The End of Sparta

fought them back with a club. Instead of the gnarly bark of the olive and the rocks of the barley field, this was now the afternoon view of Melon, son of Malgis, whose hands became more polished than cut.

On one table was an array of leather dildos, olisboi of various sizes and shapes soaking in olive oil. If that weren’t enough, the bottoms of all the wine cups of Phryne were decorated with even worse, Satyrs and centaurs mounting men and women who themselves were mounting each other-the painted scenes all visible to the guests each time a man put wine to his lips. Yet Phryne’s actual guests seemed far older than those frolicking on the walls and pots. Still, all this was of no concern for Melon, or so he said to himself, since it was usually enough for him to lie down, drink some wine, and listen to the gossip of the Thespians-especially the mention of the growing war circle of Epaminondas. He often met the roustabout Murmex and his master trader Eurybiades in the house of Phryne as well. They had three wagons, as he once boasted, and they made the trip over Kithairon every ten days. Each month the two also went northward to the hot gates and the great plains of Thessaly and the vale of Tempe. “Democracy in Thebes and Athens at the same time?” Eurybiades laughed. “So border peddling is good for us. It will stay that way-unless that philosopher Epaminondas objects. That faker with Orpheus on his shield may get one of his war ideas again. He thinks he’s god and so starts up the war and heads into the morass down south.” The profits of Eurybiades from love piled higher even than those from the loot after Leuktra, so he now praised Eros and damned the war gods Artemis and Ares.

Phryne had claimed friendship with the sophists in Thebes. When she first opened her salon, she had courted the famous Alkidamas-who few saw, but whose words many heard. In the days before Leuktra, he had told Phryne (so she said), “I say you are as firm as Nais, my Phryne, and with a livelier tongue. I knew her at twenty-five, but not at your thirty.” Phryne wanted even more from the man. “Did she sing her Simonides and Alkman? Did she dance on her toes, or swing from a limb, or have breasts as these? How many of the Spartan bibases can she do? Can she jump up and hit her buttocks with her heels, hit them five hundred times as I do? Did she speak with Platon in Attic, and dally in the bow and arrow with an Iphikrates?”

“No, no to all that,” conceded Alkidamas. “She bore me a son, the one Lichas or his foul son cut down at Leuktra. As handsome as I am ugly, Kalliphon was, though his shoulders were narrow and bottom too wide-like his mother’s. Now the earth of Leuktra covers his ashes. His name is carved in black marble with the others on the road to Tanagra, since he died for the dream of Epaminondas.”

“Our beloved general,” Phryne spoke softly of Epaminondas to Alkidamas, “is some idol that we worship as if he were gold and ivory. And why not, given his strong right arm and his honey tongue and simple dress? For your Melon of the prophecies, Epaminondas promises that the lame-leg’s genius is at last appreciated, that he has an ordeal only worthy of a few select like himself, at least enough to pleasure us with his godhead as he now puffs himself up and struts down from his vineyard. For our dear Neto, she thinks not just that she is a helot again, but has invented herself, of course, as a lord of the helots, our new Penesthelia, the Amazon general, at the head of some great serf horde that shall take down Sparta-quite something for a raisin seller just last year in the stalls weaving her webs to trap her rich master. And you, our brilliant Alkidamas, in your arrogance you believe your Epaminondas will make you first philosopher of Hellas, or maybe the new ruler of helot Messenia. Oh yes, then we have the gold-bags wall-builder Proxenos, who builds himself a castle and playhouse above the Asopos, and when that is not enough wants entire cities for his sport-as he frolics on his marble couches with that troublemaker Neto. He too says he “is for Epaminondas,” without a clue that he is building these huge citadels for those who will turn on Sparta-and perhaps eventually on us. I’ve even had the great hoplite Ainias of Stymphalos in my halls, the best killer of all the circle of Epaminondas. He wants walls for his beaten-down Arkadians, and pledges his spear craft to Epaminondas in the exchange, the most honest thug of the lot. Touch a hair on the head of Lord Proxenos of the golden coins, the builder of Ainias’s fantasy walls, and you earn a spear in the gut from Ainias, who prides himself a “Tactician” after Leuktra. Oh, I forgot Chion. Chion always loose at night, even as he dares prance in here in day as first citizen of Thespiai, as if we must praise his killing of the far better men at Leuktra. Quite a crowd, this circle the childless, wifeless Epaminondas has conjured up. My, my, I must talk with him again some day.”

Melon had heard the same from Phryne. He took solace in the knowledge that she, as the spurned lover, was now obsessed with the circle of Epaminondas, and that should the great man ever walk in, Phryne herself, like some Kappadochian plaything out of the great king’s harem, would kowtow before the Theban. Melon still told himself he was here, he insisted, only on business and so saw Proxenos the Plataian on the fourth day of each new moon as he came into the halls of Phryne covered with the dust of bricks and stone and the smell of lead and iron. Phryne gave him free rein of her house, since Proxenos had promised that her salon would stay untouched amid his rework of the fortifications of Thespiai. His new walls would go out around her crumbling corner tower, built into what was left after the Thebans had dismantled the circuit. After Leuktra the frightened Thespians, who had abandoned the cause of the Boiotians, had hired Proxenos to raise their walls, lest Epaminondas pay them a visit. As for Proxenos, he wished to try out some of his circular towers on the town before he built a new one thirty cubits high down in the Peloponnesos. Proxenos and Ainias had been down in the south each month, busy with what they called “the big things,” ta megala pragma that were turning Hellas upside down in the land of the Spartans. So here in the house of Phryne, Melon began putting together from the rumors of guests something more also about this Proxenos who appeared now to be committed to the plans of Epaminondas. And he assumed as well that anything he might tell Phryne would up in about six days in the ears of Lichas himself-and on to the shadowy Lord Kuniskos of Messenia, the new master of the helots known even in the north.

As Melon pondered this Proxenos, more memories came to him. He knew of old talk of a a rich Proxenos, an oligarch who had lived on a farm with a high tower near the battlefield of Plataia, along the reedy banks of the Asopos River. The older Proxenos was a killer, with great chests of silver (and more still that Melon did not know of with gold), who foolishly went east to Babylon for pay under the Spartan Klearchos-the Spartan thug whose son had killed Staphis at Leuktra.

The shadow from his father’s past, he learned from Phryne, was the father of this present Proxenos, this dusty man on the couch beside him. The older Proxenos, Melon remembered as well, had been murdered by the Persians while he parleyed for the Ten Thousand. Unlike the father, this aristocrat Proxenos spoke softly to Melon, in a careful Boiotian more like Attic as some did from the border town of Plataia. Watch these tame ones like Proxenos, Phryne warned Melon later, these men who plan vast new cities that will only cause more war for the price of their craft-and their vanity and their sense of entitlement and their desire to be pure and loved and all the other fat fruit that the carrion Nemesis gorges on. In their cases, she hoped the furies would be Lichas and his son Antikrates, who got their prompts from tall-ears Phryne up north.

Yes, the dreamers smile and keep their bile inside, or so Phryne preached to her clients who followed Epaminondas. Give me your ugly Lichas at Leuktra any afternoon, who is what he is by his own scars. So Phryne spoke to any who would listen and flirted when Proxenos entered, often with Ainias to discover the when and where of a winter march to the south: the one to found the great cities of the Arkadians, the new fetters of the Peloponnesos, the other to ensure that the Plataian would live to remake his fatherland in stone, and so at last keep it free from the hated Spartans.

Melon listened to her bile, but wondered perhaps if he, the hide-clad farmer on Helikon, might still match the aristocrat Proxenos, might earn Phryne’s hatred as well with some great deed to trump even Leuktra. The delusions of the town now had him and squeezed him nightly. Yes, Melon, son of Malgis, might himself plan some big upheaval to the south, something of the sort his son Lophis had once boasted about. Yes, he might do even greater things to the south. He liked the rumor and big anger from Phryne about Leuktra as he came in from Helikon and greeted the obsequious townspeople on his way to Toad’s house. No longer deemed crazy, he was no longer even mysterious, but was seen and trusted when the Thespians went to the assembly to vote for the blocks on the wall and to pay fair prices for the emancipated slaves that had earned their freedom when they went to Leuktra.

The road from eccentricity to respectability is not as long as one might think. Both rely first on being known. Melon’s name was certainly on the lips of most before, but especially after, Leuktra.

CHAPTER 15

Neto Unbound

During these dog days on the farm in the calm year after Leuktra, when the midday sleeps were the longest,