The End of Sparta (53 page)

Once the band reached the Delphians’ harbor at Kirrha and could look up the Gorge of the Pleistos and far to the right at the shadows of the peaks of Arkadia across the water, the four finally took leave of their hostage Melissos. As arranged, the youth would go back on board the Messenian ship—
Eleutheria
—to sail out of the gulf. It would row up the coast on the west side of Hellas to Epiros. The crew, after dropping their marble at Kirrha, had planned to continue north past Akarnania to fetch more Messenians who were eager to reach their liberated homeland. None of these Messenian seamen seemed to mind taking the boy along for ballast, especially as Mêlon flipped them four silver owls for their trouble.

At the docks, Alkidamas first saw a fat man grab the silver from his steward—and with his one hand, no less—even as he called back from across the boarding plank. “Old man. I thought you’d be dead now, you, my partner, and your Spartan-killers.” It was Gastêr. Gastêr who never aged, and never worried, and cared not a whit whether you were Athenian or spoke Doric, won or sat out the great war, if only you had four-piece silver owls from Athens in your palm. Yes, Gastêr was here, the anti-Epaminondas. “I’m afraid I sold our
Theôris
to the Messenians, Alkidamas. Or at least sort of. Why, that cutthroat Nikôn and his council, they gave me this merchant boat instead. I got marble and ferrying business with it to boot. Not a bad trade. Some shiny coins came with the ship swap. Those helots of yours learned to row and stayed with me on this boat too, better sailors than they proved wise men. So we meet again. I took the risk. You don’t want a cut out of my
Eleutheria
, though the
rhêtôrs
might argue it came from your money to begin with. I have proof of sale. Here, take it.”

Alkidamas took the rumpled tiny papyrus and gave it to Mêlon without thinking to throw it away. “Fine, fat man. No need of proof. You beat those Korinthians out to the gulf, and we all got to Messenê as bargained for. As for your trade for the
Theôris
—well, there’s money to be made even in Messenia, it seems. Take it as the spoils of war.”

“I already have,” announced Gastêr as he waved for their passenger to board his deck. Alkidamas then escorted the Makedonian to the quay and laughed. “You remind me of clever Kuniskos, Melissos, if you don’t mind me saying. Now that you’re both gone, as it were. Like him, you were not like you seemed—with your rickety thin bones and bad eyes. Or maybe you’re a Gastêr, as smart as you are ugly, who can tiptoe on a rolling deck with one arm and a pot belly. Yet I think you see better than the rest of us who don’t squint so. Tell the kings of Makedon that Alkidamas took good care of you, as you did him.”

The four gave their ward a final good-bye. Melissos walked on board, just as Ainias called out across the gangway. He had thought he disliked this half-Hellene and had not believed in his eye blurs or even his stutter, but instead had studied his airs and darting eyes. Now he was not so sure, and he wanted others to see the boy’s true insides here at the end, since they were more good than bad. Indeed, Ainias would not slit the Makedonian’s gullet, even if the voices in his head warned him that thousands of Hellenes not born would live if only this buzzing bee from the north were swatted right here before he ever began.

Ainias grabbed his sword. “Not so fast up on your hind legs, our little Makedonian upstart. One last order. It won’t require you to carry our shields any longer. Just tell me a final thing, down-beard northerner. What exactly did you learn from your year with our Alkidamas, and with us as well?” A wind came up, so Ainias yelled out even louder to the departing ship. “So hostage boy, give me something that I can tell our general on his return. You claim to be half-blind, but like no-eyes Oidipous you see more than the seeing can.”

Melissos sensed that Ainias meant him more good than bad. On the final walk along the gulf he had been going over just such questions and how to answer them when his father King Amyntas at home pressed him for wisdom—and for the walls and passes and armies of the Hellenes they would soon conquer in the south. He was safe, and even Ainias would not kill him now. The boy thought that he wanted to say that they were all second-thoughters like Mêlon, who would hesitate to strike the first, or maybe even the second, blow—dreamers who thought we had souls and so died for something other than loot and fame; makers of grand walls and bronze armor, but without the sense to put them to proper use. But that was not at all what came out from the departing Melissos, not at all.

Melissos turned to Ainias and spoke no longer in the role of hostage servant of Alkidamas and Mêlon, but as the future king of a warrior tribe who was coming of age. Melissos stared at the Arkadian. “I figured out many things, Taktikos, as you will soon fancy yourself as you write down your exploits for the rest of us. Of your democracy, it is not so silly as I thought—even if the dirtiest and loudest like Backwash shout down their betters. There are, I learned, lords like poor Nikôn and Nêto and cowards like well-born Antikrates. How would we know that if birth trumped merit? Any of those who whined in the hall of the Thebans we would have strung up, and yet they fight for something far better than my father’s wage, though he would have kicked them into the barns for their braying.”

They laughed at that boy’s high talk. Then even Ainias stopped, for he saw that this new Melissos was no fool, and was no longer what he had been before the great march. He went on with the airs of the Makedonian prince that he was again: “Was there some gold or a secret shipment of slaves in the bargain for you? I think not, though I was once convinced that there must be cartloads. Instead, I think here of Proxenos and your Chiôn and lame-footed Nêto and all the wild men like Nikôn and the rest who rot, who taught me, their slave, that I was as good as they with no idea that I was supposed to have been born far better than them all. I too in Lakonia and in the hut on Taygetos would have died for the dream of all them, and for crippled Nêto and my crippled master Mêlon, who taught me that I was the real cripple, after all.”

The four were struck dumb as Melissos went on. “I will also tell my father that we too will fight deep in the phalanx like you smarter Thebans. Very soon we will carry spears longer even than yours,
sarissas
we know them as. We will kill from five ranks in, not your three. We are tough, foul folk as you know, who worry only about killing in the north—not dying. Yes, I fear my Makedonians will be far better killers than you in your phalanxes. All that is written as the sun will set tonight in the west.”

Now Melissos was shouting as the wind came up. Then, as the
Eleutheria
left the pier and floated out from its mooring, Melissos ended. “A last warning, my friends: I fear you have no more Chiôns that I can see. No more giants of the soil to come, men like Mêlon and Ainias. When I come back down here as king, as I must, I will honor you all even as I must end you all.”

Then even as his voice was carried off by the wind, the youth yelled to the clouds a last time. “Oh, and you will know me next time I come back, but not I fear by your dear Melissos the Honeybee. For you see, I was and am Philippos, the lover of horses of the royal House of Pella. Yes, I am the son of Amyntas and the royal Eurydikê, the future King Philippos of all of Makedon and all of Hellas to come and Persia perhaps as well—I who carried your baggage and would do it if I could ten times and more again.”

CHAPTER 36

The Restoration

With that the teary-eyed boy was gone, although none on the pier could quite fathom the last boasts of Melissos that were lost on the gusts—something about a Philippos and kings and Persia but just a few words without sense. Mêlon would remember only that the last time they saw Melissos he was waving, the one arm of Gastêr still around his shoulder. Gastêr, no doubt, had not liked the end of his speech, but at least he was buoyed by the boy’s spirit and saw money ahead for both. As for this Melissos-Philippos, he really was seen again in the south and in about thirty seasons thence, when the grandsons of Mêlon and the men of Thespiai would fall before his phalanx of
sarissas
and Philippos’s eighteen-year-old son to be born, Alexandros,
ho Megas Alexandros
. The dream of Epaminondas would end in the narrow valley of Chaironeia, not more than a day’s walk from where they all stood, where a balding Philippos would build a great lion monument to the Thebans he had killed. There would lie the better men of the polis, the sort that decades earlier in Boiotia the hostage prince wished to become—and might have become, had he only stayed longer as Melissos at the side of Mêlon and Epaminondas.

Ainias and Ephoros were happy enough to see the odd northern boy leave, and on the ship of Gastêr, no less—though he had been handy on the road and had carried far more than they had thought he would from the look of his small arms. Mêlon told them, “He proved at the end as good as any of us, a mirror as he hinted that we too went from bad to good once we set foot at holy Leuktra and then crossed the Isthmos. The next big war, mark my words, will come from his Makedonians and by land from the north. I miss him already—though I should not, since we may have trained a cub that will return a lion. Still, with Nêto gone, and Lophis and Chiôn dead, there is not much left. And without the Spartans I wonder whether our children can stop anyone as the old ones once routed Xerxes and his Medes.”

Alkidamas turned to them and looked over at Mêlon. “Are we ready for our climb up to the sanctuary? Don’t worry about our Melissos or whatever his name was or shall be. I too believe that he may not quite be a killer, although he proved to be a killer enough still. We did our best to tame him so he wouldn’t learn just our warcraft but also the rule of law, our
nomoi
, as well and the voice of Pythagoras, which I think I heard in him beneath his strange speech. What he does with that knowledge rests on his soul, not ours. The One God sorts it all out in the end. Enough; each man fights the battles of his own day. Ours are mostly over, and his will begin soon.” The four laughed at that and spent their second day out from Naupaktos ascending through the valley of the orchards to Parnassos. They walked in shade up the hills amid the olive groves of the men of Amphissa, who waved at them from the tall pruning ladders as word had gone ahead that the slayers of the Spartans this day were climbing to Delphi.

At last they rested beneath the shiny Phaidriades cliffs, not far from the ravine at the spring of Kastalia, happy to spend their last night together in the nearby tavern beneath the upper sanctuary of Apollo. In the morning the four headed down the Boiotian road with an escort of Phokians who were eager to hear of the victories in the south as the wage of their escort—and who pressed them for news of booty and more to be had. Rumors had already reached them that the army of Epaminondas would come up from the Isthmos in a new moon with wagons of Spartan plunder and gold from the Messenians. Ephoros and Alkidamas were to go on to Athens. Ainias would accompany the two as far as the shadows of Kithairon and take the fork off to Plataia and the farm of Proxenos. So Mêlon would be the first to part in the evening at Helikon, whose looming silhouette brooded on their right. Finally at dusk the four came to the crossroad that led on to Askra and Thespiai. The wheat of the upper fields was about milk ripe, not quite in full ear—just as Epaminondas had promised the previous winter when he assured the men they would be home from Ithômê for high harvest in Boiotia. The other three said little at their parting, for Ainias wished to see Aretê of the yellow hair, the widow of Proxenos, by nightfall. He had at last bathed as promised in the icy Mornos above Naupaktos, and then shaved at the inn below Parnassos. Each in Boiotia and beyond would now talk up the virtues of Epaminondas and ready the countryside for his return.

Ainias knew that he always would be a mere day’s walk from the farm of Malgis and that he and Mêlon were yoked as the twin oxen team who, for all their grunts, would still once more, side-by-side, willingly pull the hard plow of Epaminondas. Ephoros and Alkidamas were anxious as well to get to Thebes by dark. Ephoros had to meet two Athenian scribes and was ready to dictate from his dirty scrolls all that he could remember and all that Alkidamas could relate of the great march to the south. He was soiled with mud on his chiton and his cloak was thick with burrs. The writer wanted a long bath to wash and pleat his hair and get the road stink off before he took a carriage over Kithairon to his salon at Athens, the lone brave voice to take on Platôn and his friends on behalf of Epaminondas. The great adventure that had begun so long ago with a marching into the spears of Kleombrotos at Leuktra ended quietly in the spring sunshine a few stadia away. Alkidamas told the Thespian, “I wish you would come to Athens to hear my speech on the liberation of the Messenians. I could use a strong arm since I have no friends at Athens and I hear a number of enemies would like this head off its shoulders. Their democracy is much more of a free-for-all than anything at our Thebes.”

“No, not Athens,” Mêlon laughed, “I would rather go back to Sparta than that. So good-bye to you three and farewell. I will see you at our trial. Don’t listen to the signs of your doom this year, Alkidama. I wager you will die in your sleep in your eighth decade.” Mêlon slowly made his way up the winding road to the flanks of Helikon. He was alone, just as he had begun on that cold day five months earlier when he had made the long detour to the monument of Epaminondas on his way to the great debate at Thebes. And Nêto? He had left her somewhere at Ithômê, lost in the forests above the schoolhouse of Erinna. He should have stayed, even if he had sensed that she could see him through the glens and glades and would not come out and not come home.

He recoiled at the thought of the disorder of the farm. Would it be worse than the mess that he left when he had loitered in town with Phrynê? Of course, it must. After his half-year of neglect, there would be chaos—the weeds choking the fields, mud clogging the great drain. Perhaps the stones of Chiôn’s walls fallen to the ground. The worst of it? There would not be even a one-armed Chiôn to make right what would take other lesser men years to finish. The three boys of his dead Lophis had only the half-wit Myron to guide them. Damô was twice-widowed now with a young son. She would be locked in the tower as before, now with two husbands to mourn—and, with her young Chiônikos, now four children to raise. The tower’s roof probably leaked and its whiteness had probably long since peeled off. In her frenzy, Damô would blurt out the cold voice of reason: Why die for helots far to the south? Still, Mêlon remembered that there was at least no more Dirkê. No more Thrattos or Medios, or Hippias or maybe others like Hipponichos, who had coveted the farm of the Malgidai or even plotted it harm. The final rage from the outlaw Chiôn had settled those accounts. He had played Zeus on Olympos—as Mêlon had feared both Chiôn and Gorgos might have if they had been freed—meting out final justice to any of those he thought had lived far too long.

Mêlon felt how hard the great ideas of Epaminondas, noble as they were, had fallen on the household of Malgis. He wondered what he would do as he aged, with the bad leg and without the arms of Chiôn, or even the bitter obedience of Gorgos—and with the pipe-playing of his Nêto a distant memory. A wretched farmer without son or a wife finally grows decrepit by the tiny fire and alone ends in hunger on the floor, without the energy to fetch even a light twig for the last flame. Mêlon half-expected to meet around the next turn of the road the Spartan Antikrates in his armor and tall crest to take a life for the life of Lichas. Or maybe Dirkê’s satyrs and centaurs had come down from the high slopes of Helikon and overrun his vineyard, as it went back to the wild savagery of the strawberry trees in his absence, as in the days before Malgis had cut it out from Helikon. Or would the ghost of the hag herself float up with tears and rents on her chest and arms, howling at the night for the knife work of Chiôn? Nothing is worse for a wayfaring farmer than that last day before home when the mind conjures up thoughts of ruin and mayhem of the long absence.

But none of this proved so. One hundred fifty days and more had it been since the army had left Sparta to march into Ithômê. On each, it was Myron, freed at Leuktra, who had stomped about with manure between his toes, and earned the scars and cuts from the slapping canes as he tied the pruned vines back onto the trellises and lifted the stones back onto the walls after the hard rains. In the evenings as soon as the winter freezes ceased, Myron had begun whitewashing the tower, perched on a long ladder, but bending his neck often backward, always toward the south and east to catch at least a glimpse of the homeward trek of the Boiotians. So in the last months the farm, it turned out, had improved with the absence of Mêlon. That so often happens when those of the land, the petty tyrants of our ground, think they are irreplaceable and learn on return that the truth is even far worse than that for them. Things often prove better with their departure, as liberated dependents learn to fend for themselves without the overbearing hand of the worried overseer. Or perhaps it was the work of Pythagoras all along that made the farm thrive as it did—as its symmetry entranced all who worked in it, and for their toil gave them calm in return. Myron at last found that farm work suited him, and that he was not as dull as his long arms and stooped back made him appear.

The wheat was already drooping with the weight of the ripening grains. The olive pressing that Mêlon had left before the new year was long finished, the oil safe in the vats with another even heavier new crop on the trees. The sons of Lophis would meet their grandfather in the courtyard—since they wagered Mêlon at least for now had survived the Peloponnesos and come home safely. They would be eager to boast that Myron had laid out the new pressing room on the slope near the first threshing floor as Chiôn had once envisioned.

After his first night back on Helikon, Mêlon said little in the morning to the boys, who were accustomed to rise with the sun if they were to eat one more day. Myron, it seemed, was more himself on a level with the boys. He worked alongside them rather than, like Chiôn, leading the sons of Lophis to the fields. He knew far better the lore of the neighbors and was liable to go off the farm to listen and stop the rumors that had grown up with the death of Lophis and the flight of Chiôn.

Mêlon only now grasped that folk like Chiôn and he are the worn hobnails that finally ruin the boot and hurt the wearer from the inside. In the end they must be either pulled out or hammered down, however much they have once softened the cruel wear of the hard road for others. These two were the goads of war that are useful only to stop men like Kleonymos or Lichas when such brutes threaten to run amok and hurt the weaker sort. But in peace? They must be watched or better yet kept at a distance, until bloody Ares crashes in and the more civilized and frightened call them back to bar the gate. So Mêlon noticed the worried glances of his own kin at his scars and grim look that had not yet left him. On the second night back in his bed in the shed behind Damô’s tower, Mêlon finally pulled off his old cloak, and then saw the tiny scroll that fell to the dirt—the proof of sale of the
Theôris
that Gastêr had quickly handed to Alkidamas on the quay below holy Delphi.

Mêlon got ready to put it in the flame of the lamp, but for some reason unrolled it to see how much that scoundrel Nikôn had made off the exchange of Alkidamas’s ship, if there were even a bill of sale rather than a blank scroll. Yet there was writing, but it was no receipt at all.

Nikôn salutes the men of Boiotia.

The secretary Hêlos, grammateus of the Boulê writes this. You are home safe if that one-armed Gastêr gives you this papyrus. Rejoice. We are free now. In a free Messenê, under a free Ithômê—with gratitude only to grandfather Alkidamas, and our father Epaminondas, and you, our apple, Mêlon, and dark-eyed Ainias and the souls of Chiôn and Proxenos, and wandering lame Nêto, and all you others from the north. Don’t be cross with us. The polis Messenê is better. This month looting stopped. The helots will soon be Messenians. We were worthy of your blood sacrifice. Free men elected me first citizen of the Messenians, archon Basileus, friend of the Boiotians, friendlier still to the men of Helikon. Know that we Messenians, as long as I am archon, are the first and last friends of the Boiotians.

Nikôn, son of Nikostratos, archon of the Messenians.

And Hêlos wrote this too.

Mêlon rolled back the tiny paper, tied it carefully, and put it in his small wooden box on the three-legged table next to the bed, where he could find it in his evenings by his lamp and so reread the letter from the archon of the greatest city of Hellas—who could neither read nor write. In half a month’s time as the summer solstice came on, Mêlon wondered whether he had ever been south at all, so well the farm looked as the grain harvest was continuing in the lower fields and the goats were ready to eat the stubs bare. No one came to disturb him from town. None asked who was free and who not. Mêlon’s fame from Leuktra had passed on in his absence. That Chiôn was dead was lamented, and then almost immediately forgotten. The memory of Chiôn rested only in the hearts of a few kindred great-hearted souls, the
megalopsychoi
who must remain the strong links in the otherwise weak chain of civilization. All Mêlon could do was frown when the agora lounger and wall-borers harangued at the smithy and butcher shop: “Old Chiôn had some run-in, a falling out with that runaway Gorgos, his helot slave, and went down there to fetch him, I gather. Got more than he asked for, he did. Both ended up butchered, as the slaves usually are when they have no business being freed.”