foul in his eyes not because of her looks, which never dulled, but because of her slurs and her boasts and her hatred of helots and Epaminondas—and his suspicions that she was plotting against Epaminondas. Besides, she asked only about the missing Gorgos and talked only of Lichas, and seemed to praise Sparta more than Thebes.