The End of Sparta

beneath a mountain oak and soon were asleep for the few hours left before the sunrise draw-up of the phalanx. Chion and Melon, as if by consent, were alike dreaming of the farm back on Helikon. Both were pruning and talking in these dreams before battle-as if they would soon have no more chance to meet again in this life.

Where was this high farm of Melon and Chion that drew them home in their last sleep before battle? Melon’s ground was not far from Leuktra, high up the eastern side of the massif of Mt. Helikon, two stadia above the floor of the valley. The farm was right below the hard frost line, at an elevation at which olives can thrive. It was a good, safe place to grow things, to keep away from the Thespians and all the other Boiotian villagers below-mostly hidden as it was from the invaders from the north or south, and too hard a hike up for the raiders on the coast. The slopes of Helikon itself were a divine place, the center of Hellas-a place where the Muses could speak directly to a man. Helikon was south and to the east a little of snowy Mt. Parnassos. Along these mountains the clouds piled up to hide Apollo when he visited his oracle Pythia beneath at Delphi, navel of the world.

For his part this night at Leuktra, Chion could see the land almost as if he were floating above it, like Ikaros with waxen wings. From the farm it was an easy gaze at the mountain passes of Parnon to Attika and Athens. To the south were the high woody crests of ill-omened Mt. Kithairon, on whose backside the Spartans this morning, if they lost, were going to sneak away along the cliffs above the sea. Farther in the distance rose peaks of Pentelikos and Akonthion, the ridges that kept out of Boiotia the bad Athenians, the false democrats whom the Boiotians hated more than any of the Hellenes. Chion for his part could see craggy Ptoon and the green island of Euboia lying far off into the west. The farm of Melon was right above the great plain of Boiotia-“cow-land,” those arrogant Athenians called it. Few went up to Helikon. Even fewer on Helikon wished to go down.

Over fifty crops before this morning’s battle, the founder Malgis, father of Melon, had staked out his plot on Helikon. He cleared virgin ground from the mountain. Hyacinth, amaryllis, and wild Attic orchids followed. Once the sun hit the land shorn of thousands of strawberry trees, dense beech, and poplar copses, tulips sprouted. “I did it,” the hoplite Malgis used to yell to the skies. When he patched broken tiles on the farm’s high tower roof, he could take in the view of his thirty years’ worth of work. “All this-it came off of my back, with help from the prophets of the One God, all led by Pythagoras who set me right on my course.” Farming, Malgis the founder said, was a lot like war. It needed the same order and discipline if you were to survive it. He came to worship Pythagoras, the god of order and reason, rather than the overgrown child-gods on Olympos. All they wanted were libations and burnt offerings, just like babies in diapers who cry when the teat slips out of their mouth.

Melon had been told all this by Malgis, his father, and how the old man had once planned their farm on the number principles of his god, who explained how the perfect world beyond is revealed to us through the eternal laws of the arithmoi. On a rocky expanse of about a hundred plethra, the farm’s 720 olive trees and 5,040 vines spread across the terraced ground in a careful grid. He had dug in all the cuttings and rootings himself. The holes of the pattern he marked out with chalked rope. The farm spread all the way up the slope-terraced grain fields on the rich black soil, the wine vines higher up to catch the cooler breezes, olives on the poor rocky soils atop, each crop suited for each step higher up the mountain, no soil idle, no change in temperature or wind wasted. The harvests were serial, as the clan moved through the year from grain to vines to olives-the Malgidai busy always, slack in their labor never. No ice storm could kill their triad, as the harvests of the diverse crops and their leaf-break dates were never the same. A spring frost hurt the grapes, but not the barley-in the way a fall rain cracked open the grapes, but did nothing to the unripe olives. And the farm was the goddess Amalthea’s horn of plenty, as Malgis called it: olive oil for the light in the clan’s lamps and for cooking on the stoves, or even to lubricate the wagon’s axle; grapes for raisins all winter, for fresh fruit in summer, for wine all year round; barley and wheat for their bread and gruel. Who needed anything more? Only war could stop the farm-by sending in Spartans to burn their wheat or trample their vines, or, worse yet, letting the foul Keres harvest the farm’s harvesters.

Walk into the orchards and vineyards anywhere on the slope, and the symmetry brought forth the voice of Pythagoras. On the farms of others, chaos reigned as three vines encircled a crooked row of four olives, or goat pens were plopped down amid apples. No order in the farms of others-and no reminders of the perfect world that we all must strive to glimpse and at some point enter. Malgis, the creator, told his son that in matters of great things, such as this carving out of an entire estate from the flank of Helikon, men tend to look only at the finish. The envious never remember the hard beginning or even the worse middle of doubt and remorse. Instead, without shame onlookers come to covet what they used to mock. “I can see them below from here, and that’s close enough for me. Soon the Spartans will turn on them, and they will climb up here looking for our spear arms.” Malgis taught the household to distrust the superstitious majority and to join it only when it acted in according to the precepts of Pythagoras-in other words, rarely at all. Even though the son Melon doubted that creed, he kept to his father’s admonitions to shun the crowd and keep it away-and earned both the advantages from the ensuing tranquility of solitude and the dark moods that resulted from thoughts and suppositions untested and unquestioned that grow unchecked by others.

Freedom-Malgis added in his daily sermons to his son Melon-wars with equality. Always. The fathers of the polis had once marked out the grid of bottomland farms. Originally they were all equally sized and portioned out to the hoplite farmer citizens of equal wealth. Within a generation those belonging to the luckier, or better, farmers were larger, while some of the poorer or unfortunate farmers lost their portions altogether. Melon still dreamed on this early morning before Leuktra that his father had warned him of those who demand equal slots in both the end and the beginning: Beware of the phalanx, the agrarian grid, and the assembly hall, where all are declared to be equal who in fact are not. So beware of those in the phalanx who look equal but do not protect their position as do others. They can kill you.

The farm craft of Malgis gave the vines’ canes, high up and long in the air, the full sun for the entire day. That was why his grapes made the sweetest wine on Helikon. Malgis got the idea of the arbors from a farmer outside Syracuse he met who read and wrote block letters on long scrolls. “The sun makes the grapes, and the grapes the wine,” this Sikilian Lysis told Malgis. He showed him charts and graphs, and when he returned home to Thespiai, Malgis translated all those lines and letters into plethra of arbors and pergolas, roofed with grape canes twenty feet long and more. But then Lysis also had lectured on the right dirt, the perfect elevation, the type of water, and so Malgis thought it wasn’t just the arbors that made his vintage. Good wine needed sparse soil. Grapes liked just a little water. Crisp mornings were good for color. A cold nip at night gave taste, as did the hot sun on the leaves of the vine. Vineyards would be planted above the wheat and below the olives.

The Malgidai themselves produced the bounty, not just prayers to Dionysos or cries of the Bakkhai that the ignorant shout who are without the reason of Pythagoras. When a man fails in body or soul or wisdom, he always prays to the Olympians. Or so as Melon kept dreaming before battle he remembered all that Malgis once had said. For fifty and more harvests before Leuktra, the Malgidai rarely came off Helikon except to fight for the Boiotians. They had enough coins and enough grapes, wheat, and oil to need none of those below-and no more desire to die in the phalanx of the Boiotians on the doomed left wing in the battles against the Spartans. So they were a confident bunch, and came to forget that the wages of hubris are nemesis.

Finally in the year before Leuktra, Melon had opened his ears a little to Pythagoras. For he tired of meat, and found his left arm as strong as his right, and no longer felt himself better by birth than his slaves, all in the manner of Pythagoras. He wanted to believe that he had an eternal soul that would be judged in the hereafter by its brief entrapment and struggle within an all too human body; or so he also told the believer Chion, who was determined not to return as a sparrow or snake, but to free his soul forever with deeds he deemed good. And yet Melon had hesitated until now, worried by the rumors that Epaminondas might make the worse better and so replace the tyranny of Sparta with the chaos of freedmen.

For all their farming expertise, the Malgidai’s strongboxes were heavy with coins that had not come entirely from the soil. No one ever quite makes a living on farming alone, although all always insist that they do. Instead the money had come from Malgis’s campaigning when he once sailed for fifteen days to Sikily to join a Spartan attack on Athens. He came back a rich man with the loot of the dead at the Assinaros River. His new strongbox, with the lumps of gold beneath the coins, proved so heavy that he finally sent young Melon for a chain at the town forge to haul it up out of the well. No mere hemp rope would bear all the weight of his profits. War, it turned out, was a good way to make or lose money. But profit depended on what side of a war you ended up on. Always it was the wiser choice to fight on the side of the Spartans-even if that meant halfway across the ocean in Sikily or Asia. The Spartans would enrich Malgis for most of his life. At his end, they would kill him when he broke his own rule.