The End of Sparta: A Novel (41 page)

“But why do the Athenians fight us over the salty marsh at Oropia or the scrub oak of Panakton when they had a vast rich empire in the Aegean? Why do men die for such trifles?” He was warming in the winter midmorning sun. For the first time in his life he thought he felt a larger truth coming out of his mouth that powerful men knew less than he and would listen to his logic—if only he talked even more. Mêlon was in the world of leaders now, not alone in his orchards, so his ideas grew sharper as they met frowns and nods among those who heard him. “O yes, tell me, my general, why do the Spartans mow down the Argives over that worthless
methoria
of high rocks and thistle? Why, when all the black soil of Messenia is already theirs? Or do you really think we Hellenes—or for that matter the Persians or Skythians up north—go to war only when hungry for food or land or for such good or bad reasons?”

Pelopidas stepped up and sighed, amused that a farmer of vines was lecturing generals on the subject they knew best. “Well, then, tell us what else, our Thespian wise man, causes war.”

“How about our pride? Isn’t there our honor—and our fears?” Mêlon pressed on. “Of course a sort of greed of the Spartans—the sheer desire of taking something from the Boiotians to add to what they already don’t need in the Peloponnesos.” Mêlon took Pelopidas’s silence as a goad to go on, as Epaminondas marched a bit quicker on ahead. “Maybe we insulted Kleombrotos and the king Agesilaos, we rustics, the
agrikoi
of Hellas, marching when and where we pleased. Remember, Epaminondas stared the king down at Sparta. They needed the farms of Boiotia like they needed our eels or ducks—relish, dip, a side dish, no more. No, the thistle in their sandals was the very idea that we thought we were better than they—and most of Hellas was beginning to agree.”

“So, Mêlon, do you really believe our Epaminondas should have settled up with the king? Do you think his harsh words caused a war?”

Mêlon frowned and went on, though he sensed his general was not serious, was teasing rather than learning from him. “Of course not, my general. Name a war, Pelopidas, that was an accident—just one that broke out over a wrong word.” He was soon stammering, worried that a big man like Pelopidas, leading an army to war, had little idea why they were at war at all. So Mêlon pressed him further. “Listen, my commander. The men of the Peloponnesos invaded our land because they thought they could. And, by the gods, we had done nothing to persuade them otherwise. Why not? We lost Koroneia. We stumbled at Nemea. Tegyra was only a small victory. For years when you build women’s barricades rather than raise shields chest-high, you send a message: that lesser men either cannot or will not keep the Spartans out.” Mêlon found his words were clearing his own head, putting into some sort of order what he knew in his breast. He could not have stopped if he had wished to. “So for our part, why do you think Boiotians march this morning? Only because Leuktra taught us that we could—and these red-capes to the south cannot keep their enemies out like they have the past seven hundred years. Had we lost at Leuktra, not a northerner would be in the ranks with us this day.”

Mêlon, the lone vine pruner on Helikon, had an audience and so he lectured the general on why his army was following him. He thought states were like people, and knew people well enough up on Helikon—both how to keep the bad off his land and to enlist the good to help him. “Most men have no belief, either for good or bad. They follow only the winners. So they claim we are liberators and follow you, Pelopidas, because they think you can do what you promise. If you cannot make them rich, then at least make them proud to lord it over the losers. But stumble and most will damn you not just as weak, but as bad also. Remember Backwash in the assembly. Just like at Leuktra, if we win, he’ll claim us as disciples. Lose—and he will put the nooses around our necks. Back home, right now he’s waiting and tapping his foot as we march here. Most men are like that: They pass on risks to be safe and liked.”

Mêlon forgot that they were making good progress toward the junction to the road through the watchtowers of Megara, along the very trail where Erinna and Nêto had first met so many months earlier. Melissos was right behind him, listening as Mêlon talked nonstop as if he were a Theban general leading the ranks. Mêlon at last noticed his tall ears. “So are you listening to this, Makedonian? Or do you tire from the banter of Hellenes?”

“Master, I live and sleep war. I may be a hostage. But for four months longer, I am pledged as proof of the truce to the Boiotarchs with the Makedonians—and with Alkidamas and now you, Mêlon, son of Malgis. Please tell us more; the march is no march when you talk.”

Meanwhile Epaminondas gave orders to his scouts and messengers to go back up the pass and hurry up the tail of the column. “But my Pelopidas,” Epaminondas for a blink turned and took over from Mêlon. “If we all agree wars make no sense, if they start out over pretexts, these
prophases
as the philosophers call them, what exactly allows them come to pass? Why do these shoves end up with spears and shields? What is the
aitia
, the real cause of what we are doing this day?”

“Mêlon just told us,” Pelopidas laughed, but he then paused before going on. They were climbing and he needed a deeper breath. The general was light-headed, but finished up his thought. “Aren’t we trying to restore our pride, the reputation we lost when we let the Spartans prance through our fields each spring?”

Mêlon nodded and was almost finished with his lesson. “We must with a state like Sparta. When I saw you Thebans below me hide every time Agesilaos came into Boiotia with his army, I had no stomach to go down from Helikon and join you. We are going into Sparta because we have to, because in the past you let them come to you too many times. Yes, some of you want democracy for the helots, but you march now only because Leuktra gave you honor and pride, and took both from the defeated brood of Lichas.”

The army began slowly to go downhill, bypassing the high plain of Skourta. It was veering right at the crossroads, over the road of the high watchtowers that would wind down east and south to sea and along the coast to Megara. Epaminondas hurried forward and left them with an order: “Tell me how this all ends at camp tonight.” With that he was gone, happy to be back alone out in front of the column.

Pelopidas was nearly as old as Mêlon of the one good leg, but was not used to the hard climbing in armor, since he rarely dug vines or scythed grain and his belly hung down at the bottom rim of his breastplate. He was wheezing. “Well, if Spartan fear and pride brought them northward, and the hunch they would walk over us at little cost, what will make them quit? We won at Leuktra. So why does this unending war go on?”

“Don’t play with me, Pelopidas,” Mêlon warned as they too made the turn onto the Megara road and by its first tower of many to come. He noticed that thirty or so of the Sacred Band were still marching bunched next to them, eager to hear the exchange. “Wasn’t it you, Pelopidas, in the moments after Leuktra, who called to bring the war home to the Lakedaimonians?”

Pelopidas frowned. “Yes, but I confess I like to fight—anyone and all the time. Just like your Chiôn or our Ainias, a bloody Ares that gets fat on the gore of war. So I am not a good touchstone of what others do. Much less our poleis. So how do you think wars, especially ours, will end? When we are all in Hades, a peace of the dead?”

Mêlon didn’t even look at him as he answered back, as the sun began to warm his face. “I’ll be blunter still: One side wins, the other loses. Only that way does the reason the troublemaker fights vanish, and do his big ideas get smaller. Talk never stopped any war for good; talk only passes it on to grandchildren not born.” Mêlon grimaced, thinking that all the spearing of Malgis at Nemea and Koroneia had only left it to Lophis to fall at Leuktra. Leuktra? The battle to end at last the war with Sparta? Hardly. As long as the Spartans had the serfs of Messenia feeding them, they would keep marching up here. He went on. “As for the truces of the Hellenes, they are not worth the stone they are cut on. The more some of the Hellenes swear to others before the gods that they will both have the same friends and enemies for fifty years, the more likely such a peace will not last for one.”

The two talked and were interrupted often by the Sacred Band, especially the younger of the three hundred. But they tired of the chatter and wanted to know only when they would arrive in Lakonia. Surely it must be over the next mountain as they looked down at the great plain of Megara before them and imagined they saw the Spartan Eurotas instead of a thousand stadia of walking ahead. Not a Boiotian in this army seemed to have been to the Peloponnesos. Mêlon ignored them all. “You see, we will change Sparta from what it was—take its claws away and cage it—if we can, that is. Do that, and it will never be able to make war north of the Isthmos. That is, I think, the plan of our general. So he preempts and starts this war to be the last.”

Pelopidas sighed. “I fear even with war in Lakonia, and even with the Messenians free, we will leave this war to our children unless we level Sparta and kill her kings. Our Epaminondas must make war so terrible that the Spartans can never fight us again.”

Mêlon slapped Pelopidas. “So this was a game all along, Pelopidas. You are no honest philosopher. No, you simply wished me to give back your own answers. I say that you are more the fire breather than iron-gut Epaminondas himself.”

“I suppose,” Pelopidas quietly offered, but then he stuck his head closer to Mêlon’s and in a softer voice went on. “But sometimes others can give voice to the dark truth we prefer ourselves not to utter or even hear, but wish to be aired all the same. Because you know war better even than I, and not so long ago no doubt had no appetite for this great march, Mêlon, you have taken a great worry off my heart.” Pelopidas stopped in the road to finish. “I know there is no other way. I am not just a war lover. There is really no other way to end this, but in the direction we are marching. Yes, we must cut off the head of the serpent and watch his slithering trunk die in pain.”

“No. No, there is no other way,” Mêlon answered.

“We will either end this war our way—or they will end it theirs.”

Now even Melissos echoed. “No other way, no other way—no other way than to head south and cut them all down—or have no war and no peace, as it is now.”

With that outburst, the talkers heard the trumpeters’ order to halt and pitch camp and to wait for the twenty thousand men at their backs. Mêlon could already see well the Megarid below. They figured that they had gone some one hundred twenty stadia while they had talked the first day’s march away. Still Mêlon thought on in silence. This new power of Thebes—would there come also in time the end of its own democracy? Of course it would. Sparta had once dethroned Athens. Now Thebes was doing the same to Sparta. He knew well an end-day would arrive in turn for these Boiotians. That was the nature of states. In their wealth and pride, they forgot the harder ways of earlier men who had given them plenty. Maybe the Boiotians would muster a year or even ten of such marches at his back. But even now as he looked around the front ranks of the column, he saw few such as Pelopidas and Epaminondas to lead such men again—and far too many men like Backwash to throw away what others had given them.

Victory, the wealth of peace, proves as deadly to states as does defeat. Is that man’s doom? That as we struggle to plane down the edges for the young, old men forget that their own blisters and cuts from these knots and burls made us the savvy carpenters we are? That smoothing the splintery grain for our own children only ends up smoothing them, so that they know nothing of the rough to come? That in our wish to be good we ruin those who we wish to help, because we cannot let them suffer as we did when we have the power or the wealth to stop it? That law of iron explains the fall of families and the poleis as well. Did their Pythagoras have any answers for all this, since—Mêlon knew—his vanishing Zeus did not?

Only Chiôn and Nêto and Gorgos, even—the slaves born poor and with the coarse edge of life sharp in them still—showed the stuff of the older breed, and only for a while until they would become soft lords of an aging Ithômê of soft citizens who forgot that they had been helots. That was Chiôn’s fear, Mêlon knew, and what made the freed slave stay feral and far from the appetites of the city. The key, he also saw, for polis man was to match word and deed, body and mind, the work of the hoe with the papyrus, avoid the lounge of Phrynê as much as did the shaggy hill men of Aitolia. Without the mean,
to meson
, the laborer becomes a thug, the sophist an effete. No, Chiôn would stay in the wild where he could do more for the tame in the town by almost alone of men not being tame. For his part, Mêlon consoled himself that at least for now the new Messenê to come, the city of the soon-to-be-freed helots, might yet remind Hellas, even in its dotage, of the original ways of the polis—once the low rough stones were placed on the polished top. Freeing the helots would end Sparta, Mêlon knew. But he guessed that Epaminondas thought their liberation would give Hellas itself a reprieve, both by the struggle needed to free them and the infusion of new blood into the city-states of Hellas.

Chiôn Goes South

Meanwhile, halfway to the farm, Chiôn had stopped. He grabbed the wrist of Myron. He spoke slowly, and then Chiôn began to make the freedman repeat what he said, so that Myron could say it all to Damô when he got back to Helikon—just as Chiôn ordered. At the fork, Chiôn took from Myron’s pack the sack of silver that they had promised Nikôn and sent Myron back to Helikon on the horse. He alone headed south and east over the spurs of Kithairon, running to the port at Aigosthena and the windy winter gulf. He prayed to the One God to forgive his lie to Mêlon that he would stay on Helikon; in truth, he had already promised Alkidamas that he would meet him at the dock. If Chiôn went all the way back to the farm, he would surely miss the ship of Alkidamas and his promise to Alkidamas to go southward with him and keep him safe. He had promised the old man to be on the shore by midnight and to come armed to guard them should the captain—and their money—need watching. Perhaps if he brought news of Nêto, Mêlon would grant him a pardon when they met again. Swinging the silver across his shoulder, Chiôn continued across the hills. The day gave way to dusk, then to black night, as Chiôn’s shadow moved among the trees, like a night-hunting creature in the forest, whose byways he had long ago mastered on his solitary hikes.