The End of Sparta: A Novel (50 page)

After Leuktra, had Lichas not lived, the young regent Archidamos, who met the retreating Spartans with a relief force of old men and the young, would have lost both armies—if not at the Isthmos, then on the road through Mantineia on the way to the slopes before Lakonia. News of Spartan blood at Leuktra was then in the air. But it was Lichas who kept what was left of the army together, sending out patrols, bullying townsmen to offer up food and water, and promising the Argives an invasion should they attack his bloodied rearguard. Hellas needed a man such as that, a copy of Leônidas, a Lichas who had fought the Athenian hegemons and fought the Persians with Xenophon and fought them with Agesilaos; who had fought any who threatened the freedom of the city-states; the true Hellene, the only one left alive who would die for and save Hellas—a far better man to serve than the bent-leg Mêlon and the rustics on Helikon. Name a battle of the past fifty summers and Lichas had been there, fighting always for Hellas. Or thus now Kuniskos justified his treason.

As the disheartened and stunned men of Lakonia trudged home those long days of retreat, it was also the lowly Kuniskos who assured all that another Spartan army, born from the ashes of defeat, would soon rise. This was not to be a beaten force, but a victorious one with revenge and destruction its creed. “I marched with your fathers. You are the better men, my Spartans. After your Thermopylai will come another Plataia. I know the Theban pig. You will stick him next season.” In these days, Gorgos was more Spartan than the Spartans. He put the wounded Lichas on his back and shoulders and marched through the retreating army, the two chanting as they went.

Kuniskos wrapped his master’s festering wounds and gave him soup and bread when they returned to the wagon to rest. In turn, as the slow-moving army of the defeated reached Sellasia, the wounded Lichas limped out among the demoralized and hit their backsides with his cleaver and slapped the faces of the slackers. At dusk Lichas poked the slow with his spear, sitting in the cart of Kuniskos with the dead king as it wheeled into camp. When most slept, the wounded Lichas stumbled about the camp checking on the sentries, putting the fires out, and always calling out, “Kuniskos, Kuniskos, where is my Kuniskos?”

Lichas no longer called for his son Antikrates. Instead, it was Kuniskos who, Lichas boasted, had saved the army and the body of the king as the helot traitor now charmed the mind of the Spartan’s father. Once the army reached home, Lichas kept this aged servant close by his side, for Kuniskos had proved his fealty on that bitter retreat after Leuktra. Lichas was reminded as never before that few Spartans were as loyal as this Messenian—and none, for all their woven braids or bobbing horsehair crests, as clever. Lichas gave Kuniskos a plot of ground and helpers to build a tower for himself on the many-towered estates of the Lichades. Soon Lichas made the Gorgos overseer of the flocks and buildings of the Lichades. Lichas himself, the regent of Messenia, knew that it was a lie that Messenians were natural slaves, by birth inferior man-footed beasts. They were as good as Spartans, or—as his Kuniskos proved—often better. Lichas knew all this better than any Pythagorean, better than any Theban liberator, but he was not concerned that it meant anything at all. So what does it matter that some good men are slaves, some free men are bad? That men who were by nature equal, yet were slave and master, spoke nothing to him more than the clever fox who was eaten by the savage wolf, or the cowardly knight who rode atop the brave horse. “Nature’s unfair way is sometimes nature’s way.”

If Kuniskos, Lichas thought, was a better man than any in the
krypteia
, why should that mean he must be free? All the Hellenes were all a day from slavery. That’s what Herakleitos had sung: War makes us free or slaves. War is our father. What was unfair about that? Who cared whether the slave were smart, the master stupid? It meant nothing that the unlucky man inside the citadel ended in chains, and the lucky attacker outsider the walls led him away. That was man’s lot and a good one at that—that we are all a blink from having a chain around our necks. Why, that made us honest and eager not to fail. For all the talk of Spartan oppression, Lichas nightly reminded his Kuniskos, the men of Sparta in the barracks looked alike, talked alike, and were equal—far more equal than the slave Gorgos’s old rich masters on Helikon. Most in Sparta were judged only by their spear arms, not by their Doric or fathers’ names. If for the outsiders it was the most unequal of the poleis, Sparta was also the most equal for those inside. Gorgos agreed with his new master and was treated as he deserved, or so the helot thought. And so he relearned the Spartan ways on his way home to Sparta after Leuktra. Did the Thebans, did the Athenians, ensure their citizens were equal at the end, not just in the beginning? Did any of them have kings, ephors, an assembly and an upper-body Gerousia—the
eunomia
the good order of the Spartan state that stopped the power of the demagogues and ensured the rabble-rouser was checked in his infancy? In Sparta, a fat-belly tanner could hardly shout down a hoplite in the assembly, and yet the man with one hundred
plethra
of black soil fought alongside the spearmen with five
plethra
of rocks.

Lichas and his ilk were as good as their word and judged a man on what he did, not by how many olive trees he inherited. Lichas, not Epaminondas, was the true democrat of the Hellenes—or so Kuniskos told all—the sole Hellene who let the merit of the battlefield decide a man’s worth, his real
timê
. That’s why Lichas always asked of Kuniskos about this Chiôn, the killer of Kleonymos at Leuktra, whom he admired above all of his enemies, and peers as well. A mere slave had wiped out his own royal guard? Had a slave proved better than free Boiotians on the battlefield? Yes, this Chiôn of Helikon was a spirit of Lichas’s taste. Lichas told Kuniskos to fetch him there to Sparta and give the freed slave a red cape. Chiôn was an enemy better than most friends.

For the next spring after the battle, Kuniskos ran the household of the estate of Lichas near the banks of the Eurotas, beside the orchards of both Antikrates his son, and his dead brother Leôn. Kuniskos was a new son to take the place of the dead son Thôrax, and a better bargain in the trade as Lichas himself admitted to folk. It was Kuniskos who bossed a few young helot girls about how to cook and had his way with them. He kept the animals fed, and taught the helots of Lakonia how to manage the farms—mostly what Mêlon had taught him on Helikon. The new farm tower kept rising, under Kuniskos’s orders, wider, taller than the one of Malgis on Helikon.

Since the Boiotians were far better farmers than any Spartan, by spring Lichas’s new estate was to be the best in Sparta. “You are to be free in Sparta as in the glory days of our Brasidas and Lysander, my Boiotian-lover Kuniskos,” Lichas had laughed when he saw the crews of the helot terracing the slopes in the manner learned from the terraces of Mêlon’s farm. “For all the talk of the democrats of Boiotia, you never were such a free man on the farm of the Malgidai. What you see with your own eyes in Sparta, you receive. We don’t talk of setting helots free in the south—while they send their chattels scurrying about cooking their meals and emptying their slop jars. Like us or not,” Lichas bellowed, “we are what we are.”

Gorgos agreed. In this year after Leuktra, before the arrival of Epaminondas in the south, Kuniskos was not just the manager of the estate of Lichas, but was sent on errands all over Lakonia—to the sea at Gytheion, to the foothills at Parnon and Taygetos, and back north to the border forts at Sellasia. Always he was given rein as the emissary of Lichas the ephor. He was seen on a wagon no less, standing tall at the reins of a bright red cart with yellow wheels, up and down the valley of the Eurotas, with messages and instructions from Lord Lichas. Gorgos went about mustering a helot army against the Mantineians and preparing to purge Messenia once more of the agents of Epaminondas—especially the band of wild priestesses above Ithômê said to be stirring up the helots from their precinct to Artemis. Others in Sparta, who had no memory that went back to when Kuniskos had marched with the Spartans under Brasidas, treated the man less well. Most had heard little how he had packed Kleombrotos in honey. They had no word that Gorgos had driven the king’s caisson all the way to the Peloponnesos.

Instead the wives of the Spartan peers remembered well that his Theban masters in Boiotia, the hated Malgidai, had once stripped the grand armor of the dead Lysander at Haliartos. Did not this traitor Kuniskos in the past wait on that foul Mêlon and work alongside that man-killer Chiôn—the branded slave of the north, who with his master had taken a half-dozen of Sparta’s best at Leuktra? Treachery of any sort, disloyalty, always was looked down upon by the good Spartiates. Many rumors had also reached the women of Sparta of the wounded Thespian Lophis, who had been dumped into the camp of Kleombrotos by his own manservant.

“Look at the wretch strut,” the sister of Lichas, Lampito, would say of Kuniskos as he bustled about the acropolis to buy a lamb or goat for his master. “This mangy dog of ours paid his Thespian owner back by dragging him into our camp half-dead. A helot is always a helot, a man-footed beast. I can smell it on him. Shaving his upper lip can’t hide it. This turnabout helot did not even have the good sense to leave the losers for the winners. No, the fool came over to us as we stumbled, and left his own on the eve of their victory.” In the Spartan mind, perfidy was especially to be despised when it was coupled with folly.

But Lichas would have none of Lampito’s talk and soon his wife Elektra sent his sister out of his house. This Lichas was no simple Spartan who followed the code of Lykos or let the tribe trump talent. No, his creed was his own, of the spear and the muster, where men must earn their equality. He had once been for Lysander, another rogue who cared nothing for birth and nothing for the old ways of Lykos. The upstart bastard half-aristocrat Brasidas of old was his hero too, the outlaw who had freed the helots and made them killers of the Athenians. So when a resourceful man, even if in rags, appeared, then Lichas gave him what he pleased.

Besides, he was happy with his new tower that Kuniskos had built, round and taller even than those to the north. Now with his third wife, Elektra, Lichas at last had killers as both his servant and spouse. Elektra soon came to adore old Kuniskos and would not hear a slur against her husband’s helot. In the courtyard the two fought with wooden swords, and soon Kuniskos showed her how to swing her father’s battle-ax like the heroes of old. In this house of Lichas, Kuniskos also spent most of his time mentoring the young Antikrates, whose own nearby estate had a walled pathway to his father’s vineyard. The bald helot from Helikon grew his white side braids long and forked his beard—in the style of his master Lichas. He scraped his skull’s top completely bare, and assured the son of Lichas that he was as loyal to him as he was to his father.

Antikrates and Kuniskos soon proved inseparable, as the young man needed tutelage in the ways of the helots, and the older one an ally in the house of Lichas. Because they were alike wily sorts and equally hated Epaminondas, they both were drawn toward and distrusted each other. “No need of your whimpers and dog rollovers to me, Kuniskos,” Antikrates laughed. “When this is all over, my new old brother, Kuniskos, I will kill you in some way,” the son went on. “For you lived when your betters at Leuktra did not. That’s all that matters. So you too will die. But not yet, not just yet—or so my father and his wrinkly wife protect you. But I warn you that I am a different sort than he. I have no helot love. I say instead we are what we are born into. The priestess of Pasiphai tells me I will see you lying dead, with your bald head off on the ground. So I suppose she means I will kill you. Or maybe you will die with me, but first. But I know this, that you will not live beyond me.”

Kuniskos laughed. “I hope not, toddler. For I have already thirty and more summers more than you, and grandfathers rarely outlast their sons’ sons. Still, let it be. I am old and in years have outlived you, and probably all who hate me, whether on Helikon or here. But I know this priestess as well as you. I have put up with her stink and vapors on the altar of Pasiphai for nights on end as the goddess came into my dreams, all the while the greedy woman was chanting as she took a gold coin from my palm. She tells me dreams and swears that the greatest warrior of the Boiotians will die in my house. So I, not you, must be his killer. The fame goes to me, young blood, so what does it matter if I die old but famous?”

Antikrates had followed his father out of the mess at Leuktra. On the flight from the battlefield he had killed two Boiotians from Kithairon, both stabbed in the throat for sport as the mountain men tried to block the passes. Then Antikrates had topped that boast by reminding all that he had sliced off the arm of Kalliphon, the son of the
rhêtôr
Alkidamas. “I would have gnawed on it if it had tasted any good,” he laughed. Antikrates added, “The Boiotian fool was a softie. I’ll kill the father to keep company with his son in Hades. Yes, that blowhard sophist I’ll gulp down as dessert the next time around.”

Before Leuktra, Antikrates had just finished with his barracks life. Now at three tens, at his acme, he was given a full
lochos
of
kryptes
and told to cross the high pass and patrol Mt. Ithômê out in Messenia to rein in the helots. Yet still over there rumors of war and killing grew: A firebrand helot named Nikôn was murdering red-capes at night, some as they slept in camp. With him the priestesses of Artemis were harboring the insurgents to hammer weapons in new forges on Ithômê—killers and cutthroats who were afraid to face the tall men of Sparta in phalanx battle. “I need a helot I trust,” King Agesilaos told Lichas. “Send that helot man of yours with your Antikrates. Plug this leak before it takes the dam itself.”

“Kuniskos,” Antikrates said in turn, “you better than I know the Spartan way—how our grandfathers put a lid on the helot kettle during the great war with the Athenians. So we do the same. Come with me across Taygetos to put down these thieves and murderers.” So it was almost a year to the day before the great muster of the Thebans to come that Kuniskos set out over the high pass of Taygetos in the snow. He followed Antikrates and the young
kryptes
all on their way to Messenia to patrol the mountain of Ithômê where the word was that a free Messenia was first to sprout.