The End of Sparta

The general then abruptly grew restless as he reached the end of his address, as animated now as he had been lackadaisical when he began. “As for the slurs, I plead guilty to all the charges brought by Kallistratos. Yes, forty thousand more Arkadians are waiting for us. More in the new cities of Mantineia and Megalopolis that rise. Yes, we will finish their walls in the south. Yes, in the middle of winter we will enter Lakonia. There are twenty thousand of us ready tonight to march out of this city. Look out below. If all this is a conspiracy, then I plead guilty for wishing it and I will bleed for it.” Epaminondas had no ability to out-talk either Kallistratos or Menekleidas. The man in the weatherbeaten thin cloak with his cracked and broken helmet pushed back on his head was appealing not to the heads but the spirits of what he hoped were his unbroken Boiotians.

His shield and spear lay at his feet, and he was pointing with his dagger. “The Boiotarchs and the Boule already voted for a muster days ago. So I went north and did just that-signed up thousands as you can see from the sea of tents below here. Your coffers are full of silver from allies. The army of our coalition, Phokians, Euboians, exiles from the south, and Lokrians-you know them all-is outside our walls. Eleans and Arkadians wait on us in the south. They are ready to cut the head off the Spartan snake. Unlike us, they care little that it is cold and wet. Those without freedom don’t worry whether the season for campaigning is over. Their eyes instead are on the Spartan acropolis alone. They want to share in the freedom you have-what you shrug at as your tired birthright.”

The Boiotians were murmuring that the angry general seemed like the beggar Odysseus about to throw off his rags and take revenge against the suitors. Indeed just then Epaminondas took off his helmet and began waving it around with his left hand. “Our purpose, you ask? Why, it is to help the men of Mantineia and that means kill Spartans, of course. The more the better until there are no more-or for their part they kill us all. Some talk grandly of war. But war, my Boiotians, is killing all of the enemy who need killing-and there remain thousands in Sparta who do need killing.”

The tiny general then paused. “I swear a great oath to you, men of Boiotia. The Boiotians will march out tomorrow following this vote today to give me command. But I care little whether it is the month of winter Boukatios or summer Hippodromios. Or whether I have thirty days or three hundred days left of my tenure. No, we march at dawn. We will cross the Isthmos. Then if the One God wills it, we keep safe the Mantineians and then go over the pass with the Argives to the heart of Lakedaimon. We Boiotians will hit the Spartans in their own courtyard, the first foreigners to take arms into Lakonia in five hundred seasons.”

Some, maybe half of the Boiotians of the assembly, were beginning to stand and clap in approbation. Epaminondas jumped down from the bema and walked out. Just then he caught the eye of the Athenian delegation. Then he made a sudden detour in their direction at the front column. The Theban stood not more than a cubit from their noses and stuck his blade in their faces for the Boiotarchs to see. At least he was not clubbing them with his helmet. “As for this Kallistratos and his Athenians here, listen well, Boiotians-especially this Iphikrates that I am nose-to-nose with and his Athenian thugs. At sunrise, I take this army out over Kithairon. On the next day right across your border over Kithairon to Megara.” With that, far more of the crowd was on its feet, hooting and clapping, as they strained their necks to see the hapless Athenians-for they knew their Epaminondas was at times a sort of brute himself, who would beat a man in assembly as easy as salute him. “Join me, fight me, ignore me-that is yours to decide. But should I see a single Athenian hoplite barring the border pass on high Skourta tomorrow, this army of free Hellenes will first turn south to Athens. We will climb up your Acropolis and march right through your white marble Propylaia, Perikles’s unfinished gateway to your city of Athena. We, the pigs of Boiotia, will tear it down, block by block, and cart it back in our wagons back over to Thebes.”

Epaminondas’s voice rang out above the crowd. “We will rebuild the Athenian marble on our own Kadmeia- proof that we are deserving of such a gate to our city. We are the real democrats, you the ghosts who live in a city built by those far better than you. As for you Boiotians, listen to Kallistratos and his lackey potter Menekleidas until dusk tomorrow if it is your wish. But I have an army to muster at dawn and a date to keep in the Peloponnesos.”

“A date to keep in the Peloponnesos!” Melon too found himself standing and roaring approval, the first time in his life he had ever clapped for anyone or anything. As the philosophers of old said, it was easy to moralize in your sleep. But he saw that performance, not intent, judges a man good or bad. All this the brawler Epaminondas had taught him at last in his old age-or perhaps retaught him when he came down the mountain. You didn’t have to be perfect-a god on Olympos-to be good, to be a mortal better than others. So here he was like a witless democrat alongside the illiterate stall-sellers and rope-makers. He had been carried away with the current for war by the single speech of a single man-in the manner at which he used to scowl in others. He was headed for the vale of Sparta for Epaminondas and then over Taygetos to help free the helots and bring home his Neto.

Melon found himself almost hoarse. He was the last to stand in sounding his approval, possessed by the wild rush to march out with this army, for Lophis and dead Staphis, and for the safety of Damo and the boys, and maimed Chion, too, and always for the dreams of his missing Neto. For all this and more he yelled out until his lungs nearly were raw to follow Epaminondas. He could not care less whether a wintry katabasis into Lakonia was possible. He only knew that he would rather be on the wrong side with Epaminondas than right with these buskins of the assembly. In a wild mood such as this, he might well go back on the left wing again, even if Epaminondas asked him to cross the Eurotas and storm the acropolis of Agesilaos himself. The cure of Melon-the old misanthrope and cynic on Helikon who after the battles of Nemea and Koroneia had hid from the affairs of the Boiotians-was at last complete. Epaminondas had brought him back into the world of men and ideas and belief and off the mountain of his isolation, and the search for Neto would take him the rest of the way southward.

The applause quieted down, as if the crowd itself had been stunned by their own spontaneous roaring. But what now? Did they know where the ripples of their wild assent would lap? Would harsh Reason goad them back to quiet? Then Melon for the first time noticed that the sophist Alkidamas, of all people, not the other Boiotarchs or once again Pelopidas, or the Athenians, was approaching the bema, both arms upraised with his big open palms to calm the crowd-as if this were his plan, as if it had been his army all along. The Athenians were murmuring and starting to become nervous; they were surrounded by now frenzied Boiotians.

Then Alkidamas spoke: “I take this thunder as a voice vote that we are to march under General Epaminondas in the morning before the frost melts. Pelopidas as his habit will be in charge of the marching order. Look out in the plain below; the muster is nearly complete and only awaits our nod. Let the Boiotarchs sort out the details. The seven generals who had doubts have already ceded their command over to our two leaders. I have nothing to add to the promises of Epaminondas-other than this.” Now Alkidamas himself also grew quiet, not quite sure what he would say next. But speak he did. For the great sophist of the Hellenes was possessed, he would say later, by an inexplicable fire, one from the mouth of Pythagoras himself. So the words came out not entirely his own. “No man is born by nature a slave-this curse that so often makes the strong and wise unfree and the weak and dull their master.”

The crowd was bewildered at these lofty thoughts so out of place in a sermon to march to war, but stayed quiet for more. “Beware of those who say the Messenian helots know nothing of letters as if they were man-footed beasts of dim wits and animal grunts. They are unfree because they live next to the Spartans. So we the Boiotians, and Kallistratos and his fancy Athenians, might well have been as well, had our borders butted such a race of granite as those who wear the red capes. The Messenians will be free thanks to the strong right arms of the Boiotians.” Now Alkidamas waved his arms and yelled to the crowd in far louder fashion than had Epaminondas. “Yes, they will have their free city of Messene.”

With that, Alkidamas stepped down and abandoned the politics of Boiotia for good, for this man of action also had business himself in the Peloponnesos. As the assembly of the Boiotians broke up, the white-haired sophist lumbered over to Melon, who put his hands on the shoulders of the old man and raised his voice over the din, “I hope to be alive to hear all that again, your defense of the Messenians, this no man a slave. I think you have the beginning of a real speech some day from these embers that flared up in your chest as if the One God of ours was working your bellows.” Then he pointed where the general had stalked out of the assembly. “This winter Epaminondas will go beyond his tenure that expires at the new year. Then I wager that we will all be renegades. It will be our choice to be right and dead with Epaminondas or wrong, alive-and growing old-with Backwash. We all go out under the command of Epaminondas who soon will find himself an outlaw general. There will be a death sentence when-or if-we return, earned for the freedom of distant slaves.”

Alkidamas then barked to Melon over the noise, “When the law is in service to servitude, and its violation means freedom, then the choice for a good man is not hard. If the helots are freed and we tramp back alive, then