The End of Sparta

the blood of Lophis. Then another odor hit the hound, and he was off toward Kithairon. Neto thought he’d be back after the smell of a dappled fawn proved false. She gave the woman of the shrine a bag of raisins and figs-and another silver Athenian owl for good measure. Then Kallista helped her douse and scrub off Lophis with oil and sprinkle him with wine, and wrap his stiff corpse in Neto’s blanket. They tied it into a bundle and then slung him gently over the back of Xiphos. The horse jumped at that, raw as he was with cuts from the battle. Neto shuddered; she had seen this picture in night visions before of her strapping a dead body on a horse in front of a shed, but was it this one now, or was there another corpse in yet another bad night in the future?

A bony hand grabbed her shoulder. “Stay here the night, pretty one? Don’t go off in the dark with killers on the road. I hear the wild man-bear is out tonight, come down from Helikon out your way to harvest some Spartans. For another three silver pieces, I can lead you to my hut up the draw over there.” But Neto pushed Kallista away, flashed her knife, and decided to wait no longer for the marauding dog Porpax to return. She turned Xiphos around and slowly led the horse by the reins, careful that the body remained balanced on his back.

On the way back, an Athenian-or at least he sounded like one in his loud Attic-ran up to her in the darkness and grabbed the tail of Xiphos. The pony kicked hard. Neto waved her blade in the air. She glanced back at the robber in the dirt, a boy, with two or maybe three more friends, out for easy steals in this blur between peace and war. During the trip back there were small parties of Spartans to watch for, trailing the army that by now was well past the Megarid. She remembered the warnings of her master, Melon, who had told her everyone has a choice in this life-a way to either live in fear or to give fear to others. So don’t be a slave to your terrors, Neto spoke to herself. Let those robbers worry what Megale Neto, the Amazon warrior, will do to them with this sharp knife, not what they might do to me. At that she pulled out her blade and pointed it ahead as she rode.

She went faster on her way north, and by midmorning Neto could see the farm’s tower in the distance on the slopes of Helikon. The Dog Star sun was warming up. She wanted to get Lophis inside the cool air of the bottom floor of the farmhouse where the water from Helikon was piped in, and she knew Melon would be waiting. Then she heard loud voices far in the distance, but thought at first it was only the Athenian robbers, accosting some fool without a horse and knife. It was nothing but sounds on the wind, as a hard breeze came up from south of the Isthmos.

She yelled out anyway in the direction of the noise: “I am Neto of Helikon. Make way-or die.”

PART TWO Between Peace and War CHAPTER 12

The Lizard’s Tail

Off in the distance a world away, far to the south in Messenia, maybe a thousand stadia away from Neto on Helikon, at this very moment hawk-eyed Nikon of the helots, would-be leader of the revolt, stared out fixed on the late summer moon. His helot rangers had backed off from their leader and let him scream in his drink on his rocky perch, as he did on occasion when they walked on the high mountain trails of Ithome far above Messenia below. This Nikon was a tanner and smelled of hides and lye, and he was unlettered. Yet he knew knife work and had led the fiercest of the helot rebels. Let the Messenian leaders parley with Lichas for a quarter, a half of Messenia. But he would free it all, and kill every Spartan caught on the wrong side of Taygetos. Now he was perched on a cleft on Mt. Ithome in the land of the Messenians, and he kept repeating to the stars under the moonlight, “I am Nikon of Messenia. Make way for me-or die.”

This same night Nikon was on his second bag of sweet wine, and calling out to anyone under the same sky of Hellas. Did the men of Boiotia care that the heilotai were whipped and killed and in the best of their moments pelted with rotten fruit, poked and lashed by the drunk Spartans at dinner in the syssitia? Did they know the Spartan overlords sang of “Messene good to plow, good to plant” as if Ithome were theirs, as if helots were but ants of their soil? Nikon may have been the rabble-rouser of the helot rebels here on the upland. But the wine and the starry night on Mt. Ithome had put him into a trance, as if his saviors in Boiotia, half the length of Hellas away in the north, might hear him-but only if he called out loud enough to their shared sky. He had heard voices of prophecy, of Epaminondas and Melon, of great armies to come, and of the Messenian woman to the north, Neto of Helikon, who was promising a great reckoning this coming winter or next. Or so he told himself that there were real sounds and talk in his head, and not just gibberish brought on by two pouches of unmixed wine. He had no runners to send north for news, no money to visit the oracles at Delphi and Olympia for the gods’ plans. So the illiterate Nikon yelled to the stars in hopes that an oracle, a priestess maybe in Boiotia far to the north might hear him.

“Who said who was to be free and slave? What god did this thing? The Spartans? Is their Lichas an all- powerful Zeus Soter? Why for three hundred and fifty harvests have the Messenians been the asses of the men of Sparta, while all the rest of Hellas has been free?” But Nikon was talking only to himself. Only his henchman Helos, who knew how to write the block letters and put his master’s thoughts onto scrolls, followed him on the high path on the cliffs of Ithome. Loyal Helos had his own bladder bag, but one of icy spring water; and the good partner tried to get Nikon to drink and dilute the raging heat in his head. It was also Helos, the finest scribe in the west of the Peloponnesos, who saw that the illiterate Nikon alone of the rebel bands knew the mind of the Spartan, how to ambush him, how to goad the helots into killing their landlords.

The rest of the helots had taken the other path down after their nighttime patrolling. The rival Doreios yelled to them, “Join me-not this anvil-head Nikon. His name spells defeat-not victory.” All this meant nothing to the mumbling Nikon, who this night kept up his helot shouts at the moon. “I watched my daughters with horse tails, clipped to their butts, forced to neigh, poked by Spartans at the symposia. Or made to bellow like cows, mounted from the backside, to the strains of their bastard poet Tyrtaios. Or my son Aristomenes, flogged and kicked as he howled like a dog to the laughter of the Spartans, hit with their black olives and mushy apples and then dragged like a side of beef from his pony.”

Nikon, in desperate appeal, thought he could plead to the female voice in his head from north in Boiotia. “Is there anything worse than for a man to pick his grapes, stomp them, filter the juice, store the amphora, and age the wine-only then to cart it over to the Spartan acropolis? To give them as apophorai-to be whipped for the service as the idle red-cape soldiers gulp down a year’s work, most of it ending up as piss and vomit on the floor?” Now Nikon went on to the black night above, “Don’t forget the cleft of Kaiadas, the black abyss on Taygetos. Where we are thrown and then broken at the bottom, waiting at night for the wolves to eat our dying flesh as our tortured souls fly out from our ruined bodies.” Soon his dwindling band split off on the paths between the wild figs. They laughed at the wages of wine, for now they saw that their captain Nikon, silhouetted on a rocky outcropping across the vale, was taken with one of his periodic manias, as he talked with voices that wafted in the air.

He was drunk. Dionysus had sneaked into his head. Or worse, he had chewed some of the wild weed with the bitter white flowers that made the horses and cattle bellow and fall over. Alone of all the leaders of the helots, Nikon could see that an army would come, and that some men in Greece were for justice and not just plunder and their own pride when they marched to battle. He looked more to the gods above, as the late-night fog lifted, and he saw the yellow moon of the coming Dog Days, smiling at the very thought of the liberation to come.

“I am Nikon. A Messenian. No helot. A free man. Born here in Messenia. Citizen of its Messene to be. Messeeeniiiaaa. On free Ithooomeee.” Like the gray night wolf he yelled. He wanted his howl to reach the Spartans in their drink below and in dance behind their walls.

“Quiet, Nikon.” From a distance across the ravine the rival helots of Doreios on their way to the villages called back. “Shut up, drunken fool. No more wine boasting-unless you want to bring back Lichas from the north and his helot henchmen to string us up. Hush, mad dog. Siga. Go home. Helos! Hit him, Helos, won’t you? Some leader-this fool who wobbles down a tiny path. Chew your bone alone, far off this holy mountain. Dry your gut out.” The helots sang and laughed, far away, at the fading cries of their would-be leader.

Let the others talk of revolt while only Nikon’s men freed helots. Now Nikon bayed at the moon all into the