The End of Sparta: A Novel (64 page)

In the days after the deaths of Lichas and Gorgos up on Taygetos, Mêlon and Ainias said little. They kept busy on a hero shrine outside the Arkadian Gate where their hired Messenians had erected two gray limestone lions. Proud heads roared in stone over the ashes of Proxenos and Chiôn. Each sat on his haunches and seemed to be bellowing out to the southeast, “The end of Sparta.” Ainias took up the chisel himself, and wondered again as he cut the stone what had driven two northerners to come so far south to die for those who had never known them. When he was done, something of the faces of Proxenos and Chiôn stared out from the lions’ manes and whiskers. For a bit he was angry again for the end of his friend, the death of Chiôn and the laming of Nêto, angry at the once-grand idea to free the Messenians, and so he could not keep quiet even among the helots around him. “Look at us, Mêlon. Making stone beasts roar like our Chiôn and Proxenos. Look at what they died for—a city of crooked towers, of thieves, of looters and worse. Proxenos planned their city and we cannot even give him credit, so we lie about some faker Aristomenes who envisioned it so that these child helots won’t have hurt feelings that they could not even plan their own city. Now look at them, drunk on the freedom we gave, all in need of the Spartan lash. Killing each other when they can’t find Spartans. Next they’ll turn on us, their liberators. I helped do this. No polis here at all—there never will be. Why, most city-states wouldn’t even let that thug Nikôn in the city gate. Here he is an archon. I would burn him up before I would Lichas.”

Mêlon ignored the rantings from the dirty and unkempt Ainias. He smelled of wine and sweat and wore the blood of Proxenos on his cloak like the victor does the laurel, and went from the middle way to unhinged in a blink—and would yet return to his senses soon enough. Mêlon the farmer saw something quite different from Ainias. With new eyes he began to perceive a stirring amid the mess, and larger walls than either at Megalopolis or Mantineia. For the farmer who brings the wheat field out of thistle and bramble, his eye is always not on the natural chaos, but on what order can emerge from it. Amid the gallows, and the sewers, and the corpses, he saw majestic stone temples, and houses—and the skeleton of a great polis to come, one that grew flesh each day. And the clouds above it all, this day they seemed now to be as faces, yes faces of Chiôn and Proxenos both, as if they had become Olympians who smiled down on their subjects.

His mind took in Messenians torching the corpses of the executed and arguing to stop the killing, and young men racing in the half-built stadium, throwing the discus and hitting targets with their javelins, in preparation for the great games of the founding of holy Messenê. “Freedom is not so clean. The Athenians have had their democracy maybe a hundred and a half-hundred years, they say. It still is, well, you know, chaos, Ainias; these Athenians who started wars each season and killed Sokrates and slit the throats of the Melians, and all the rest. And us? Has it even been ten years since Pelopidas and his gang dressed up as women and assassinated our oligarchs in their drinking parties? So we are to demand of these helots perfection, our beautiful virgin
Dêmokratia
, all in Parian white, without a blemish or chisel mark on her bosom?”

In their grief the two hoplites were largely left alone by Epaminondas, who had mustered the army only then to camp it three times and more, reluctant to leave Messenia and face his trial at home. The general instead walked all night, paced the ramparts of the nearly finished walls of Messenê, wondering whether his victory would draw out Agesilaos—and whether he should head back east over Taygetos for the summer to attack the lame king.

Pelopidas laughed at his fantasies. “You’ll be lucky, Theban, to get this army home as it is. One hundred and twenty days and more I reckon our men have slept outside and fought the Spartan. Half are sick from the cold. The rest vomit from the bad water. They feel the foul air and the fever it brings. If we don’t leave soon before the summer, they’ll hate the helots more than the Spartans—if they avoid the fevers of these lowlands by the coast.” Pelopidas then pointed to the Boiotians in the camps below the finished ramparts. “They need do no more. You promised a march home thirty days ago. Not even Zeus with his thunder on Taygetos could get them to go back east. They will not go back into the lair of Agesilaos. No, they are tiring of founding cities for ingrates.”

“If you want your Messenians to enforce their laws and finish their walls, then it is time for us to dry up the teat and wean these infants who have grown teeth aplenty. The spring star Arktouros has long ago arisen with our month of Agriônios and winter is past. Even Epitêles knew that and took his Argives home last month—and no less on the advice of Lelex and Nikôn, who want their polis to be their own. Do you like your uncle sleeping in your tower bedroom a hundred days after his promise of a short visit?”

Nêto had drifted back to the empty schoolhouse of Erinna far above the city, and was said to have gone quiet in the night as the vapors of the goddess had set the other virgin priestesses afire. She could tend the outer sanctuary, and plant her garden, but was not allowed into the temple proper or precinct, not after her stay with Kuniskos. She wished to avoid Mêlon, ashamed that he would spurn her, for she was soiled and ugly and she walked slower than did her master. She instead talked to Erinna in her sleep, but out of make-believe since the visions of what was to come were gone. Even Doreios, who before her capture had claimed he would make her his own, let her alone now, since he saw that she drew men’s eye for her scars rather than her beauty. The more he had once talked of yoking his Nêto, the less he saw of her, for her deer legs were a faint memory and her gait was not a pretty thing to watch.

Nêto at last had her free Messenia, but the deaths of Chiôn, Proxenos, and Lophis, and the looming date of departure of the northerners, Mêlon especially, bore hard on her—as did the truth that her dream talk to Nikôn had almost gotten them all killed on Taygetos. That lamentation turned Nêto away from the world of reasoned men and for a time back to the gods of Olympos who alone, it seemed, a day or two each month spoke to her. If a year earlier she had turned all the heads in the agora at Thespiai, now few in Messenia gave her a look, and then only to gaze at her slumped walk and her scarred cheek. Her leg had healed with a bad bow and she favored it like the old women in black shawls with the hump-backs and staffs.

Gorgos had left her a bitter look, as he promised, with her branded scar. Nêto for her part wanted no man. Kerberos would not leave her side anyway and she in turn kept him from going back to the wolves. Nêto in her shame soon limped more into the deeper hills, even far above the house of Erinna and was seen with the deathless naiads of the glens, now more a phantom than a fleshy mortal. Mêlon had tried to track her down, but the mountain helots were ignorant of her wanderings, and he had lost his tracker Chiôn. Finally, he sent out messengers with word to her to come home. But no ranger could find her, not even the hounds found a scent of her Kerberos. Both vanished from the thoughts of the Messenians. Mêlon remembered her harsh talk to him the previous summer on Helikon and at least figured she was happier in her free Messenia than back in his Boiotia. Or so he told himself.

Finally, not just the hoplites, but their officers also, told Epaminondas to leave. They demanded of Epaminondas that they reach home before the green stalks of the wheat fields of Boiotia turned yellow and heavy. The army took inventory and prepared provisions for the march across the Isthmos. Then Alkidamas appeared again. He had gone north to Olympia, and had news as he returned southward to the new city. “I have called on you too much, Thespian. You have given too much of the earth and water of Helikon for the cause of the Messenians. I ask a final favor, a homecoming gift. I think that when you go north with the new month, we will not see each other again—at least until the trial of us all. So our tiny band of liberators should go homeward toward the gulf, ahead of the army, together as part of one final good deed, to smooth the rocks from the road before Epaminondas arrives with a bounty on his head. Let us get to Thebes first, before Epaminondas arrives, and make sure he sees flowers, not a rope, around his neck.”

So five left ahead of Epaminondas. Alkidamas led with Ephoros, the writer of history. Melissos followed at the rear. Ainias and Mêlon walked in between, both silent in their hatred of the Spartans who had killed Proxenos and turned Nêto feral. After a two days’ walk, the five reached the coast of the gulf of Korinthos. From there they could see the wave-crested sea of Megalê Hellas to the west, and the dark cliffs of Aeolis directly across the water where men of the polis seldom went. Soon on their way to the docks, they passed the first huts outside the great walled city of Patrai, city on the gulf, friend to Athens and home to the Achaians of old.

Ainias had grown tired already of the south, of his own Peloponnesos, and was ashamed of his Doric—and now even of himself as well. As promised, he would tend to the farm of Proxenos up on the Asopos River, at least for a while. The sooner he got to Plataia, and away from this southland, the better for himself and his companions condemned to see him in his madness. He would find his cure in the olives and vines of Proxenos. There he would swear off Dionysos, and bathe in the cold Asopos each morning to cleanse his stains. He would teach the sons of his friend to bend the bow and dig the vineyard. Or so he promised once he was north of the gulf and free of his homeland.

The joints of Alkidamas were stiff, and Mêlon himself was quite lame from his bad leg. His knee was nearly twice its normal size. His foot was blistered and torn from walking on its side. Lame and tired, they were all glad to go inside the city gate of these men from Achaia and walk down between the Long Walls to the port on the gulf rather than continue east to the Isthmos along the shore. Alkidamas laughed, “Ah yes, we take the ferry straight over to windy Naupaktos. No Gastêr this time, just an honest ferryman and his barge. We stay the night over there on the high eastern road by the water. Then up a day through the olive groves of Amphissa to Delphi and we will pass along by the snake oracle of Trophonios into Boiotia, coming up on Helikon on her backside. Once across the water we are safe. Done with the deed—at least for this season.”

Mêlon and Ainias were mostly quiet on the broad-bottomed ferryboat over to Naupaktos. The late-spring sea of the fickle month Theilouthios was choppy. But the aged tiller was no fat one-armed running mouth, but an expert young sailor from Zakynthos with his father’s boat, who crisscrossed to the opposite side despite the white tops on the waves. Even with a strong northern headwind in their faces, they reached the northern shore by the noon, and then made the sixty stadia to Naupaktos in less than a day.

There Alkidamas rented a large common room, an
andron
with six wooden couches and reed mats. He had ordered food brought in to sup together a final time—olives, garlic, some dried fish, and an octopus or two, with four
kratêres
of black wine and greens and spring
horta
from the well-watered slopes above Naupaktos. He had on either side of him flute girls. Two porters brought in torches and a long low table. “Well,” Alkidamas began as he leaned on his elbow, chewing a tip of raw wild asparagus, “well, well, we have a sort of symposion with girls and couches. Let the wine and eating and boasting begin. I am the
symposiarchos
, and preside over our talk session. Look. I have bought laurel wood for a roaring fire.” A short Akarnanian girl in a see-through cloak of light linen kept their cups full. Another with a large backside from Ithaka walked around the table with an
aulos
. On the prompt of Ainias, she took up a soft song of Erinna of Athens. Ainias had no smile on his face as he leaned forward. Rather than drop a raisin in his mouth he threw several across at the beard of Alkidamas.

“So we ended the Spartans,” he growled. “Don’t lie to me that we left something better. You saw the mess at Messenê. Lichas was right. We miss him—and can’t bring him back to right things.” Alkidamas wiped a dribble of wine from his chin, clicked his fingers, and the Akarnanian girl—Skylaki, they called her—brought in a new calyx of red, the third of the night, and a towel for his face. “I am hog at the symposion and won’t let any of you speak, no, not just yet,” Ainias announced. “There is an army still left with Agesilaos. Even after Leuktra he is enough alive. He sits safe on his acropolis. I think we will all be back in the vale of Lakonia—and more than once.”

The other four were fidgeting. Ainias looked away from them. They were unsure how much the wine rather than Ainias was talking and looked over to see that his spear was on the floor. They signaled for the music to begin again, in soft fashion, as they heard him out, hoping the five-foot tune would calm him and that they themselves would not be persuaded by his anger. Ainias was a slave himself to Dionysos and would not calm. He kicked up his feet and jumped back up in the lamplight, spilled an entire
kratêr
of the white, and almost turned over the table itself. “Will your ox Aias pull the yoke any better, Mêlon, because there are no more helots? Will that big press work better without a Chiôn? I think not. Who challenges all this? All vanity. It was all about the vanity of Pythagoras, this notion you could play god, and make some serfs free so to make yourselves feel more something—what I don’t quite know.”

The drunken Ainias knocked over his couch and walked around the table, along the backside of the couches. Not one of the four was reclining. Mêlon might have agreed with some of this nonsense of Ainias. Now he kept quiet, for he had a half-thought to cross swords with Ainias, and more than a half that he would take down the Stymphalian. The piper Skylaki started on her flute and began to dance and lead Ainias back to his couch. It was the writer of
historia
among them, the yellow-haired
malthakos
Ephoros, who challenged the mercenary. How odd that the twig-armed Ephoros cared little about a spear-thrust from the drunken hoplite. He was even redder from the winter sunburn he had acquired on the trip down, but his voice came out through his nose in his affected Attic. There is courage in writers on occasion, especially if there is a story to come of it. Ephoros had learned to endure slights and an occasional slap as he questioned the helots for his great saga of their liberation to come. For all his perfumed locks, he was no coward. Ephoros had said little in fear that the veterans would scorn his white skin and soft hands—and his support for a war that he had not fought in.