The End of Sparta (39 page)

Ainias interrupted the silence as he stared down at the white face of what once was Proxenos and his black beard already spotted with ice. “The stones of the free cities of the Peloponnesos are his markers. He lies here dead cold for the helots. Pray to the One God that they were worth it. Dead for the damned helots.”

“No,” Mêlon answered, “for his pleasure. It was his pleasure to come south. That is enough for me. You can figure out the rest.”

Meanwhile, Epaminondas had drawn the column back from the river. The army began its retreat to camp, cold and tired and disheartened that they would never cross the Eurotas. While the four had worked to keep Proxenos warm and breathing, the last fording had failed. Epaminondas was waving all back as arrows whizzed by his head. This was the first time Epaminondas had tripped—and yet it would be his last mistake. King Agesilaos had been right after all: No man of Boiotia would ever bring fire to the very heart of a defeated Sparta. The women were braver on the banks, and hurling insults at the Thebans, baring their icy breasts in mockery and throwing rocks into the river in disdain. In front of them always was shrill Elektra, like Medea of old, holding up one bare shriveled breast, waving her left hand above her head, spitting and ululating all the while. “You all need this teat like the babes you are!” she cried.

Nêto also had been right in her visions when she had long ago warned that none born in the countryside of Thebes would kill Lichas or his son Antikrates. Dozens were wounded and sixty Theban hoplites dead for this failed mad gambit to defy the prophecy. Proxenos was borne on a bier back to camp, with Pelopidas and Melissos carrying the front corners of his litter. Mêlon and Ainias did the same at the rear.

Yet none saw behind them the new Proxenos swimming across the eddies of the hot Eurotas. He waved to them all as they turned out of sight on the main road and headed to the camp north of town. He ascended the bank opposite. The Spartan shades, as promised, did the Plataian no harm. So the Olympian gods with their heaven and Hades were real after all? Now too late the Pythagorean Proxenos must concede that—even as he flitted as an empty ghost among the heroes of old who drifted about just as Homer had sung? Proxenos looked in vain for his Nêto for help, as if he felt she too were somewhere near or maybe already across the Styx at this very moment. Instead here were the Elysion fields of deep green and the marble homes of the hemi-gods.

So all the fables of the ignorant were true. Where would his soul end up in such a place as an unbeliever in Olympos, as an apostate follower of Pythagoras—down lower next to Sisyphos or Tantalos or in the depths of Tartaros? But then came noise and light. In another eye blink all these fantasies of his first twenty years of life disappeared. The false shades of Kleombrotos and Kleonymos dissipated. Proxenos felt himself in a vortex. He was whirling upward toward a bright sun. There was certainly no Zeus here.

Heat, heat of all things amid the ice, came over him, and in an instant Proxenos was given knowledge of how the plan of it all worked: that the good man alone finds peace and that the end of all things was, as his One God of Pythagoras had promised, not Hades at all, but a return to his very beginning. So Epaminondas had saved him, after all, as he knew he might. He was not in Persia like his father with Xenophon, on the royal wage, drenching his spear arm in blood for Spartans and for gold and land as well. He was not scheming to keep his olives free from the tramp of armies, but down here on the Eurotas for nothing other than his pleasure and the visions of Epaminondas for something called Hellas. For all that his soul had been made deathless a year earlier, and now he would learn that, as he would come no more again to the physical world, even as the crow or dog, but had won the battle for his soul in his brief life as the
aristos
of Plataia. The last thing he remembered as Proxenos of old was the soft murmur of Pythagoras’s warning, “When you are traveling abroad, look not back at your own borders.” Proxenos searched no longer for Ainias and his funeral march. Not now as he reached the light and became something better than he had been.

Ainias shuddered and almost dropped the corner of the bier. His breath stopped when a warm—hot even—draft from the south swept across his ice-bitten neck. Then he caught himself and whispered, “So it is. So as our holy one promised, my Proxenos.”

But at that moment far away on the other side of snowy Taygetos, Nêto shuddered as if an icy breeze had reached her.

She wept. “Our Proxenos crossed the Isthmos, but not the Eurotas.”

CHAPTER 28

Lord Kuniskos of the Helots

Gorgos had not done too badly for himself this past year in the valley between the mountains of Taygetos and Parnon, back home near his gloomy Eurotas. There, as a young man and a freed helot, more than fifty summers earlier, he had once mustered in with the Spartan general Brasidas to join the long marches against the Athenians. He remembered the farmhouses of the Spartan clans of his childhood. Lichas even had given him back his name “Puppy Dog”—Kuniskos. The helot came faster at the sound of it.

Lichas feared that his Sparta suffered the curse of
oliganthrôpeia
, an insidious depopulation that was the wage of sending boys into the
agôgê
, separated from women until they were thirty, and deploying the army out on patrol for months at a time—his red-capes training and fighting when they should be sowing the seeds of the Spartan state. That the peers were defined by pure Spartan blood from both parents only made the hoplites shrink farther, as those of mixed and foreign blood began to act as if they were Spartiates themselves. The army had been large at Leuktra, but only because those left at home to defend Sparta itself were now few. So here in a shrinking Sparta a talented freedman like Gorgos found opportunity to reclaim his lost status, not just because he was gifted in the arts of guile and double-cross, but also because there were now few Spartiates in a state desperate for men of his caliber.

At Leuktra Gorgos had not really meant to take the wounded Lophis to Lichas at all—at least not at first. Or so he swore to himself and to others later. Instead, he had wanted to risk his bones to carry the broken body of the son of his master from the fray—back up, as promised, to Nêto and their wagon on the hill above the battle. Yet when he found himself near the red-capes and saw Lichas trapped amid a sea of dead hoplites, his Spartan blood warmed and drew him to the
lochos
of the old guard. Just as it had fifty seasons earlier and more when he had stormed Amphipolis with Brasidas. Most leave a losing cause; Gorgos had just joined one.

After Leuktra, and a third of the way home, the Megarians, as a sign of goodwill, had offered the royal wagon some honey to pack the dead Kleombrotos for the way across the Isthmos and then over the Argive passes back home. Gorgos poured it into the cask and smeared his king, just in the manner he had seen it done as a youth. It was Kuniskos alone who drove the fallen royal home. Kuniskos tended with wool, oil, and honey to the torn ear and bloody thigh of the lame Lichas, as he took back his proper place once again in the service of the high Lakedaimonians. It was as if for the past twenty years and more he had lived in a bad trance, trapped on Mêlon’s Helikon with rustics, when he should have been serving his betters in Lakonia. As the army made its way back, Lichas in his wounds bellowed from his wagon for help. “Where is my Kuniskos? Kuniskos, how many stadia have we to home?”

After Leuktra, had Lichas not lived, the young regent Archidamos, who met the retreating Spartans with a relief force of old men and the young, would have lost both armies—if not at the Isthmos, then on the road through Mantineia on the way to the slopes before Lakonia. News of Spartan blood at Leuktra was then in the air. But it was Lichas who kept what was left of the army together, sending out patrols, bullying townsmen to offer up food and water, and promising the Argives an invasion should they attack his bloodied rearguard. Hellas needed a man such as that, a copy of Leônidas, a Lichas who had fought the Athenian hegemons and fought the Persians with Xenophon and fought them with Agesilaos; who had fought any who threatened the freedom of the city-states; the true Hellene, the only one left alive who would die for and save Hellas—a far better man to serve than the bent-leg Mêlon and the rustics on Helikon. Name a battle of the past fifty summers and Lichas had been there, fighting always for Hellas. Or thus now Kuniskos justified his treason.

As the disheartened and stunned men of Lakonia trudged home those long days of retreat, it was also the lowly Kuniskos who assured all that another Spartan army, born from the ashes of defeat, would soon rise. This was not to be a beaten force, but a victorious one with revenge and destruction its creed. “I marched with your fathers. You are the better men, my Spartans. After your Thermopylai will come another Plataia. I know the Theban pig. You will stick him next season.” In these days, Gorgos was more Spartan than the Spartans. He put the wounded Lichas on his back and shoulders and marched through the retreating army, the two chanting as they went.

Kuniskos wrapped his master’s festering wounds and gave him soup and bread when they returned to the wagon to rest. In turn, as the slow-moving army of the defeated reached Sellasia, the wounded Lichas limped out among the demoralized and hit their backsides with his cleaver and slapped the faces of the slackers. At dusk Lichas poked the slow with his spear, sitting in the cart of Kuniskos with the dead king as it wheeled into camp. When most slept, the wounded Lichas stumbled about the camp checking on the sentries, putting the fires out, and always calling out, “Kuniskos, Kuniskos, where is my Kuniskos?”

Lichas no longer called for his son Antikrates. Instead, it was Kuniskos who, Lichas boasted, had saved the army and the body of the king as the helot traitor now charmed the mind of the Spartan’s father. Once the army reached home, Lichas kept this aged servant close by his side, for Kuniskos had proved his fealty on that bitter retreat after Leuktra. Lichas was reminded as never before that few Spartans were as loyal as this Messenian—and none, for all their woven braids or bobbing horsehair crests, as clever. Lichas gave Kuniskos a plot of ground and helpers to build a tower for himself on the many-towered estates of the Lichades. Soon Lichas made the Gorgos overseer of the flocks and buildings of the Lichades. Lichas himself, the regent of Messenia, knew that it was a lie that Messenians were natural slaves, by birth inferior man-footed beasts. They were as good as Spartans, or—as his Kuniskos proved—often better. Lichas knew all this better than any Pythagorean, better than any Theban liberator, but he was not concerned that it meant anything at all. So what does it matter that some good men are slaves, some free men are bad? That men who were by nature equal, yet were slave and master, spoke nothing to him more than the clever fox who was eaten by the savage wolf, or the cowardly knight who rode atop the brave horse. “Nature’s unfair way is sometimes nature’s way.”

If Kuniskos, Lichas thought, was a better man than any in the
krypteia
, why should that mean he must be free? All the Hellenes were all a day from slavery. That’s what Herakleitos had sung: War makes us free or slaves. War is our father. What was unfair about that? Who cared whether the slave were smart, the master stupid? It meant nothing that the unlucky man inside the citadel ended in chains, and the lucky attacker outsider the walls led him away. That was man’s lot and a good one at that—that we are all a blink from having a chain around our necks. Why, that made us honest and eager not to fail. For all the talk of Spartan oppression, Lichas nightly reminded his Kuniskos, the men of Sparta in the barracks looked alike, talked alike, and were equal—far more equal than the slave Gorgos’s old rich masters on Helikon. Most in Sparta were judged only by their spear arms, not by their Doric or fathers’ names. If for the outsiders it was the most unequal of the poleis, Sparta was also the most equal for those inside. Gorgos agreed with his new master and was treated as he deserved, or so the helot thought. And so he relearned the Spartan ways on his way home to Sparta after Leuktra. Did the Thebans, did the Athenians, ensure their citizens were equal at the end, not just in the beginning? Did any of them have kings, ephors, an assembly and an upper-body Gerousia—the
eunomia
the good order of the Spartan state that stopped the power of the demagogues and ensured the rabble-rouser was checked in his infancy? In Sparta, a fat-belly tanner could hardly shout down a hoplite in the assembly, and yet the man with one hundred
plethra
of black soil fought alongside the spearmen with five
plethra
of rocks.

Lichas and his ilk were as good as their word and judged a man on what he did, not by how many olive trees he inherited. Lichas, not Epaminondas, was the true democrat of the Hellenes—or so Kuniskos told all—the sole Hellene who let the merit of the battlefield decide a man’s worth, his real
timê
. That’s why Lichas always asked of Kuniskos about this Chiôn, the killer of Kleonymos at Leuktra, whom he admired above all of his enemies, and peers as well. A mere slave had wiped out his own royal guard? Had a slave proved better than free Boiotians on the battlefield? Yes, this Chiôn of Helikon was a spirit of Lichas’s taste. Lichas told Kuniskos to fetch him there to Sparta and give the freed slave a red cape. Chiôn was an enemy better than most friends.

For the next spring after the battle, Kuniskos ran the household of the estate of Lichas near the banks of the Eurotas, beside the orchards of both Antikrates his son, and his dead brother Leôn. Kuniskos was a new son to take the place of the dead son Thôrax, and a better bargain in the trade as Lichas himself admitted to folk. It was Kuniskos who bossed a few young helot girls about how to cook and had his way with them. He kept the animals fed, and taught the helots of Lakonia how to manage the farms—mostly what Mêlon had taught him on Helikon. The new farm tower kept rising, under Kuniskos’s orders, wider, taller than the one of Malgis on Helikon.

Since the Boiotians were far better farmers than any Spartan, by spring Lichas’s new estate was to be the best in Sparta. “You are to be free in Sparta as in the glory days of our Brasidas and Lysander, my Boiotian-lover Kuniskos,” Lichas had laughed when he saw the crews of the helot terracing the slopes in the manner learned from the terraces of Mêlon’s farm. “For all the talk of the democrats of Boiotia, you never were such a free man on the farm of the Malgidai. What you see with your own eyes in Sparta, you receive. We don’t talk of setting helots free in the south—while they send their chattels scurrying about cooking their meals and emptying their slop jars. Like us or not,” Lichas bellowed, “we are what we are.”

Gorgos agreed. In this year after Leuktra, before the arrival of Epaminondas in the south, Kuniskos was not just the manager of the estate of Lichas, but was sent on errands all over Lakonia—to the sea at Gytheion, to the foothills at Parnon and Taygetos, and back north to the border forts at Sellasia. Always he was given rein as the emissary of Lichas the ephor. He was seen on a wagon no less, standing tall at the reins of a bright red cart with yellow wheels, up and down the valley of the Eurotas, with messages and instructions from Lord Lichas. Gorgos went about mustering a helot army against the Mantineians and preparing to purge Messenia once more of the agents of Epaminondas—especially the band of wild priestesses above Ithômê said to be stirring up the helots from their precinct to Artemis. Others in Sparta, who had no memory that went back to when Kuniskos had marched with the Spartans under Brasidas, treated the man less well. Most had heard little how he had packed Kleombrotos in honey. They had no word that Gorgos had driven the king’s caisson all the way to the Peloponnesos.

Instead the wives of the Spartan peers remembered well that his Theban masters in Boiotia, the hated Malgidai, had once stripped the grand armor of the dead Lysander at Haliartos. Did not this traitor Kuniskos in the past wait on that foul Mêlon and work alongside that man-killer Chiôn—the branded slave of the north, who with his master had taken a half-dozen of Sparta’s best at Leuktra? Treachery of any sort, disloyalty, always was looked down upon by the good Spartiates. Many rumors had also reached the women of Sparta of the wounded Thespian Lophis, who had been dumped into the camp of Kleombrotos by his own manservant.

“Look at the wretch strut,” the sister of Lichas, Lampito, would say of Kuniskos as he bustled about the acropolis to buy a lamb or goat for his master. “This mangy dog of ours paid his Thespian owner back by dragging him into our camp half-dead. A helot is always a helot, a man-footed beast. I can smell it on him. Shaving his upper lip can’t hide it. This turnabout helot did not even have the good sense to leave the losers for the winners. No, the fool came over to us as we stumbled, and left his own on the eve of their victory.” In the Spartan mind, perfidy was especially to be despised when it was coupled with folly.

But Lichas would have none of Lampito’s talk and soon his wife Elektra sent his sister out of his house. This Lichas was no simple Spartan who followed the code of Lykos or let the tribe trump talent. No, his creed was his own, of the spear and the muster, where men must earn their equality. He had once been for Lysander, another rogue who cared nothing for birth and nothing for the old ways of Lykos. The upstart bastard half-aristocrat Brasidas of old was his hero too, the outlaw who had freed the helots and made them killers of the Athenians. So when a resourceful man, even if in rags, appeared, then Lichas gave him what he pleased.

Besides, he was happy with his new tower that Kuniskos had built, round and taller even than those to the north. Now with his third wife, Elektra, Lichas at last had killers as both his servant and spouse. Elektra soon came to adore old Kuniskos and would not hear a slur against her husband’s helot. In the courtyard the two fought with wooden swords, and soon Kuniskos showed her how to swing her father’s battle-ax like the heroes of old. In this house of Lichas, Kuniskos also spent most of his time mentoring the young Antikrates, whose own nearby estate had a walled pathway to his father’s vineyard. The bald helot from Helikon grew his white side braids long and forked his beard—in the style of his master Lichas. He scraped his skull’s top completely bare, and assured the son of Lichas that he was as loyal to him as he was to his father.

Antikrates and Kuniskos soon proved inseparable, as the young man needed tutelage in the ways of the helots, and the older one an ally in the house of Lichas. Because they were alike wily sorts and equally hated Epaminondas, they both were drawn toward and distrusted each other. “No need of your whimpers and dog rollovers to me, Kuniskos,” Antikrates laughed. “When this is all over, my new old brother, Kuniskos, I will kill you in some way,” the son went on. “For you lived when your betters at Leuktra did not. That’s all that matters. So you too will die. But not yet, not just yet—or so my father and his wrinkly wife protect you. But I warn you that I am a different sort than he. I have no helot love. I say instead we are what we are born into. The priestess of Pasiphai tells me I will see you lying dead, with your bald head off on the ground. So I suppose she means I will kill you. Or maybe you will die with me, but first. But I know this, that you will not live beyond me.”