Athens whose name, accursed, I abhor to utter. A pair spawned in hell, to rule these hell-spawned times!”
“Times have changed,” Lysander replied coolly, “and what has compelled them if not God's will? Tell me, old man. Do mortals not honor heaven by altering with the alteration of the times and profane her by adhering mindlessly to antique ways?”
'Lysander, you elevate blasphemy to a new acme.”
“What would you have us do, Antalcidas? Cluster on the salt shore chanting hymns of glories gone, while the future speeds past us more swiftly than a racing man-of-war?”
The elder now espied Alcibiades, crossing to Lysander's shoulder. His glance swung from one to the other, as if fixing as the foe these twain together, representative of their generation and not their several states.
“I give thanks to the Almighty, Lysander, that I will not live to see that Sparta over which you and men like you come to rule.”
XXVI
Alcibiades was absent much of that summer, in Ionia and the islands, working as an agent of Sparta. As earlier during the Peace his enterprise had brought into alliance with Athens such great states as Argos, Elis, and Mantinea, now he enlisted such powers on the counter hand. He incited Chios, Erythrae, and Clazomenae to revolt from Athens, then sailed to Miletus and brought her over too. He then produced the prime prize: alliance for Sparta with the king of Persia. He induced Teas to tear down her walls, and Lebedos and Aerae to revolt. He did this alone, backed by one Spartan commander and only five ships. He directed the Chians to widen the rising to Lesbos, where they incited to insurrection the great states of Mytilene and Methymna, while Spartan land forces moved to secure Clazomenae and capture Cyme. And Alcibiades had conquered another sovereign province. This was the heart of Timaea, wife of the Spartan king Agis. She was his lover, every chambermaid and urchin of Lacedaemon told, and carried his child as well.
As for myself, recovery came labored and tardy. As late as summer I could not hike the slopes at Therai, let alone sprint them.
Soldiers say a man dies when more of them he loves reside beneath the earth than above it. That was my story. Yet breath is a resistless river, and dawn a reveille sore to ignore.
Alcibiades had drawn a berth for me before he left: imparting a chest with full kit, a phoinikis cloak, and ten minae in gold, an enormous sum, all I could have saved from Sicily had the expedition succeeded. I was lodged in the guest barracks at Limnai, a room of my own, and enjoyed the status of xenos, guest-friend, the same as an ambassador. Meals I may take at Endius' mess, the Amphyction. I could train in the gymnasia or hunt if invited.
Sacrifices I may offer at any temple save those proscribed to non-Dorians. In addition I was granted privileges to both Endius' and his brother Sphrodias' estates. This meant I could help myself to horses or dogs, as Peers do, even claim a helot as my attendant. I might take water from any spring or public well. The only rights denied were those to bear arms or take fire. My benefactor's final instructions were to keep my mouth shut till he returned.
It was Alcibiades indeed who had compelled Lysander's intercession for me; this I learned from old friends, mates of the Upbringing with whom I now reestablished acquaintance and through whose eyes and confidences I assimilated afresh the state of the Lacedaemonians.
The city had changed much in the years since I had seen it. I was invited on a hunt. The yeoman of snares was a Messenian serf they called Radish. As he and his seconds staked the trail, our host, a Peer named Amphiarius, called to him to speed it up. “I'm humping as fast as I can,” replied the fellow, without a breath of “sir” or “my lord.” A decade earlier such insolence would have left its utterer ekpodon, “out from underfoot.” Now it was let go with a shrug and a jest.
The effect of the neodamodeis, the “new citizens” who had earned their freedom serving under arms, and the brasidioi, who had done likewise beneath the great general Brasidas, was everywhere. No vassal, however lowly, regarded his abasement as irremediable. “Hope is a dangerous liquor,” my savior Lysander had addressed the ephorate in a speech so notorious it had actually been written down and circulated, unheard-of in Lacedaemon.
“War has unstoppered the flasket, and nothing may seal it again.”
Lysander and Endius had set themselves up as patrons of the unfranchised, or at least recognized the inevitability of integrating these into the polity. Neither was an altruist, and certainly no democrat, but like Alcibiades a realist. The pair had been reconciled to him, I was informed, or embraced the wisdom of mutual exploitation. It was Endius who had procured his friend's admission within Laconian borders and Lysander, as polemarch, who stood surety for him now.
“All great states,” the transcription of Lysander's address read,
“found themselves upon an outrage of nature, from which springs both their vigor and their vulnerability. Athens' derangement is democracy. To the good, this species of license unleashes enterprise in the citizenry unknown in more closely governed states, and these energies may propel the nation to unprecedented prosperity. Its mischief is the envy it looses in the body politic.
Democracy devours its young. The higher a man ascends, the more fervidly do his fellows work to procure his downfall, so that when an individual of legitimate greatness does arise, the state may make use of him a moment only before the mob lashes his limbs to the stake and fires the brands at his feet.
“As to Lacedaemon, our aberration is the servitude we have imposed upon our helots. Our bondsmen's sweat produces, we imagine, that might by which we knuckle them under. But who rules whom? We lie down upon a carpet of those who would eat us raw in the night and wonder that we toss in our slumber. And our army, for all its vaunted invincibility, ventures afield timorously and tardily, trepidant to turn its back on the kitchen cleavers it leaves behind at home. On campaign we face our pickets inboard, more in fear of those who serve us than of the enemy. Our unemancipated masses are the sword by which we thrive or perish, and we must seize this or be slain by it.”
Lysander wanted a navy. He wanted expansion and inclusion.
But the ancient constitution would not permit purchase to enact reforms. Nothing could change. Nothing would. Yet it must, and these young men knew it.
Here was the further unsettling phenomenon-the political clubs or “oil-and-dusters” as they were called after their spawning grounds, the wrestling schools. Such hives of ferment had never existed. Now they were rife and dominated all.
Part of the genius of the ancient laws, by which the Spartan polity had maintained herself intact over six centuries, was the leavening of youth with age throughout all institutions. There were veterans everywhere; no club or clique escaped supervision by its elders. The oil-and-dusters were tearing this apart. They were young men's clubs and they were impatient. They sided with the future, and their leaders were Lysander and Endius, Chalcideus and Mindarus. Gylippus, too, was a member of “the Ring,” as the hero Brasidas before him. In short this camp comprised the most brilliant and ambitious Spartiates irrespective of fortune or birth.
Endius was far the wealthiest. His estate in the north valley produced such exceptional wine as to be called meliades, honey-sweet, and sufficient surplus of barley, figs, and cheeses that Endius could sponsor no fewer than four score defrocked Gentleman-Rankers whose fortunes had fallen so far as to no longer support their membership in a mess. Endius advanced their dues, restoring their station as Spartiates. In addition he stood guarantor for a number of mothakes, Peers' bastard sons, funding their tuition to the Upbringing. These stood now as loyal to Endius as to the commonwealth. Accounting the helots by whom he was considered patron, it was said that Endius commanded a private army second only to the kings'.
Championing Alcibiades had elevated his influence further.
Each success his friend produced overseas redounded to Endius' credit at home. His horse property at Kranioi was a hundred and ten acres; on this site he had set up a headquarters in exile for his companion. There, on the eve of Alcibiades' decampment to work his mischief in the East, I found myself called to attend upon him and a
