The End of Sparta

without end.

At fifty Melon was on the downhill course without a rock or stump in his way, with a better farm for his boy Lophis than what Malgis had given him-and with a better son in Lophis than he himself had been. Lophis riled Melon with new talk of helots and Epaminondas and grand marches and Lichas and how he must come down to fight the Spartans if he were to claim he was a citizen and a man of the polis. But shortly after making his decision to fight, Melon had begun to see black visions sent from the gods-the dream changing on alternating sleeps. He always saw two cities to the south, far beyond the Isthmos, and now at Leuktra those old dreams came back and turned his mind from Helikon.

The first one was a rising city of tall stones, with ladders of men at work, and black cut rock stacked everywhere amid the growing ramparts. Two big levers with pulleys and hooks lifted squared blocks on a temple wall. A theater was half-finished. Workers swarmed on the embrasures, singing with the oxen-team drivers in a thick Doric. An agora was crowded. Farmers in peace flocked in to sell their wares. Squabbles were settled in a large dikasterion by swift-mouthed rhetors and voting jurors. Women brought their men apples in baskets. They sang to them as they hauled stones. On a bema, a tall orator lectured to his listeners, who jeered and clapped-but then voted in peace and praised their freedom as their walls always rose higher. Calm and order reigned.

On the other gloomier nights when there was no moon, Melon saw these same towers and walls, but unfinished, with many more black blocks ready to be stacked. This other vision of the city was longer, darker and louder. There were rotting Hellenes hanging in nooses from the gates. Dogs and birds fought over even more corpses in ditches and refuse piles, pulling on their putrid ankles. There were more bodies half-eaten outside the towers, clubbed and knifed, with their purses and packs stolen. Men were killing and raping at will, and packs of cutthroats in the chaos of the city’s license roamed over the unfinished city that was full of trash and worse, as slaves dumped their slop jars into open pits. Always upon waking Melon asked himself how could this same city be two different cities, and which dream was the real, which the false. Somehow he put himself in the answer: His presence in the south could ensure the good city of this Epaminondas, holy Messene to come-while his absence would mean its failure and descent into chaos. But, he asked himself, would Gorgos, would Chion stay or go with him, and if they went, who would keep the farm and the family of his son Lophis safe?

A spear’s length away, Chion on this hard-baked ground this night now saw these same images, but he had more of his own dreams and memories before Leuktra that would not easily give way. Malgis, he knew, had roped the slow-moving pursuing helot Gorgos in the free-for-all after the Theban phalanx had broken at the Nemea and the battle lines had been crossed. The prisoner Gorgos had squirmed on the ground and whimpered that he was the prized shield carrier of a Spartan noble. Maybe the manservant to the big ephor, to Lichas himself he was. Now the Messenian slave was somewhere around six tens, maybe more, or so he claimed, though his arms seemed too hard for a man that old. On feast nights for the two meat-eaters, Chion saw Gorgos crush a piglet’s head like he did a squash. Gorgos said he was nearly blind-though the helot saw more than others the bad spots and crooks of the farm. Most days he shuffled about and was just worth the food to keep him going, although Gorgos talked as if he owned the estate itself. Chion’s dreams now stayed on Helikon.

Neto did more work than the Messenian. But she never stayed put as she wandered throughout the hamlets of Boiotia. Years earlier Melon had bought her as a twelve-year-old; he’d put down twenty good Boiotian silver coins, the new minted ones of the Confederation with the stamped shields. Down at the harbor at Kreusis some Spartan renegade had sneaked in at night in a leaky boat, eager to barter her away along with four other helots and a bronze breastplate. The trader had charged more for her than for the others, and had spun stories that she was the aborted daughter of a fallen virgin Messenian priestess. Artemis, he said, had struck her mother when she had found her pregnant. Then the goddess had cut out Netikon alive from the shaking womb and had bellowed, “You live and are cursed to be damned when you reveal today what will happen tomorrow.” Melon told Chion he had bought her to help Gorgos; but he told also the tale of her birth, because, he reasoned, if she thought she was a priestess, well, then that was better than a slave after all, was it not?

The girl was more than twenty seasons now. Gorgos had tried to poke her twice. But Melon had beat him hard with his stick both times. A third time was even worse when Melon slapped him with the shaft of his spear, the heavy one of ash-even though the helot had fancied his Netikon would not fight back once she had had a taste of his horn. The last time his back bled from the hit so much that Gorgos dared to snap back at his master that he was beating the saddle rather than the willing mount. Yes, he’d try to settle up soon enough, Chion suspected, and with all of them if he could. Chion had heard Gorgos boast that Neto needed a brand on her soft face to take her down two pegs-just like the one on Chion’s own cheek.

Neto had whispered to Chion, “For all his singing of lions, Gorgos has no thought of what floor he will end up on-or that he will die one day at the hand of another helot. But that is what the divine whispers say.” She warned Chion to either kill or free him. The bit of freedom that the master Melon gave him, she knew, made the slave hate them all the more that it came late and in such small measure. At least that was how Neto accounted for what she saw as the unaccountable, since the petulant Gorgos was treated as if he were free, and fared far better than any down in the Peloponnesos. Always Chion watched them from the high grain fields, as he pried up an oak stump with an iron bar and ax. Kill this broke-back now, Chion had thought. Or later, as Neto foretold? For sport here-or soon in battle, no difference. Why just him? Why not even the score, since one killing makes the murderer as much as five or so. The neighbor below, Dirke, and her slaves, the Spartan-lovers, would those traitors be good relish too? All this Chion went over in these dreams, just as if each choice were a different stone to be stacked and fitted into his grand terrace on the upper five plethra, or another notch on the windlass of the new olive press. When you live to kill the bad, you can do more good than the good, or thus Chion claimed his own ideas had the sanction of Pythagoras and called his plans to kill the god’s wisdom to save his own soul.

Chion had been told that Malgis, the slave collector, had picked him up cheap-for almost nothing-at age three, when Malgis was on the way home from the wars in Asia. Malgis had once marched with the Ten Thousand and then stayed on to fight for better pay with the lords of the Spartans. Before Derkyllidas and the Spartan fleet sailed west, the Egyptian plague swept the islanders. Most island clans were selling off their scarred orphans-those few survivors who were free for life from the boils-for an owl coin or two from Athens to the ships as they passed to the Peloponnesos.

Chion also had been told that Malgis had paid only three obols-a half Athenian owl-for the pox boy with the ugly Spartan brand. It was a lambda burned into his cheek. Scars covered most of his face and arms from the nosos. “This sick worm, not much to be sure,” the Spartan pilot had offered when he sold him to Malgis. “He’s an ugly white toddler, too, maybe a snowy Thrakian. But then three obols is not much of a gamble either, is it, for a raggedy thing splashing about the currents of death?” Malgis had made the exchange. Only then the Spartan had grumbled, “No buyer’s second anger for poxy boy-but the priestess of Artemis on Chios told me to kill this half-dead thing, since the pox and the hungry belly couldn’t. She says he is a killer of Spartan royalty, Lichas’s bane. Beware-or be happy-over that.”

The words of the island trader had been forgotten, even if Chion had heard them enough. What was pock- marked and yellow soon grew on Malgis’s farm into a near giant. Six-cubit Chion he was, with the stone shoulders of the Titans of old. Just like the vines on the high trellises that got stronger with the more sunlight, Chion had taken off on the mountain, and his remedy for a day behind the ox was “More work.” He chanted no Tyrtaios as did Gorgos, but strains from Helikon’s native Hesiod as he pulled Neto’s plow: “Ergon epi ergo, ergon epi ergo-work on top of work.” As the great year of settling up with invading Spartans approached, Chion often went out alone to the sycamores on the crests of Helikon. He stalked the wilds, eating berries and killing game for the poor for days at a time-as if he were a hunter, perhaps a hunter of men with no need of the polis or even the meat for his own belly. “The Panther Chion,” Neto called him, the all-beast panther. With that, the dreams of Chion ceased and black sleep held him a while longer.

But not so Melon, whose mind still saw visions as he snored. For all the tranquility of the farm, rumors of a new war had bored deeply into Melon. He knew that. They never really left him in peace again. It was not a mere battle anymore to showcase courage but something quite different-a struggle to overturn the ancient order itself that needed a hoplite like himself who could put his lore to good use for thousands of democrats. That bothered-but intrigued-him. Worried him that a man who promised to change the world would enlist a broken-down man like himself, and yet goaded him on that Epaminondas might see in Melon, sore back, and a deaf ear, and a locked knee,