The End of Sparta: A Novel (57 page)

Epitêles was sent for, back with the Argive
lochoi
that had camped ten stadia or more away in the middle of the column. Epaminondas laughed to these two helots. “I sent word half a year ago, expecting one thousand might meet us on Ithômê after the first of the year. But Lelex here has brought the entire folk of the Peloponnesos to the shoulders of Ithômê.”

Lelex slowly replied. “Nêto had told us there is an urn, a stash somewhere with the sacred books of the ancient hero Aristomenes who left directions how to build the city of his visions. Only she and you and Epitêles know the whereabouts of these plans. But we can’t begin raising this polis until these written prophecies are found.”

“Yes, I know,” Epaminondas answered. “Epitêles tonight when the moon rises will walk the slopes and find this sign, as Artemis has told you. Your Nikôn and Doreios will help. Then look for us tomorrow at midmorning here where we will pitch our permanent camp.”

The Argive generals under Epitêles joined Epaminondas for their late meal of garlic, dried apples, and, for the Dorians, some salted goat. As they parleyed, Ainias went out among the company commanders. “Women must cook. Make shelters as the men cut and drag the stone down the hill. We hear there are a thousand oxen and as many horse. I see they have wagons and rollers, all hidden away on the mountains and already coming down.” The more Epaminondas noted the organization, the food, the quiet here, the more he puzzled how the man-foots had routed the Spartans and made themselves so ready to start to build. He turned to Pelopidas. “This is all the work of Alkidamas. For a sophist he seems to know something about stone. He plans to drag and roll the blocks down from the quarries, right up to the walls. Our Proxenos figured that we could cut our rock on Ithômê and have the downhill walls up in three months and be home before the grain heads droop.”

Epitêles scoffed. “They’ll all loot. So we better kill the first hundred to remind the others we’re hoplites, not dancing girls. Do it the Argive way. Hang a few of ’em from that oak over there as a sign to the others. The Spartans left, and about ten thousand no-goods will come out of the shadows, wolves from the hills to butcher the sheep. They’ve been killing hoplites this year, and they won’t stop just because we’re freeing them. Whether they kill enemy Spartans, or their benefactors the Argives, they care little. Blood is blood to these waylayers. So we kill the worst of them, peace returns, and the city builds. Do it right at the very beginning and
nomos
, law, reigns. Else—we have another Kekyra of old, a war of everybody against everybody. Just watch. My Argives will go out tomorrow and kill the first helot they see who has a goat or pot not his own—and then a hundred more for good measure.” With that he grunted, threw on his shaggy coat, and stormed out of the tent, ordering his officers, “Help the helots who work. Kill all who won’t.”

Epaminondas let him go. “We need more brutes like that. Our Ainias counts as only one, and he needs help to bang a few heads.” Then a silence came over the meeting as all turned toward a procession of torches coming into the camp from Ithômê way. In walked priestesses, a half-dozen women in hoods, accompanied by ten or so Messenian hoplites and dancing in unison to the tune of pipes.

The End of the Beginning

The women then threw off their capes. They cried out that the Spartans had all been killed or scattered in fear of the arrival of Epaminondas. “Our thousands chased down their hundreds. Ask the priestesses of Artemis how many have been hunted down and gutted. The bodies of our masters are scattered all over Ithômê. Talk to Alkidamas. Look, our Alkidamas is here. We have the plans of the city and are ready to have the gods bless the founding—and start tomorrow.”

Bedlam followed as the celebrants lit more torches. The drummers took up the strain. Thousands of Messenians came out of the shadows and mingled in with the Thebans and Argives. Then Alkidamas came forward with a sickly sort of fellow at his side. Ephoros waved as the man addressed the throng. “Patience, silence, my guests. We sleep now. Soon the high priestesses return from Ithômê and Eva with the gods’ nod about our city’s founding. So for now, sleep, our Argive and Theban guests. Lay out your camps and tents. Sleep in peace, we of Messenia have food and peace for you—and a city to build tomorrow.” Then the tribal leaders of the Messenians went into the camp of Epaminondas and waited for his arrival.

On the next morning Epaminondas called Lelex back to the camp of the generals. Epitêles was at his side, and he was calmer now, since a thousand of his men had found the night quiet and most helots asleep around Ithômê and Eva. Lelex and Doreios, along with Nikôn and some others, sat down as Epaminondas threw down a bag of scrolls taken from the sack of Proxenos. By rote he claimed, “Here. We found them. Just as it was fated that the urn of old Aristomenes would be uncovered when the Spartans left. In it are the plans of the new Messenê, buried on the slopes of Ithômê since the time of the great ones. The priestess Nêto once told us where the goddess had hidden the plans of our city. We have brought the ancient scrolls back from the crypt on Ithômê.”

Lelex went dumb. Before him on the ground of the tent was a pile of Proxenos’s papers, with charts of towers, and four gates, and drawings of the mountain Ithômê and the saddle to Eva surrounded with walls running up the sides of Ithômê—which he believed had been unearthed from a crypt just dug from the ground of the mountain, written, he thought, hundreds of years earlier. “Artemis of Ithômê. We are where we should be. We are standing on the city walls of our grandchildren. So we will start today with the quarrying. Tisis here will organize the companies.” For the rest of their second day in Messenia, the Boiotian generals divvied up the protection of the Messenians with the Argives. One myriad would guard the workers. The other ten thousand would join with the Messenians laying the foundation trenches, some thirty stadia of them. Fifty thousand Messenians were to stay up on Ithômê, cutting and dragging down the gray stone. Another twenty thousand would work the machines to hoist the blocks and guide the iron and lead mongers to fasten the stones. Half the women were to cook, as they hunted down the Spartan stores and the caches in the abandoned Spartan camps. The other half set up tents and shacks for the workers and hoplites. Nikôn’s crews already had cut tall spruce timber, forty feet and more. With the help of Ainias, he was planning to build ten tall swiveling cranes, with pulleys and tackle, that would hoist the blocks some thirty feet high and more.

It was a good time to build. The winter of grain had been planted now for over two months and harvest was another five months away, so the oxen were free and could pull the cut stone down the mountain. Proxenos’s craftsmen, a hundred or so in the army, who had worked at Thespiai and advised the builders of Mantineia and Megalopolis, brought from their packs drawings of arches and battlements—as if they had just inked them—and paired off with Messenians to ensure the walls went up straight according to their plumb lines. Now Ainias took up his dead friend’s scrolls and with Epitêles and Epaminondas held parley with the leading helots. Beside the Athenian helots that had come with Alkidamas, there were Doreios, Tisis, and Lelex, who spoke for all, though it was Nikôn who claimed preeminence by having done the most fighting against the Spartans. And, of course, he had made the long run to Helikon to fetch Chiôn and had rescued the corpse of Erinna. He now stepped forward. “We are the leaders of the Messenians. At least until we elect our archons. We’ll vote once the walls are up. Our Athenian helots are drafting the laws. So we are ready to build our city. You, Ainias, tell us of our plans. We want to cut stone. The sooner new Messenê is up, the sooner you go home. We want you home by the end of the year’s fifth month for your wheat harvest this spring as much as you do.”

Ainias looked at Proxenos’s master plans that he had gone over for a year, recently dirtied, wrinkled and torn a bit, as though Aritomenes had sketched them at the dawn of the polis. “Look here at these ancient worn scrolls. They say that the wall goes up thirty feet high at the towers, twenty high on the ramparts in between—the tallest in Hellas. It runs thirty stadia from the backside of Ithômê’s crown. Then it takes in the crest of Eva to the valley. Look for the guide points. Right here on the mountain. That’s where we put our northwest corner. All the holy ground to Asklepios and Artemis are set aside—and marked up here.”

Then Ainias tried to remember more from all his long talks with Proxenos about this third and best of his citadels, and so went on. “My men are cutting out the traces of the walls with spades. Only a city this big can have your herds and crops inside the walls, along with your houses and temples. All will be out of the Spartans’ reach, but with more inside your walls than either at Mantineia or Megalopolis. You can farm or vote or bathe inside, and care little whether ten or ten thousand Spartans are outside your walls. We put towers on every rise, like the scrolls of Aristomenes tell us, forty and more—and more of them square than round. Yes, four gates, one in each direction. But our busiest entry will be the east one, facing our sister-polis in Arkadia. There we will have a courtyard and swing doors higher than any at Mantineia. Its lintel—well, it will weigh far more than the Cyclopes’ work at Mykenai. Just watch when we slide that stone down the mountain. It will take forty oxen to pull, five hundred men to hold tight the ropes behind.”

Then Pelopidas walked up and warned the leader of the Messenians what to expect this spring. “You can say these plans were buried in sacred pots and come from your hero Aristomenes, or we can say they were the work of Proxenos who died on the Eurotas. It matters nothing to me. All we care is that ramparts go up and go up now. We have only three months for you to build the walls, and for us to keep out the Spartans before their spring campaign seasoning starts and maybe as late as Homôloios. Epitêles promises us a few more days for his Argives. He claims that he followed us to Messenia and will lead us out of here—the last to come and the first to leave. At night Alkidamas’s Athenians give you the laws and constitution. Listen up. You have no choice. The Thebans did not come south to set up an oligarchy. But we don’t want rule by the
ochlos
either. We kill the first looters we see, hang ’em up on the scaffolds we will. Epitêles has already done that. You bring Spartan hostages to us, no more killing of captives. Fix your own affairs by vote of the people—but only after we leave. Until then Epaminondas is your king. Don’t forget it. If you wish to eat, you better have the walls up before the barley harvest—otherwise you can chose between eating or dying in the open field when Agesilaos brings his Spartans over the mountain.”

For the next month, the helots cut stones at dawn with iron saws and then put them on carts to be guided down the mountain to the trenches. There, all night long, the forges turned out thousands of iron clamps for each day’s work. The fire men kept molten lead in huge iron pots to seal the joints from rust. The Messenians on the rising walls quit only after the lighting of the torches, even as the days lengthened and the spring equinox approached. While the men cut and stacked and the women cooked and weeded the fields, Epaminondas and his Thebans patrolled the countryside. They killed another four hundred Spartan holdouts, making two thousand altogether now dead from among the Spartan overseers and half-helots. Epaminondas knew the number because Ainias wrote the count on a vast scroll and posted it each day on a wood pillar next to what would be the Arkadian gate. No one counted how many Messenians Epitêles executed, for he hung up outlaws and thieves well beyond Ithômê, down the Alpheios and all the way to the sea.

But Epaminondas himself had also strung by the heels another eight hundred Messenians, looters and cutthroats who would neither work nor let those be who did. Most were Spartan inside anyway, but not all. The bodies of the murderers and thieves swung in the winter cold afternoon breezes with placards around their necks APEKTENON or EKLEPSA—“I murdered” or “I stole”—followed by APETHANON and “I died.” Some Messenians worried that they had exchanged the executions of Kuniskos for those of Epaminondas. Epitêles talked of his killing in camp at night while Epaminondas kept quiet. “It took us a hundred years and more at Argos, and we started as free, better men than these man-foots. Why do we think that those who were slaves will be masters of themselves and vote? Even if they vote, what’s stopping these hide-wearers from stealing money from the rich and voting themselves all sorts of free this and free that—the way they do it in most of our democracies?” Then he turned gruff. “Let’s find this Nikôn fellow, or maybe Lelex over there, give him some spearmen. Let him sit high in a castle on their new acropolis and like a good
tyrannos
run things until these people learn the rule of law. Before you have a Perikles—and I don’t see any here—you need a Solon a hundred and more years earlier, or better yet a Peisistratos or Pheidon. You can’t smooth a road without a hard rock bed underneath.”

Epaminondas laughed at the brute, but sensed also that he was a keen judge of the polis, having survived the killer gangs at Argos to come out on top. “Maybe. But babies can’t walk, yet at five they run faster than those in their seventh decade. Hellas has lots of democracies, my dear Epitêles. But they are old and tired, and need these toddlers and crawlers to keep us young and remind us what we once were. We gave them freedom, and they in turn have saved us from what we might have become, new barbarians of leisure and affluence who won’t put a toe outside of our city gates if there is a cloud in the sky. Now freedom is theirs to keep or lose. Either way it does not detract from our gift.”

Epitêles did not back down. “I and my Argives, we feel no better or worse from freeing them, and hardly think their freedom is a gift. Sparta is weak. Finished as we know it. She has no farmers to feed her phalanx, and won’t march out of Lakonia, at least for a while. That is good enough for me and mine. These helots can do what they like.” Epitêles laughed and for the next few days kept patrolling with his guard to hunt down more thieves who were stealing from the bread carts next to the scaffolds. He knew men by nature to be bad. They would kill and worse if they were not tired from work or scared of punishment. It was not in his nature to build, so he did what he knew best, he punished and hoped he killed more guilty than innocent—and worried little when he did not. “These Thebans can free anyone they please. But then who can’t do that? But they have no idea how to knock heads and keep these half-tamed on their leashes. Zeus in heaven, I think these Boiotians want to be liked rather than feared.” That the helots slacked off from the walls was of no real concern to Epitêles, other than as reason enough to kill those who were probably stealing rather than working. When enough were executed to discourage the no-goods, Epitêles would head home to Argos and the hard life among the murderous factions there. And so he did soon, and passed out of the history of the Hellenes.