The End of Sparta

Just over a year earlier, when the black clouds of Sparta hung over Helikon, all in town had listened to her prophecies and begged her to repeat her strange promise that the Thebans would be mightier in war. But now? Those were her great days lost. Then Lophis was riding about and Melon let her run the farm. Then Chion and the dogs were at her side. Gorgos was lusting after her blush, in the long afternoons of the spring and summer of the previous year, before everything had changed at Leuktra. The rich man Proxenos thought he would free and marry her, or so he boasted. She alone was the ear for Melon. He was the recluse eager for the news of the world below. She had once been his only conduit to the polis people beneath. Melon thought how foolish men lament that the long days are always the same. They are not, he knew. We change even as we speak. So in his folly he judged that the world had passed young Neto by. In his new fame from Leuktra, and life in town, he felt sorry for her. Or was it that he feared that she might well not need the farm and tower anymore-and that she talked in confidence rather than hurt? Or that she might be as wary of wedding as he? Melon’s last words of lament surprised him. “Neto, come back with us. Theano can hire Thrattos. She is better off for Leuktra and is no helot, but the widowed hero of a great man Staphis and with coins for his death no less. Come back and let us both avoid town and work the vineyard, side-by-side.”

He took his hand off her and looked down, “You are the one that all the men of Thespiai talk of-some with many vines and six hundred plethra of the bottomland at their call. They would all yoke you this very summer. Come back to us. Stay.”

Neto flashed. “I earn my keep as all free women do: with work. I have no need of the men of Thespiai. Like women they stayed in the theater when we all marched to Leuktra. They watched you and Chion and Lophis and Staphis carry the yoke of Thespians. Believe me, I have no love of the Thespians, men or women. Some are like Backwash, the others Phryne. Their backsides from sitting are wider than the shoulders they never use. They would as soon kill as free a helot. Neto as you knew her is gone and for good. And so is the old Melon of Helikon.”

Melon was drawn to her even more by her defiance. But he saw finally that she was already gone from the farm. She would not come back. Not unless perhaps he would offer her what he would not yet give. He liked the idea that some day they might run the farm as two, but he saw too late that for too long he had liked even more the notion that she would wait for that moment without really thinking it would ever quite come. “Go then. Be the helot you are. Scrub the floor of Theano. Forget the needs of the boys of Lophis. Go play the Thisbean strain to Lord Proxenos. Sit at the foot of Alkidamas.”

“Siga, calm, master. You speak only in anger and hurt. What I see and hear of the army to come is not really of my doing,” Neto quietly countered, “but only what the goddess warned me long ago. I don’t believe in these Olympians. I know only their anger at my treason, and my loyalty to the One God of Pythagoras. So they have put voices, wild ones, in my head. Because of them, I am not leaving you as much as beginning the trip south, where I think we two will see each other a last time and perhaps for good.”

She continued more slowly. “There is a Nikon to the south. He is a tanner, a poor man but one who fights. His better helots just talk. But Nikon kills Spartans. I hear his voice in my head. He says he needs me soon, needs a prophet of things to come as guide for his gangs, needs a voice to counter the lies about us that Phryne up here sends down there. And Alkidamas says there is a poetess as well that will go south with me before this summer ends. She’s a great charmer who can help stir up the Messenians as well. Helots should help helots free themselves. And you, master? Some day you will stop thinking you, in your quiet arrogance, are not quite part of the world and join us who are in it up to our necks.”

With that, Neto passed him by as she made her way down. Melon noticed that she had a short double-edged blade, a Spartan xiphos that she had probably taken from one of the corpses the previous summer at Leuktra, to go along with her jagged single-edged chopper. Melon left her with, “It is hot today, girl. But your wits were long ago cooked. Be happy with a free Boiotia. Let the Spartans be-unless you must dress up your desire for Alkidamas with talk of trumpets and banners. Unless you have your eye on some helot lord, some tanner Nikon to the south if it has not been Proxenos already.”

Neto kept her head down and moved down the path alone, chattering away, her words heard by no one as Melon was already up the trail. She was chanting, stitching together words of a song that came into her head, between Thisbean strains on her reed pipe. “Farewell-until the winter, until the winter when we will meet far away on Ithome.” But he was already long gone and well around the turn, with only a stade left to the tower and home.

She missed him at the first bend; and Melon for his part began to miss her the very moment she turned away.

CHAPTER 16

The Healing of Melon

By mid-autumn, Phryne was shooing strange customers from her house and angry even as her coin boxes filled with the new business. Their accents were not Boiotian, even in out-of-the-way Thespiai. These bounders were not mere northern pilgrims on their way to consult the Pythia at Delphi. They had no religious business with Apollo of Ptoon. Most were fighting men of scars and dirty leather. Now they camped outside the walls of Thespiai and said little to the natives, as they drilled and sparred in bronze. Thebes would be mustering soon, and thousands of foreign hoplites were spreading over the countryside of the Boiotians. Phryne sent messengers to Lichas, in silly fashion thinking that after Leuktra there were still enough Spartans left to come north-when, in fact, those who had survived the battle still woke with the night terrors of seeing again Epaminondas, Melon, and Chion in their armor.

Some at the campfires danced the Pyrrhic with their shields and spears and bought women. They sang the enoplia war songs in Doric. Their tents and shacks surrounded the walls. Even when sleet showers of winter came, men camped in the cold in the last months of the year, as if the foreigners and xenoi knew more than the Thebans themselves what would happen next. Melon had no luck hiring any of these itinerants for the final end of the olive harvest. Many were not like hoplites of the polis, but had the look of hired killers. They talked of money to be made from plunder in the south. What were they doing here-when it was the coming of the cold solstice, and the season of arms long past? What rogue, Phryne screamed in her halls, had summoned them here?

Then arrived more winter roadmen, at first all northerners, later from almost every region of Hellas, marching on the trails leading over the northern passes into Boiotia. Lokrians came. Horsemen too rode in from Thessaly on taller ponies. Then trudged in later islanders from across the strait of Euboia and beyond. All of these by the first frost walked in the streets of the Boeotian cities as if they owned the polis. Chion saw that his Aegean folk were rowing in ahead of the winter storms. Some came from as far as Lesbos and Samos with accents like the Aeolic Hellenes-maybe his kin from Chios as well, or so a stocky Melian down at Kreusis told him in town when Chion hiked over to watch some of these island sorts sail in (and to turn upside down Neto’s prophecies that he should not view the waves and breakers).

Even Arkadians from Mantineia were marching northward to Boiotia in twos and threes. All heading now for Thebes, all going over the gulf road near Aigosthena along the water and up through Kreusis. Five hundred Messenians had come east along the coast from Naupaktos. These were the children of the helot refugees in the north freed at Pylos during the Athenian war. Thirty years later they swore to deliver their kin from the Spartan yoke. Most still had their Doric talk. Melon tried for a time to race against this great shaking up in Boiotia and finish the olive harvest in his own world on Helikon.

As the family team worked in the shortening days of late autumn during the month of Boukatios, Chion proved the natural father all along to Melon’s grandsons. The dead Lophis for all his spirit had had no heart in either the land or its sons. He too often swore when the deep mud caked inside his long fingernails, and the boys tried to mount his sleek charger Xiphos and pile on behind their father. “We are not all men of the soil,” Malgis once had warned his grandson Lophis. “You find keeping this farm for your sons hard, but keep it nonetheless you must. A farm is the stored work of a man’s life. Lose it, and the rope snaps, with you, the weak weave. Then the boys will not have what you were given. You inherit, and see to it that you add to it-so others get more than you did. We Malgidai, we will buy the soil of others, or cut out more from the mountain, but we will not sell, not now, not