The End of Sparta

Neto moved out of the estate and prepared to head south on the scent of an autumn war and upheaval. She was, of course, her own person after the emancipation decree of the Thespians for all those who had gone to Leuktra-even those slaves in the camp who had not put on armor and joined the ranks. Neto had known no other home but Helikon, since her sale ten and more years earlier. Neto was now renowned in Thespiai as the conduit to the voice of divine Pasiphai. She was acclaimed as the one seer of the north who rightly had seen in her sleep that her master Melon, the apple, would kill Kleombrotos. She had promised that the Thebans would prove mightier in war at Leuktra. That too had happened. That she knew even more about the fates of Proxenos, Chion, and Gorgos, perhaps even Melon and Epaminondas, she now kept quiet.

The new freedman Myron was about town as Neto once had been, talking up the Malgidai and soon to reopen the family fruit stall that Neto had begun. Myron talked with much more zeal, since for a collector of dung it was quite a rise in life to sell cucumbers and raisins as a free man, in the shade of a stone stoa no less. Of course, his master Hippias had been murdered and could not sue to reclaim his property, and he had no agenda about helots and Spartans and such things in the south. Few on Helikon cared that Neto had found and hired Myron-only that he was the new Neto without the babble. Soon she was now as irrelevant when freed as she had been valued when a slave despite her fame in town. Eudoros and Neander needed no guide, either. She even faulted herself for the dead Sturax, who had gone with Gorgos to the camp of the Spartans, but never returned. Worse still, she had lost the other Molossian hound Porpax as well. All these thoughts, both trivial and fundamental, piled high in her mind. Each was like the stones on Chion’s terraces, and together they pressed her down to a sort of mania-that she was now the enemy of her own people, now the exile in her own land. Be careful, she remembered her Pythagoras, of getting too much of what you dream for.

Added to these constant second thoughts and regrets was the growing paradox of her long harangues about the freedom of the Messenians delivered from her safe perch on Helikon. Was it not more honest, as Damo had lectured her, to agitate when actually on Mt. Ithome with Nikon and his helots, where such talk meant often death? After Leuktra, with her freedom and the fame of her master, she thought at last Melon might wed her. He was a recluse, a duskolos anyway and would care little of what the Thespians might say about taking a freedwoman as wife. With Chion and Damo and the three boys of Lophis, and her boys to come, the farm would enter its greatest phase and would no doubt carve even more new fields from Helikon. Instead Melon had ignored her and talked more of the rumor-monger Phryne’s salon than the high pond where they used to gaze out at the hillsides below when she put him to sleep with her Thisbean strains. Neto had tried to purge herself to cleanse out the black bile. A doctor in Thespiai had bled her as well. Still the cloud surrounded her. Night became more welcome than day.

With her pupil Proxenos gone often to the south, Neto had also met a strange new teacher, this Alkidamas, who kept his hands out of her chiton and instead encouraged her visions. On the day before she decided to leave Helikon, she saw him coming out of the house of Phryne, outside of which she had developed a habit of lingering and watching when she finished peddling the farm’s harvests. His admonitions had helped to convince her to leave, although that was not necessarily his intent. “You are our bridge to the Olympians. As their superstitions fade with the bright sun of logos, they impart shadows of things to come to you as their final gifts. Use them for us, Neto. Leuktra was not the end of things as they say. But as the Olympians whisper, the beginning of them all. Things are on the move to the south, though we cannot sense that yet in the quiet up here.”

Be careful of surrendering completely to geometry and measures and numbers, Alkidamas had also taught her-lest she build her house on false reason, one weak foundation supporting ever more mud bricks of logic before collapsing altogether. Logos is a cold god. It could not explain all that he promised to explain. Reason might tell us why and how black and yellow bile differ, or how to measure the distance to the moon. But logos cannot say why one farmer suffered so from the bad air and fevers and another didn’t. Or why one man was run over by a wild cart and another veteran of five battles lived to eighty. No, she needed faith in a moral god as well, not just pure reason and not just the deathless ones on Olympos who were worse than men. On the afternoon after listening to Alkidamas, Neto passed Melon on her way down the trail and sealed the parting. “Whoa master, it is too hot to hike up in the sun. Look at you without your broad hat. Fetch it from the shed.”

“Is that where it is?”

“Yes. Put it on.”

“Neto, Neto, always the slave. Though you are freer than any polites in Boiotia and all that you saw came to pass. So well did the gods-or at least Pasiphai in the south-breathe into you the ways of the future. But remember, Hellas is wild. You are weak and a woman and going where such kind do not venture- even if you claim to be a priestess and a freedwoman at that, and under the protect of Chion and Melon of Leuktra. I gave you freedom, and you trumped it, but that does not mean others see that way. If I was foolish enough to come up bareheaded in the heat, why are you so silly coming down alone and without a hat as well?”

“Let me worry about the heat, man of the city.”

“Well, you alone on Helikon have a fountain pipe to bring you cold water. Here are five silver shields I got for the bag of dried pears I carried down today to peddle in town, though I hear I did not do as well as you did yesterday.”

“Pay me nothing, Melon. I eat more on your farm alone than I earn these days. I am going to see Theano, the widow of Staphis, to help her with the vintage. It is not safe anymore with even tough Thrakians murdered in the wild-and Hippias, master of Myron, killed like a dog. Yes, this man-bear that killed Hippias and maybe Dirke’s two men, he is out there above the timber line. They say that Hipponichos, son of Hippias, bars himself in fear in his tower-although I figure he may already be rotting up there hung from the rafters, and can’t answer the door. Theano is a Messenian-again like me, a helot at birth.”

“Theano is good and poor, you mean, Neto,” Melon went on, “But you have chores here. Neander wants to learn your block letters. Damo says you must nurse Chion’s new one. It comes with the spring. Your shovel-head Myron needs help. He is a dull one, an empty skull to begin with. The vintage is good. But only because you clipped off the excess bunches. We-I most of all-have more need for you than ever. I miss your tune of Thisbe to call me down from the high orchard.”

“Not at all.”

“Always.”

“Never. I am needed only to keep the farm so you may not, to stay in the orchard, so you can go into town.”

Melon ignored this final chance to show her proof of his devotion and instead offered only lame small talk. “Who will hear my tales of spear play at Koroneia? Now I’m boasting only to the ox Aias and the pigs of Leuktra.”

Neto blushed and then laughed, “Even they forgot you. The only pigs you know are the fat men in the halls of Phryne. Damo runs the agora. When she prances in, they either leave or keep quiet if they know what is good for them. The agora is your home now. Or so Dirke whom you love so well tells me of this Phryne. Oh yes, and her soft pipes and full table and more still. Beware of such a woman who will roast you even without fire, who wishes to be mistress on Helikon to the hero of Leuktra and lord over our widow Damo. Each word you utter is known to Lichas in the south. She might as well brand a lambda on her forehead. Peace used to bore you. Beware that victory ruins us as much as defeat.”

Such a strange thing, Melon knew, that those who have no formal bond, and no history of physical love between them, nevertheless expect each other not to taste the flesh of others. Stranger yet that they both understand and honor such a pact though no words are ever spoken and they themselves are resigned to wait for each other-without worry that the wait may prove endless and outlast the flesh. He had half-expected that Neto knew that he wanted her as his wife, without ever asking her-or even making her his wife. Wasn’t the idle wish of his enough? Did she not know that he had risked his all to stop the Spartans, the oppressors of her dear helots? And had he not accepted Pythagoras on her prompt, and then let her roam over Boiotia, flirting with Alkidamas and Proxenos as they recruited for Epaminondas?

He grabbed her shoulder and made Neto look him square in the eye, despite the glare from the stones. Melon felt a sort of pity for Neto. Her ambition put her hopes into something greater than the greatest battle of the age that had just passed-as if to be alive during Leuktra was not enough for any mortal, much less a helot girl on Helikon. Did she know how small her world really was? Or how those far greater than her determined whether she and her kind lived or died?