The End of Sparta

destroy the Spartan army with this aging cripple of prophecy, Melon, son of Malgis, at their side and General Epaminondas at their front.

Melon saw ahead the lookout running down the hill, but made no point of it. He was in the back of the cart and stretched his legs out. The Thespian also ignored the singing of one of his slaves, Gorgos, beside him. Instead, he pointed to the other with the reins, Chion, to find the good ground and let old loud Gorgos be. Melon’s feet without sandals were now dangling from the open backside. His old, twisted leg was wrapped. He had bound it with leather straps for battle. Melon had wedged himself among the food and arms, propped up in the back of the deep cart-and had just woken up again, when a wheel jolted out of the stone ruts and slammed back in.

The groans of the ox Aias, as the wagon kept uphill a bit longer, had helped to rouse Melon from his dark returning dreams of a high mountain hut. The shack was not the one on his own farm on the uplands of Mt. Helikon. Not at all.

Instead, it was alien and had something to do with this impending war, and seemed to be shared somehow with Gorgos. But it was far away, cold-and, he sensed, to the dreaded south. How he wished the dream interpreter Hypnarchos were here, with his red-lettered scrolls that made sense of the nonsense of the night visions, and taught which dreams were false and which could prove true. In these apparitions, this shed was also shrouded in rain and winter fog, high in spruce trees somewhere amid the clouds. The hazy peaks around it were foreign, and not those of his Helikon. His Gorgos was there too, just as he was here now, still singing his Tyrtaios, but different looking and sounding as well. His other two slaves, Neto and Chion, they were also in this far-away vision. He remembered that much and accepted that the dreams became more frequent as the war loomed closer.

But Melon was now fully awake and he sensed Gorgos was, too-likewise rousted from the same dream. Melon looked about Boiotia again as the wagon slowly creaked past the hill’s summit to a flat meadow. He saw no shed of his dreams anywhere, but he heard his name shouted by some guards off to the right. Otherwise, the cut grain fields were quiet and empty. Not a Spartan yet to be seen. A brief lull had taken hold of the countryside. The early summer threshing was long over. The grapes had their first color on the greener hillsides.

So all was quiet for tomorrow’s battle. For all the summer heat, his Boiotia was not nearly as dry, not so barren as he feared it might be. Towering Mt. Parnassos was at his rear. A peak higher than Helikon, with a touch of the undying snow even in summer. To his left rose rocky Ptoon by the sea. Up there was the temple of Apollo. He had hiked the pathway with Malgis-even after his father had stopped seeing the older Olympian gods, and had turned instead toward worship of the Pythagoreans, whose god was Lord Logos, and whose priests were philosophers, claiming that the divine was not just more powerful than men, but more moral as well. On behalf of this god, long ago his father Malgis had died at the battle at Koroneia. For all this land, long ago Melon had ruined his leg against the Spartans. And for all the Boiotians, his only son, the best of the three of the Malgidai, was tomorrow willing to ride into the spears of the Spartan horse.

As he scanned the plains and hills around Leuktra, Melon saw now how the farmer creates his own better world of trees and vines. He gets lost in it, and needs someone to bring him out of his refuge. His son had now done that for him and so brought him to the grand vision of Epaminondas, but then, again, Lophis had never fought the Spartans. Any who did, as Melon had, might wish to never again, and so would remember why the world of the orchard and vineyard was far safer than the chaos of what men produce in town. Yet then again, no man can be the good citizen alone on his ground, although Melon had tried that for thirty years and more, in between his service for the Boiotians. A farm may hide failure, be a salve to hurt and sorrow, even disguise fear and timidity, but it cannot be a barricade of peace when there is mayhem outside its walls. And there was now plenty of that at Leuktra.

As he neared the creek of Leuktra, Melon saw again from the jostling wagon that his Boiotia was a holy place. It was no pigsty of marshes and dullards the way the Spartans slandered it. If it were, why would they be here this day to take it? It was time anyway for this settling up tomorrow, Melon thought, even if it meant that the Malgidai would have to mortgage their all-himself, Chion, Gorgos, and Lophis, maybe even the farm itself. The fight was not yet about Epaminondas freeing the slaves of the south, he assured himself. Not entirely tomorrow. Nor about the Pythagorean dream of “we’re all equal” that would take the gods to enforce. Nor about the promises of oracles and seers that Melon was the apple who had to fight at Leuktra for Epaminondas to win-and for a Spartan king to die.

Apart from all that, Melon and his son Lophis would battle just this once more to push the invaders off his soil. Or at least he thought he would, since he had not yet met this Epaminondas-this huge jar into which everyone seems to throw their dreams, fears, and hopes. The seers said the men of his age were not like the grandfathers of their grandfathers, who had saved the Hellenes from the Persians at Marathon. Melon’s debased generation was said not even to have been the equal of their grandfathers, who had helped the Spartans stop Athens from gobbling down Hellas. But now the Boiotians-right here, tomorrow-they could at least end Sparta? That would prove that the polis was not through yet, that the blood of the old heroes of Hellas, of Miltiades, of Lysander and of Pagondas, still ran in the veins of the Boiotian farmers at Leuktra.

So a sense of contentment, of eudaimonia had come over Melon, son of Malgis, as they had left his farm this past morning. For its vines and trees, and tall grass-and for fear of being found wanting in the eyes of the dead-he would pick up his spear. For his son Lophis, and his son’s young wife Damo and their boys and their neighbor Staphis who had braved the hoots of the Thespians in the assembly-and for the simple folk of his Thespiai who never had harmed Sparta-he would fight Sparta and seek to end Sparta. Staphis with the smelly single cloak and a bleary eye and his stick arms was the least likely hoplite in Thespiai-and the only one who had joined the Malgidai for battle. Even now Melon recalled the rabble in the assembly back home, who had hooted the vine man Staphis down when he alone had called for the town to muster with Epaminondas.

“We know,” Staphis had screamed back at them, “that the Pythagoreans will join Epaminondas, whoever this general is.” Vine growers rarely had the ear of the assembly and he was not about to lose his moment as he bellowed out more. “And we know his fellow Thebans will as well. And those who could use plunder from the dead on the battlefield may wish to go to Leuktra. Others who hate Sparta will line up in the front rank. But why should we farmers on the high ground of Helikon care whether these Spartan invaders torched the wheat land of the lowlanders below or trample our vines? Why would I, with two daughters and a gout-footed wife, risk a spear in my gut, when my grapes are overripe and rot on the vine for want of pickers? Why? Well, I will tell you: for the name of Helikon, of course. And for the pride of our Thespiai, and for holy Boiotia that bore and raised us. Yes, for the idea that no Spartan will ever again barge into the ground of their betters, and that on the morrow, we shall end Sparta for good as we knew it. For all that, I, Staphis, will walk alone to find a slot in the front line of my general Epaminondas.”

Now remembering all the lofty words of the defiant Staphis, as he neared the enemy encamped at Leuktra, Melon sensed, like Staphis, that decay was not fated. Decline was a choice, a wish even, to idle and to lounge and willingly to become lesser folk, rust that appeared to feed on the hard iron of what their parents had wrought. If Boiotia were to fall, it would not be because of Lichas and his Spartans, or Persians from across the sea, or the wild tribes who swept from Makedon, but because lesser Boiotians simply let them in, preferring wine and flute-girls to blood and iron.

The farmers of Helikon had the good on their side. They had never yet marched down into Lakonia to bother the Spartans. Melon had never sung war songs like the war-loving Spartans did. But now, today, they were burning his homeland of Boiotia, and nearing his polis Thespiai. Until now, for much of his life, he certainly had not had much feeling one way or another about their helot slaves-at least not until this summer. But the Spartans had provoked Epaminondas, and now the general in fury would risk thousands of Boiotian farmers killed for the freedom of the Messenian serfs and to end Sparta for good. Is that the nemesis that the hubris of Sparta has earned-and their ruin that was to come at last? But was there another way to stop them? Surely not, at least not for good. A wall of stone, a mountain perhaps could block a line of advancing Spartan hoplites, but not other mere men, at least as he had known them until now. A man, Melon now smiled at his wild thoughts, could think of a lot as he rested in the back of a cart on the way to war.

Each spring, the tall men of Sparta from the south came to torch when the grain of Boiotia grew heavy and dry. This summer, almost on a town crier’s schedule, King Agesilaos had ordered the other king, his royal partner, Kleombrotos, to bring in another army. The two promised that Boiotia would be theirs before the rumors of war and promises of revolution spread to the south and took flesh-before the rest of Hellas got drunk, they also said, on the mad idea that the poor man with nothing could vote in the assembly right alongside the noble with everything and put the worse in charge of the better. All that would ruin what was once good in Hellas. Or so they also said.

Boiotia knew that Kleombrotos, if his army won at Leuktra tomorrow, would then unleash his henchman