The End of Sparta: A Novel (9 page)

“Well enough,” and the three young longhairs at his side assented. Mêlon knew none of them. But he grabbed his son’s lance to test its balance. As Lophis watched his father jab with the huge shaft, he was reminded that none of us knows the whole past of even those we see each day. But arise a chance moment, a move, a word, perhaps just a gaze, and a keyhole opens to a hidden, larger life on the other side. It both frightens and excites us to see that one so dear to us has another, an unknown, perhaps a deadly side.

Lophis watched Mêlon take up his clumsy lance as if it were a light spear. As he stabbed about, even Lophis cowered a bit. His father’s round shield was larger than most, closer to four than three feet in width, with stains of Spartan blood and brains soaked deep within its grain. The breastplate was one of Malgis’s and had patches of tin and bronze and layers of paint that hid cracks and dents. Bora, his spear on the ground, had notches at its head, thirty and more, to mark all the Spartans who had fallen from it at the hands of Malgis and Mêlon. His father, Lophis could see now, handled a cornel spear as if it were not much more than a pruning hook.

Lophis then felt even smaller as he tried to stop his father’s shadow jousting. “Epaminondas has told us that he has about three hundred of the horsemen of Boiotia. We will hit the Spartans first. We will give you hoplites some summer dust for your surprise. No doubt Sparta will send its horse first out as well. We’ll have a real mix-up for all of you to see. The Spartans are not mounted folk. We will kill them for sport. All can watch. They will have no warning that you with fifty shields are on the left about to cut down their king.”

“If only it were so plumb and square,” his father replied, unsure what would happen when his son learned that battle was an awful thing, a
deinon
, nothing like the stabbing and romantic spearing of the stone Amazons and Lapiths far above on the friezes and pediments of the high temples. Still, it was good that young men like Lophis talked so—without fear and ready to go to blows for a bad look or less. Stout hoplites and daring horsemen were needed to face the Spartans. Who would otherwise if they knew such killers firsthand? Without the innocent Lophises of the world no one would fight for anything—but instead would count the risk, the gain and loss, worried more about the coins in the strongbox that might not be spent if he were gutted in the fields of Boiotia. Lophis had never seen the Spartans in battle, had only as a boy watched them cross Helikon to Koroneia from the mountain vineyard. He had never been in a melee with thousands of longhairs bearing down on him. When he got his down beard, he had stayed put during the killing at Tegyra to guard the farm while Mêlon took along Gorgos and Chiôn to the battle. He had been left behind to watch in case the Spartans sidestepped the patrols and raided the mountain. Now he resented that he had been the one son, the only son, to be saved at all costs—and thus had been deprived of just those ordeals that make fathers proud of their boys. Men with brothers have more freedom, since fathers know that a death in battle does not kill the entire line.

Still, Mêlon was trying to show his pride in Lophis when all the other mounted rich men of Thespiai either had hidden or had gone over to the Spartans. “Perhaps, Lophis, it will be as easy as you say, since you and Nêto first taught me of the thinking of Epaminondas. But we left orders for your wife Damô all the same to prepare for the worst, should we fall. Nêto came here to Leuktra as well. But after her oracle-mongering is done, she is to go home to guard the farm with our Sturax. They are supposed to go up into the tower and bar the door. The only Spartans who will reach Helikon are a bone or two of them that we bring back for the dogs.”

Mêlon was surprised at his own confidence. But he was feeling better with this plan of fifty shields, left wing, and attack at the slant—except for a final thought as he looked over his son. “One last thing, Lophis. Trade breastplates. Trade now. Mine is the heavier. Its flared bottom stops the downward jabs. You won’t mind its heavier weight on Xiphos. It is dull and patched, but it can turn any blade made by the Spartans and covers the shoulders far better. Let me wear my father’s gaudy inlaid plate. On you I fear it will be the magnet stone for any who think they can kill one of the Malgidai. It’s bright with too much gold inlay. Remember Malgis stole it at the battle near Haliartos. It is Spartan and foul. He should never have brought it home, though the metal is worth five hundred olive trees if not more. Did I tell you that the plate was once worn by the demon Lysander? Lichas and his folk miss it dearly. All that will only make you a bigger target, when the sun soon breaks through and the shine draws Spartan eyes to your chest.”

Lophis laughed. “Wars are not won by worries, old man, you know that better than I. The bigger the target, the better, Father! I will ride right into their ranks. I will break them like Malgis did. Those around Kleombrotos will fear these men that wear without shame the armor of their dear Lysander.” With that final exchange, Lophis climbed on Xiphos, tipped the end of his spear to his father, and galloped down the hill to battle. He was a man with everything to lose. Damô, his wife, was known on Helikon as Helen for her beauty. He had three boys and would inherit the finest farm in Boiotia. And he rode off to be among the first of the Boiotians to collide with the Spartans—galloping to ensure he was at the fore of the cavalry attack. Mêlon turned to Chiôn and sighed. “My dull plate would save him. His shine may well kill him. He is brave—but I fear that it is the bravery of the noble ignorant. My boy forgot that Malgis never broke the Spartans at all. I wish he were here beside me in the ranks, between my right arm and your left. No Spartan, not even Lichas there, could touch my son. And I wish I had never heard the name Leuktra.”

Chiôn said nothing. He assumed that he would kill enough Spartans on their right wing himself to keep both his masters safe, even if Lophis were mounted and in front of the phalanx. As Lophis disappeared, the two lay down beneath a mountain oak and soon were asleep for the few hours left before the sunrise draw-up of the phalanx. Chiôn and Mêlon, as if by consent, were alike dreaming of the farm back on Helikon. Both were pruning and talking in these dreams before battle—as if they would soon have no more chance to meet again in this life.

Where was this high farm of Mêlon and Chiôn that drew them home in their last sleep before battle? Mêlon’s ground was not far from Leuktra, high up the eastern side of the massif of Mt. Helikon, two stadia above the floor of the valley. The farm was right below the hard frost line, at an elevation at which olives can thrive. It was a good, safe place to grow things, to keep away from the Thespians and all the other Boiotian villagers below—mostly hidden as it was from the invaders from the north or south, and too hard a hike up for the raiders on the coast. The slopes of Helikon itself were a divine place, the center of Hellas—a place where the Muses could speak directly to a man. Helikon was south and to the east a little of snowy Mt. Parnassos. Along these mountains the clouds piled up to hide Apollo when he visited his oracle Pythia beneath at Delphi, navel of the world.

For his part this night at Leuktra, Chiôn could see the land almost as if he were floating above it, like Ikaros with waxen wings. From the farm it was an easy gaze at the mountain passes of Parnon to Attika and Athens. To the south were the high woody crests of ill-omened Mt. Kithairon, on whose backside the Spartans this morning, if they lost, were going to sneak away along the cliffs above the sea. Farther in the distance rose peaks of Pentelikos and Akonthion, the ridges that kept out of Boiotia the bad Athenians, the false democrats whom the Boiotians hated more than any of the Hellenes. Chiôn for his part could see craggy Ptôon and the green island of Euboia lying far off into the west. The farm of Mêlon was right above the great plain of Boiotia—“cow-land,” those arrogant Athenians called it. Few went up to Helikon. Even fewer on Helikon wished to go down.

Over fifty crops before this morning’s battle, the founder Malgis, father of Mêlon, had staked out his plot on Helikon. He cleared virgin ground from the mountain. Hyacinth, amaryllis, and wild Attic orchids followed. Once the sun hit the land shorn of thousands of strawberry trees, dense beech, and poplar copses, tulips sprouted. “I did it,” the hoplite Malgis used to yell to the skies. When he patched broken tiles on the farm’s high tower roof, he could take in the view of his thirty years’ worth of work. “All this—it came off of my back, with help from the prophets of the One God, all led by Pythagoras who set me right on my course.” Farming, Malgis the founder said, was a lot like war. It needed the same order and discipline if you were to survive it. He came to worship Pythagoras, the god of order and reason, rather than the overgrown child-gods on Olympos. All they wanted were libations and burnt offerings, just like babies in diapers who cry when the teat slips out of their mouth.

Mêlon had been told all this by Malgis, his father, and how the old man had once planned their farm on the number principles of his god, who explained how the perfect world beyond is revealed to us through the eternal laws of the
arithmoi
. On a rocky expanse of about a hundred
plethra
, the farm’s 720 olive trees and 5,040 vines spread across the terraced ground in a careful grid. He had dug in all the cuttings and rootings himself. The holes of the pattern he marked out with chalked rope. The farm spread all the way up the slope—terraced grain fields on the rich black soil, the wine vines higher up to catch the cooler breezes, olives on the poor rocky soils atop, each crop suited for each step higher up the mountain, no soil idle, no change in temperature or wind wasted. The harvests were serial, as the clan moved through the year from grain to vines to olives—the Malgidai busy always, slack in their labor never. No ice storm could kill their triad, as the harvests of the diverse crops and their leaf-break dates were never the same. A spring frost hurt the grapes, but not the barley—in the way a fall rain cracked open the grapes, but did nothing to the unripe olives. And the farm was the goddess Amalthea’s horn of plenty, as Malgis called it: olive oil for the light in the clan’s lamps and for cooking on the stoves, or even to lubricate the wagon’s axle; grapes for raisins all winter, for fresh fruit in summer, for wine all year round; barley and wheat for their bread and gruel. Who needed anything more? Only war could stop the farm—by sending in Spartans to burn their wheat or trample their vines, or, worse yet, letting the foul Kêres harvest the farm’s harvesters.

Walk into the orchards and vineyards anywhere on the slope, and the symmetry brought forth the voice of Pythagoras. On the farms of others, chaos reigned as three vines encircled a crooked row of four olives, or goat pens were plopped down amid apples. No order in the farms of others—and no reminders of the perfect world that we all must strive to glimpse and at some point enter. Malgis, the creator, told his son that in matters of great things, such as this carving out of an entire estate from the flank of Helikon, men tend to look only at the finish. The envious never remember the hard beginning or even the worse middle of doubt and remorse. Instead, without shame onlookers come to covet what they used to mock. “I can see them below from here, and that’s close enough for me. Soon the Spartans will turn on them, and they will climb up here looking for our spear arms.” Malgis taught the household to distrust the superstitious majority and to join it only when it acted in according to the precepts of Pythagoras—in other words, rarely at all. Even though the son Mêlon doubted that creed, he kept to his father’s admonitions to shun the crowd and keep it away—and earned both the advantages from the ensuing tranquility of solitude and the dark moods that resulted from thoughts and suppositions untested and unquestioned that grow unchecked by others.

Freedom—Malgis added in his daily sermons to his son Mêlon—wars with equality. Always. The fathers of the polis had once marked out the grid of bottomland farms. Originally they were all equally sized and portioned out to the hoplite farmer citizens of equal wealth. Within a generation those belonging to the luckier, or better, farmers were larger, while some of the poorer or unfortunate farmers lost their portions altogether. Mêlon still dreamed on this early morning before Leuktra that his father had warned him of those who demand equal slots in both the end and the beginning: Beware of the phalanx, the agrarian grid, and the assembly hall, where all are declared to be equal who in fact are not. So beware of those in the phalanx who look equal but do not protect their position as do others. They can kill you.

The farm craft of Malgis gave the vines’ canes, high up and long in the air, the full sun for the entire day. That was why his grapes made the sweetest wine on Helikon. Malgis got the idea of the arbors from a farmer outside Syracuse he met who read and wrote block letters on long scrolls. “The sun makes the grapes, and the grapes the wine,” this Sikilian Lysis told Malgis. He showed him charts and graphs, and when he returned home to Thespiai, Malgis translated all those lines and letters into
plethra
of arbors and pergolas, roofed with grape canes twenty feet long and more. But then Lysis also had lectured on the right dirt, the perfect elevation, the type of water, and so Malgis thought it wasn’t just the arbors that made his vintage. Good wine needed sparse soil. Grapes liked just a little water. Crisp mornings were good for color. A cold nip at night gave taste, as did the hot sun on the leaves of the vine. Vineyards would be planted above the wheat and below the olives.

The Malgidai themselves produced the bounty, not just prayers to Dionysos or cries of the Bakkhai that the ignorant shout who are without the reason of Pythagoras. When a man fails in body or soul or wisdom, he always prays to the Olympians. Or so as Mêlon kept dreaming before battle he remembered all that Malgis once had said. For fifty and more harvests before Leuktra, the Malgidai rarely came off Helikon except to fight for the Boiotians. They had enough coins and enough grapes, wheat, and oil to need none of those below—and no more desire to die in the phalanx of the Boiotians on the doomed left wing in the battles against the Spartans. So they were a confident bunch, and came to forget that the wages of
hubris
are
nemesis
.