The End of Sparta (16 page)

Pelopidas came up and raised his spear, but he was checked by the hand of Epaminondas. Still, Pelopidas thought it better to kill this man now. Ainias nodded to him and grasped his hilt. Never again would such men as their own be together to get this close to the Spartan. If it was not done now, both sensed that this man would bring them and their own catastrophe upon catastrophe in the year ahead. But it was the softer Proxenos who already had his spear out. He was lowering it in the shadows for a groin stab, for a foul black mood had come over him as Lichas and his brood neared. He was a man of vast lands and black soil and halls with marble columns, while these lords of Sparta lived in hovels and knew not a plum from an apricot. Proxenos did not believe Nêto’s prophecies about a bad end across the Isthmos, but he did sense that one day he would march safer in the Peloponnesos without the evil of Lichas and his tribe.

Epaminondas stepped even closer, to within five palms’ width of the Spartan’s face. “You claim to be Lichas? You carried the dead king out. I apologize—for not killing you myself. But we had others of the royal blood today to deal with first. You yourself have lived too long, old man.”

Lichas blustered at that. “None of us ever explain what we do. We do all for Hellas—make her free. I keep the good on top to take care of the weak like you on the bottom. You only talk of making the bad equal to the good so that we all end up bad. Yes, what you cannot be, you would tear down. But we are the Hellenes, you its polis destroyers. Sparta is Hellas, Hellas Sparta, nothing more, nothing less.” Lichas spat out some of the dried goat meat he was gumming on. Then he continued, looking at Mêlon. “Is it to be more war? Or do my Spartans march out under truce? No difference to me. I killed ten of you today, and got back Spartan armor from the babe in diapers who thought he could wear it.” Then he laughed at all that and stepped a pace closer.

Mêlon hobbled up closer to the side of Ainias. In his own wounds, old and new, he looked as torn as Lichas himself; a knot on the side of his temple was as large as the egg of a hawk. Its blue sheen better reflected the torchlight. From the eyebrow to his jaw the side of his head was black with swabs of dirt and dried blood. Some cuts were wet and seeping, around the massive bruise to his face. His arms were bloody and his skin beneath his shoulders everywhere was torn like latticework. Every man, however small his stature and reasonable his nature, has his limits. Mêlon cared little whether he lived or slept for good, as he eyed the man who had killed his son. He had just woken from his trip to Hades, and did not find the change so much of a relief, this living without a son on his Helikon. Suddenly the fear of Lichas left him, and he quit scanning his enemy in worry about how to kill him. He knew he would kill the Spartan, and it mattered little whether it was here or next year in the south. Going to the house of the dead was a small coin to hand over—and would save the lives of others later on. This Lichas talked grandly of killing, but he had not killed either Mêlon or Chiôn. They had in turn sent most of his own to Hades.

Lichas first grunted as Mêlon came into his torchlight. “Hold up. I thought I killed you, yes, peasant boy of Helikon? So remind me. Did I hit you today? I am sure I killed you, cripple-leg. Is not this Mêlon, son of Malgis of the old women’s tales? I remember you, Thespian. You’re not the
mêlon
to fall, but the sheep to be slaughtered. I know our tongue and your
mêlon—mâlon
to me—means sheep, not apple. So bray for us.”

Mêlon laughed. Any small fear of the Spartan had vanished. Only hatred for the killer of his son remained. “Not yet, Lichas. You are old, only good for carrying away dead kings, not for protecting live ones. We meet again, not for the last time yet. The voices of Nêto’s seers ring in my head as well. This time you gave me an ear. Now give me back my helot Gorgos and my son he carried in.”

“Your Gorgos? You mean my Kuniskos? Our long-lost puppy? That creaky helot would not fetch more than an Athenian drachma or two on the auction block in Delos.” Unlike the other Spartans, Lichas had been a harmost and had traveled all over the Aegean. If he wished, he could talk more like an Athenian than any Boiotian. “But Gorgos was—is—mine again. I missed his service these long years. I needed my puppy’s little teeth. He could have had better things to do for me than prune vines for you and drink in his stupor. He wagged his way back home to me. Of his own will. Like any good little dog that has lost his master and, when at last he picks up the scent, comes yelping back to his kennel, with a crushed hare in his mouth, a gift for good will.”

Lichas went on. “The body that Gorgos lugged into our camp just now I keep safe in good faith—or what is left of him. Ah. I see now, he is your son. I thought until now it was you I had killed, you who had taken to riding horses with your bad leg that I gave you at Koroneia. I see that I have these years killed both the father and son of yours, Mêlon.” Lichas smiled as he saw the Boiotians edging toward him. “Men like us sire plenty of boys to fight and die—at least if they are to be good men at all. I have another son you saw today,
megas
Antikrates. He killed Boiotians, better even than Kleonymos. Neither of you can escape, not from him. My big son, this one, is a sort even we fear at Sparta. You’re already dead—so’s your general and that branded slave we cut down this day.” Lichas stayed fixed on Mêlon. “But, Mêlon, why was your young upstart on a black pony with armor not earned or worn well? One thing for your son to wear Lysander’s plate, another to fight like a Spartan—a lesson your dead father learned at Koroneia.”

Mêlon replied, “Lysander was a thief himself. Like all you Spartans who make nothing, but steal all from others. You neither farm nor build yourselves. You live in a city of wood, not stone. You have no money, no iron, nothing except what you steal. You are the true polis destroyers. Without your helots, you can’t tell an oar from a winnowing fan. If we bind you, Lichas, perhaps your folk will hand over my Lophis in exchange.”

Epaminondas now stepped up. “Go, Lichas, before Mêlon puts a spear in your face. It is written that with you goes the last Spartan who will ever walk under arms in Boiotia,” He saw the logic of letting the enemy regroup his army for the long march to come. “It is better this way, Lichas, to settle it down south in your courtyard anyway. Some day when there is new snow on Parnon and Taygetos, look for me when you least expect a winter horde from the north. On the banks of your Eurotas, we will meet you when its waters roar in winter.”

With that the parley broke up and the two sides went back to their lines. Left unsaid was that the Spartans before light would be given passage to the mountains, and that the body of Lophis would be returned. As the two Spartans lumbered away to their awaiting guard, Mêlon kept silent, knowing now that his Lophis would not rot among dogs and birds, and that Lichas would not live long in the south.

The trailing Lykos turned around before the shadows swallowed him and faced the Boiotian. Lichas had already disappeared into the night. “Bother us no more, cripple of Helikon. Your time is past, Chôlopous. The dreams of Pasiphai warned us that you would kill our king. So our king you have killed—the worse one. But we have another. The gods tell us that by tonight you have no more power over us.” Then Lykos, a peer of royal blood, gripped his sharp sword with his left and lowered his spear with his right, and backed off a few feet as he ended his lecture. For all his bristling, he was a Spartan man of his word, who did not break oaths or lie. “Gorgos leaves your son—or what is left of him—at the coast road tomorrow before night, with a hag at the seaside shrine. Lichas keeps his armor. It belonged to our big man Lysander. You keep the mess that was once your son. Lichas knocked him off his black horse. He was thinking it was you. Be proud, for he was a hard kill like your father, or so Lichas said. Four or five stabs and his eyes would not stay closed. And proud he was this day that he was the first of the Boiotians to die. He spat that in our faces when Gorgos laid him down. Lichas cut his throat to ease the pain of his spear wounds. Gorgos then turned to go home to Helikon, but we convinced him that he wanted to stay with us. And then he nodded he did.”

With that Mêlon fell silent as the five walked back to the phalanx of Thebans. Pelopidas in his melancholy quickly sent all the Boiotians on home who were sated with plundered armor and the coin pouches of the dead. Mêlon turned darkly to Epaminondas. “Not quite over. You and I will see this Lichas again, and it will not be in Boiotia.”

CHAPTER 11

Ripples of Leuktra

Epaminondas fell in with Pelopidas and the Sacred Band as they trotted off in silence under the moonlight on the road back to Thebes. It was full night and Mêlon was alone. Proxenos and Ainias went south in the darkness in the opposite direction toward Plataia, promising to visit Helikon within the year. Proxenos had sent word to his wife, Aretê, that both had survived the melee and would be home on the Asopos before the sun came up over Kithairon. Neither wanted any plunder and never liked the look of an army as it breaks apart. Both, as the new partners they had become, were plotting the rebuilding of Mantineia to the south and the greater citadel of the Arkadians at Megalopolis, the new democratic fetters that would hem Sparta for good inside the Peloponnesos.

The sound of Lakonian reed pipes filled the air. A clamor rose of moving wood and bronze. Mêlon did not look back. What was left of the Spartan army would before dawn march out with torches from Boiotia. A huge fire roared, consuming what dead they had managed to carry out and what Spartan corpses they had been given by the Thebans. Mêlon was stumbling about. The blow by Kleonymos had done more than close his eye, and after this long day he was nearly done for. He heard a high note and feared there was a daughter of night flapping in the air—or at least a shrill Kêr perched on a low limb of an oak, waiting for him to fall. But the sound was a better strain and from the living, not from Hades and not a Spartan reed, either. As it entered his ear, he recognized the familiar soft piping of a Thisbê song—the strain of safety and health that always brought him home. It was Nêto’s old tune to him, the sign to come down to the house from the vineyard. He followed the sweet sound of pipe back to the wagon.

Nêto and Myron met him with the ox and the wounded Chiôn in the cart behind. She put her reed
aulos
down and recoiled in fright at her master’s swollen head, now half blue and covered in blood and shiny in the torchlight. His eye was completely closed. Still, she soon had the two resting in straw. Sturdy Aias would pull all four back to Helikon. The ox was eager to reach once more the hay and quiet of the stalls even after the tall stand of green grass by the stream on the parched hills above Leuktra. There would be no shaking off this runaway Myron. He feared his master’s wrath and begged only to sleep one night in the shed of Mêlon and a chance to care for Chiôn.

As the wagon rumbled home, Nêto sang softly and reflected that she, Chiôn, and even Myron now would be manumitted and claimed as heroes of Thespiai, who had helped break the Spartans—in Myron’s case for merely following her around the wreckage of the battlefield. This night she concluded that the Myrons of the world always survive war and peace. They are not scroll-smart and can’t recite a line of Homer. But they stay immune from the vanities of ambition, always knowing their own station in life and the narrow limits between which they must live. Earned pity is their currency. Even the hardest man would be hard put to lay a hand on Myron. His smile they said was from stupidity, but if so, it gave him more power than any shield, and came from a craftiness that even the wise could not match. Gorgos surely couldn’t. Yes, in this war to free the serfs of the Peloponnesos, a Myron would survive a Proxenos or Alkidamas—as he all along had known he easily would.

She was stitching verses as was her wont, lines about the Spartan enemies in her midst—Lichas of the one ear and Sphodrias and Kleonymos who supped together in Hades with Klearchos and all the other Spartans that her heroes this day had killed. Her master Mêlon, always her master Mêlon at the van, side-by-side with Chiôn, sire of Lophis, all her men of the soil. She felt an anguish over the death of Lophis, and not only because she regretted that Mêlon had learned of it from other lips. If Nêto were to list all the ways Lophis had kept the Malgidai together, her tally, she feared, might be small. Likewise, she could not point to the tower roof or the oil press beam and say “Lophis made that.” But she knew that without him there was no young heart left on the farm, no laughing, no energy from youth, just the void of his loss, and the wounded and old, and perhaps the end of the farm as they knew it, if she could not rouse the three boys to become men by first frost.

Mêlon lay numb next to the bleeding Chiôn, who took most of the cart’s space. The slave murmured in his forced breath that his good right arm had already been pledged to avenge Lophis’s ghost. He tried to lie on his side to give his master the greater straw, mumbling in the evening, “No worry, no worry. Lichas dies next time. It is written. Gorgos with him, even if he hides in the mountains to the south. I will hunt him down—and string him up.”

Mêlon grumbled only, “If he fights next time like today, we’ll both be dead. I liked the wagon ride over here far better than the return.” Flat in the bloody straw, the heroes of Thespiai—the killers of Deinon, and Sphodrias and tall Kleonymos, and the king Kleombrotos as well—returned on their backs to Helikon from their day at Leuktra—and on into the myths of the Boiotians.

When Nêto finally drove the wagon up to the farm, it was still half a night before dawn, although the massif of Helikon blocked all light. She hailed Damô, wife of the dead Lophis. The farm woman had seen the torches of thousands plundering in the plain below but had not known whether they were Spartans coming her way or her own men soon to be rich from the loot of the Peloponnesos. Now Damô saw the wagon’s torch moving along the winding road up the low spurs of Helikon. So she was waiting in the courtyard. The three boys helped Myron carry the two wounded hoplites onto oak benches in the stone hall. “Xiphos.” Damô looked to Nêto. “The wretched horse of ours. He galloped in at dusk, and with blood on his flanks—without his bit or Lophis’s reins. Dried blood. I smelled our own. Saw the light on pyres to the south. I thought Lophis must lie on one.”

Her hair was torn, her face was gouged with grief—and her sorrow was made worse when she saw the proof in the limp arm of Chiôn and the swollen face of Mêlon—and no Lophis. No battle that had maimed the brute slave could have spared her husband. “These are the wages of your Pythagoras,” she hissed at Nêto and then let out a loud
uluh-uluh-uluh
before returning to human speech. “Why us on Helikon, why us? Where were the blowhards of the assembly? Is there a son of Epaminondas among the dead? Is there a boy of Pelopidas without an arm? Did the big talkers like Backwash lead the charge?”

Damô finally sat down on a small bark chair, muttering to the hound Porpax on his dung heap. “Even your Sturax is gone. Everything’s gone from this farm. Just as if the Earthshaker had knocked us to the ground.”

Nêto spoke quietly. “We all knew what we were doing. We should have no second thought. Today is a great moment for the Boiotians. Though a sad one for the Malgidai.”

Damô glared. “Try saying that when you’ve buried sons or a husband, but don’t you dare in your virgin purity. You, barren womb, and your childless Epaminondas get too many killed. Too many rot for your visions and high words. Leave me be—
parthenos
, no-child, no-husband, no-mind, busy-body. No, the nice like you get too many killed who do their bidding.”

Mêlon was half-awake. But when he tried to get up, he saw darkness and nearly fell over. Nêto—Nêto, he thought, would set things right, if Damô were to see her grief turn to madness. Then he saw no more of the torches of the courtyard. As he fell into the whirl, Mêlon also heard the voice of Malgis reminding him that in all great crises, but in matters of death especially, there are a few who come forward to do what no one should be asked to do: close the eyes of the dead, wash the corpses, and prepare the funeral for the departed. Then when their hard work is done in the worst moments of shock, they fade. They retreat into the shadows before the ensuing ritual and staged talk of weaker others that follow, when the public crying and group lamentation by a new, a lesser cast begins. Mêlon, as he went back into the dreams of sleep, knew it would be so with Nêto. She alone would keep the farm in the time after Lophis’s death when he and Chiôn lay in the netherworld spread out in the hall of the big house. Nêto, freed from the anchor of Eros, or the goads of money and of pride, would do the right, the necessary thing as she always had. So Mêlon fell back asleep muttering to her that the Spartans had told him that Lophis would be found on the sea road to the south.

Nêto prepared to go fetch Lophis, certain that the word of Lichas, at least as her master related it, was good and that her young master’s body was safe in some lean-to shrine. She unhitched the wagon and led Aias into the shed, where she soaked his back with a wet sponge and rubbed some olive oil into his wounds. She spent what little was left of the night taking off the armor of the two men, tending to the bandages and poultices of Chiôn, and putting oil and honey on the face of Mêlon. She even readied a stew of greens, beets, and wild cucumbers for the three boys to eat in the morning when they woke.

The three now had no father, only a crippled henchman in Chiôn. Gorgos was gone. There was not a hale man on the farm. Mêlon, the grandfather, was dazed and wounded—and already mumbling in vain about rising to harvest fifty baskets of red grapes before they rotted on the vine. The crops would not wait for Mêlon and Chiôn to heal. In a blink at Leuktra, the three sons of Lophis had gone from being boys to being farmers.

Care of the farm of the Malgidai now rested with Eudoros, Neander, and Historis, in the manner in which long ago a crippled Mêlon had inherited responsibility for the grape and olive crops from his dead father after Koroneia. If the three boys could scramble up the olive ladders, together hold the plow firmly behind the ox, and pack the grape baskets into the press, the family might keep the land; if not, even its coin box could not for long keep nature at bay, and soon Dirkê the neighbor would steal what she could at the first sign that there was not a man of the Malgidai with a long knife in his belt overseeing the orchard. The olives, the grapes, the wheat and barley, they all cared nothing for the health of the farm, but simply grew, ripened, and decayed in a natural cycle of oblivion without the human overseer to intervene to weed, fertilize, and harvest. Wound and illness matter nothing to a rotting olive or weedy field—or so the small orphaned boys of Lophis would learn this autumn after Leuktra.

The house slept the next day until the sun was high. Then finally Nêto took the boys out to pick strippings from the vineyards, the final red clusters of the dying year that they would put on the trays to dry into the sweetest raisins. When all else failed the household returned to what it knew best. But as dusk neared of this first day after Leuktra, Nêto took a rough wool blanket and some rope. She hid her jagged long knife in her tunic as well. No sleep, she shrugged, not a blink since the night before the battle, near the wagon on the hill with the long arms of Gorgos. At dusk then Nêto mounted the rested but lame Xiphos. His hoof was sore, but Nêto had filled its crack with lard and axle grease. They went slowly down the mountain and off to the east. Porpax, as best the dog could, followed her down the trail, in the direction of the stale scent of his Sturax, or maybe to find a hobbled deer on the lower folds of Kithairon. Damô would notice her absence not at all. For most of the next day the widow of Lophis would yell out to the shed below, “Nêto, come up here, my Nêtikon.”

But Nêto was far away, headed for the coastal road to Kreusis by the sea and its junction with the main Theban way along the sycamores and ash trees, on the spurs of Kithairon and the rough pass up and over to Aigosthena by the sea. There Lichas and the Spartans would have earlier turned south for the trek home to Lakedaimon along the cliffs above the gulf. They were hugging the mountain, along the goat path above the surf. The survivors of Leuktra had been marching since before sunup and already had left Boiotia via the shore.

Mêlon had said only to find Lophis on the “sea road.” Yet the trail along the gulf was long, and Nêto did not know exactly where it started and ended. The best way was just to head to the cliffs and surely she would intersect it. Almost as soon as Nêto found the pathway southward along the sea, she noticed even in this second night after the battle that the countryside was alive with Boiotians. Thousands of them in all directions were streaming back to their demes to the north. Most had packed up armor and spears, with carts full of wounded and dead, victims and heroes and gawkers to be sure, but brigands and throat-cutters as well. Some of those who appeared to Nêto to be the worst were fresh over the pass from Attika—Athenian rabble with the scent in their noses of booty and stories of unarmed Boiotian folk in the night countryside. Once the euphoria was gone, those waiting in the shadows came out to claim their due. Phokians, she could make out, too. These tribal kind, without cities and the ways of the polis, were riding and spearing stragglers still. They were after men with armor and coin—whether Boiotian or Spartan, it mattered little.

Nêto felt for her knife. She whistled for Porpax to come close. Then Nêto patted the neck of the tired Xiphos to prepare for a hard go should these foul riders turn to her. Some farmers had nooses around the necks of a few captive Peloponnesians, the allies that had run from the battle at the first crash and might be put to work or ransomed. She had some idea that it was the will of Epaminondas that these southern prisoners be spared. The ideal of the left wing, at least in the mind of Epaminondas, had been to leave the allies of both sides out of the fray—with good intent for the next act of the war. In the new Hellas of Epaminondas to come there would be no Hellene slave to any other, no ally to die for the hegemon.

But all that had been before the death of Lophis, and of Kalliphon, son of Alkidamas, and before the wounding of Chiôn. Nêto thought of these captives hardly as kindred souls. She thought to herself out here alone, “These Peloponnesians are like slaves after all. Now they are learning that every Hellene is always a day away from waking up a servant.” She trotted past one miserable fellow on the road. He was a tall southerner without sandals. The captive was led by a fleshy farmer from way up on Skourta who had noosed him around the neck. Nêto showed no pity to the Dorian, though the Peloponnesian captive asked for water that she had plenty of to spare. As she passed him by, she put out of her mind the thoughts of Pythagoras and again thought that slavery was not so bad for those who enslave others. “These lost Spartans are helots now. In their pride these invaders gave no thought to helots, to those who were always as they will be now. Herakleitos says ‘War, the father of us all, makes some free and others slaves.’ So it is for this captive—slavery for him, freedom for me.”