The End of Sparta

was lamented, and then almost immediately forgotten. The memory of Chion 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 Melon could do was frown when the agora lounger and wall-borers harangued at the smithy and butcher shop: “Old Chion 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.”

To the crowd at the agora of Thespiai, Lichas and Antikrates might as well have been cold stone hoplites, nameless on the temples at Thebes. None knew that a stone lion known as Chion now guarded the Arkadian Gate at holy Messene. The farmers of the bottomland around Kopais up until the plain of Chaironeia, had they even known of tall Messene, would have only yawned at the business of folk far to the south and of no import for the Boiotians. Yet they would never again fight men from the south on the slopes of their Ptoon or Messapian. That there would never be Spartans in their fields-never Spartans in anyone’s fields in all of Hellas-they just by rote and habit assumed, as if it were their birthright and not a gift paid for with the lives of Lophis, Staphis, Proxenos, and Chion.

Melon was through with the world of petty repute, the town’s whispers of the larger coin chest in the well, and the rolling gossip of the agora; and yet in these first ten days of his return he was restless too on his mountain. Damo and Myron asked him little about the fighting to the south, as he returned to the chores of the farm. He heard even Phryne was to flee to Attika, in disgust at Epaminondas who had emptied the countryside of her customers and ruined her colony of eros, and whose army might torch her salon of gossip and treason should they catch her still in Boiotia. At that thought Melon at last hiked down to pay her a final visit. She had received word of his visit, and so his Sphex was sitting under the plane tree by the lion-head fountain in a bright white chiton, with her breasts tucked high, and her hem hiked to the upper thigh.

She had come out to watch her carts go with her load of love gear, both her girls and the rich baggage of the porneiai that headed back under the guidance of Eurybiades to Athens. In the past at Athens, when Phryne was in trouble in the courts, she simply bared her breasts and won her freedom. Now? If she had stripped naked, it would have done no good in winning a pass to stay at her palace in Thespiai, as both her breasts and her audience were not as they once had been. “You could have stayed the hero of Leuktra, my Melon,” she sighed. “I would have had all thoughts of that know-nothing virgin girl Neto out of your breast the moment my cloak dropped. Instead you were helot-crazy. Too eager to kill your fellow Hellenes. All for man-footed slaves like that Neto of yours, whom I hear didn’t come out so well after all. I could have used her, it seems, but not now, I hear at any rate, unless it is for some depraved sport among the bad ones. So you took away my clients on the long march south and soon the city here will turn against me. Yes, the army will return with no goodness in their heart for those of us who opposed bitterly your Epaminondas. They say I gave silver to Backwash to stop this madness. They claimed I offered free eros at Athens to Kallias and Iphikrates for their words and weapons to save Hellas from your bloodlust. They say I sent runners to Lichas to ready the Spartans for Epaminondas, and they say your Gorgos was in my pay.”

Melon turned away, happy that he had never mounted this woman. Do that, he thought, and he would have been thinking of his terraces and vines, and the need to get home before he was even done. Only now he knew why men called her “Toad.” Still, as he turned away, he spoke to her. “They say? No, no, so I say. I say that the Boiotians who come back will not have patience with any of you. None of you traitors they like. As for helot-crazy, I suppose I was. Yes, I found out that I was, both for the freedom of the Messenians and for the company of Neto.” He then got up and ended, “Not you, not me-not any of us have ever been helots. Have we, Phryne? Cutting down the wheat stalks, only to give flour to masters on the other side of Taygetos-as thanks each year that they might kill only a few hundred not thousands of our kin?” Now Melon turned wild and raised his hand to slap her hard if she even squeaked back a slur. “No, you go from here. Go. Leave from out Thespiai. Your lust, your sway is nothing. It leaves your customers hating you as much after their pleasure as they flatter you for it before. So, no, I have no apologies. Maybe only one: We should have battled the ice of the Eurotas and killed Agesilaos when we could have. Or stayed on Taygetos and hunted down that Antikrates. Or stayed in the high country until I carried my Neto back kicking on my shoulder.”

“My, my, even face-to-face with my beauty, you still miss your helot girl, Melon, I can see that well enough.” And with that, the Toad left Thespiai-at least until the town’s zeal for the Pythagoreans and democracy for helots might pass.

CHAPTER 37

Epaminondas Returns

Then before the summer came on, all gossip stopped. At last the grand army of the tired Boiotians trudged in from the south-a thousand stadia and more of tramping from Ithome to the hike down Kithairon, a month and more after Melon himself had reached Thespiai. Tired and dirty, the Boiotians had pushed their way through the Athenians at the Isthmos and marched proudly over the Megarid on the heels of Iphikrates as he scampered in fright back with his army to Attika.

Epaminondas had smashed Iphikrates at the Isthmos, like a farmer’s boot flattens the dung beetle. So the army came into Boiotia dirty and ragged, but with another triumph still and in perfect order. The long snake wound through the pass just as it had left nearly half a year earlier, but with Pelopidas and Epaminondas singing Erinna’s songs at the head and worrying little about what their war had been for. The Boiotians came down over the crest of Kithairon at precisely the time the rhetores in Thebes were swearing their sons had been lost in the land of Pelops and the harvests would rot in the fields for want of men. Menekleidas of Aulis, in the middle of his peroration to confiscate the property of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, ran from the bema. All the Athenian silver and gold of Kallistratos did him no good. Backwash was unsure whether the rumors were true that the veterans were about to storm the ekklesia and hang the seers of doom like himself from the plane trees in the central courtyard. So he fled over to Euboia, always in fear the island was too close to Epaminondas.

In the plain below the Kadmeia, smoke arose off to the east above Plataia as the army broke up and spilled over the plain. The Thebans in the agora cheered as they saw the morning campfires of the horde that was already nearing and filling the roads of Boiotia in the thousands. A long line of creaking wagons came down the pass, full of pots and tools, and Peloponnesian herds behind to enrich the villages of the flatlands. Immediately upon his formal report of the army’s return to the Boiotarchs, Epaminondas was ordered by the council of the Boiotians to be tried within thirty days. First, the stay-at-home Boiotarchs had in their fear immediately ordered his army to disband, to scatter to their harvests and homes. Perhaps they could try him in the night, and stone him at the Kadmos Gate, before the thousands who followed him even knew he was in the jail on the order of the rhetores.

On these first days of the army’s return, Melon figured that Epaminondas had no retainers to bar his arrest. Bluster and boast had not yet filtered through the countryside about the size and beauty of the not finished new cities of Mantineia, Megalopolis, and Messene. No one knew of the terrified Agesilaos trapped on his acropolis, with Lichas and the others of Sparta’s worst all dead, with twenty-five myriads of helots free and full of hatred for Lakonia. Yet, Melon guessed, once the truth of free Messenia was out, and the extent of the plunder from Lakonia seen, tempers would soften. The truth would spread that thousands of Boiotian hoplites were wealthy, with good pay from the Peloponnesians and plenty of plunder in their sacks and gifts from the Messenians. Yet in these initial days after the arrival of the army, few had any love for the generals who had marched their men south to help others when their own fields needed tending.

So it is with all wars, that both supporters and critics weave and warp until the final story is known-and alike then go back with their plumb strings to line up their past principles with the final verdict of the last battlefield. This Epaminondas knew and shrugged off as the price of leading rather than watching events go by. While he feared he had not yet ruined Sparta as he wanted, he also accepted that his men thought he had, and so would always follow a leader who gave them victory, and whose own sense of achieving less than he hoped was more than they had dared imagine. At last, the day of the trial of Epaminondas came. He was standing in the dock alone; if he were