The End of Sparta

But the voice sounded too high, too shrill for a Spartan king. The king spoke as if battle with Epaminondas were to be avoided rather than sought. He finished weakly, “If every Spartan peer, if every ephor, if even a Spartan king should fall tomorrow, so be it. It would be worth that great price to kill Epaminondas and stop his democratic madness. Follow me to victory. Follow me up their Kadmeia.”

His army murmured. Only a few raised their fists at their king’s notion that any Spartan would need die at all against these pigs. Most of the companions in disgust turned to finish off their wine. Then the pipes took up and the king’s guard took the frightened royal into his tent. Before the men laid out their reed bedrolls, and smothered their cook fires, Lichas the ancient ephor climbed back up on the wagon bed. He bounded up as if he were no more than twenty. The brute Kleonymos, captain of the king’s guard, stood on one side, Lichas’s son Antikrates on the other, his shield still on his forearm. Both were a quarter royal and, better yet, claimed bloodlines from Brasidas himself. The two always had fought side-by-side and argued only over the number of their kills. Yet the sly night-killer Sphodrias came too and towered behind them all, even if he usually sought to hide rather than strut his size as he crawled about the campfires of the enemy. He planned this very night to go behind the lines and bring back a Theban shield-or, better, a hand or foot.

Lichas was becoming tired of his reluctant king. He could care not a whit whether the odds, or the omens, or the weather, or the battleground favored either Spartans or Boiotians. He was of the old ones, a Spartan like Leonidas. An ephor. In defeat or victory, Lichas, son of Lichas, of the greatest polis of Hellas, in its greatest age. He would fight like his grandfathers at Thermopylai. He would kill Boiotians and he would bring untold misery to them and endless glory to his own. If their own king was fated to die, better to rid them of a royal not fit for the Spartan office. The women of Sparta claimed Lichas was even uglier than Kleombrotos, and they boasted it was due to the scars of battle, not the bad draw at birth.

“My peers, my equals. We muster before dawn. This time the pigs claim they will go over us tomorrow and on into Sparta. The fools claim they will not slink back into their sties as in the past but will fight for all sorts of silliness under the silliest of all, Epaminondas. They want us to be all the same, to ruin Hellas and to call it democracy-to end our beloved Sparta as we know it. We say the best men are best to keep the weaker ones secure. That’s why we come into pig land to collect our rent for keeping the swine penned up and safe.”

He liked the sound of his roaring voice. Lichas could not stop. “Whether we have to fight the Titans or Olympians, the verdict is the same, always the same. You Spartans are born, raised for the fight against anyone, at any moment we please. We all will die without it. I ask our seers here-will it be young Kleonymos, the tower of the phalanx, or my boy Antikrates, who breaks the guard of Epaminondas and sends him and his fools to Hades? Which one? Tell us now. Place your bets before sunrise when we throw the knucklebones. As for me, your Lichas here- Lichas, ephor son of the ephor Lichas? I vote for none of them. Only for me. I’m the one, the best killer of them all.”

He let out an eerie high-pitched laugh, even as more Spartans drifted back from their campfires to hear him. The growing throng was calling out Lichas as loudly as they had been quiet listening to their stuttering king. The more he swaggered and talked, the more the men in their long capes cheered Lichas. Behind such a Spartan, they felt safe. They could boast they were no worse men than those Spartans of old who had followed King Leonidas against the Persians. If there were dike still in the vale of Lakonia, any justice at all, this man Lichas, without birthright of a king, long ago rightly would have been their king. Or so they mumbled in admiration at the four tall men on the wagon.

Let the Boiotians talk of the faker god Pythagoras, who preached that all men were equal to the worm or sparrow. Let them shout for Epaminondas and the new fantasy cities to rise in the Peloponnesos. Let them do all that and more. The Spartans had Lichas, Lichas of the old gods and the ways of the south, and that would be proved more than enough tomorrow.

But even now Lichas was not quite done. He then roused them with a final taunt, as he seemed to know all the Theban generals and why they had begged Melon to come down from Helikon. “So who of us kills the counterfeit Epaminondas? Who then kills the other general Pelopidas and with them their Theban plague of demokratia? Who sends this Thespian would-be savior, the broken-down farmer Melon who, the hag priestesses say, will kill us all, if he dares to show up-the so-called apple of women’s fables that kills our king. Who sends him to the houses of the dead?”

“Who? Who?”

“Ego Lichas. Ego. Not your Kleonymos. No, not my Antikrates. Not even sneaky Sphodrias here. No, I say it will be your Lichas. I am your Leonidas at Thermopylai reborn. The gods say no free man born of a free woman can kill me. Not tomorrow, not ever. You bet on others. I wager on Lichas-on myself. Sparta is as it was always before. We take the power we need and let others worry whether it’s fair. For all we care, these pigs are no better than Persians, and they will die as badly as well.” Then Lichas lumbered down. The other three followed him with a shout. The leaders of the lochoi rushed up to the wagon, pushing and shoving the crowd ahead to touch the old man. They wanted their Lichas as king-Lichas their man of hard oak, by his speech and zeal capturing the hearts of thousands that the green-stick king Kleombrotos had lost despite his birth.

As Lichas finished, back across the plain in the Thespian camp high across the creek bed, Melon and his slave Chion were almost finished digging their armor from the wagon, cursing at the frayed straps and patched clasps since they had not put the full bronze of Malgis on in more than seven summers-since the last spear crossing near Tegyra beneath Mt. Ptoon. Finally at late dusk the two began to make their way slowly toward Epaminondas. His tent was in the gully below.

Gorgos was left back alone with the ox. The helot slave was sitting on the ground against a wagon wheel, happy enough to be alive with Chion gone. In vain, he once more strained for even more Doric sounds from his godly poet Tyrtaios, as those sweet melodies wafted in from the Spartan campfires across the gully. The music of old brought dreams of his son Nabis, the beardless boy he had left as an orphan long ago in smoky Lakonia, when Malgis had captured him up here in pig land.

Gorgos had been more than a helot in the south. He had risen to leader of the helots in Messenia, renamed by his masters Kuniskos, or so he claimed to the slaves on Melon’s farm. In his youth he was freed by the house of Lichas for his battle courage and had once become known even as Lord Kuniskos-Lichas’s fixer, the eyes and ears of the Spartan ephor and hero. Gorgos now dreamed that after the victory of Lichas at Leuktra perhaps he would return to Lakonia and be known this time as Kuniskos the Terrible-no longer Gorgos the snake man. Once the two, side-by-side, had spear-charged the Thebans at the great battle at the Nemea River-only to have Gorgos fall stunned, brought down and dragged out by Malgis the Thespian, bound with a rope on his way to servitude on Helikon, land of the pigs. Gone forever from his beloved master Lichas. Now he was old and had ended up as no more than Gorgos the dung spreader, who for twenty and three winters had emptied the slop jars in the vineyard of Malgis.

With Chion gone, Gorgos was soon napping at the wagon amid the flies of Aias. As he dozed, he chuckled out loud, as he went deeply back into the old dreams of his highland hideout, on his beloved mountain of Spartan Taygetos, far to the south in the Peloponnesos, where he was once more Kuniskos meting out justice for his lost son Nabis. Now he was cooking in his own hut, and laughing in his slumber that Neto, and Chion, and Melon had just walked into his house, his own house, where his dinner, quite a meal, was ready for them all. There on Taygetos, the slaves were masters, and masters were slaves-though not in the way that his fellow dreamer Melon had thought.

CHAPTER 3

General Epaminondas

Melon was trying to pick up the soft sounds from the playing of Kopaic reeds as he and Chion neared the main tents of the Theban generals of Leuktra. The two were let inside by a few leather-clad sentries with felt caps, stoking the evening fires of Epaminondas.

At last here was the great Epaminondas. Their general, who would lead all the Boiotians tomorrow, did not look like much. Was this short fellow really the god who claimed he could chase a myriad of Spartans back home