a good man in war unless he can endure to face the blood and the slaughter, go close against the enemy and fight with his hands. Here is courage, mankind’s finest possession, here is the noblest prize that a young man can endeavor to win, and it is a good thing his polis and all the people share with him when a man plants his feet and stands in the foremost spears relentlessly, all thought of foul flight completely forgotten, and has trained his heart to be steadfast and to endure, and with words encourages the man who is stationed beside him-
“When I first heard these verses of Tyrtaeus,” said Endius, “I was a child precisely as old as you are now, sitting in exactly the same place. The telling was done in just the same way, by a Spartiate as honored as Aeimnestus who stands here today, for the very same purpose. Savor this moment, boys, for it is given to none of us to hear Tyrtaeus for the first time twice. And like Aeimnestus, you will come to know every word of ‘The Code of the Citizen’ as well as you will know the fourth hour of a night watch, or what it feels like to take your place in the bronze-girt line. It has been this way since the sons of Herakles first conquered the kingdom of the Atreids, and so it will be thousands of years after we are all heaped on the pyre.”
The boy-herd looked to the soldier, who picked up his shield and, with a comradely nod to the pack, departed. To hear that the reciter was Aeimnestus, the very man who had killed the Persian general Mardonius at Plataea, inspired each boy to look on him with new eyes. Those ropes under his skin were the very tendons that bound the muscles of heroism; those were the glossy locks that fell across the shoulders of legends. Looking down, Stone beheld the horn-nailed, callused feet of a veteran campaigner. In the proud, self-sufficient vacuity of Aeimnestus’ eyes, he got his first look at a life dwarfed by its own renown-though it would be years before he understood this. For now, the moral of the man’s mere presence, that such honor was within the grasp of anyone in the pack, was as compelling as anything written by poets.
Endius gave the boys their first official orders. They were to memorize and recite the first twenty lines of the “Code” by the next day. Omission or inaccuracy, he warned, would tell on the backs of those who failed. The same went for those who flouted the state’s demand for them to learn their letters, and the dances of their fathers, and all the observances that sustained their city in the eyes of the gods. Then he asked the pack a question:
“For what purpose is the Spartan system?”
The abstractness of the question, and the sudden demand that they use their wits, at first kept the boys silent.
“My father said that his father told him that we suffer the Rearing to learn discipline,” said Redhead. “So the answer is discipline, then.”
“Too many words,” replied Endius. “Never prattle. And you’re wrong: discipline is never a goal, but only the means. Anyone else?”
“Victory?” Rehash ventured.
Endius kept looking, as if this answer wasn’t worth a reply.
“Virtue?”
“Who said that?” asked Endius.
Stone raised his hand.
“I ask again, who said that?”
Antalcidas stood up. “I said it.”
“That’s better-never hide in the crowd, boy! If something’s worth saying, it’s worth standing on your feet and taking credit for it. Understand?”
“Yes!”
“You said virtue. That’s closer to the truth, but still not right-virtue comes as naturally to the well-reared Spartan as fruit to the trees, but it is not itself the goal. Anyone else?”
No one spoke.
“There are two right answers. I’ll tell you one of them: freedom. The Spartan citizen is as free as any mortal can be of enslaving passions. Most binding of all are the pleasures that men pursue. To teach you these truths, all children of citizens must suffer the Rearing, without regard to their families’ honor or wealth. Remember this when you are hungry, or cold, or if you are lucky, facedown on the field of battle: you suffer because it makes you free.
“As for the other right answer-that is one you will have to learn on your own. It will not be told.”
With that, Endius announced that he would answer precisely two questions. The youths looked at each other, as if unsure of what to ask or how to ask it. Beast shoved the nearest boy to him and snarled, “Come on now-any grub questions?”
Cheese straightened up and spoke, measuring out his words sparingly. “It is said that other Greeks live in proper cities. Why do our people still live in villages?”
“What you call ‘proper cities’ are the conceits of mortals,” replied Endius. “The Lacedaemonians live in their five villages, and other Greeks in their cities. The Persians have the biggest settlements of all. Yet where do finer men dwell than here? Thebans and Corinthians assemble in vast meeting halls. Yet are the decisions of our elders any less wise for their meeting in the forest, where they are undistracted by roofs and statues and other vanities? The Babylonians have a city wall half a stade tall, and they have been conquered many times. We have no wall, yet we have never known an enemy soldier to plant his foot in our soil. Sparta’s walls are the bodies of the men who defend her.”
“How large is our territory?” asked Frog.
“You have seen the boundary yourself. It lies at the tip of Aeimnestus’s spear. Wherever he carries it, that is the territory of Sparta.”
The pack was dismissed. Their suffering, and therefore their freedom, was enhanced by a spell of cold weather that shrouded Taygetus and the folds of their tunics with frost. They forgot their discomfort by running through the woods, flying under the opposing limbs of the trees, lashing the trunks with fennel stalks. As Stone charged, he struck a young laurel, scattering the leaves behind him as he sang the words Beast had taught him: I would not say anything for a man nor take account of him For any speed of his feet or wrestling skill he might have not if he had the size of a Cyclops and strength to go with it…
8.
The raising of Epitadas consumed almost all Damatria’s attention until it was time to let him go. In those years she fed him, bathed him, swaddled him, and taught him with the fierce possessiveness of a lover. She rarely let Lampito hold the child; Damatria had no patience at all with Molobrus’ paternal fumbling. Of his other kind of clumsiness, the one that afflicted him in the bedroom, she no longer took notice. The act interested her only insofar as it resulted in the salvation that was Epitadas.
In a most un-Spartan manner, she took pleasure in her son’s cooing helplessness. The freshness of his smell possessed her, as in the night she tended to his little cries, his spit-ups, his chubby arms held out to her. Upon the spectacle of his first steps, she wept. For four years she nursed him, seeking privacy so she could gaze into his eyes. The power of his suck kindled a sensual glow that Molobrus’ blunt pokings could never match.
When the day came for him to take the Rearing, she felt as if a piece of her heart was being cut out. She made Endius come three times, telling Epitadas to hide in the fields on the first two occasions. By the time his surrender could no longer be avoided, she left it for Molobrus to hand him over. Damatria watched him leave from a safe place, her hands grasping her milk-swollen breasts, too full of rage to let a sound escape the contorted mask of her grief.
She had to know where Endius took him. She followed them through the barley farms east of the villages, over the pelleted sheep tracks, to a hollow formed by two cypress-clad hills. An altar to mirthless Demeter lay in the center, its mass built up from centuries of solid ash tarred by dripping animal fat, scorched hair and bones and, on this occasion, the tears of a single Spartan mother as bereft as the goddess facing her daughter’s exile to the underworld. From there she watched the boy-herd take the boy into the field to meet his fellows.
After a few days tracking the pack, Damatria learned its movements and could predict with fair accuracy where her son would be at any moment of the day. The paradox of it, that the movements of a group meant to be in a perfect state of freedom could be so easily forecast, was not lost on her. It was of use, though, in her efforts to keep the boy fed. Heedless of the scandal it would cause, she supplemented Epitadas’ diet in secret, bringing him
