The End of Sparta (32 page)

Lykomedes had promised good stocks in his new city, and they had pledges of twenty thousand to join them from Elis and Arkadia, all to meet at Mantineia. Ainias and Proxenos along the way had bought in advance a thousand goats, five hundred cattle, and two thousand sheep to be picked up by the army as it moved, some of them paid in Elean silver in advance to the Megarians and Nemeans. The two already had purchased five hundred
medimnoi
of barley and five hundred of wheat in measures of a hundred stored in dry cisterns every other day past the Isthmos. Ainias had posted a warning to the plainsmen of the Megarid and those beyond the Isthmos that Epaminondas would take what he had paid for, should the towns not produce what was bought, especially since Ainias had agreed to the high winter prices and put down two talents for the grain stores.

Before the high noon of this first day of the march, the generals parleyed over the food and route—snow in the shady ravines, with some ice in the low spots under gray skies. Even with the sun out, the morning was windy and cold, and the oncoming low clouds from the north made Mêlon worry that this huge muster was star-crossed or cursed by barren winter. He had marched for thirty years but never in winter, and never under s
tratêgoi
with less than a month left on their tenure. Yet his farming sense told him the wind would let up and they would see the sun before they crossed the Isthmos. Epaminondas noticed the Thespian’s silence. “Worried about becoming an outlaw, son of Malgis—a hungry
phugas
or an
adikôn
even? Don’t. Don’t give in to your fears. The army will march at the pace of your limp. If we don’t make it by the new season but decide there are other things to clean up in the Peloponnesos, well then I will gladly stand trial, not the men who follow. But I doubt the talkers in the agora wish to execute ten thousand of their own Boiotians in armor for the crime of humiliating Agesilaos.”

Suddenly, at the summit, the sky in the distance became blue and clear, and the storm clouds blew on by out to the Aegean. Looking back they had a clear view of the horde following them. Epaminondas resumed his own talk. “Take in all these men tramping in the cold of winter. Think of it all, Mêlon.” Even on this eve of winter the land looked lush with month-old green barley and some sprouting wheat stands. It all prompted a gasp from Epaminondas as they headed into a dark bend in the pines. “Farmland like no other, ours is. No wonder Kleombrotos tried to take all he could of it from us. I would too, if I were from parched Lakonia.”

Without warning Mêlon grabbed his arm as they marched, worried that his general did not know war for all of his years of bleeding in it. “Did he really only want that, my general? Doesn’t the king have green land enough from the water that runs down from the ridges of Taygetos? Or do you think Spartans starve and are without the twenty thousand
plethra
of bottomland in Lakonia and Messenia?” The farmer, who knew something about land and the fight over it, wanted to let these generals know what they were about to march into. “Is this what we are marching about? Who will own the great plain of Boiotia? Is that all you think wars are about? Taking what you are in need of from someone else? This greed, real or imagined—this
pleonexia
?” Suddenly Mêlon felt a
daimôn
had infused his thoughts. He could not stop. His tongue ran on. He even forgot where his feet took him over the pass. Now his stiff leg eased, and the words poured out. It was as if for those last ten years of thought in his vineyard alone, he could claim his due to speak with a hundred captains about him as recompense.

“But why do the Athenians fight us over the salty marsh at Oropia or the scrub oak of Panakton when they had a vast rich empire in the Aegean? Why do men die for such trifles?” He was warming in the winter midmorning sun. For the first time in his life he thought he felt a larger truth coming out of his mouth that powerful men knew less than he and would listen to his logic—if only he talked even more. Mêlon was in the world of leaders now, not alone in his orchards, so his ideas grew sharper as they met frowns and nods among those who heard him. “O yes, tell me, my general, why do the Spartans mow down the Argives over that worthless
methoria
of high rocks and thistle? Why, when all the black soil of Messenia is already theirs? Or do you really think we Hellenes—or for that matter the Persians or Skythians up north—go to war only when hungry for food or land or for such good or bad reasons?”

Pelopidas stepped up and sighed, amused that a farmer of vines was lecturing generals on the subject they knew best. “Well, then, tell us what else, our Thespian wise man, causes war.”

“How about our pride? Isn’t there our honor—and our fears?” Mêlon pressed on. “Of course a sort of greed of the Spartans—the sheer desire of taking something from the Boiotians to add to what they already don’t need in the Peloponnesos.” Mêlon took Pelopidas’s silence as a goad to go on, as Epaminondas marched a bit quicker on ahead. “Maybe we insulted Kleombrotos and the king Agesilaos, we rustics, the
agrikoi
of Hellas, marching when and where we pleased. Remember, Epaminondas stared the king down at Sparta. They needed the farms of Boiotia like they needed our eels or ducks—relish, dip, a side dish, no more. No, the thistle in their sandals was the very idea that we thought we were better than they—and most of Hellas was beginning to agree.”

“So, Mêlon, do you really believe our Epaminondas should have settled up with the king? Do you think his harsh words caused a war?”

Mêlon frowned and went on, though he sensed his general was not serious, was teasing rather than learning from him. “Of course not, my general. Name a war, Pelopidas, that was an accident—just one that broke out over a wrong word.” He was soon stammering, worried that a big man like Pelopidas, leading an army to war, had little idea why they were at war at all. So Mêlon pressed him further. “Listen, my commander. The men of the Peloponnesos invaded our land because they thought they could. And, by the gods, we had done nothing to persuade them otherwise. Why not? We lost Koroneia. We stumbled at Nemea. Tegyra was only a small victory. For years when you build women’s barricades rather than raise shields chest-high, you send a message: that lesser men either cannot or will not keep the Spartans out.” Mêlon found his words were clearing his own head, putting into some sort of order what he knew in his breast. He could not have stopped if he had wished to. “So for our part, why do you think Boiotians march this morning? Only because Leuktra taught us that we could—and these red-capes to the south cannot keep their enemies out like they have the past seven hundred years. Had we lost at Leuktra, not a northerner would be in the ranks with us this day.”

Mêlon, the lone vine pruner on Helikon, had an audience and so he lectured the general on why his army was following him. He thought states were like people, and knew people well enough up on Helikon—both how to keep the bad off his land and to enlist the good to help him. “Most men have no belief, either for good or bad. They follow only the winners. So they claim we are liberators and follow you, Pelopidas, because they think you can do what you promise. If you cannot make them rich, then at least make them proud to lord it over the losers. But stumble and most will damn you not just as weak, but as bad also. Remember Backwash in the assembly. Just like at Leuktra, if we win, he’ll claim us as disciples. Lose—and he will put the nooses around our necks. Back home, right now he’s waiting and tapping his foot as we march here. Most men are like that: They pass on risks to be safe and liked.”

Mêlon forgot that they were making good progress toward the junction to the road through the watchtowers of Megara, along the very trail where Erinna and Nêto had first met so many months earlier. Melissos was right behind him, listening as Mêlon talked nonstop as if he were a Theban general leading the ranks. Mêlon at last noticed his tall ears. “So are you listening to this, Makedonian? Or do you tire from the banter of Hellenes?”

“Master, I live and sleep war. I may be a hostage. But for four months longer, I am pledged as proof of the truce to the Boiotarchs with the Makedonians—and with Alkidamas and now you, Mêlon, son of Malgis. Please tell us more; the march is no march when you talk.”

Meanwhile Epaminondas gave orders to his scouts and messengers to go back up the pass and hurry up the tail of the column. “But my Pelopidas,” Epaminondas for a blink turned and took over from Mêlon. “If we all agree wars make no sense, if they start out over pretexts, these
prophases
as the philosophers call them, what exactly allows them come to pass? Why do these shoves end up with spears and shields? What is the
aitia
, the real cause of what we are doing this day?”

“Mêlon just told us,” Pelopidas laughed, but he then paused before going on. They were climbing and he needed a deeper breath. The general was light-headed, but finished up his thought. “Aren’t we trying to restore our pride, the reputation we lost when we let the Spartans prance through our fields each spring?”

Mêlon nodded and was almost finished with his lesson. “We must with a state like Sparta. When I saw you Thebans below me hide every time Agesilaos came into Boiotia with his army, I had no stomach to go down from Helikon and join you. We are going into Sparta because we have to, because in the past you let them come to you too many times. Yes, some of you want democracy for the helots, but you march now only because Leuktra gave you honor and pride, and took both from the defeated brood of Lichas.”

The army began slowly to go downhill, bypassing the high plain of Skourta. It was veering right at the crossroads, over the road of the high watchtowers that would wind down east and south to sea and along the coast to Megara. Epaminondas hurried forward and left them with an order: “Tell me how this all ends at camp tonight.” With that he was gone, happy to be back alone out in front of the column.

Pelopidas was nearly as old as Mêlon of the one good leg, but was not used to the hard climbing in armor, since he rarely dug vines or scythed grain and his belly hung down at the bottom rim of his breastplate. He was wheezing. “Well, if Spartan fear and pride brought them northward, and the hunch they would walk over us at little cost, what will make them quit? We won at Leuktra. So why does this unending war go on?”

“Don’t play with me, Pelopidas,” Mêlon warned as they too made the turn onto the Megara road and by its first tower of many to come. He noticed that thirty or so of the Sacred Band were still marching bunched next to them, eager to hear the exchange. “Wasn’t it you, Pelopidas, in the moments after Leuktra, who called to bring the war home to the Lakedaimonians?”

Pelopidas frowned. “Yes, but I confess I like to fight—anyone and all the time. Just like your Chiôn or our Ainias, a bloody Ares that gets fat on the gore of war. So I am not a good touchstone of what others do. Much less our poleis. So how do you think wars, especially ours, will end? When we are all in Hades, a peace of the dead?”

Mêlon didn’t even look at him as he answered back, as the sun began to warm his face. “I’ll be blunter still: One side wins, the other loses. Only that way does the reason the troublemaker fights vanish, and do his big ideas get smaller. Talk never stopped any war for good; talk only passes it on to grandchildren not born.” Mêlon grimaced, thinking that all the spearing of Malgis at Nemea and Koroneia had only left it to Lophis to fall at Leuktra. Leuktra? The battle to end at last the war with Sparta? Hardly. As long as the Spartans had the serfs of Messenia feeding them, they would keep marching up here. He went on. “As for the truces of the Hellenes, they are not worth the stone they are cut on. The more some of the Hellenes swear to others before the gods that they will both have the same friends and enemies for fifty years, the more likely such a peace will not last for one.”

The two talked and were interrupted often by the Sacred Band, especially the younger of the three hundred. But they tired of the chatter and wanted to know only when they would arrive in Lakonia. Surely it must be over the next mountain as they looked down at the great plain of Megara before them and imagined they saw the Spartan Eurotas instead of a thousand stadia of walking ahead. Not a Boiotian in this army seemed to have been to the Peloponnesos. Mêlon ignored them all. “You see, we will change Sparta from what it was—take its claws away and cage it—if we can, that is. Do that, and it will never be able to make war north of the Isthmos. That is, I think, the plan of our general. So he preempts and starts this war to be the last.”

Pelopidas sighed. “I fear even with war in Lakonia, and even with the Messenians free, we will leave this war to our children unless we level Sparta and kill her kings. Our Epaminondas must make war so terrible that the Spartans can never fight us again.”

Mêlon slapped Pelopidas. “So this was a game all along, Pelopidas. You are no honest philosopher. No, you simply wished me to give back your own answers. I say that you are more the fire breather than iron-gut Epaminondas himself.”

“I suppose,” Pelopidas quietly offered, but then he stuck his head closer to Mêlon’s and in a softer voice went on. “But sometimes others can give voice to the dark truth we prefer ourselves not to utter or even hear, but wish to be aired all the same. Because you know war better even than I, and not so long ago no doubt had no appetite for this great march, Mêlon, you have taken a great worry off my heart.” Pelopidas stopped in the road to finish. “I know there is no other way. I am not just a war lover. There is really no other way to end this, but in the direction we are marching. Yes, we must cut off the head of the serpent and watch his slithering trunk die in pain.”

“No. No, there is no other way,” Mêlon answered.

“We will either end this war our way—or they will end it theirs.”

Now even Melissos echoed. “No other way, no other way—no other way than to head south and cut them all down—or have no war and no peace, as it is now.”

With that outburst, the talkers heard the trumpeters’ order to halt and pitch camp and to wait for the twenty thousand men at their backs. Mêlon could already see well the Megarid below. They figured that they had gone some one hundred twenty stadia while they had talked the first day’s march away. Still Mêlon thought on in silence. This new power of Thebes—would there come also in time the end of its own democracy? Of course it would. Sparta had once dethroned Athens. Now Thebes was doing the same to Sparta. He knew well an end-day would arrive in turn for these Boiotians. That was the nature of states. In their wealth and pride, they forgot the harder ways of earlier men who had given them plenty. Maybe the Boiotians would muster a year or even ten of such marches at his back. But even now as he looked around the front ranks of the column, he saw few such as Pelopidas and Epaminondas to lead such men again—and far too many men like Backwash to throw away what others had given them.