The End of Sparta: A Novel (5 page)

Let the Boiotians talk of the faker god Pythagoras, who preached that all men were equal to the worm or sparrow. Let them shout for Epaminondas and the new fantasy cities to rise in the Peloponnesos. Let them do all that and more. The Spartans had Lichas, Lichas of the old gods and the ways of the south, and that would be proved more than enough tomorrow.

But even now Lichas was not quite done. He then roused them with a final taunt, as he seemed to know all the Theban generals and why they had begged Mêlon to come down from Helikon. “So who of us kills the counterfeit Epaminondas? Who then kills the other general Pelopidas and with them their Theban plague of
dêmokratia
? Who sends this Thespian would-be savior, the broken-down farmer Mêlon who, the hag priestesses say, will kill us all, if he dares to show up—the so-called apple of women’s fables that kills our king. Who sends him to the houses of the dead?”

“Who? Who?”

“
Egô Lichas. Egô.
Not your Kleonymos. No, not my Antikrates. Not even sneaky Sphodrias here. No, I say it will be your Lichas. I am your Leônidas at Thermopylai reborn. The gods say no free man born of a free woman can kill me. Not tomorrow, not ever. You bet on others. I wager on Lichas—on myself. Sparta is as it was always before. We take the power we need and let others worry whether it’s fair. For all we care, these pigs are no better than Persians, and they will die as badly as well.” Then Lichas lumbered down. The other three followed him with a shout. The leaders of the
lochoi
rushed up to the wagon, pushing and shoving the crowd ahead to touch the old man. They wanted their Lichas as king—Lichas their man of hard oak, by his speech and zeal capturing the hearts of thousands that the green-stick king Kleombrotos had lost despite his birth.

As Lichas finished, back across the plain in the Thespian camp high across the creek bed, Mêlon and his slave Chiôn were almost finished digging their armor from the wagon, cursing at the frayed straps and patched clasps since they had not put the full bronze of Malgis on in more than seven summers—since the last spear crossing near Tegyra beneath Mt. Ptôon. Finally at late dusk the two began to make their way slowly toward Epaminondas. His tent was in the gully below.

Gorgos was left back alone with the ox. The helot slave was sitting on the ground against a wagon wheel, happy enough to be alive with Chiôn gone. In vain, he once more strained for even more Doric sounds from his godly poet Tyrtaios, as those sweet melodies wafted in from the Spartan campfires across the gully. The music of old brought dreams of his son Nabis, the beardless boy he had left as an orphan long ago in smoky Lakonia, when Malgis had captured him up here in pig land.

Gorgos had been more than a helot in the south. He had risen to leader of the helots in Messenia, renamed by his masters Kuniskos, or so he claimed to the slaves on Mêlon’s farm. In his youth he was freed by the house of Lichas for his battle courage and had once become known even as Lord Kuniskos—Lichas’s fixer, the eyes and ears of the Spartan ephor and hero. Gorgos now dreamed that after the victory of Lichas at Leuktra perhaps he would return to Lakonia and be known this time as Kuniskos the Terrible—no longer Gorgos the snake man. Once the two, side-by-side, had spear-charged the Thebans at the great battle at the Nemea River—only to have Gorgos fall stunned, brought down and dragged out by Malgis the Thespian, bound with a rope on his way to servitude on Helikon, land of the pigs. Gone forever from his beloved master Lichas. Now he was old and had ended up as no more than Gorgos the dung spreader, who for twenty and three winters had emptied the slop jars in the vineyard of Malgis.

With Chiôn gone, Gorgos was soon napping at the wagon amid the flies of Aias. As he dozed, he chuckled out loud, as he went deeply back into the old dreams of his highland hideout, on his beloved mountain of Spartan Taygetos, far to the south in the Peloponnesos, where he was once more Kuniskos meting out justice for his lost son Nabis. Now he was cooking in his own hut, and laughing in his slumber that Nêto, and Chiôn, and Mêlon had just walked into his house, his own house, where his dinner, quite a meal, was ready for them all. There on Taygetos, the slaves were masters, and masters were slaves—though not in the way that his fellow dreamer Mêlon had thought.

General Epaminondas

Mêlon was trying to pick up the soft sounds from the playing of Kopaic reeds as he and Chiôn neared the main tents of the Theban generals of Leuktra. The two were let inside by a few leather-clad sentries with felt caps, stoking the evening fires of Epaminondas.

At last here was the great Epaminondas. Their general, who would lead all the Boiotians tomorrow, did not look like much. Was this short fellow really the god who claimed he could chase a myriad of Spartans back home and turn Hellas into a single polis?

Epaminondas seemed to Mêlon dark and wiry, with shoulders almost too broad for his small frame. His beard was flecked with gray. Most of the head was without hair. But it was hard to tell since his scalp was leathery and dark from the wind and sun. Eyes, nose, mouth—they were all dark too, and blended in with beard and crusty face. He was neither old nor young, neither fair nor entirely foul—just burned and wrinkled. He was covered in something that looked more like hide or bark than real skin. No wonder, Mêlon thought, folk like this talk of freedom, and deathless souls and all the other code of the wild Pythagoras. Most ugly sorts on the wrong side of four decades usually do babble of god and the good they will do as their end nears—like the great rationalist Perikles himself, who wore an amulet around his neck and invited in the witches to chant in hopes that they might abate the boils and fevers from the great plague that ate his body away each hour.

The gear of this Iron Gut—
sidêroun splangchon
, his hoplites called Epaminondas—was cheap bronze, as dull as the panoply of Antikrates shone in the campfires across the way. The breastplate was cracked and dented. Cheap bronze patches were badly hammered on everywhere. Epaminondas wore no greaves. But he should have. His lower legs were scarred from ugly wounds. A tattered green cloak blew up over his shoulders. Mêlon’s eye fixed on his bare right spear arm. It was nearly as wide as Chiôn’s. A long scar went from his shoulder to his elbow. A worse
oulê
had reached his neck, right above the edge of his breastplate.

Mêlon looked for a general’s horsehair crest, a leader’s scarlet cloak, surely a gold sash of the usual Theban
stratêgos
. There was none—just an old round-topped Boiotian helmet and a cracked wooden shield without worn blazon. All those cuts and scars and he had still ended up a bald man with no money about to die fighting the Spartans. He was no peacock general. Or maybe one so marked by Ares that he more often suffered than gave blows in the mix-up. Whatever he believed in, he had believed in for a long time—and had fought for it, too. The nondescript, the poor and needy looking, these are far more dangerous revolutionaries than those with gold clasps and purple cloaks. Mêlon knew that, but he also sighed to Chiôn at his side, “Poor ugly Theban. He’s a walking wound. They must call him
ho traumatias
. And he is to lead us tomorrow?”

Five or six other
stratêgoi
of the Boiotian Confederation—the elected Boiotarchs of substance and repute—in new armor, were there to urge Epaminondas to start talking with King Kleombrotos. The generals chimed in that it was time to back out of the valley and beg Kleombrotos for peace. The army was outnumbered and out-positioned, the Boiotarchs protested. They offered talk and money as well to pay the Spartans to leave. The best of the Boiotarchs, Ladôn of seventy summers, who owned five hundred pomegranate trees near Anthedon on the coast and was too old to earn a fist for his slurs, threw his wadded-up cloak in the face of Epaminondas and spat out, “Blood will be on your hands, Pythagorean. I figure Lichas would gladly take in payment some cows and grain to leave. Then he might let us be until next year. Unlike you, he prefers to do business than kill us.”

Epaminondas ignored them. They all had white beards or big bellies, or wore purple cloaks or had hammered silver blazons to their shields, and so seemed to Epaminondas to think that their property mattered more than their honor. The generals were terrified that they would die en masse soon, given that they believed neither themselves nor any in the tent could stand up to the wall of Spartan shields and spears. And most liked the sun on their faces in the morning and were not about to give it up for the price of having Sparta ravage their grain each spring or some olive limbs in the fall, and install a few of their bothersome fixers on their
acropoleis
. Meanwhile the officers of the army looked only at their Epaminondas for a nod to fight or a sigh to go home. One look of hesitation, and seven thousand Boiotian hoplites would pack up their armor and head back to their fields. A fight broke out in back and knocked over two torches. Mêlon drew his curved knife—and wondered whether to unleash Chiôn, who cared little how many trees or years Ladôn claimed.

It now was almost dark, and the meeting was still little more than shouts and shoves. The Thebans of the Sacred Band, the three hundred elite hoplites who followed their general Pelopidas, were again playing their flutes in disdain, mocking the wavering generals and throwing the brawlers out into the latrine. Now they quietly put them away on the smile of Epaminondas. Mêlon saw again the blazon on the general’s shield propped up on a wooden stand, and could now make out that it was a crude picture of Orpheus—as if this Pythagorean would descend, like the flute player of myth, into the Hades of the Peloponnesos to bring the helots down south out of their serfdom, and thereby ensure their liberators that their souls, suddenly eternal, would be even happier in the hereafter once freed from their brief-lived bodies. Pelopidas and the rest of the Sacred Band, one hundred fifty pairs of warriors in green capes, had now ringed the camp. The uneasy crowd was mostly made up of the lesser officers of the
merê
from the outlying villages, the boroughs far from Thebes. Mêlon looked in vain for his son Lophis in the tent. But at least he heard horses outside, perhaps on the far hill, where the cavalry and his boy were camping. He noticed the snake eyes of Epaminondas watching to spot a shaking knee or a stained cloak of the trembling among his officers. Find that, Mêlon knew, and then get that man out, before his look swept over the entire group.

Ainias the Stymphalian had enough of the noise and shoves and he shouted above the crowd with a mere point to Mêlon, “He’s here, here from Helikon.” Ainias was an Arkadian mercenary, born by the gloomy lake at Stymphalos, with rumors of slaughter and gore to his name from the south below the Isthmos. He had earlier left word for the command to watch for “the hoplite Mêlon of Thespiai, of prophecy fame.” It was he who had sent his newfound friend Proxenos out to the high ground to look for wagons from Helikon. At least some were relieved at Mêlon’s sudden appearance. Ainias paid heed to the seers who had promised victory should an “apple,” a
mêlon
, join the army, and he knew that was the only way to win back the ranks for war. Even the generals now quieted when they noted the arrival of two such killers from Thespiai for the front line, old as one seemed to be, and even though the other brute was a branded slave.

Mêlon was pushed into the center of the crowd. Retainers stepped aside in deference to the son of Malgis. They knew he had fought at the Nemea, and the same year at Koroneia, and then later at Tegyra—and, in fact, in all the battles of the last thirty summers, after he went out with Malgis at his first battle at Haliartos and beat the Spartans back. In the three-sided open tent were another twenty officers of the provinces, crowded together in a closed circle around the general. As Chiôn strode in with Mêlon, no Boiotian wished to ask of his business. Most knew of this slave from Chios. They remembered that a few years earlier Chiôn had bashed Spartan skulls at Tegyra as he left the baggage train and joined in the pursuit. His branded face and bull’s neck won him offers of seats, even from men of Anthedon under the rich Boiotarch Ladôn. He said that he was here at Leuktra for his master. But who knew—maybe also for their own farms as well, or even to restore the name of disgraced Thespiai, since he planned to kill a Spartan king and walk over the corpses of the royal guard to get to him—Lichas’s most of all.

This was at last his moment. Chiôn, the “Chian” who never knew the island of Chios of his birth; Chiôn the “snowy white one” who had no affinity with the whiter Thrakians; Chiôn the slave who hated the slaves he knew far more than he did any free man. Chiôn was of nothing to anyone, nor anyone to him—except in battle, where his killing of the Spartans, or so he thought, would do far more for Hellas than any philosopher Alkidamas or Platôn.

Epaminondas moved over to a small bench, sipping some light barley and pork soup out of a black clay bowl with a long handle. He looked back over at the
misanthrôpos
Mêlon. He had never met the hoplite, but he sensed a kindred outsider who likewise had earned the distrust of the mob. Both perhaps would know each other by creed and need no formal greeting. Epaminondas rose in silence and laid an arm on Mêlon’s shoulder. He sat him down gently. Then the general began to laugh as if all these bad things had in fact turned out as he wished—as if he enjoyed the ruckus and the brawling over his plans.

“Kleombrotos has come in from Kreusis by the sea—not where I thought by Chaironeia beneath Helikon. Now I reckon only seven thousand of our Boiotians bar his way from the agora of Thebes itself. They will have us as well for their relish.” Epaminondas paced in tiny circles, and pointed to a few stools at the front of the crowd. “Sit down in front of us over here, Mêlon of Helikon. The seers cry out that you, the lame one from Helikon, will not lose this battle. Yes, he—you—will cut down a Spartan king. Or so the mouths of the gods quietly sing in prophecy. Your name alone is worth a thousand hoplites. Most came here to join my army for you—not me—convinced a king would fall if you fight in the ranks beside them. But I knew you would come even without the prophecy, you alone of the Thespians, because you are the son of Malgis, the greatest hoplite that we Boiotians have yet put on the field of battle. You had no choice, you are of the Malgidai, and I wager you will prove tomorrow as good as or better than your father whom we knew well.”