The End of Sparta

chin and beak nose, he began squawking as if he’d found his dinner in some half-eaten rotting carcass on the byway. Iphikrates yelled out to the crowd, “Siga. Sigate. Let our Kallistratos speak; it is his right as a guest. He’ll set right the lies of your Pelopidas. Listen to your friends from Athens. Give us our due as guest-friends. We are envoys-protected by the nomima of the Hellenes.”

Alkidamas was sitting behind Melon. He leaned forward to whisper in his ear as he identified the Athenian strangers. “There is Kallias. With the bun of hair tied on top, the money chest next to Iphikrates. He has more coins in his mouth than even you do in your strongbox.” Alkidamas went on. “Kallistratos is a follower of Isokrates. He loves the Spartans dearly. His name may imply “a fine army,” but he is a weaver of intrigue, not a fighter. Even at Athens these two know more about us and our Epaminondas than we do ourselves-thanks to the nighttime visits north and south by Phryne and her agents, that spy whom you dub Sphex. Even I have not fleshed out all her plots, both with Lichas and with the Korinthians who so often bar the Isthmos.”

It was just this Kallistratos who finally mounted the bema. He began the Athenian attack. “Men of Boiotia and friends of Athens. What is all this fiery air that this lackey of Pythagoras has breathed into this hallowed assembly of yours?” With that start, he bore down on the friends of Epaminondas in the front row in their broad-rimmed leather hats. “Do you have the noble dragons of old on your Kadmeia? If so, who let in this serpent Pelopidas who for no reason would scorch Hellas with his sparks and embers of hate, trading in peace for hateful war?” Kallistratos was pointing back at Pelopidas and Epaminondas. “Bloody Ares has left us. Peace with all her gifts is at hand. Yes, beautiful Eirene has flown in; peace sits atop us all. Yet these men alone spurn her soft, feathered wings and downy breast, and instead yearn for the black-taloned Keres, whose beaks drip with the meat of corpses rotting in our fields. By the gods, man, at least give this peace a moment. You Boiotians, the summer before last, won a great victory. All Hellas acknowledges the achievement of Leuktra. This turnabout was not unwelcome in my own city of Athens. But do not spoil the triumph with greed. Why would you drop the firm shiny apple in your hand by now grasping for the rotting one on the limb so far above your reach?”

Jeers followed from the crowd with a hail of flying nuts and raisins. Nonetheless, the Athenian pressed on, still striving to undo the work of Pelopidas. “We men of Athens have no love for the Spartan. Indeed, for thirty years we fought him.” Kallistratos spoke carefully now. “Then your own grandfathers were not so friendly and indeed as enemies were heartened by our grief. Thebans, not Spartans, stripped our houses on the border. Thebans sent men to Sikily to spear our Athenian sons. Thebans clamored to tear down Athena’s city when Lysander sailed into the Piraeus in his pride. All this we paid you back not with invasion. No, we gave safe haven for your radical exiles-when the Spartan occupiers then turned their attention to you and sat atop the Kadmeia right over there.”

Kallistratos once again lowered his voice, and he extended his arms with his palms open to the audience, now and then grabbing the folds of his outer cloak. It was easy for the crowd to say they hated Athenians, but more difficult to jeer at such mellifluous Attic speakers who sounded far better than their own, and were offering peace rather than war. A few Thebans now rose and cheered him on. “He makes more sense than our own warmongers. Give him more time, tell us more.”

In response, Kallistratos now threw out his enormous belly. He cared little that he was already bathed in sweat in midwinter. He wanted these enraptured Boiotian pigs to see just how rich was his table, and how much high-priced food from Attika went into his gut that alone could fuel such deep cadences. “There are many faces in this crowd-not the least this tame Pelopidas himself-that I recognize from their sanctuary in Athens. We the men of Athens once took them in, all so hungry and all on the run. Then no one else would-we did so at great danger to ourselves from our newfound Spartan friends. But these renegades would turn their flames on their benefactors by scorching friend and enemy alike. Gratitude and-magnanimity-xenia, I would have thought, are attributes not lightly thrown away by the Hellenes.”

To scattered applause, Kallistratos now frowned and took on a melancholy tone. “We Athenians are magnanimous folk. From the time of Theseus the men of Athens have come to the aid of you Thebans. Learn from us. War, after all, has proven a great leveler. We have had our fall. So has Sparta its own ptosis. Beware that you of Boiotia do not trip up as well.” Slowly the sadness began to leave Kallistratos, and then with an increasingly contorted look, as if he had a bone in his throat, or had a stinky tooth, he began to raise his voice a notch. “We should patch our tears, and pull up over our heads our shared stitched Hellenic cloak to fend off the harsh wind from Persia. A new order has emerged after the war: No one city of Hellas, in this balanced world, dictates to another. My Theban friends, stay within your borders. Do not put the democracy at Athens in the unenviable position of having to censure its cousins across the mountain.” Kallistratos felt the crowd hush. Only one Theban, no more, yelled out, “When did Athens ever stay within its borders-or is our Delion in your Attika now?”

Kallistratos ignored him, but began to worry that the fickle farmers five rows back were tiring of his Athenian oration, as they groaned, then clapped, then hissed, then laughed, depending on the skill of his performance. “Now I address men of substance and prudence and dispense with you of the mob. My dear Boiotarchs, men of moderation and sobriety, ponder this wise counsel and put off action until after the new year. Then once more when the weather warms and the buds break can we bring matters to the council of all the Hellenes in peace, without the disruption of firebrands who as infants soil their diapers and crawl out of councils when they do not get their way.” At the end, Kallistratos’s voice had once again turned soft, as soft as Pelopidas’s, but by far the more polished. Had he not been an Athenian, the Boiotians would have perhaps preferred his mellifluous speech to that of any of their own. As Kallistratos began to slowly walk away, he stopped in the aisle amid the shouting. “A final warning. You are not talking of war thrust on you, as happened on that dark day of Leuktra when a red-caped king crossed your borders.” He pointed his finger at the front row where sat the long-haired estate owners who owned the horses of Boiotia. “No, lordly men of Boiotia, you are pondering a war of choice. This is a preemptive act. Why an optional war? Why lose the goodwill of the victim to earn the antipathy of the aggressor?”

Kallistratos went on even louder, eager to win back the crowd. “Epaminondas will just say he wants to go to Arkadia. When he gets there, he will just say he wishes to go on to Sparta. Then once there, that he wishes yet again just to cross Taygetos into Messenia-and there he gets killed any still alive. We supported your first good war at Leuktra. But not this second, unprovoked, bad war against the Spartans, this we cannot stomach. Preemption and unilateral aggression-these provocations are not in our Athenian natures.”

The assembly grew silent at that, after having laughed at his girth and been entranced by his oratory. Now they were simply confused by his warning that they might die in an unnecessary war that would have no end. Melon, however, saw that the real message, the only constant, from this rogue was whatever the men of Thebes did, the Athenians were against. The former was a young, a fresh democracy of farmers, the latter an old democracy of the jobless and those who looked to the dole. The one was as confident as the other was fearful. Perhaps what wily Kallistratos really had meant to say-or so Melon barked to Alkidamas above the shouting-was that Sparta once in the great war had beaten Athens badly. Now Athens feared that Thebes might do the same to Sparta. After all, it would be a bitter blow indeed to Athens, the self-proclaimed school of Hellas, if Epaminondas could do to Sparta in a single season what Athens had not been able to in twenty-seven.

CHAPTER 19

No Man a Slave

Suddenly there was a commotion as a Boiotian loudmouth stood up in the crowd and demanded his say. It was Menekleidas of Aulis again, old Backwash, who had tried to stop the fight the night before Leuktra. After the battle he had appeared on the battlefield, amid the wreckage and corpses, covered with his rubbed-on blood and screaming in pain, he said, from a blow by Lichas himself. How he had been nicked in the fiftieth row from the front, no one quite knew. But that had been more than a year ago, and in the interim Backwash had repeated so often the lie that Leuktra had been his plan all along that the wearied listeners came to half-believe it-and his false wound as well.

He did not believe that Epaminondas could take an army into the vale of Lakonia in midwinter-and moreover the Athenians had given him five pouches of silver to say so. He was as firmly set against fighting now as he had been in the tents of the generals on the eve of Leuktra. Quickly Backwash brawled his way through the crowd in the assembly, turning his head from Melon when he got to the front, already chanting