The End of Sparta

of Boiotia, related. “Hear me out. All the prophets sing of our Melon the Thespian. This man the oracle of Pasiphai from far-off Thalamai warned. He is the lame one-come here tonight from his high farm on Helikon. He is the one the king was warned about. This I can prove. I have talked to the priestess of Apollo on Ptoon. She too has heard the gods’ voices: “Should Melon live till tomorrow and see the face of a Spartan king, then the sons of Leonidas, they will be no more.”

Proxenos grew even quieter in speech. “Some of you have heard the rumors about the Thespian Neto, near Askra. She’s the virgin helot, the slave on Melon’s farm. She has sworn that the priestess of Trophonios, the snake-goddess of Lebadeia, promised us victory-if only the son of Malgis would fight. Ah, she is here with us now.”

Then on cue a blood-curdling shriek filled the tent. “Alalale. Alalalalaleee …” The war cry of Helikon. Tall and thin, Neto stood on a chair above the hoplites. She had sneaked off from the farm, once Melon had left with Chion and Gorgos, and had spent yet another day at Thebes with Proxenos studying the omens. Now with her hair in waves and her eyes rolling, she posed like those wild gorgons in stone, carved high on the big temples, with mouth and teeth wide open. Back on Melon’s farm, Neto had learned to sound her war cry in Boiotian, when guiding the oak plow that Chion drew-always in fear that the snorting, sweating slave would break her plowshare on the half-hidden boulders ahead. She had been born a helot but had been bought here in the north by Melon. He claimed her seller had told him that the little girl was daughter of a disgraced priestess of Pasiphai to the south. Now she was the oracle of the Thespians in the woods of Helikon. She acted no more like Melon’s slave than did Gorgos or Chion.

Then this wild Kalypso went on again, louder in man speech, winking at her master as she began. “Here is Melon. Among you Melon, son of Malgis. Don’t you see? Melon. Listen to our one God. Melon of Thespiai is chosen. Yes, yes he is the one they fear to the south. Melon will kill a Spartan king. Why? Why? He is the melon of course, the “apple” the seers say will end the Spartans.”

Now she was quite out of her steamy breath. Shaking, swaying, almost tipping off the chair, near collapse, she offered gibberish all mixed up in clumsy hexameters. One hand went up and flailed the air. The other was stabbing the breeze with her reed pipe. The hoplites had never seen anything quite like this. The sudden shouts, followed by her eerie calm voice, kept them still. All this ranting in cadence came from what looked like a slave and a woman. In Boiotian with some Messenian strains-delivered with a high pitch that cut the ears. She appeared as odd as her verse. Neto was as tall as most men, cloaked in the rough wool of a man. Her nose was a bit long. Her lips were too wide. Her ears were big enough that her long hair could never quite cover them. Yet she was pretty, perhaps even goddess-like-or so she seemed to the eyes of her master Melon, who let her roam all over Boiotia.

They could see all that right now, so at least she was humankind. Neto’s face balanced out well enough, as if its parts could not do without each other. Her legs were long. She often ran up to the dam above the farm of Melon, with the fawns and does. “Deer Legs,” Chion called her. Yes, Neto of the fast legs that outpaced the stags on Helikon. Some of the Thebans murmured that she was a wood nymph or worse than a naiad. But who could get her off that high chair? She must have jumped up with those panther thighs to get there. Without much prompting, Neto threw off her cloak and hood. As if possessed by the Pythia’s vapors, she slowly sang out a few more phrases as she pointed to Melon. “Him. Him. The Spartans must kill or lose tomorrow morn. Keep him safe. Do that and the king will die. The Thebans are mightier in war.”

Even the glum ones such as Philliadas were stunned silent once they heard that the violated virgin ghosts of Leuktra were to be in the skies floating above them in battle, tearing at the red-capes. They would keep away the winged demons of death from the Thebans. These were the Keres, the blood-sucking goddesses who appeared, at one time or another, at all the battles of the Hellenes, drawn from afar by the shouts of battle and the smell of gore-with their craws full of man-flesh and sharp claws plucking up any who were tottering-assured that the life- threads of these victims were already spun by Klotho, measured by deathless Lachesis, and then cut by their partner Atropos, and that all three of the divine Moirai had nodded to their flying henchwomen that the doomed could now be stripped, their carcasses feasted upon, their souls whisked off to Hades.

In battle, the untouched hoplites saw none of the Keres of this netherworld. Only the blood-spattered and dying were given the sudden vision of these feathered vultures, who grew fat from the carnage. When sated, the women of the night landed in weariness among the flies and dung to walk off their meal, and vomit and crap out tooth and bone, and then fly up for more. They flapped off cackling and farted out the fumes of human blood. Yes, on oaks around the battlefield the Keres perched and fouled the ground with their red pus dung. They stank, as they always dove back, eye-level over the battlefield, with their pale breasts, bloody tunics, and long white fangs-eyeing any falling hoplites that could be grabbed and torn apart before the souls went down into Hades. The foolish among the dying saw their female full-white breasts and long red nipples, and paused-only to find fangs in their necks and talons under their arms as they were snatched up. All these would fly above the battle tomorrow-and yet the hoplites were encouraged that perhaps the good ghosts of the virgins of Leuktra might keep the black daughters of night away from them.

Neto quickly covered up and looked around for Melon. Then she jumped down and took her place with the servant girls who scurried about the tent to clean up the mess of eating and loud men. Finally she went over to Proxenos, and amid the commanders, Neto whispered despite the din of the tent. “I had a shudder. The Olympians speak through me, even if I damn them and instead worship Pythagoras. Yes, you and I claim we understood these signs, but not all of them. If there is truth to the prophecy of the melon-there is also truth to another warning that Proxenos, son of Proxenos, lord of Plataia, shall not cross south of the Isthmos.”

He laughed. But she only grabbed harder on the arm of the Plataian. “The gods on Olympos hate our arrogant Pythagoras, who has stopped so many of their sacrifices and the burnt meats men offer up to their greedy tastes. I hear these old ones, petty, spiteful, and full of envy, at night. Yet they do not always lie to me, especially when I sleep. They hate him and his logos.” She was weeping in this, the moment of her joy that the army was about to fight and would win, she knew-and then would go south and free her Messenian kin after all, even if thousands of helots down south as yet knew nothing of Thebes, of Pythagoras, or the idea of democracy.

But then Neto frowned and grabbed the cloak of Proxenos. “Listen, again. Do not go south after our victory tomorrow. We will win. But you lose if you do not stay north of the Isthmos. You are no Melon, who even in his age is stronger than you, and is the god-loved. Nor are you an Ainias who can oversee your walls to the south. There are no black clouds above that man, either, and yet he cannot keep you safe. I see only corpses of enemies at his feet, never his own. He will die with a white beard and a walking stick at his own choosing.”

Proxenos the architect laughed, this time even louder. He was young and tanned more than he needed to be from his days fixing the walls of Plataia. Birth and money, and his white teeth and black beard, gave him a certain arrogance that comes when a man feels bigger and stronger and richer than those around him. He had been born into wealth and bred to think less of slower wits. Women, he knew, he could always persuade. Neto would be no different: No doubt she was entranced by his vigor, looks, and silver, and now worried that she might lose the chance to enjoy them all the more when the war ended.

Proxenos had met this Neto the previous year at the shrine of Eurynome on the Asopos River below his red grape vineyards. A chance occurrence, he had thought, to see a naiad alone in the wilds of Boiotia. But now he was not so sure of that long-ago accident, as Neto had come often for most of the past spring. She had taught him of Pythagoras, and soon no longer was he the bored aristocrat lamenting that the capitals of his atrium were Doric rather than new Ionic. Instead the new Proxenos became a devotee of her Pythagoras when she told him that his genius could raise walls of new cities to the south taller than those of Troy-his work for thousands rather than for a few aristocrats who wanted a new portico on their mansions. He could draw the plans in the north, and let others follow them to the south.

Now, in reply to her warning, Proxenos’s soft words flew out as pained concession, or more condescension from lord to master. “Neto, Neto, my Neto. We go to all the trouble to consult these fat priests. If that is not enough, we give heavy silver to the virgins of the temple to tell us of their signs and visions. And now you tell me to go home to the Asopos? Some day, if the One God wills, we will march into shadowy Messenia and at last live up to our divine logos that says no one is born a slave-and just as we start, you tell me all that reason, that faith in numbers is but a lie?”

Neto grabbed the arm of Proxenos. “But my Proxenos, reason or not, don’t press too hard the dying gods who like to give short lives to those too certain of themselves. Run from Nemesis.” She was almost ranting again.