The End of Sparta

night. He clung to the ledge that pointed north to far-away Boiotia-as if in his sudden fit his godly Boiotians could hear him a thousand stadia away. “Eimi Nikon. Eleutherios gignomai.” I am Nikon … I am born free.

Yet for all the prophecies of Neto and the drunken calls of Nikon on his ledge, Epaminondas did no more marching this summer after Leuktra. Nor the next spring did he call out the Boiotians to descend on Sparta and free Nikon’s helots. Most Boiotians instead thought that the great, the seemingly final victory at Leuktra had proved war to be the parenthesis and peace the natural, more common order of things. So in the hamlets around Thebes the yeomen hoplites went right on after the victory into their cycles of the farming year. The timeless soil cared little what its temporary human tenants thought or did. The ground mute beneath the farmers just endured and went on whether Leuktra was won or lost. War or no war, for free men or slaves, the tasks of the season-sow, weed, reap, cut, and thresh-continued day in, day out. For most of the other vineyard men on Helikon, the battle was no more to be remembered than the severed tail of the stone lizard who proudly wags his growing stub without a thought of the old one, rotting in the dirt.

After finishing the later vintages of summer, the three boys got to work on the autumn harvest of the olive trees. For all the visual splendor of the estate, there was a well-thought-out economy to it as well, as in its irrigation ditches from the pond above that meant less carrying of the water with the donkeys. The three threshing floors spaced near the grain and barley fields made the harvests far easier. The eighty plethra could produce twice the food of the neighbor Dirke’s similarly sized place with about half her labor and expense. That gift-only vaguely appreciated in the past-was sensed by all in these days of loss. Melon had tried to let Myron go. But the awkward slave stayed on. Soon he followed Chion on the farm and even into the woods, like and not like him-both enormous, but Chion’s maimed arm impairing his stride far less than did Myron’s natural clumsiness. Myron had been freed by his presence at Leuktra according to the decree of the Thespians, and now earned his wages from the Malgidai.

Myron’s skill in the collection and spreading of dung hardly meant he knew pruning and tilling. But he met rebuke for his poorly cut spurs and his crooked furrows with a shrug. Like the Korinthian mirror glass in town, he turned the harshness back on his master. Chion was freed, but as a one-arm he was more unfree than he had been as a slave of two hands. He saw that a man’s body is his only master after all. Thoughts are nothing without the leg and arm, which alone turn word into deed. Yet he bore the hale newcomer Myron no grudge, praising his new henchman as he climbed high into the olives with his tree saw. “Myron is my left arm I lost at Leuktra,” Chion laughed to Melon. “This freed slave is not so bad, once his dung stink wore off and he picked up rocks in the field and quit collecting the mess of the public toilets. I wager no master ever will pry him off Helikon.”

“Yes, he’s our Sturax and Porpax come back alive,” Melon offered, “the new watchdog of the farm. Our lost tail has grown back longer, and the farm is as good now as can be without our Lophis.” Myron winked or twitched at that, since he knew them better than they knew themselves. So he let praise roll off his back, and looked down as they lauded him to the skies. Myron was working for different, better sorts now, and on a wage, no less-and so he no longer bore pots of dung from the city stalls to his master’s vineyard, in fear of the lash of his owner Hippias, who each summer morning galloped on his pony down the rows of the vines, hitting the backs of his slaves with his mule-tail whip. This Hippias often came by Helikon on his black horse to take back or sell off his Myron. But Melon’s spear and the dark look of Chion shooed him off, and reminded the mounted grandee that the assembly of the Thespians had freed all the slaves who had flocked to Leuktra to fight-a fact known to Hippias, who now wanted to keep the silver buyout from the polis and yet get his slave back for a double profit. No concern. Soon Hippias was no longer seen near Helikon-nor seen at all.

On a late summer morning, a year after Leuktra, it was Myron who found the rotting Medios, the Thrakian slave of Dirke, the neighbor, hung up by his heels on a short pine tree far above the farm on Helikon-dead half a month or longer. Dirke, Melon, and Chion soon followed Medios’s trail-he had been cutting oak for plowshares above the farm of the Malgidai, so Dirke said-but uncovered no others tracks of his killer. Now in fear of a demon-like man-bear on Helikon, Dirke for a while came less to the farm of the Malgidai. She certainly said no more about Medios. Dirke told no magistrate, and wanted no talk of where Medios had been-or how he’d been hung up and sliced, and how there was a man-beast killer loose on Helikon. Otherwise, despite the warnings of endless war against the Spartans by Epaminondas, the long months after Leuktra proved among the most peaceful in recent memory in Thespiai. Soon no one missed Medios.

Meanwhile, the Spartan booty-helmets, breastplates, mess kits, swords, and even a few coins-from the battle turned up from the Attic border all the way up to Phokis. Farmers hiked often over Kithairon to Attika to buy stock and more slaves with their newfound money from the sale of plunder. The Thespian trader Eurybiades grew rich beyond his wildest boasting. His wagon full of pots and bronze creaked for days over the roads beneath Helikon to garner some of the captured Peloponnesian armor and coin in trade. At least ten thousand Spartans from the Peloponnesos, Eurybiades figured, had left most of what they had brought up. His practiced eye would find the final remnants of what they had cached in stone crevices and in cusps of trees.

“Not since my beardless days, all this money. Then I used to loot both sides of Kithairon. I’d strip the high border farms below Panakton of their roof tiles. Yes, and even the woodwork in the great war. But not like this. Never such a full cart like this. At this rate, I will buy another wagon. Maybe I’ll hire this new Myron of yours, to follow me in my dust with another ox for my wares. Why, there are even Athenians who pay to ride back over the pass with me, just to look at the soil of Leuktra, to boast that they have walked on its holy ground. I’ve got my boy over there peddling clay toy Boiotian shields to the fool gawkers, with the sides notched out just like yours in the shed, and stamped on the front side with EPAMINONDAS.”

“Oh, no, you won’t take our Myron, king peddler. I’ve taken a liking to his empty head and wide shoulders. He stays here with Chion.” Melon grabbed Eurybiades by the arm, “He’s worth more than any three of them. Even his master, the whipper Hippias, won’t get him back with a chain around his ankle.”

There were to be more battle monuments for Leuktra, and victory decrees and temples from the booty. Thebes for most of the winter after Leuktra and following spring had sent its best monument builders and stone- cutters up to the sanctuary at Delphi. Of course, the architect Proxenos was hired to accompany the first party to survey the site. He would barter with the holy shrine keepers over the fees for buying a spot. The Boiotians were to build their own treasury on the Sacred Way, right in front of the Athenians’ Parian marble eyesore.

Proxenos had become a court builder for the Boiotians. He traveled with scrolls stuffed with charts and lines drawn to make sense from the wild rantings of Epaminondas. Why he left his estates and horses on the Asopos, none were too sure, only that he came up to Thespiai more even than to Thebes, and to his home Plataia not at all. He was at work redesigning the walls, building clay models of vast new cities and for weeks taking trips south of the Isthmos with his packs of scrolls. Perhaps he wanted to build anew entire shrines and cities even, without the bother of old temples and the burden of poorly placed stones to hamper him-straight streets and right corners of fresh cities to rise, and not the hard work of straightening winding pathways of their fathers’ cramped and dark poleis. Maybe too Proxenos wished to bring the mind of Epaminondas to stone, so that when his words were forgotten the ramparts of Megalopolis or Messene would not be.

Soon Proxenos designed a white marble monolith right at Leuktra itself, on the spot where King Kleombrotos had fallen. The polished stone trophe was shaped like a cucumber of sorts. At its base the trademark notched Theban shields ran continuously around the circumference. Melon visited the builders at the big monument at Leuktra four times over the winter and spring. The tall column was as high as the new pyramids outside Argos on the Tripolis road, but of better stone than the plastered Herakleion at Thebes. For all the talk of Leuktra as the beginning of a new Hellas, it now appeared to have been the end of that idea, especially since nothing much had happened after the battle. If the tenure of Epaminondas were not renewed at the winter solstice, the new Boiotarchs would end all talk of a grand march into the Peloponnesos.

Widowed Damo was slowly regaining her looks. With her glow came back her power that had once reduced Lophis to teary entreaties to win her from the other nine suitors in Thebes, who had as much land and money, but also the coveted flat black earth around Kopais. Beauty is the great leveler among men, Damo remembered after Leuktra. She knew that folk didn’t like some men because they were short, or dark, or had the barbarians’ blue eyes and red hair, or could not speak the language of Hellas or owned only a cloak, rather than bottomland along Kopais. But the unspoken prejudice was really against their ugliness. In turn, the favor and advantage went not so much to the well-born, or the male, or even the moneyed, but to the beautiful. Children had suited Damo’s look, and had widened her hips a bit only, but had added a sheen on her skin and a sway to her walk. This new Damo, hair black