The End of Sparta

put a foot-long wooden peg in the holes of the gear. That held taut the ropes. The beam could not spring back up from the resistance of the pile of olives. A thud followed. The heavy ropes had pulled down the end of the beam. In turn, it forced the stone press weight at its middle farther down on the pile of olives in the receptacle. As Melon relaxed, the two observers clapped as a fresh stream of oil spurted out through a small cutting beneath the stone and into the channels on their way to the jars. “Before Malgis died,” Melon spoke as he rose back up, “he had brighter ideas still. We were to put this entire business on a high foundation, with three steps up to the floor of our new room. That way we would not have to ladle out the oil from the storage jars. The ducts instead would lead to pipes that would go through the wall. All onto a cart with jars outside. Clever?”

Proxenos frowned. “Perhaps. But you are the smarter one. You work with what you have rather than dream and idle about something you haven’t. Why, you can turn out more oil with this beam than four or five of the old- style rollers and hand-pressers in town. Still, your neighbors will gossip. They hiss that you’ll have no need of slaves with this machine. Without work, what will slaves do-set up a democracy with Epaminondas and walk as free as us?”

Ainias likewise teased his host. “You are no longer our friend-but instead act like some god who lives here on your Olympos with his henchman Chion. First a recluse, then a town-monger, and now what are you, my Proteus?”

Melon laughed. “A little of both. At least I know you are not another muster officer here to take us down to battle. Every time some stranger from the flatlands hikes up, one of the Malgidai dies.”

“Or goes into song.”

“Or rather you mean into Hades.”

Ainias turned from the fire, got up, and kicked the press, “We come to say good-bye. Our year after Leuktra here in Thespiai is over. The archons of the city are glad we are finished with their tiny walls-and the townsfolk won’t carry the stones any longer. Phryne bade us hike up here. She never sees you in town as before-and wondered whether you had taken sick with the fever of the highland swamps, or had grown tired of her yapping. Or was it that you thought this toad’s big breasts had sagged to near her belly and were no longer worth the hike down?”

“Oh no, it’s the olives. Even this short crop proved too much. Now that Chion has one arm only, I have to pull the lever as I used to. I must finish before the muster.” He ignored the question of Phryne below in Thespiai, whose breasts hardly sagged and which he, in fact, had never felt. Instead, she had turned foul in his eyes not because of her looks, which never dulled, but because of her slurs and her boasts and her hatred of helots and Epaminondas- and his suspicions that she was plotting against Epaminondas. Besides, she asked only about the missing Gorgos and talked only of Lichas, and seemed to praise Sparta more than Thebes.

“As I meant to say, we are heading south-to killing and to war, before Epaminondas,” Ainias offered. “Or at least as far as my lake at Stymphalos and then maybe down to the plain of Mantineia. The archon of the city, Lykomedes, promises to deal with the Spartans there. They are just sorting out Leuktra down there, and eager to get something back of what they lost up here.”

“Both of you?” Melon was puzzled, especially by the mention of Mantineia, the great killing-field of the Hellenes where the Spartans had once crushed Argos and her democratic friends. “What’s a Plataian doing heading across the Isthmos to Mantineia? Are you tired of the low wages of the Boiotians? Has it come to that already-an invasion into the south and in midwinter no less?”

“The whole countryside is not afire just up here. So it is too down there,” Proxenos said. “We know it. Hear it. See it. The end of Sparta is near. The men of Mantineia barred entry on the borders to King Agesilaos. He and Lichas are hobbling about the countryside trying to spear enough rural folk to settle them all down. The empire of the Spartans to the south is unraveling as we speak. It is for us to rip it finally apart.”

Ainias broke in with his thick Doric, tapping the broad beam of the press. “Proxenos goes south to build cities of my Arkadia-to oversee their rising. To finish two citadels that he has designed. They are not small. Not circuits like Plataia or Thespiai. No-vast and new, at Mantineia, with all the villages of the plains and hills inside. The first is done, or almost. Hellas has seen nothing like it since the days of the Cyclopes that stacked up the stones of Mykenai. He weaves the stones, emplekton they are. The walls in turn weave over the ground.” The Stymphalian pointed to Proxenos, who on that prompt pulled out of his leather bag a long papyrus roll. He spread it carefully out along the floor of the shed. But first Proxenos scattered straw beneath to keep the oil away. On the map there was a circle with carefully drawn small boxes and lines. A plan of sorts, of a round city of stone, but topped off with mud brick. Proxenos promised that this citadel was to have walls twenty-five stadia in circumference, with more than a hundred towers.

Below it, farther down the roll, Melon recognized sketches that looked like the new towers of Thespiai. But they were drawn to such a size that they were more like the ruins of Troy. Or maybe they were the old parts around the Kadmeia of Thebes that the Titans had built. As he looked at these charts of Proxenos, Melon scoffed, “These walls of your southern cities look Boiotian. Your corner drafts, and gates and towers, all are like ours. You’re building a Thespiai all over again, bigger, and many of them, to my eye-all for the southerners to keep out the Spartans?”

Ainias pointed to the towers. “Why else would he stay here for months in your one-whore town, Melon?” Then he looked at Melon again. “No, we can finish this new city in Mantineia in months, not years-and then head on for even more.”

“More? And finish what else?”

Proxenos ignored him. “For a man so smart you have become so dense. The Peloponnesos is on fire, in open revolt against Sparta now that its hoplites were crushed at Leuktra and Boiotia is filling up with hoplites. Just as Epaminondas knew it would be after the victory. Do you ever think why we are up here at all? Ainias and I are wall-builders-or rather fencers who are encircling Sparta with fortified free cities.”

“To keep them in or out?” Melon was puzzled since he had only crossed the Isthmos once to fight at Nemea, and even then knew nothing of what was really down south.

“To keep them inside their own land and out of everyone else’s. The days of the Spartan kings coming northward up here are over. Leuktra proved that. What happened in Boiotia will eddy into the Peloponnesos. Once more, we will crush the head of the serpent and leave free people to surround Sparta. There will be Leuktras all over the south.” He was almost childlike in his ramblings, a real nepios-and sounded suspiciously like Neto in her zeal. But Proxenos went on still. “We didn’t start all this. A free city in new Messenia and a free Mantineia and a free Megalopolis would be the locks that keep Sparta chained-forever.”

Ainias broke in, “You see, Arkadians have plans for something even more grand still. They will build a second ‘big city,’ a megale polis that will rise with walls higher than even those at Mantineia. Proxenos promises me he has drawings on those other newer scrolls wound tight in his pack.” Ainias went on. “Mantineia is not more than five days, maybe six with the winter mud and rains, from this farm. We have no fear to get there. The Korinthians let us through at night. We started the tenth course of the city circuit last month. The people are also waiting all the days for news of Epaminondas, waiting for him to lead all these new men into Sparta itself. Mantineia will be the great way station for the armies of Epaminondas before they make the final descent into Sparta itself, the gateway to our new Hellas.”

Proxenos interjected. “Melon, Melon. I don’t understand it all myself. We are caught in a divine madness to mount ladders and hammer in the iron clamps. Thousands of free men, maybe fifty thousand and more, are at work south of the Isthmos. They bring their towns into one fortress, a walled circle in the plain, the greatest synoikesis of our age. We are living in the great age of stone. Build a city on a grid and the people will at last think like right angles.”

But Melon asked the two, “How can you bring your goddess Demokratia by force, if men there won’t do it themselves as we did? And I doubt most of these bounders outside our walls here are following Epaminondas for democracy.”

“Who cares what they think, only that they will march and they will free the unfree. And when has democracy not come from force, and with help from others? At Athens? At Thebes? Please. My friend, name one polis.” The shed grew quiet as Proxenos finally calmed. Ainias took a quick glance to see if anyone was about, since the dogs had started up again. It was only Chion. He had seen the light and come down with his big knobbed stick in his good hand. He said nothing as he walked in and sat down. The two seemed to have feared his presence and worried that he had been listening outside to their talk of maps. Both ignored the blood that spattered his cloak and was smeared on his stick.