The End of Sparta (17 page)
Authors: Victor Davis Hanson
She soon arrived at the edge of the steep cliffs by the glistening water—the waves catching the early rising morning fingers of dawn. Far off in the distance Nêto could see the occasional fading glint from the spear tips of the army of Lichas. His Spartan army was marching on its second day without sleep, winding the way home over the high trail above the sea and back toward the Isthmos—beaten men, all of them. All eager to get back into the safe folds of the Peloponnesos, but fearing more the cursing of their Spartan women on their return.
Porpax had a few scrapes with some mangy dogs as he kept close to the heels of the slow-moving Xiphos. It was all Nêto could do to keep awake on the pony. Then she remembered that it was not just the previous night, but for the past three days and two nights that she had not slept, whether in fear of Gorgos above Leuktra, or in her long talk with Proxenos about their One God of Pythagoras. Then Nêto stopped. After some wild riding in circles, at about a stade beyond the road junction she smelled something foul. Nêto found the body of someone, not far from the sea, near a small mud-brick shrine to Kreusian Dionysos, about where Mêlon had told her to look. An old widow who tended the shanty temple said that she was standing guard over a corpse to keep the dogs and birds away.
“He yours, slave girl? A red-cape from the south—he told me, he said a Thespian would come here. You her? But I need another owl to give him up, though he stinks and is hard as a plank. Took you long enough. Name is Kallista—‘the best of all.’ Me Kallista—and I need an Athenian coin.” She shrieked more, but had two teeth, so the howl came out as only whistling gibberish. This Kallista was covered in a black cloak, head to toe, and had only a scrawny hand out to catch her silver.
Nêto looked her up and down, to make sure it wasn’t some demon. No, she was human, a hag with rump back. Kallista spoke Boiotian coast, that much was clear, and seemed a near twin to her neighbor on Helikon, Dirkê—if not the shrew herself in disguise. Nêto jumped down. She followed the woman’s point to the shanty shrine. There was the body of Lophis. Kallista had already washed much of the gore from him, dead a day and a half now. The Spartans Teleklos and Lykos, for all their gruff, had given her a coin to keep the Thespian whole for his kin, a better gesture, Nêto thought, than what she herself would have done to the dead of Sparta. Lophis lay on the bench in front of the stone statue, the broken body that had been ridden over by the cavalry of the Spartans. Her master’s throat was cut. It was caked with dry blood as the Spartans had said. But there were enough ugly wounds below the armor line that made Lichas’s final slice no matter. These spear jabs to the lower stomach had finished Lophis anyway. Nêto finally looked away. How hideous Lophis had become—stiff, swollen, and blue-black and ghastly in expression like Medusa’s face.
Was this the war she sang about—and urged others to risk their all for? All Lophis’s grand dreams had been reduced to this contorted mess of flesh, to be thrown across the back of his tired horse by a slave girl? This—not Epaminondas’s “one step more”—was the face of war. Perhaps she herself, if freed, would not vote for Epaminondas as Boiotarch, since he would only lead his people into more Leuktras south of the Isthmos. She flicked a maggot off his neck and poured some wine over his hair to flesh out more crawlers. The broad nose of the Malgidai was bent flat on his face, his strong jaw smashed and mangled apart from its joints. This certainly was not the battle that she’d seen from the camp above Leuktra, not the grand prelude to the march south to free her helots. How many Boiotians—she should ask the grand planners like Epaminondas or Alkidamas—was a new Messenê on Ithômê worth? Surely her One God must give her a number. A thousand? Five thousand were worth it?
Meanwhile, the dog Sturax was nowhere to be found. Yet Porpax soon smelled the hound’s death scent on the blood of Lophis. Then another odor hit the hound, and he was off toward Kithairon. Nêto thought he’d be back after the smell of a dappled fawn proved false. She gave the woman of the shrine a bag of raisins and figs—and another silver Athenian owl for good measure. Then Kallista helped her douse and scrub off Lophis with oil and sprinkle him with wine, and wrap his stiff corpse in Nêto’s blanket. They tied it into a bundle and then slung him gently over the back of Xiphos. The horse jumped at that, raw as he was with cuts from the battle. Nêto shuddered; she had seen this picture in night visions before of her strapping a dead body on a horse in front of a shed, but was it this one now, or was there another corpse in yet another bad night in the future?
A bony hand grabbed her shoulder. “Stay here the night, pretty one? Don’t go off in the dark with killers on the road. I hear the wild man-bear is out tonight, come down from Helikon out your way to harvest some Spartans. For another three silver pieces, I can lead you to my hut up the draw over there.” But Nêto pushed Kallista away, flashed her knife, and decided to wait no longer for the marauding dog Porpax to return. She turned Xiphos around and slowly led the horse by the reins, careful that the body remained balanced on his back.
On the way back, an Athenian—or at least he sounded like one in his loud Attic—ran up to her in the darkness and grabbed the tail of Xiphos. The pony kicked hard. Nêto waved her blade in the air. She glanced back at the robber in the dirt, a boy, with two or maybe three more friends, out for easy steals in this blur between peace and war. During the trip back there were small parties of Spartans to watch for, trailing the army that by now was well past the Megarid. She remembered the warnings of her master, Mêlon, who had told her everyone has a choice in this life—a way to either live in fear or to give fear to others. So don’t be a slave to your terrors, Nêto spoke to herself. Let those robbers worry what Megalê Nêto, the Amazon warrior, will do to them with this sharp knife, not what they might do to me. At that she pulled out her blade and pointed it ahead as she rode.
She went faster on her way north, and by midmorning Nêto could see the farm’s tower in the distance on the slopes of Helikon. The Dog Star sun was warming up. She wanted to get Lophis inside the cool air of the bottom floor of the farmhouse where the water from Helikon was piped in, and she knew Mêlon would be waiting. Then she heard loud voices far in the distance, but thought at first it was only the Athenian robbers, accosting some fool without a horse and knife. It was nothing but sounds on the wind, as a hard breeze came up from south of the Isthmos.
She yelled out anyway in the direction of the noise: “I am Nêto of Helikon. Make way—or die.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER 12
Off in the distance a world away, far to the south in Messenia, maybe a thousand stadia away from Nêto on Helikon, at this very moment hawk-eyed Nikôn of the helots, would-be leader of the revolt, stared out fixed on the late summer moon. His helot rangers had backed off from their leader and let him scream in his drink on his rocky perch, as he did on occasion when they walked on the high mountain trails of Ithômê far above Messenia below. This Nikôn was a tanner and smelled of hides and lye, and he was unlettered. Yet he knew knife work and had led the fiercest of the helot rebels. Let the Messenian leaders parley with Lichas for a quarter, a half of Messenia. But he would free it all, and kill every Spartan caught on the wrong side of Taygetos. Now he was perched on a cleft on Mt. Ithômê in the land of the Messenians, and he kept repeating to the stars under the moonlight, “I am Nikôn of Messenia. Make way for me—or die.”
This same night Nikôn was on his second bag of sweet wine, and calling out to anyone under the same sky of Hellas. Did the men of Boiotia care that the
heilôtai
were whipped and killed and in the best of their moments pelted with rotten fruit, poked and lashed by the drunk Spartans at dinner in the
syssitia
? Did they know the Spartan overlords sang of “Messenê good to plow, good to plant” as if Ithômê were theirs, as if helots were but ants of their soil? Nikôn may have been the rabble-rouser of the helot rebels here on the upland. But the wine and the starry night on Mt. Ithômê had put him into a trance, as if his saviors in Boiotia, half the length of Hellas away in the north, might hear him—but only if he called out loud enough to their shared sky. He had heard voices of prophecy, of Epaminondas and Mêlon, of great armies to come, and of the Messenian woman to the north, Nêto of Helikon, who was promising a great reckoning this coming winter or next. Or so he told himself that there were real sounds and talk in his head, and not just gibberish brought on by two pouches of unmixed wine. He had no runners to send north for news, no money to visit the oracles at Delphi and Olympia for the gods’ plans. So the illiterate Nikôn yelled to the stars in hopes that an oracle, a priestess maybe in Boiotia far to the north might hear him.
“Who said who was to be free and slave? What god did this thing? The Spartans? Is their Lichas an all-powerful Zeus Sôter? Why for three hundred and fifty harvests have the Messenians been the asses of the men of Sparta, while all the rest of Hellas has been free?” But Nikôn was talking only to himself. Only his henchman Hêlos, who knew how to write the block letters and put his master’s thoughts onto scrolls, followed him on the high path on the cliffs of Ithômê. Loyal Hêlos had his own bladder bag, but one of icy spring water; and the good partner tried to get Nikôn to drink and dilute the raging heat in his head. It was also Hêlos, the finest scribe in the west of the Peloponnesos, who saw that the illiterate Nikôn alone of the rebel bands knew the mind of the Spartan, how to ambush him, how to goad the helots into killing their landlords.
The rest of the helots had taken the other path down after their nighttime patrolling. The rival Doreios yelled to them, “Join me—not this anvil-head Nikôn. His name spells defeat—not victory.” All this meant nothing to the mumbling Nikôn, who this night kept up his helot shouts at the moon. “I watched my daughters with horse tails, clipped to their butts, forced to neigh, poked by Spartans at the symposia. Or made to bellow like cows, mounted from the backside, to the strains of their bastard poet Tyrtaios. Or my son Aristomenes, flogged and kicked as he howled like a dog to the laughter of the Spartans, hit with their black olives and mushy apples and then dragged like a side of beef from his pony.”
Nikôn, in desperate appeal, thought he could plead to the female voice in his head from north in Boiotia. “Is there anything worse than for a man to pick his grapes, stomp them, filter the juice, store the amphora, and age the wine—only then to cart it over to the Spartan acropolis? To give them as
apophorai
—to be whipped for the service as the idle red-cape soldiers gulp down a year’s work, most of it ending up as piss and vomit on the floor?” Now Nikôn went on to the black night above, “Don’t forget the cleft of Kaiadas, the black abyss on Taygetos. Where we are thrown and then broken at the bottom, waiting at night for the wolves to eat our dying flesh as our tortured souls fly out from our ruined bodies.” Soon his dwindling band split off on the paths between the wild figs. They laughed at the wages of wine, for now they saw that their captain Nikôn, silhouetted on a rocky outcropping across the vale, was taken with one of his periodic manias, as he talked with voices that wafted in the air.
He was drunk. Dionysus had sneaked into his head. Or worse, he had chewed some of the wild weed with the bitter white flowers that made the horses and cattle bellow and fall over. Alone of all the leaders of the helots, Nikôn could see that an army would come, and that some men in Greece were for justice and not just plunder and their own pride when they marched to battle. He looked more to the gods above, as the late-night fog lifted, and he saw the yellow moon of the coming Dog Days, smiling at the very thought of the liberation to come.
“I am Nikôn. A Messenian. No helot. A free man. Born here in Messenia. Citizen of its Messenê to be. Messeeeniiiaaa. On free Ithooomêee.” Like the gray night wolf he yelled. He wanted his howl to reach the Spartans in their drink below and in dance behind their walls.
“Quiet, Nikôn.” From a distance across the ravine the rival helots of Doreios on their way to the villages called back. “Shut up, drunken fool. No more wine boasting—unless you want to bring back Lichas from the north and his helot henchmen to string us up. Hush, mad dog.
Siga
. Go home. Hêlos! Hit him, Hêlos, won’t you? Some leader—this fool who wobbles down a tiny path. Chew your bone alone, far off this holy mountain. Dry your gut out.” The helots sang and laughed, far away, at the fading cries of their would-be leader.
Let the others talk of revolt while only Nikôn’s men freed helots. Now Nikôn bayed at the moon all into the night. He clung to the ledge that pointed north to far-away Boiotia—as if in his sudden fit his godly Boiotians could hear him a thousand stadia away. “
Eimi Nikôn. Eleutherios gignomai
.” I am Nikôn … I am born free.
Yet for all the prophecies of Nêto and the drunken calls of Nikôn on his ledge, Epaminondas did no more marching this summer after Leuktra. Nor the next spring did he call out the Boiotians to descend on Sparta and free Nikôn’s helots. Most Boiotians instead thought that the great, the seemingly final victory at Leuktra had proved war to be the parenthesis and peace the natural, more common order of things. So in the hamlets around Thebes the yeomen hoplites went right on after the victory into their cycles of the farming year. The timeless soil cared little what its temporary human tenants thought or did. The ground mute beneath the farmers just endured and went on whether Leuktra was won or lost. War or no war, for free men or slaves, the tasks of the season—sow, weed, reap, cut, and thresh—continued day in, day out. For most of the other vineyard men on Helikon, the battle was no more to be remembered than the severed tail of the stone lizard who proudly wags his growing stub without a thought of the old one, rotting in the dirt.
After finishing the later vintages of summer, the three boys got to work on the autumn harvest of the olive trees. For all the visual splendor of the estate, there was a well-thought-out economy to it as well, as in its irrigation ditches from the pond above that meant less carrying of the water with the donkeys. The three threshing floors spaced near the grain and barley fields made the harvests far easier. The eighty
plethra
could produce twice the food of the neighbor Dirkê’s similarly sized place with about half her labor and expense. That gift—only vaguely appreciated in the past—was sensed by all in these days of loss. Mêlon had tried to let Myron go. But the awkward slave stayed on. Soon he followed Chiôn on the farm and even into the woods, like and not like him—both enormous, but Chiôn’s maimed arm impairing his stride far less than did Myron’s natural clumsiness. Myron had been freed by his presence at Leuktra according to the decree of the Thespians, and now earned his wages from the Malgidai.
Myron’s skill in the collection and spreading of dung hardly meant he knew pruning and tilling. But he met rebuke for his poorly cut spurs and his crooked furrows with a shrug. Like the Korinthian mirror glass in town, he turned the harshness back on his master. Chiôn was freed, but as a one-arm he was more unfree than he had been as a slave of two hands. He saw that a man’s body is his only master after all. Thoughts are nothing without the leg and arm, which alone turn word into deed. Yet he bore the hale newcomer Myron no grudge, praising his new henchman as he climbed high into the olives with his tree saw. “Myron is my left arm I lost at Leuktra,” Chiôn laughed to Mêlon. “This freed slave is not so bad, once his dung stink wore off and he picked up rocks in the field and quit collecting the mess of the public toilets. I wager no master ever will pry him off Helikon.”
“Yes, he’s our Sturax and Porpax come back alive,” Mêlon offered, “the new watchdog of the farm. Our lost tail has grown back longer, and the farm is as good now as can be without our Lophis.” Myron winked or twitched at that, since he knew them better than they knew themselves. So he let praise roll off his back, and looked down as they lauded him to the skies. Myron was working for different, better sorts now, and on a wage, no less—and so he no longer bore pots of dung from the city stalls to his master’s vineyard, in fear of the lash of his owner Hippias, who each summer morning galloped on his pony down the rows of the vines, hitting the backs of his slaves with his mule-tail whip. This Hippias often came by Helikon on his black horse to take back or sell off his Myron. But Mêlon’s spear and the dark look of Chiôn shooed him off, and reminded the mounted grandee that the assembly of the Thespians had freed all the slaves who had flocked to Leuktra to fight—a fact known to Hippias, who now wanted to keep the silver buyout from the polis and yet get his slave back for a double profit. No concern. Soon Hippias was no longer seen near Helikon—nor seen at all.
On a late summer morning, a year after Leuktra, it was Myron who found the rotting Medios, the Thrakian slave of Dirkê, the neighbor, hung up by his heels on a short pine tree far above the farm on Helikon—dead half a month or longer. Dirkê, Mêlon, and Chiôn soon followed Medios’s trail—he had been cutting oak for plowshares above the farm of the Malgidai, so Dirkê said—but uncovered no others tracks of his killer. Now in fear of a demon-like man-bear on Helikon, Dirkê for a while came less to the farm of the Malgidai. She certainly said no more about Medios. Dirkê told no magistrate, and wanted no talk of where Medios had been—or how he’d been hung up and sliced, and how there was a man-beast killer loose on Helikon. Otherwise, despite the warnings of endless war against the Spartans by Epaminondas, the long months after Leuktra proved among the most peaceful in recent memory in Thespiai. Soon no one missed Medios.
Meanwhile, the Spartan booty—helmets, breastplates, mess kits, swords, and even a few coins—from the battle turned up from the Attic border all the way up to Phokis. Farmers hiked often over Kithairon to Attika to buy stock and more slaves with their newfound money from the sale of plunder. The Thespian trader Eurybiades grew rich beyond his wildest boasting. His wagon full of pots and bronze creaked for days over the roads beneath Helikon to garner some of the captured Peloponnesian armor and coin in trade. At least ten thousand Spartans from the Peloponnesos, Eurybiades figured, had left most of what they had brought up. His practiced eye would find the final remnants of what they had cached in stone crevices and in cusps of trees.
“Not since my beardless days, all this money. Then I used to loot both sides of Kithairon. I’d strip the high border farms below Panakton of their roof tiles. Yes, and even the woodwork in the great war. But not like this. Never such a full cart like this. At this rate, I will buy another wagon. Maybe I’ll hire this new Myron of yours, to follow me in my dust with another ox for my wares. Why, there are even Athenians who pay to ride back over the pass with me, just to look at the soil of Leuktra, to boast that they have walked on its holy ground. I’ve got my boy over there peddling clay toy Boiotian shields to the fool gawkers, with the sides notched out just like yours in the shed, and stamped on the front side with EPAMINONDAS.”
“Oh, no, you won’t take our Myron, king peddler. I’ve taken a liking to his empty head and wide shoulders. He stays here with Chiôn.” Mêlon grabbed Eurybiades by the arm, “He’s worth more than any three of them. Even his master, the whipper Hippias, won’t get him back with a chain around his ankle.”
There were to be more battle monuments for Leuktra, and victory decrees and temples from the booty. Thebes for most of the winter after Leuktra and following spring had sent its best monument builders and stone-cutters up to the sanctuary at Delphi. Of course, the architect Proxenos was hired to accompany the first party to survey the site. He would barter with the holy shrine keepers over the fees for buying a spot. The Boiotians were to build their own treasury on the Sacred Way, right in front of the Athenians’ Parian marble eyesore.
Proxenos had become a court builder for the Boiotians. He traveled with scrolls stuffed with charts and lines drawn to make sense from the wild rantings of Epaminondas. Why he left his estates and horses on the Asopos, none were too sure, only that he came up to Thespiai more even than to Thebes, and to his home Plataia not at all. He was at work redesigning the walls, building clay models of vast new cities and for weeks taking trips south of the Isthmos with his packs of scrolls. Perhaps he wanted to build anew entire shrines and cities even, without the bother of old temples and the burden of poorly placed stones to hamper him—straight streets and right corners of fresh cities to rise, and not the hard work of straightening winding pathways of their fathers’ cramped and dark poleis. Maybe too Proxenos wished to bring the mind of Epaminondas to stone, so that when his words were forgotten the ramparts of Megalopolis or Messenê would not be.