well treated for his work, then all the better will the Makedonians be pleased with the cities of Hellas.”
Melon answered back, “I raised my son Lophis to plow and prune, but Lichas killed him as well-and my father Malgis, and nearly me twice. So I think, Alkidamas, the problem was not in our sons or in us, but in Lichas, whom few who breathe and walk can kill. As for the education of your Melissos, perhaps let him ape the Sacred Band. They drill, they say, and take kindly to boys in their midst. Though, to be frank, your spindly barbarian Melissos with his bony nose and foreign tongue might not stir up Eros in those boy-lovers.”
“The note of contempt in your voice I share, Melon, for such folk. I grant Melissos has not yet a look of a hoplite. He is not the horseman that we expect from such northern tribes. But in the year I’ve had him, I wanted his muscles to grow behind the plow in a way Kalliphon’s did not. You, like me, have no son now, you the far better father than I ever was. Why not a young boy to teach as your own, at least until the next grain harvest comes and these northern hostages go back to Pella? I wager as you watch this sapling grow up-for I can see it myself-you too will grow in a sense.”
Melon laughed at that prophecy, but warmed even more to this man-a sophist to be sure of smooth talk, but one who, like himself, had already given his only son to Boiotia. But there was something also about this Melissos that gave him a second stare: He had a hard look for all his ugliness and listened more than he should to each word spoken. On occasion the gawky boy blurted out
Alkidamas with a wink added, “But of course, as I said, he can carry armor as well as haul out olive limbs. Melissos might prove as good a groom to you and make you into something else as you do the same to him.”
Melon laughed. “My manservant Gorgos is gone. But I don’t miss him since there are only vine props in my hands, and I don’t need a shield carrier. Your Melissos will learn all that well enough if he works with me high above Thespiai on Helikon-or if the Boiotians decide to march to the south and I join them to find my Neto in the south. It is already cold and the season of battle is over. The new year is upon us. Orion and the Pleiades and the Hyades have all long ago set and hid from the sky. I doubt anyone will vote to march anywhere in the coming winter. There is not a stalk of wheat in the fields.”
“Listen, as I said, you may learn as well, old Melon, from young Melissos-though in ways you’d rather not.”
Melon sensed what Alkidamas meant and now knew not merely that he would take in this Melissos but that something good would come of it as well. For a second Melon saw all this in the thistle Melissos, who looked and took in everything and boldly poked his nose into the talk of his masters-this young weed in the field that might just keep growing despite the Spartan scythes to come in the days ahead. He was sharp, as thistles sometimes are. Sometimes the young, the ugly, the outsider-they can see through the smoke and dust far better than those who make it, and so teach their would-be teacher the lessons that the masters had mouthed but forgotten. Besides, even if the army stayed home Melon would go on alone and be entering enemy ground soon, in search of his Neto and without his Chion, and so he could not be choosy in his helpers.
Meanwhile Melissos fell about a stade behind the two, looking at the terrain of Boiotia as if he were forty and a general on a horse, scouting a camp outside Thebes for his army of thousands. After the two ahead ceased speaking, Melissos caught up, muttering that the Thebans’ walls did not look so high after all.
The great polis was now before them. At last, all of them quieted as they turned the final corner of the rising road. They passed through the gate of Kadmos and entered the seven-gated city of Oidipous and the heroes of legend.
CHAPTER 18
The three had taken most of a day of steady walking to reach the high ground of the Kadmeia from the monument at Leuktra. The Thespian had been to Thebes only once before, in the year of the twin musters before the battles at Nemea and Koroneia. But that was more than twenty seasons prior. Melon now was bewildered by the unfamiliar sights in the capital of the Boiotians. The Thebans, with the sales from the spoils of Leuktra, were rebuilding the great temple of Apollo Ismenios. Twelve new columns rose along the temple’s long side. Forty men, with scaffolds and block and tackle, levered a huge marble capital on the nearest, a scroll of the Ionian type. This was the great gated city of Kadmos and Oidipous and Kreon, now to be remade as the democratic capital of a new Theban hegemony of equal poleis. Melon stared like a country ephebe at the seven arches and hills, as the travelers went over the bridge and through the Onkan Gate and on past the walls.
They made their way to a hut that Alkidamas owned near the Borean Gate. There they spread out three cots. Melissos led Xiphos down to the public stalls on the nearby hill of Ampheion, then went quickly back to join the two in this hovel near the tomb of Herakles. The place was more a sty than a house. It was not long until early dusk. The room was already cold and damp and offered little shelter from the winter sleet that was pelting the city. Shouts rose amid the storm. Outside the shuttered window, Thebes was in a frenzy. Strange-sounding foreigners from all over Hellas were yelling and scuffling in their drink. What had Epaminondas wrought? Thousands of hoplites were sleeping in the cold sheds and icy stalls of the agora. More were perched on the turrets and walkways on the city walls. How many were camped beyond the walls all the way to the coast? All boasted they were ready to march against the men of Sparta in midwinter for plunder. As Melon fell into sleep, he could almost hear the voices in the assembly.
Melon guessed that the Boiotians had no stomach for any more war, despite the cutthroats who were flocking into Boiotia and the muster in progress, and despite the victory at Leuktra. At the debate tomorrow, there would be more of the same rabble-rousing as there had been the previous year on the eve of Leuktra-the usual shouting mess of democracy. That was both the beauty and horror of
Of course, if he marched in winter, he might spare his men the heat of the hard summer in the month of Panamos. It was smart, too, to leave right at the end of his tenure. That way the Boiotian high-talkers could not call the army back. And Epaminondas surely knew that should he not preempt now, King Agesilaos next spring would come northward back into Boiotia anyway, as he had so many times before, and make the Boiotians once again the subjects of Sparta. Then again, it was possible that the wild stories of Neto and Lophis-and Damo’s warnings-were all true: that this Pythagorean Epaminondas really did believe in a wild idea of the “freedom of the Hellenes”; that he wished all of Messenia to be liberated, the very idea of helots-or even slaves as well-to be a thing of the past, for the security of Boiotia and the justice of Hellas and the salvation of their souls.
The hovel was not far from the assembly on the Kadmeia. The next morning Melon got up before the snoring Alkidamas and went on ahead to beat the crowd to the assembly hall. But on his way to the
“A waste of time, that assembly of yours.” The stranger laughed as if he knew Melon well and could start in with him in mid-sentence. He now stopped and pointed his finger. “I came north to learn of these Pythagoreans, to see whether their
