The End of Sparta: A Novel (47 page)

Mêlon’s leg was sore and his foot blistered. This latest escape of Antikrates was the second time the killer had eluded the Boiotians. Was there a god’s reason for it? Who, what could kill this man? The life of Antikrates and his father, Mêlon understood, hung by a thick rope, not a thin thread. Even the Fates couldn’t cut through them with a sword. “Go ahead, you two. Burn the house of Leôn. Or maybe it is that of the woman Elektra, the wife of Lichas. But set foot in it without sulfur and flame? No, I Mêlon, son of Malgis, will not. I have too many dreams of farmhouses to come with the brood of Lichas, and flames in them as well.”

So the Spartans under Antikrates and Elektra made their way at dawn from their compound and escaped across the Eurotas into the city of Sparta proper. Nevertheless in the next five days the invaders’ ravaging continued right on into the new year and past the end of the tenure of general Epaminondas. The Thebans mostly kept apart from their allies, especially the men of Mantineia, the self-proclaimed liberators who were busy rounding up Spartan helots and
perioikoi
for their own slaves. Gangs from the potters’ quarters of Mantineia had already foolishly crossed spears with Philliadas and his men of Tanagra. The Boiotian plunderers had killed their rival allies for sport—and warned Lykomedes they would as easily butcher all the Mantineians just as if they were Spartans. With the Spartans safe beyond the river, the three armies without a common enemy would soon battle each other for the plunder. Finally Epaminondas headed the Thebans out in the phalanx for the river and sought a way to cross it and enter the unwalled city of the Spartans. Thousands of plunderers began to follow behind the columns of Boiotians who had assembled under Epaminondas at last for this final assault on the citadel of Sparta. Even the looters figured that should the mad general get across, then the city would be theirs for the robbing. But the Peloponnesian allies in arms—except the Argives—were already scattering over the countryside as snow came in from the north. True, the Spartans were trapped inside their city. But the charge of Antikrates and Elektra from his farm had frightened the Mantineians. Few had any stomach to face him again.

Among the allies chaos reigned. Plunder, not the freedom of the helots, was what most of the allied armies had joined up for—cattle, and weapons, and bronze pots, even the oak doors and pine sills of the houses of the Spartans. Now in the icy wind, thousands of the Arkadians had already moved into the abandoned farmhouses of the Spartans and were camping in their barns and sheds as well, burning their fences and pens to keep warm. “Boiotian folly” and worse they called the plan of Epaminondas to storm the citadel of Sparta in the dead of winter. The green plain was smoky from thousands of campfires and burned towers. But amid the haze, all could see the acropolis opposite and the untouched roofs of the Spartan homes. All around Sparta was burning, but so far the city itself across the river was untouched.

Mêlon had just armed again. He formed up in the columns of Epaminondas with Ainias and Proxenos, and made sure that Melissos stayed clear of the looting. As the Boiotians broke camp for the final reckoning with King Agesilaos, their ranks passed some Mantineians swarming another grand estate that must have belonged to an ephor. Its tower and long whitewashed wall were as grand as those of the Lichades. “Here, over here,” a Peloponnesian lord on a horse yelled out at the passing column. “You Thebans, here, right here, they say, this is the farm of lame Agesilaos, the king no less. Not Leôn’s, but the king’s himself. You know Agesilaos, the lame killer? The place is full of plunder from your Boiotia—even the man’s clay pots are Theban. We even found the gold and silver from your temples. He stripped your land for years. Here, take your share.”

Melissos and Mêlon paused to look at the estate of King Agesilaos. But this was all, just some simple stones and a few wooden columns? In this new Hellas upside down, a hoplite just walked into the house of the great king of the Spartans and did what he pleased? Was this the power of Epaminondas to make the make-believe ordinary? But then, Mêlon thought further, how small an estate for a king? This was all they were to burn? Were there still leaders enough in Hellas like Agesilaos who lived as simply as did their hoplites? Mêlon knew Agesilaos fought alongside his men, but now he saw that he lived like them as well.

Suddenly about ten or so Mantineians with iron bars pried the roof off, sending it down between the mud brick walls. Others were gathering the roof-beams and throwing any of the debris they didn’t burn into wagons. Few knew that they had destroyed a royal house of the Spartans—built ten generations of men earlier and never a footprint of the enemy in its courtyard. Fewer cared. One cart was full of
pithoi
of oil, another of spades, rakes, and scythes. There were even some breastplates—the bell types that the Spartan elders wore a hundred years earlier and more when they had stopped the Medes at Plataia. Some Mantineians in their drink danced on top of the field wall. They were tossing like balls the light bronze helmets of the Persians, taken as booty long ago in the great days by the Spartan breed who broke the Persian general Mardonios. The livestock of the king’s farm, cows and goats, had been driven off. Any that had been left behind had been butchered. Their carcasses had been piled before the entrance that was covered in smoke as the looters torched rafters and poured a vat of olive oil over some loose wood to light the mess. A few were already cooking rotten meat on spits over a bonfire in the courtyard.

Mêlon had thought he would never tire of the flames devouring all things Spartan, especially that of the royals. But now? The burning sheds and dead cattle were not so much Spartan, but the works and efforts of farmers like him—and the destruction was therefore senseless. His own strongbox in the well at home was full of silver that Malgis had earned doing just what these Mantineians were busy with. Yet Mêlon, son on Malgis, wanted no more of any of it. These were farms, not farmers, that they were destroying. He cared little who worked them, only that it was wrong to burn the holy olive, to cut the gnarly vine, to torch the well-oiled roof-beams that exist beyond the owner.

Meanwhile, Mêlon stared at some loud Arkadians holding a rope. On it a helot boy was lowered down a well. Already drunk on their wine, they were scuffling over a treasure not yet found and cursing each other for slacking—as the dangling youth below banged against the stone sides of the well. The more hardy beyond the house were trying to ax down a few olive trees. But most had given up after lopping off the lowlying limbs, and were content with scrounging moldy nuts from a nearby ancient almond. Lykomedes himself rode up and pointed to the passing Boiotians. He was happy enough, since his wagons were already full of plunder, he had met few Spartans, and his Mantineians saw no need either to cross the Eurotas or the spine of Taygetos. “Tell your madman Epaminondas to forget Agesilaos. Forget his acropolis across the river. Forget battle and fighting Spartans. There’s sport enough with us. First the house of Elektra. Then Lichas’s, and now the king’s.” He shook a fine silver pitcher at them. “The closer we get to the river, the richer the plunder. Every now and then we find a Lakonian holdout with a scythe—a wild one who thinks he can keep Arkadians out of his garden. But why go get yourself killed when there is more profit in plunder here? We can do the Spartan just as much bad, worse even, by carrying off everything he has. Get near the river to give us cover. But no need to cross, no need for battle, no need to get us killed when we can get rich.” So Lykomedes laughed and rode by. A Lakonian wagon creaked behind him, filled with Spartan red tunics, plumed helmets, a set of armor, three helots shackled, and a horse and mule tethered to the back. The Arkadian driver yelled out, “For a Dorian race that has no money, these Spartan thieves have more than we do.”

It was to be mostly a Boiotian army that Mêlon and Melissos rejoined, one prepared to cross the Eurotas and face Agesilaos in the streets of Sparta to try to end the king’s power. Only the hoplites with Epaminondas were willing to head for the citadel and battle the Spartans beyond the river. Over there the eye of Agesilaos was everywhere. Spartans ran back and forth at each planned ford. As the army of Epaminondas pressed on, Proxenos and Ainias fell farther back in the ranks with Mêlon, at a slower pace than even the fat and lame hoplites. Ainias knew that if he questioned his friend about his stab wound, he would once again be met with furor at the thought of stopping, or even of touching his armor.

Proxenos finally himself grabbed his flank near his wound and whispered to the Arkadian, “Then it is to be crossing the river for us, after all?”

The Visions of Proxenos

Does that bother you, Proxenos?” Ainias had an eye for small things when his men marched. This day of assault he had found his Proxenos a little slow and quiet, even for his aloof nature. Ainias had tried to look at his wound, even as his friend had pushed him away. So he was not so puzzled now that the Plataian lingered in the moments before the great fording. Proxenos had begun to walk even behind the lame Mêlon and the slow-cart servant Melissos who carried a shield and pole and pack. Ainias hoped that Proxenos’s sloth meant, as his friend had once laughed, that the lack of stone here no doubt bored the architect of ramparts. The plains of Sparta were aflame, and its hoplites were running or hiding. Did that mean Proxenos was not so much hurt as bored, since here were no stones to set or tear down? Ainias asked again, “Why do you fear the River Eurotas, man? Stop here for a blink and let me see whether your bandage is bloody.”

Proxenos ignored him and whispered again, “Did you hear me—are we to the river?” He waited for no answer. “Is it really to be the water, the black Eurotas?”

Ainias was relieved that his friend was at least talking and still walking, though he did not like the sound of the “black Eurotas,” since the river ahead was icy and white but not dark. Still, Ainias went on to try to cheer his friend as they slowed and brought up the rear of the column. “Let them go ahead, Proxenos. We will stop up ahead, since your brow is wet and your face flushed. I’ll wash the wound and salve it with the honey in my pouch. But I also wish we’d leave the crippled king alone over there. Since there are no bridges left over the river, and the fords are all guarded. Even Megas Epaminondas cannot cross what you call the black Eurotas in this weather.” Ainias mistook the silence of his friend as a friendly nod to go on. “Now I see that even without Spartans on the other shore, we couldn’t ford this icy water. Then climb the mud of the banks? Impossible. I agree. But do not tell our Iron Gut that. Oh, no. Many will die trying. Many who shouldn’t. Instead we should be marching westward to free right now the helot folk—or better yet just go back to camp and let me at last take a look where Antikrates nicked you.”

Proxenos smiled at the thought of going home to the Asopos and his own orchards and vineyards near Plataia. Then when they were close enough to hear the roar of the swollen river, he finally spoke a bit more to his friend Ainias. “Oh, no bother. The wound closed. My breastplate keeps it warm. I slow you down, because I’m not sure why we are heading to the river, or why it is so cold so far south. You know that our strings are measured. A man can no more extend his own than he can stretch dry rope.”

Ainias at first ignored his babble, and planned to force him to stop near the bank ahead, even if it meant holding him down and, with Melissos, tearing off his heavy breastplate. Proxenos talked more now as if they were lounging at the symposion than marching to battle the Spartans. Had the Spartan Antikrates knocked the sense out of Proxenos when he nicked him earlier at the farmhouse of the Lichades? Gone was the boasting of the wall builder of the past year that men are the measures of things and live or die according to their own merits. So Ainias countered him with a frown as they waited for a column of northerners that had joined their own phalanx at the crossroads to Gytheion. “If your wound does not bleed, and there is no fire on your brow, then at least clear your head. This black bile does not suit you, Plataian. We have men of bronze and iron to cut down. You have a city to found. A third one for the helots. Raise your shield. Show us what Plataia can do.”

A sense of finality had come over Proxenos after his run-in with Antikrates. As he staggered along, Proxenos was measuring a life up before the black clouds above his brow closed in. His children were near grown. His Aretê had a good dowry of a house, one with three stories inside the very walls that he had rebuilt. Their two hundred
plethra
above the banks of the Kephissos made good oil and wine, all with a view of the wide bend below. Yes, he had three hundred more olive trees on the rolling slopes nearby. His wife lacked for nothing with a strongbox of ten thousand Athenian owls, good silver that his father had earned with the Ten Thousand, and the booty share given to him by Xenophon and the Spartans. His grandfather Ladôn had left behind a strongbox that was buried deep under the floor of the tower.

At somewhere more than thirty seasons, his wife, Aretê, Proxenos figured, if she avoided the summer riverbank fevers, the Egyptian pox, and hot-face Helios that blisters the face and arms and spins the head, had a good ten years left. He had made Ainias, when they set out southward, promise to visit her in Plataia, as they joked over the rantings of Nêto and her warning that Proxenos was not to cross the Isthmos. The breasts of his Aretê were deep, her hips firm—as Ainias, he wished, would soon learn. And himself? His teeth were still white and all there, his beard black as the raven’s wing. His muscles were firm without the sagging of flesh in men half his age. But there was no life force. Proxenos felt no different from the collapsed puppets in the agora once the strings of their masters had been put away.

All his land, the height of his tower, the beauty of his wife—all that meant nothing in the snow of Lakonia. Or perhaps less than nothing here in the mud of the Eurotas far to the south where he was soon to be just another rotting spearman too far from home. Proxenos, although he had volunteered to come south despite the fears of Nêto, still thought it unjust—no, a real madness—that he, the man who had crafted the three great cities of the Peloponnesos, was a mere soldier in the ranks, for whom a single spear-jab to his gut meant no walls of Messenê or a wrong tower in Megalopolis. So in his delirium he thought Epaminondas or at least his friends should have kept their holy Proxenos in camp, a man of genius like Daidalos of old not to be wasted in cheap battle. But he also knew that often we are hardest on those we love most, and treat the friend roughly either because we demand his company in shared danger, or out of friendly envy want him to remember in our shared risk that he is no better than us. So Proxenos, the architect of the greatest cities of new Hellas, was but a common hoplite at the Eurotas. If here was where they wanted him, so here he would stay.