The End of Sparta: A Novel (34 page)

At last the sun broke out of the clouds and the beauty of Hellas, north and south, was before them. The winter sea had turned deep blue. All day long Ainias had his hand on his sword hilt. He assumed that to get to the south, they would have to kill a man or two, whether bandits or Korinthian rangers. Ainias followed Proxenos, who was singing ahead as he climbed fast toward the hills above Nemea. The Plataian had never liked the south, where he had done most of his stone work, but he thought his melodies would at least lift his melancholy. The next day the two had the brisk northern breeze at their backs as they continued southward. They had stopped at Zeus’s high temple at Nemea for the night, and paid well for two sacks of food. The townspeople were advised to look for Epaminondas and his horde ten days before the new year—and that they would be well paid for their flocks and granaries by Theban agents four days before the army’s arrival. Finally the two zigzagged down the steep road, and on their sixth day from Kithairon could see fog blowing out from the great swampy plain of Mantineia clearly below them. Ainias was confident that Epaminondas could make this same march this winter, at least this far, and the return home back north across the Isthmos. He had put out more than a hundred stakes to mark the way for the army where food was plenty and local folk were eager to sell the Boiotians supplies.

The two slowed as they made their way down through the mud and past the junction at the Tripolis road. Then in silence Ainias pointed to the left jaw of the mouth of the plain. He had decided first to climb to a low spur of hills overlooking the rising city of Mantineia to scout and ensure the city below was safe to enter. Perhaps from the hillock they could get a good view of the first stronghold of the Boiotians’ grand plans to close off Sparta with cities of free people. From this small lookout mountain—Skopê, the locals knew it as—both would be able to gaze out at the borders of Arkadia and see land that months ago in summer had been rich with cherries and grapes and thigh-high wheat between the ranges of Maenalos and Ktenias.

Here and there on the fields of the plain barley sprouted, though there were few farmers in the field in the winter cold. The sprouts of next spring’s grain had already come up green and were a palm’s width from the ground. But there were no ripe crops of any sort in the countryside. The dirt paths below long ago had turned muddy with streams from the storms raging down from the mountains. Yet the two travelers, who had a good eye for farmland, were struck nonetheless at the layout of this new city in the rich bottomland below—especially Ainias, who stomped and kicked the ground of his native Arkadia, as he climbed up the small lookout. Suddenly a laborer, a dirty-looking stranger in patched leather, came down the path and muttered to a surprised Ainias, “
Daimones kakoi, pantes kakoi. “
Demons, bad ones, all bad ones.” Then he disappeared into the low underbrush. “
Ide. Ide
.” “Watch the foul wind, watch the stink up here. The bad hill—
lophos kakos, pas kakos
.”

Proxenos was atop first, and calling out over the breezes as he gazed from the low summit of Skopê at the city below in the distance. “Forget that rustic. Ignore his superstitions. Look down instead at my Mantineia, and how your Arkadia has a polis bigger than Athens, the tired democracy. Thirty stadia and more it goes off into the horizon. Look at my
Nea Mantineia
. They have followed my drawings. We can see at least a hundred towers and tall gates, ten and more, with walls as thick as six or seven men.”

Ainias snapped back, “I see, I see. I know who planned it and who built it. But who was that leather-clad fellow coming down off Skopê—the one scared out of his wits?” He was full of bile, and angry at his own detour. On the way up, they had had to fight through dead thistle and the branches of tamarisk, slipping in the mud and ash on the slope. The view from the top was not worth the climb. “From boyhood I knew this valley,” lectured Ainias. “But I never liked the scent up here on Skopê. Now something about this perch riles me even more, more than the terrified stranger who just warned me. A bad wind blows across the crest. Nêto could tell us why. Had we her gift, we could make something of that circling black hawk up there, warning us what plans Zeus has. I wager that black bird above is really a Kêr, and not a hawk after all. I can keep you alive to finish Megalopolis, but only against those who bleed, and not the shades who feed on them.” With that Ainias grabbed the arm of his friend. “Proxenos, come down from this place. I don’t want to ever come back here. Voices of the dead waft in.”

Proxenos laughed. “Ainias, you sound like the bitch Hekuba barking at the crossroads. Skopê is no more than rocks and dirt, not the home of the goblin Empousa to scare little boys. But we go down now. There are four towers unfinished down there in Mantineia that I can see from up here. Another bridge over the water is no farther along than when I was here a month ago—and in the wrong place.” The two began to lumber down and headed back along the road from Tegea to the new city. Ainias immediately felt better to be off. He was home at Mantineia and the two were safe. Now as they walked on flat ground he felt embarrassed about his fears of the hill and tried to praise the genius of his friend, who was somehow growing fainter in voice and slower in his walk.

“Proxenos, you have your immortality. These three cities—if later Megalopolis and Messenê on Ithômê grow as Epaminondas promises—are your legacy. If your scrolls burn tomorrow, it doesn’t matter anymore. Our ideas are already set in stone. For a thousand seasons and more they will be known—or at least until the stones of these cities themselves are carried away by folk whose names are not yet even known. Men not yet here will praise your work. They will wonder how the style of Epaminondas’s cities—your
emplekton
way—found their way deep into the Peloponnesos.”

“Perhaps, Ainias,” Proxenos said as they walked on. “But we have no idea of the way we shape others, or what word or small act sparks another to do good or evil. Some of us were noble by our disposition and our voice and did good, but that won’t be known until we are long on the other side. Others are foul sorts. But for a moment, a beam of goodness, of
to kalon
, comes out from them. It hits the bystander more than even do the soft words of the far better. But enough.” He plucked a blade of green barley and stuck it in his mouth. Pointing at his friend, he continued. “No man alive knows more of war than you, Ainias—how to organize the defense of cities and bring in supplies, to spot traitors inside the gates, to discover tunnels and signal with fire, and create passwords and open locked gates. You Stymphalian, better than any, know how to marshal an army on the plain to battle. So I will call you
taktikos
. Yes, you are to be our Ainias Taktikos—the tactician.” Proxenos was pleased at that new title and was on to something. “Leave something behind of this skill. I have scrolls aplenty in that sack. So scribble down your thoughts. He who doesn’t write, dies. Leave a little behind at least of the mind of General Ainias Taktikos of Stymphalos and his skill that defeated the Spartans and kept the Arkadians free.” Proxenos then grew serious. As the good aristocrat, he was without much envy of the gifts in other men. He had taken stock of Nêto’s warning against crossing south of Isthmos, and he felt now, after the smell and bad air of Skopê, that his life rope had fewer strands here in the south where he should not be; and this oddly gave him relief rather than worry, despite his money and fame.

Why, Proxenos the Plataian wondered, had he once more ended up so far south, in a once familiar country, headed even farther southward? The rich like he who owned green fields on the Asopos had no business down here in the barren crags of the Peloponnesos. But then did the Spartans, men like Agesilaos or Lichas, have any reason to be in Messenia? How would Sparta ever let men live freely if the Proxenoi of the north counted their trees and talked in the
stoas
of the freedom of Pythagoras and yet did not put a spear under their chin, when ten myriads of helots were but a quarter moon away? At any rate, his legs became heavy and the ash and the blowing seeds of the dead grass on Skopê had clogged his nose and swelled his cheeks. He began to like the idea that he might not need to come back along this long road south when the war was at last over, as most wish to take a different road home than the long one out.

Proxenos then tried to talk his way out of his sluggishness. “I have heard your war talk, Ainias—how warfare has changed, and your rants that fighting is no longer battle between gaudy-crested spearmen on fair and level ground. No more spears and shields. As you say, it is a war to the death of all against all,
pantes pros pantas
with the slaves and poor and sieges and ambushes and betrayal. We for our part cannot win such a war without the helots of Messenia. Yet you have mastered this new hateful war. Write down how we are to survive, so that we Hellenes don’t relive all the mistakes again and again. You will be a writer of war, you Ainias Taktikos.”

With that, the two forgot their grand talk of tactics, scrolls, immortality, and all that and in no time had left the gloomy hillock of Skopê far behind them. Once they were distant, their spirits lifted for good. As they neared the new walls of Mantineia and crossed a stone bridge over the river, both looked up at the main gate that had been hung since the last visit of Proxenos. It was built of mountain oak wood, twenty feet high, with black iron on its borders. A massive beam hung to lock the doors at night. The gate was ringed by towers—each forty cubits and more above the plain, about every half stade on the walls.

Proxenos was counting. “Ten gates, one hundred twenty towers. Like nothing in Hellas, this city. Yet had I my way, my towers would have been round rather than square. A round one pleases the eye. It is harder to knock down, and the stones and iron of the enemy glance off it better. But it takes a builder with a keen eye, and a mason who knows something of art and beauty.” Mantineia was the largest city to have been built in Hellas in five hundred years and more. Unlike all other walled cities in Hellas, it had not been laid out around an acropolis in the hills or on the slopes, but spread out in a large oval on flat farmland, in a valley ringed by tall mountains. Proxenos’s proud citadel had no need of the high ground to survive, and there was not the bother of the long walk up to an acropolis. He had planned an entire city like the rich houses of the
aristoi
—with running water piped into the fountains, and with sewers beneath the floors and streets to carry out the waste—all to tower over the hovels of the Spartans. The men of Mantineia would find no help for their security from rocks and heights of nature, but instead their polis grew out of the mud of the valley. Yes, this new city of the Mantineians proclaimed to the Spartans: “We new men of Arkadia can build something in a season better than anything over a lifetime at Sparta—and we dare you, who need an acropolis, to take down our walls in the plain. Come, take them if you can.”

The stone work of the new Mantineia was unlike that of other poleis. It incorporated strange ideas of regular courses, a moat, and a grid of square city blocks inside with streets that made sharp right angles, with the names of the ways chiseled on the building corners. Its dressed stones had the cut of Boiotia with their trademark corner drafts, as if to proclaim also that Epaminondas was on his way and the Arkadians were more Boiotians than Peloponnesians. Proxenos thought that the order and symmetry of his Pythagoras would grow into the minds of these new dwellers. Men foul and low by birth were to be given a new city, and a new democracy, and then they would act with reserve and show taste like those born into the great houses of Boiotia, once their material surroundings uplifted their spirits.

Why were men poor? Because of accident or hurt, or was it rather due to their sloth—poor because they were no good by nature inside? Or drank the unmixed wine? Or stole, and killed and maimed when they should have been pruning the high olive trees? To find that answer Proxenos had followed Epaminondas down here in the first place. So would these freed Mantineians, and better yet, the helot Messenians next, turn away from superstitions of the Olympians to worship the deity Reason that had so ordered their own lives? Or would they loot in their new city as the serfs and helots they innately were, and prove the Spartans right that they were inferiors by nature and would make their new city as foul as they? A voice of the master answered in the head of Proxenos, “No, one day they will think as they live in their new grids. Square corners make square thoughts.”

A storm was blowing in from faraway Thrace. Winds and sleet headed down the pass to the Peloponnesos. The drenched hoplites ran under the arch, happy to be alive and off Skopê when the lightning hit. Mantineia was the first city of this new Peloponnesos where rank was gone, a
dêmokratia
that made Athens tame in comparison. Owning big orchards or bottomland wheat fields meant nothing. With the promised end of Sparta, bulwark of oligarchy, the idea of the polis of privileged property owners, alone fighting in the phalanx on behalf of the lesser community, was to be over. Instead, here in Mantineia the
dêmos
would tax the rich horsemen and the orchard growers to pay for the walls to protect the landless. The world of Hellas was to be upside down. The poorer the man was, the more qualified he was to run the polis. Squeeze the soft rich until their juices ran, and then go after the pulp as well—or so the new democrats of Mantineia bragged.

Many
plethra
of wheat fields were walled inside this strange city’s fortifications, and newly transplanted olives lined the streets. Wooden grape arbors with bare winter canes covered the city squares, as Proxenos’s walled Mantineia was to be both city and country. How could Agesilaos and his Spartan raiders ever starve out a town that grew its own food year-round inside its ramparts? The snake river Ophis had been diverted to run around the oval city’s foundation to serve as a great moat, dug thirty feet deep and lined with paving stones. But far below the foundations of the city, clay pipes brought the water into the fountains and cisterns and fed small ponds around which the city dwellers grew their own gardens, and that they stocked with fish and water fowl as well. In the previous wars, the Spartan army once had turned the river to flood towns in the valley and wash away their mud bricks. Now the waters were to be the bulwark, not betrayers of a far larger polis.