The End of Sparta: A Novel (51 page)

In two days the new partners and their cadre were over Taygetos, descending through olive orchards near the coast en route to the dark Ithômê, the volcano mountain that loomed off in the distance. This peak was the holy silhouette of song that every helot looked to in his moments of hope—and so beneath it was the best place to build a new Spartan camp that would put down the growing insurrection. There all could see the looming peak. Gorgos planned well. He wanted walls of all timber, with sharp stakes at the top. Antikrates talked at length with the helot who had already told him much of the landscape of Taygetos and where the best black soil of Messenia lay and the richest helots, and where the precincts of Artemis were, and the nature of this Nikôn and his brigands—and later rumors of a Nêto and a poet Erinna who were hiding in some tall mountain pass. The Spartan pressed Kuniskos for knowledge of the hard methods of Brasidas. He wanted to know just how in the great war of fifty years past the legend of the Spartans had armed the helots to fight the Athenians and thereby gone northward in victory nearly to Makedonia on his wild marches of liberation. The lash? Women? Gold? Freedom and more? “How did a Spartan get its helots to fight, to beat back and then nearly destroy the democracy? Speak to your Antikrates, helot. How can we do that again?”

“We helots believed,” Gorgos grunted, as he watched carefully the knife hand of Antikrates. Indeed Kuniskos had all sorts of ideas that the young Antikrates was all ears for—drawn from the wise ways of his youth, fifty years and more earlier when all those now dead had held their shields high for Sparta. In fact, Kuniskos walked straighter than he had ever in the vineyards of Helikon. Gone entirely was his stiff gait. Old sprains had already begun to fade on the hill above Leuktra. He spoke his old Doric again, the grunts and cadences that only the elder few had remembered hearing, but in long tirades and with words only the sophists knew. Rule, he knew, rather than service suited him—even though in the house of Mêlon he had worked far less than he did in traversing the countryside of the helots. Epaminondas once talked of how freedom could cure anything. Now Kuniskos agreed.

Soon he pranced in his fine robe, with a scarlet stripe and a rabbit-fur collar, and messed with the red-capes in his compound, spurning Spartan vinegar water and demanding unmixed wine as he passed on the black bread and barley gruel of the hoplites, for finer wheat fare and red-blooded lamb. Kuniskos kept barking promises and lies to the helots out on his travels from the coast near Pylos to the border with Arkadia far to the east. “Spartans freed the few deserving it,” Kuniskos assured all. “We—and I a helot like you—fear no Dorians, our brother Dorians.” Then he used his learning from Helikon to lecture to the assembled helots about how men born into Messenia all have a place in the empire of Sparta. Helots must feel that they are in debt to those who can guide them best—however unhappy they are to be told that they are not all by birth deserving of equal portion. If Nêto and Nikôn could lie to the Messenians about freedom, Lord Kuniskos would counter-talk to the helot unfree about why and how they were already free under Sparta.

Kuniskos reassured himself that an upstart of little talent like the empty-headed Nêto, who could wiggle her high-rigged ass in front of Mêlon and the hungry Chiôn, would never survive down there where men earned rather than whined about freedom. To hide her dullness, Nêto talked the high empty talk. But men of the stuff of Kuniskos put their lives into the service of the Spartan order. His was the natural way of men, the
phusis
, that let them find their station by will and talent and not mere
nomos
and convention and long speeches. But Nêto again, why did he always wander back to Nêto? Did he wish to kill her or take her for pleasure or both or neither? Why Nêto everywhere, always? Kuniskos was troubled that he saw the revolt caused by Nêto alone, although he knew a single woman could no more stir up twenty myriads in a half-year than could Zeus himself on Olympos.

Kuniskos would stamp out wild helot stories of a liberation to come, hunting down this Nikôn and Nêto and rooting out their prophecies of a philosopher in arms invading from Thebes. All this prattle and more after Leuktra, Kuniskos soon discovered, the Messenians had gathered, exaggerated, and spread. Epaminondas had caused this revolt, after decades of obedience and tranquility in Messenia. Women were said to have sown these lies about liberation. The priestesses of Artemis of the lowlands had given seers and poetesses the power to see the minds of the Spartans. Or so they said, as the insurrectionists went from precinct to precinct, begging bread and sanctuary in exchange for wild tales of a new Pythagoras to come down from the north, with freedom and money for all. By late summer, Kuniskos discovered that the enemy was not just helots, but also
xenoi
, strangers like the new priestesses of Artemis, and another even higher up in the hills—this Erinna and her Amazons who spread lies that Spartans were fleeing even before the arrival of Epaminondas.

Kuniskos often instructed Antikrates at night that he, the young son of Lichas, could be killed by no free man. Yes, Kuniskos had gotten that out of Nêto long ago back on Helikon and he knew it to be true. Once spoken, it would give this indomitable Antikrates even more strength to make it true. Kuniskos patted Antikrates on the side of the head and went on, “None of the Lichadai has the nod of the gods like you do, Master. That is worth all that they had and more still. No free man, no helot, no slave can fell you. Not one.”

At first Kuniskos had limped into the hamlets disguised as an old Argive traveler. He walked about with a walking stick and heavy wool hood, asking for shelter and news of robbers and the safety of the roads. Sometimes he wanted a meeting of the elders, as if he were a runaway helot in his thick Doric speech. A few claimed Kuniskos was also a farmhand, stripped to the waist, with wide shoulders hoeing the olives and learning of the strongest of the helots. But once he learned the nature of the towns and farms, Kuniskos came back on a horse with a phalanx of mounted spearmen behind him.
“Kuniskos eimi, akouete pantes, akouete ê apothanete.
I am Kuniskos. You listen up or die.” Two hundred young
kryptes
rode fifty steps behind him. On his ululation, they galloped to cut down any he pointed out. “Join me or die. Epaminondas and his murderers, his rapists, and his thieves will soon shear you. Your Spartans alone can save you. Join me or die—
proschôrêite moi ê apothanete
.”

As the weather grew hot in the next summer after Leuktra, Gorgos was looking for the troublemaker Erinna. He had reports of a she-man poetess who plotted with Nêto—always Nêto, always her—who had joined wild Nikôn and the other gang of Doreios in organizing the helots in tens and twenties. Yes, he must find Nikôn and this Erinna, who had borrowed his Nêto and never given her back, as the two helped expand the revolt. Two hundred and more Spartans under command of Antikrates were found every month rotting in the countryside. Most were gutted in the byways by these breakaways—many with black-feathered arrows in their necks, a red letter
mu
for Messenia swabbed on their backs with their own blood. Whole tribes of Messenians were living free in the mountains and had since abandoned their farms. They even had a forge and bellows to make blades of black iron and bronze breastplates. Nêto had taken Nikôn to her temple and had his scribe Hêlos draw on an enormous hide map of Messenia, showing where the Spartans had forts and guards. Then she parceled out regions to Nikôn’s helpers and he in turn had given them killing quotas each month. These helots rarely fought in daylight, but instead swarmed the Spartans at night, throwing pitch torches on their timber stockades and flinging arrows as they bolted out from the flames, or they hid in the forests and picked the red-capes off on the narrow paths. Or sometimes they would lie in ditches all night and cut the throats of drunken Spartans who in their wine sang their war songs as they stumbled back home from evenings with their helot women—most of them informers of Nêto’s circle.

Soon the Eleans were sending daily more copper and tin ingots and iron from down on the Alpheios, as the helots spread their forges and hammered out new swords and spearheads. Finally, most of the daylight Spartan patrols stopped altogether. As summer waned they were forced to stay mostly in Gorgos’s stockade at Ithômê. Antikrates had built a second outer wall, to surround the inner one, with more pointed stakes to keep the horde of throat-cutters out. But for all his warcraft, he began drinking more than commanding and had no stomach for fighting outside the phalanx in the ambushes where the helot renegades might kill their betters indiscriminately from afar with arrows, sling bullets, and javelins. Kuniskos soon ran the stockade, and the son of Lichas went back over Taygetos, ceding Messenia to Lord Kuniskos. Antikrates was hoping at the first of the year to fight as a spearman on the icy Eurotas, to cut down those Boiotians whom he had missed at Leuktra. Better all the way around this way. He would kill Mêlon and Epaminondas to fulfill his prophecy. The loss of Messenia—well, it would be due to Kuniskos, the old helot who would have proved unworthy as a Spartan overseer when his master had left him in charge—until Lichas and son would return to Messenia from their victory to reclaim what the treasonous helot had lost. Or so Antikrates figured as he rode home over Taygetos and left Messenia to Kuniskos.

As the last month of the year neared, just about the same time that Epaminondas was promising to tear down the Propylaia of Athens as he headed out over Kithairon, the Spartans under Kuniskos could neither leave the stockade at night nor lure any more helots inside its walls with promises of freedom. Kuniskos more often than not spent his days by the fire in drink, as his guards grew soft on the timber ramparts and fearful of the helots who no longer sent their wagons of food over Taygetos to Agesilaos. On these gray days, Gorgos prepared for the worst, and yet he often lamented to himself that life was far too short for a man of his genius, and how unfair it was that he had come into his own at the end of his sixth decade, with talents that had been unrecognized both when he served as the young lackey of Lichas and then for too many years on Helikon when he worked as a farmhand. He reflected that his life had started out well, a helot with Brasidas at ten and six. He had grown to be a man with children and freedom to his name when the great war against the Athenians had ended and been won. Then all had been lost later at the Nemea, when Malgis had caught him and made him a slave again—even as Lord Lichas before the battle at last had made him a king’s servant and with a green cape at that.

While enslaved on Helikon, Gorgos had lost all track of his wife Elaia and his son Nabis to the south. His family was banished—hungry and now dead, or so Lichas had told him. Lichas had said they all had perished when their papa Gorgos, well over forty seasons old, had not returned home to his freedman’s plot among the
perioikoi
near the Eurotas. Long-gone Gorgos was slandered among the half-helots as a runaway and a trembler, a dirty shield-carrier of the dirtier Boiotians. His family died in shame, or so he was told by Lichas, who often treated those he liked, and his own family as well, more harshly than he did his enemies.

Kuniskos thought, as he stretched out his long legs on his low table in his compound, that he could have created a new Messenia, had he just started at his first beard rather than in his near dotage, had he been given an indentured people at rest rather than being ordered to put down a rebellion. His dead son Nabis could have worn a red cape. He might have been a peer of Sparta, and had a hundred
plethra
of red grapes. Yes, if only Gorgos had not been captured at Nemea, if only the Spartans had not lied that he had not served his king. Life really was not fair when a man who was more Spartan than the Spartans had seen his genius marooned in the vineyard of Mêlon. These present triumphs, then, made Kuniskos even angrier. He was not so much grateful for his current renown as furious that it had come so late. He had been betrayed by his Nêto, by Antikrates who had left him with the growing revolt, by his master Mêlon who would soon come to settle up, no doubt to unleash on him the killer Chiôn. Only his own genius was left.

For a bit longer Kuniskos, fired by wine, about every tenth day tried to go out with his horsemen for a few stadia, to at least make a show of force with his mounted spearmen. In his wake the Messenians later would see an occasional helot with throat slit and arms tied to a post along the road. The few who could read the block letters told others that the placards read—in high Hellenic, no less—“I killed a Spartan and so am dead myself—on orders of helot Kuniskos, lord of the Helots.”
Tina Spartiatên apekteina, kai ôs apothnêskô autos. Touto keluei ho helotês helotetôn despotês ho Kuniskos.”
Kuniskos was after the girl helot seer who was said to be promising a day of freedom for the helots—and who was arming them to fight. Kuniskos was sure that Nêto led the helot ambushers from her sanctuary in the temple of Artemis; but he found few who would confirm his suspicions, and he was now as often as not befuddled with drink. So perhaps the chief troublemaker might be this Sapphic Erinna, who, his spies related, was causing rebellion in her supposed school on the high cliff. Kuniskos decided to make his own night raids to catch them both. With his last hundred horsemen, all the cavalry he had there beneath Ithômê, he targeted the shrines and rural temples of Messenia and all the farmlands that belonged to the gods, sweeping down on moonless nights to plunder and burn them, and riding off with the priestesses back to his compound by dawn.

Inside the stockade, Kuniskos would have their heads shaved. Then they would be given fur caps and dressed in skins and hides, with leather ropes and long fox tails dangling from their naked waists to their bare buttocks. The guards would chain the captives to serve meals for the
kryptes
. Kuniskos would keep twenty or so of his “animals,” then when he tired of them, he would send the batch over Taygetos to Lichas and seek more replacements. At banquets, Kuniskos and his peers soon were throwing raisins at the helot servant girls while they danced and sang bare-breasted under coercion. Then, full of wine, Kuniskos and his thugs took whoever they pleased, the more virgins, the better. Life could be good in the twilight of Spartan Messenia.