The End of Sparta

Lichas had he been raised in the agoge of the Spartans.

Nevertheless, after Leuktra, Melon explored all these forbidden ideas further, and he now started up again to Chion. “Dirke was as bad and yet right as much as our Lophis was so good and so wrong-about how the oligarchs at Sparta would come even to accept Pythagoras. But thank the gods for these Dirkai. She is the voice of all the dark thoughts in the world. Chion, Dirke has been a great gift to me these years, sounding out and exposing the bad that is in me. She gives me a chance to hear my dark thoughts spoken, hear it all said by another, not me. Then I redeem myself by sneering at it, and claim the high ground from it, when she turns everything so foul and has no shame to voice the evil in us that we too feel.”

Chion ignored his high talking and started to return to the olives-until Melon grabbed his rough wool cloak. “But Chion, she has reminded me that you were the better man at Leuktra, and one freed by the town fathers of Thespiai. So you marry Damo. Raise my son’s boys to take this farm. More if you carve out another slice of the mountain with your one arm. Damo is still not three tens. She has three or four boys more in her yet. I can’t pay you to stay on the farm. But stay you will. All that Malgis gave me will be your own to care for-at least until the boys of Lophis and your own to come are of age.”

Chion and Eudoros, with Neander, Lophis’s second born, were a small phalanx now. Chion was right. There was no need to hire slaves of others. Not when Chion and the boys had handled this olive crop, late but well enough in the absence of Lophis, and crippled as Chion was. Myron in his dung boots was strong and loyal, so he might work out as well. The wheel of luck would turn yet again for the farm. The upswing would be as good as before. The battle was over. Calm had arrived. Even the gossips of Thespiai would say little about the marriage. Chion was becoming the big talk of the forge loungers, jawed to the skies to the sound of hammer and anvil. They would all say the union of Damo and Chion was good farming-to keep the land safe and the free slave on the farm without paying wages, and the widow Damo from begging coins in the agora.

“Chion,” Melon spoke slowly as the two made their way up to the high vineyard again. “You are my son now. The father of my son’s sons. I claim my right as her legal guardian to pick who Damo marries. Those in Askra, and Koroneia and even Thespiai, too, will live with it-if for no other reason than all of Boiotia fears our two right arms.” Chion said little. But his master was pushing him hard, to make him lord of the estate, father and husband and free man, citizen of the high property qualification, a rich hippeus should he wish to fight from a horse-all the honors Melon himself was tiring of as he waited for the call to go south. If Melon wanted a yoking on this farm, why not then he and the freedwoman Neto? Were not they the better pair to stay home and guard the vineyards and pass the farm on to the boys of Lophis?

Yet Chion said to himself that he would try all this, at least for a while. Who would not wish the pleasures of Damo? Still, the wild, the high land of Helikon called, the better place-or maybe the strange piney, wilder mountain to the south, the slopes of gloomy Taygetos, where his mind went in his sleep to a highland hot on its slopes. He would try this plan of Melon, for they were all still in peace, and his master was the killer of Kleombrotos and so to be obeyed, even if Chion was no longer a slave. He would try. But he had his doubts. He and his master after Leuktra were each trying to make the other the custodian of the farm. Yet neither of them any more wanted to stay the man rooted to the soil, not with the scent of the south in their noses. “It is as you say master, as you say, at least for now.”

Melon was coming off his mountain every other day, far more even than Damo. No longer was he the misanthropos and eremos of old. The famous king-killer walked proudly on the narrow winding streets of Thespiai. He nodded to the admiring looks of the town folk from their balconies, those who had all voted to stay put, to keep themselves safe rebuilding their walls. He had been cured by Epaminondas and his fame of Leuktra from the disease of solitude, but the medicine had done far more than end the malady. His visits, he said, were meant to keep gossip about Damo and Chion within reason, and to learn what Dirke was up to. Melon wanted to shame any he heard talking the dark stories about the heroes of Helikon. Or so he said of his time in town. But to Chion and Neto, this new busybody was not their Melon, and they feared he was falling into something worse even than his years as the recluse before Leuktra.

As Melon strolled into town, sometimes he stopped at the potters’ quarters to teach the idlers about Chion. They must know of the prostates of the phalanx who had yelled “For Thespiai, for Helikon,” as he slew Deinon, and Sphodrias, and cut down terrible Kleonymos in his proud youth. Chion, Melon lectured the craftsmen, gave his arm for these here, for the idea that they could idle in town. Melon went on and slapped the faces of the pot turners and kicked the kiln feeders. “It was your Chion, Chion of Thespiai. He killed the kings’ best, when my Bora was shattered. He took on Kleonymos. He took that blow from Lichas so that I could spear Kleombrotos.” Praise in town for his own clan-and for himself-was now as dear to him as the Thespian’s disdain had once been to him out on the farm before he had heard the name Epaminondas.

A year and more after Leuktra, Damo and Chion were yoked. As a pair they had often driven Aias down from the farm, with Eudoros riding on Xiphos and the other two boys in the wagon, always just as the sun came up over the spurs of Kithairon to the east. They drove through the rubble walls into Thespiai to buy a litter of Lakonian hounds that the new henchman of Eurybiades had hauled over from Kithairon. Murmex was his name. He bought and sold dogs, blacks and spotted browns, with clipped tails and upright flat-topped ears-Lakonians not as large as the lost Molossians, Sturax and Porpax.

When the small caravan of the Malgidai made its way through the main gate and the roaring stone lions, and on by the theater, those at the forge yelled out to Chion, “For Thespiai.” The hoplite stood up, turned, and roared back, “For Thespiai. Always for Thespiai.” The widows at the looms shook their heads wondering how it had happened that Chion-the islander branded at birth by the Spartan hoplites of Lysander and sold to Malgis for two obols-had become his son and keeper of the name of the Malgidai. For all her three boys, the townsmen remarked that Damo was the real Aphrodite of Boiotia-and that Melon’s rich soil grew goddesses as well as heroes.

CHAPTER 14

The House of the Goddess

In these autumn months, between Pamboiotios and Boukatios, well after the first celebration of the Leuktra with its hekatombs and feasts, and the union of Damo and Chion, Melon found he could still not keep away from town, and he praised those on his farm as much as he sought to avoid them. The Spartans were defeated-and yet not quite defeated, given that thousands had escaped under Lichas. No doubt the surviving king, lame Agesilaos, was raising an army to stop the democracy madness, which like the black spills from the ink bottle was staining the entire Peloponnesos.

In the great uncertainty over quitting while ahead, or marching southward, some daimon had turned Melon’s thoughts back and forth, to solitude and then company, to being alone and to following the tug of the mob, and all in a blink. From relief that he had survived Leuktra to restlessness that something else was promised, something far bigger in the south that remained a rumor. So in his mix-up Melon began seeing Phryne, the newly arrived courtesan from Athens-though she claimed she had been born at Thespiai and worked hard to sound Boiotian. For his part, Melon claimed he only needed news in his calm after the battle, though, as Chion worried, his master liked too much the back pats of town when it would have been better to join his former slave on his treks across the mountaintops of Helikon or Parnassos. Nonetheless, Phryne knew the whispers of thousands-knew them and whipped them up or put them down depending on whether or not they favored Epaminondas, whom she hated more than any man north of the Isthmos. She did not quite know why she hated him, and she gave differing accounts to her friends about the wifeless, childless Epaminondas and his reluctance to visit her salon. To her clients, she cooed about the Theban at first, praised the general for his philosophy, and then only slowly showed her doubts about democracy, helots, new cities to the south, and all the dreams of Epaminondas.

Melon heard Phryne’s stories from both the peddlers of fruit and her own clients. Famous she was at Athens for having posed for the stone-artist Praxiteles himself. At ten and six years she had killed another prostitute, Lalage, who claimed the tighter flesh. Phryne had slashed her with nails and teeth, before finishing her off with a sharp mirror handle. Once when the young rhetor Hyperides, her lover, could not win an acquittal from the Athenian court for her profaning of the mysteries, she tore off her cloak in the