The End of Sparta: A Novel (65 page)

He had come late with Alkidamas. So he missed all the battles north or south. His only battle scars? The vomiting from the long boat to the Peloponnesos and some scratches from fighting off a big helot rower on Gastêr’s boat. Now he had no intention of letting the friendship of all be turned sour by a good man gone bad in his drink—not now, right before they set out on the last road to holy Delphi at sunrise. So better to prompt the battle of words with Ainias here in friendly Naupaktos. That way their bile would rise and pass. Then they could march east in easy quiet to Delphi. All could enjoy the hike up to Apollo’s shrine. As sober friends once more, the five would descend from the high meadows to Trophonios and the borders of home.

Ephoros poured himself a calyx of warm unmixed wine and began. “Sit down, dear Ainias, just as our dear Akarnanian Skylaki orders. Please, let us all sit down and recline, and show some respect to one another and the idea of a proper symposion, as we do in Ionia. Where is our
symposiarchos
to impose order? Girls. You two bring in more wine, and play something soft on the lyre as we speak, an elegy perhaps, and do some of your twists and leg raises for the men over there.” To the general surprise, the Arkadian Ainias did just as he was told.

“Is that what Lophis and Kalliphon, the son of our Alkidamas, fell for at Leuktra? Chiôn, and Proxenos and all the other best men of Boiotia whose names I have written on my scrolls? Did they all die to just kill Lichas, the better man? Was it only to kill Kleombrotos and his henchmen at Leuktra?” He picked up some cucumber relish and spread it on his bread and then again looked up. “The helots are free and yet they squander their liberty in license? My, my—they loot. They steal, Ainias. By Zeus, they even plunder their own temples, or so you shriek.” Ephoros leaned on his elbow and somehow raised his squeaky voice even another notch higher. “We laid out their walls. They sleep on them rather than build them higher. We died for Messenians. And, oh my, they have no government, no laws, no rules on stone. Spartans at least kept order with their
kryptes
and their chasm of death.” He may have been fragile, this papyrus leaf, but Ephoros nonetheless looked over at the drunken killer Ainias and faced him down.

“This is your writ—that you prefer order to freedom, the rules of the pit of the Kaiadas to the chaos of the unruly assembly? Hah. So you think if we were smart, we would bring back a Spartan harmost, and have Antikrates and Lichas and his braids back again?” Ephoros looked around to his right. He wanted to see if any in their sorrow and drink agreed with the bitter Ainias and might prick his backside with a spear tip. So he went on to provoke Mêlon right across the table, although he was unsure of his reaction. “Was that the goad for you too Mêlon, son of Malgis, only to keep Agesilaos on his acropolis and out of the vineyards and wheat fields of others around Helikon? You had no thought of the helots or the cities of the Peloponnesos?”

Now the pale Ephoros broke his own rules of the symposion. He leaped up, but much more violently than even Ainias had. He stalked, yes, stalked to the wall and back. He had feather arms and even smaller legs. Yet he paced to the back of the Arkadian’s couch and took on Ainias, and showed the greater courage for standing right over the reclining killer.

“Ainias, you will return to your old fire soon enough and lead Arkadia onto the path of its old renown—once you hear the voice of your Proxenos and the whispers of your Pythagoras. We are in the north again, across the gulf now, Ainias Taktikos. So obey your oath to the dead. Fill your wine flask with spring water. Cut off your filthy mane and bathe in the nearby Mornos tomorrow, and if you are man enough to go to Plataia, as you boast, go and raise the children of Proxenos. Otherwise keep still and join the other drunkards on the corners and the alley beggars with their coin cups, or go back down to Taygetos and take up where Chiôn finished.”

Mêlon finally looked up. “All of us sit down, lounge back, and have some relish and more wine.” Mêlon spoke rapidly and with confidence. “Nêto is not a mere cripple. She is not ugly or feral. No. She is free. She has whispered that it will be this angry Ainias, who alone will become the tyrant slayer of the Peloponnesos, who will deal with Lykomedes yet—who may prove the great traitor of us all as he colludes with old Agesilaos. Yes, in your pride and zeal, you will go south there again—I fear for you—and settle up with our backstabber Lykomedes in Mantineia. You are the biggest liberator of us all.” He went on. “Erinna is not dead. Her song lives on. Epaminondas hums and sings it as we speak. So, yes, all that has been a good thing to die for, Ephoros, for the freedom of the Hellenes. I am at last proud to be a Hellene. I won’t stay on my mountain.” Mêlon wanted to finish and get it all out, and show that he was one with Epaminondas at last, no difference between the two of them. “Let the others talk of your Pythagoras as the evil
daimôn
that addled the wits of the democrats of Boiotia. Or say that he sent them south on this mad dream of a dead philosopher. What is it for me who has no love for that sect and likes to eat meat as much as beans? It was the freedom of the Messenians that I now know was worth the blood of the Malgidai. We ended the Spartans who marched into the land of others. I have no regrets. Not one. Not ever. Not since I came down Helikon to fight at Leuktra for Epaminondas. For I too was freed from a different sort of slavery, one worse in some ways: a slavery of the mind—and of the soul that once believed in nothing other than itself. Nothing is worse than the cynic who is disappointed by the world about him for not appreciating in his own genius, for being less than perfect. I know that now from years of wilderness.”

Pale Ephoros from across the table, behind his large
kratêr
of warm wine, looked over at Mêlon. “It will be sung a thousand seasons and more from now that the stones that grew out of the Peloponnesos this season prove who was the better man after all—and who the worse. What will they say of Sparta? What will they say when one day when we are ashes, and the Hellenes to come conclude, ‘Why look. There is nothing here, no stones on the acropolis of Agesilaos. The Sparta of song was nothing. But the walls of its subjects, why over at Messenê are they looming over the Peloponnesos?’ ”

Melissos twitched. He for some reason was not tired of these talkers. He liked them and what they said. What was this Hellas, this notion of no city-state, but one people—one language, the same gods, from Thessaly to Crete? “Please, don’t speak of our ruin. Think of the ruined at Sparta. They feel their own misery far more. Isn’t that enough? The world is split between those who apologize for killing their enemies and those who take pride in it. What we did was good, right as you say. Surely you taught me that much.” Gone was his half-Makedonian slang. He had wanted to fight with Mêlon at Taygetos, die even if need be. So he had earned their attention. Now he spoke as clearly as any Boiotian three times his age.

“Antikrates is not feasting with Agesilaos. More likely the two are serving their own table. They drown their tears in bad wine of their own bad making—with a dead king Kleombrotos, and a dead Lichas, and a dead Kleonymos, and all those others dead at Leuktra. Their helots are gone. And bald Kuniskos is ash in the high
aithêr
.” This new boy Melissos was making good sense, as he turned and signaled the girl from Ithaka to sit by his feet and rub his upper leg. He turned to the Akarnanian who continued with her lyre and grabbed her cloak. He scarcely had a beard but he had known such women since his second teeth had grown in. The year of apprenticeship of this Melissos was coming to an end. Alkidamas had told the young man, on the word of Pelopidas, that there was a ship waiting for him at Kirrha over the hill, below Delphi. They would fight the wind out of the gulf and then battle more of it northward along the coast, and row him home up the west side of Makedonia.

The treaty had held through the late spring as summer approached. None of the northern Makedonian folk of Melissos had attacked them from the rear when the Boiotians went south. So the northern kings had kept their word—at least for now—and the year of his guaranty and truce was honored. Melissos, along with the other Makedonians held at Thebes, was once again a free man. He was already feeling once more his privilege and birth rank, and yet he was learning from these Hellenes who bled and died so well for nothing other than helots, than helots no less. Alkidamas jumped up from his couch, then clapped his hands and dismissed the servants. He ordered all to get ready their beds and end this symposion, since it had gone just as he had planned. The once surly and tired banqueters had let their
daimones
out, and would return with one story as friends, with four empty
kratêres
as proof of their amity. Ainias, he knew, would shortly bathe and cut off his matted hair of mourning. Mêlon had come down at last from Helikon and would never really go back up again. Ainias nodded at Alkidamas and put away his wine, the goblet half full. He felt relieved that his own bitterness had at least not spread to others. He pointed at Ephoros and then picked up his own spear and broke it over his knee as if it were a tooth-picker.

“For a while longer,” Ainias promised, “I will be your captain. Sleep and wake sober. We have a long march to the port of Delphi. Then there is a steep climb up to the temple. There we can gaze down at the pass into Boiotia. On our last day we pass through the hill of the Sphinx and near that dreadful snake goddess at Lebadeia. Like it or not, the age of Epaminondas, and of men like Lichas, and of Chiôn—and us here tonight—is over with.”

The returning veterans left the lodging the next morning and set out into the hard winds of the mouth of the gulf, pressing to get on the road to the east and home. The travelers fell in soon with yet another band of Messenians along the coast road. These were the children of free men. Forty years earlier they had settled in Naupaktos to the north, when they fled Pylos during the Athenian war. The helots walked briskly as if for the first time in their lives it was a thing of pride to be known as Messenians and not mere helots of Sparta. All seven of these wayfarers were stonecutters and likewise were climbing to Delphi. Or so said their leader Artemidoros. He boasted to the Boiotians that the new assembly of the Messenians, under the direction of the rebel Nikôn,
polemarchos
of Messenê, right after the liberation had sent them on a ship with black marble of the type the Athenians quarried at Eleusis. The transport was at the dock in Kirrha. These Messenians were to guide the rough stones with the teamsters up the mountain to the Sacred Way of the sanctuary. There they would set up the great altar of the liberated Messenians. This work was, as Ainias knew, the last design of Proxenos, the final scroll found in his pack after his end on the Eurotas, so confident had he been that there would be a need for a victory monument of a free Messenê at Delphi. None of these helot folk now at his side even knew the name of the benefactor who had perished to plan their new city; much less had they any idea of the hide-clad Nikôn who once had poached his way to freedom on the slopes of Ithômê.

At the notion of a Messenian polis with a sanctuary at Delphi, Mêlon now thought as they hiked that it was the Boiotian farmer, the horny-handed plowman who had hated war and had drunk his cool red and napped beneath his arbors, who had nonetheless gone willingly southward for the freedom of these helots. These lowly men from the marshes of Boiotia had chased the Spartans, the very taskmasters of war, across the Eurotas. With Epitêles they had marched amid the high ice into Messenia and built a city out of stone. Now they were ready to go home and blend back into the black soil of Boiotia, in hopes the great shaking-up in the south would mean that the northerners would never again worry about Spartans, who would instead always worry about the Messenians. These were the true Hellenes, the
geôrgoi
, these rocky stones like Philliadas, and Antitheos and Staphis, who, immovable on the banks that anchored the poleis, kept it alive a bit longer, while the city folk joined the deluge that was carrying all the lesser pebbles headlong over the falls. For a while longer they would trudge into town and warn their betters that their right spear arms, not walls, kept the enemy distant, that the Makedonian and the Persian would always come from the north unless stopped, and that the more
gymnasia
and
palestrai
the city built, the softer the citizens became. Yes, the burning of Lakonia to the south was the win of the farmers, the
mesoi
who had proved stronger than the lords of Sparta, who had shown they could hold their shields as high as those at Marathon.

Mêlon himself remembered little of the next day’s trek along the coast to Kirrha—other than that for most of this last leg of the march he worried as he stared at the familiar massif of Parnassos. His farm: Had it been overrun or abandoned in these few days following the death of Chiôn? Was it even his farm anymore, with Malgis long gone, and Lophis dead, and himself absent? Who would the Boiotians charge with treason for fighting well past the new year: the five Boiotarchs who followed Epaminondas and Pelopidas? Or perhaps Alkidamas and Ainias, who, the jurymen would allege, had planned the campaign? Surely he too as well would be stoned or cut down for joining? A democracy—or so Mêlon well knew Backwash would allege—could not survive should its leaders trample the laws as they pleased. And they were all lawbreakers of their own as much as liberators of others.

Once the band reached the Delphians’ harbor at Kirrha and could look up the Gorge of the Pleistos and far to the right at the shadows of the peaks of Arkadia across the water, the four finally took leave of their hostage Melissos. As arranged, the youth would go back on board the Messenian ship—
Eleutheria
—to sail out of the gulf. It would row up the coast on the west side of Hellas to Epiros. The crew, after dropping their marble at Kirrha, had planned to continue north past Akarnania to fetch more Messenians who were eager to reach their liberated homeland. None of these Messenian seamen seemed to mind taking the boy along for ballast, especially as Mêlon flipped them four silver owls for their trouble.