The End of Sparta

and did good, but that won’t be known until we are long on the other side. Others are foul sorts. But for a moment, a beam of goodness, of to kalon, comes out from them. It hits the bystander more than even do the soft words of the far better. But enough.” He plucked a blade of green barley and stuck it in his mouth. Pointing at his friend, he continued. “No man alive knows more of war than you, Ainias-how to organize the defense of cities and bring in supplies, to spot traitors inside the gates, to discover tunnels and signal with fire, and create passwords and open locked gates. You Stymphalian, better than any, know how to marshal an army on the plain to battle. So I will call you taktikos. Yes, you are to be our Ainias Taktikos-the tactician.” Proxenos was pleased at that new title and was on to something. “Leave something behind of this skill. I have scrolls aplenty in that sack. So scribble down your thoughts. He who doesn’t write, dies. Leave a little behind at least of the mind of General Ainias Taktikos of Stymphalos and his skill that defeated the Spartans and kept the Arkadians free.” Proxenos then grew serious. As the good aristocrat, he was without much envy of the gifts in other men. He had taken stock of Neto’s warning against crossing south of Isthmos, and he felt now, after the smell and bad air of Skope, that his life rope had fewer strands here in the south where he should not be; and this oddly gave him relief rather than worry, despite his money and fame.

Why, Proxenos the Plataian wondered, had he once more ended up so far south, in a once familiar country, headed even farther southward? The rich like he who owned green fields on the Asopos had no business down here in the barren crags of the Peloponnesos. But then did the Spartans, men like Agesilaos or Lichas, have any reason to be in Messenia? How would Sparta ever let men live freely if the Proxenoi of the north counted their trees and talked in the stoas of the freedom of Pythagoras and yet did not put a spear under their chin, when ten myriads of helots were but a quarter moon away? At any rate, his legs became heavy and the ash and the blowing seeds of the dead grass on Skope had clogged his nose and swelled his cheeks. He began to like the idea that he might not need to come back along this long road south when the war was at last over, as most wish to take a different road home than the long one out.

Proxenos then tried to talk his way out of his sluggishness. “I have heard your war talk, Ainias-how warfare has changed, and your rants that fighting is no longer battle between gaudy-crested spearmen on fair and level ground. No more spears and shields. As you say, it is a war to the death of all against all, pantes pros pantas with the slaves and poor and sieges and ambushes and betrayal. We for our part cannot win such a war without the helots of Messenia. Yet you have mastered this new hateful war. Write down how we are to survive, so that we Hellenes don’t relive all the mistakes again and again. You will be a writer of war, you Ainias Taktikos.”

With that, the two forgot their grand talk of tactics, scrolls, immortality, and all that and in no time had left the gloomy hillock of Skope far behind them. Once they were distant, their spirits lifted for good. As they neared the new walls of Mantineia and crossed a stone bridge over the river, both looked up at the main gate that had been hung since the last visit of Proxenos. It was built of mountain oak wood, twenty feet high, with black iron on its borders. A massive beam hung to lock the doors at night. The gate was ringed by towers-each forty cubits and more above the plain, about every half stade on the walls.

Proxenos was counting. “Ten gates, one hundred twenty towers. Like nothing in Hellas, this city. Yet had I my way, my towers would have been round rather than square. A round one pleases the eye. It is harder to knock down, and the stones and iron of the enemy glance off it better. But it takes a builder with a keen eye, and a mason who knows something of art and beauty.” Mantineia was the largest city to have been built in Hellas in five hundred years and more. Unlike all other walled cities in Hellas, it had not been laid out around an acropolis in the hills or on the slopes, but spread out in a large oval on flat farmland, in a valley ringed by tall mountains. Proxenos’s proud citadel had no need of the high ground to survive, and there was not the bother of the long walk up to an acropolis. He had planned an entire city like the rich houses of the aristoi-with running water piped into the fountains, and with sewers beneath the floors and streets to carry out the waste-all to tower over the hovels of the Spartans. The men of Mantineia would find no help for their security from rocks and heights of nature, but instead their polis grew out of the mud of the valley. Yes, this new city of the Mantineians proclaimed to the Spartans: “We new men of Arkadia can build something in a season better than anything over a lifetime at Sparta- and we dare you, who need an acropolis, to take down our walls in the plain. Come, take them if you can.”

The stone work of the new Mantineia was unlike that of other poleis. It incorporated strange ideas of regular courses, a moat, and a grid of square city blocks inside with streets that made sharp right angles, with the names of the ways chiseled on the building corners. Its dressed stones had the cut of Boiotia with their trademark corner drafts, as if to proclaim also that Epaminondas was on his way and the Arkadians were more Boiotians than Peloponnesians. Proxenos thought that the order and symmetry of his Pythagoras would grow into the minds of these new dwellers. Men foul and low by birth were to be given a new city, and a new democracy, and then they would act with reserve and show taste like those born into the great houses of Boiotia, once their material surroundings uplifted their spirits.

Why were men poor? Because of accident or hurt, or was it rather due to their sloth-poor because they were no good by nature inside? Or drank the unmixed wine? Or stole, and killed and maimed when they should have been pruning the high olive trees? To find that answer Proxenos had followed Epaminondas down here in the first place. So would these freed Mantineians, and better yet, the helot Messenians next, turn away from superstitions of the Olympians to worship the deity Reason that had so ordered their own lives? Or would they loot in their new city as the serfs and helots they innately were, and prove the Spartans right that they were inferiors by nature and would make their new city as foul as they? A voice of the master answered in the head of Proxenos, “No, one day they will think as they live in their new grids. Square corners make square thoughts.”

A storm was blowing in from faraway Thrace. Winds and sleet headed down the pass to the Peloponnesos. The drenched hoplites ran under the arch, happy to be alive and off Skope when the lightning hit. Mantineia was the first city of this new Peloponnesos where rank was gone, a demokratia that made Athens tame in comparison. Owning big orchards or bottomland wheat fields meant nothing. With the promised end of Sparta, bulwark of oligarchy, the idea of the polis of privileged property owners, alone fighting in the phalanx on behalf of the lesser community, was to be over. Instead, here in Mantineia the demos would tax the rich horsemen and the orchard growers to pay for the walls to protect the landless. The world of Hellas was to be upside down. The poorer the man was, the more qualified he was to run the polis. Squeeze the soft rich until their juices ran, and then go after the pulp as well-or so the new democrats of Mantineia bragged.

Many plethra of wheat fields were walled inside this strange city’s fortifications, and newly transplanted olives lined the streets. Wooden grape arbors with bare winter canes covered the city squares, as Proxenos’s walled Mantineia was to be both city and country. How could Agesilaos and his Spartan raiders ever starve out a town that grew its own food year-round inside its ramparts? The snake river Ophis had been diverted to run around the oval city’s foundation to serve as a great moat, dug thirty feet deep and lined with paving stones. But far below the foundations of the city, clay pipes brought the water into the fountains and cisterns and fed small ponds around which the city dwellers grew their own gardens, and that they stocked with fish and water fowl as well. In the previous wars, the Spartan army once had turned the river to flood towns in the valley and wash away their mud bricks. Now the waters were to be the bulwark, not betrayers of a far larger polis.

The engineers of Proxenos ensured that no machine of the Hellenes could tear down his stacked blocks, not even the new belly-bows from Sikily that sent iron shafts of twenty palms and more in length-and faster and heavier than any arrow-for two stadia. Double iron clamps, in the shape of axes, joined his blocks, and heavy lead sealed them from rust. The walls were half as deep into the ground as they were tall. Far beneath the earth they were anchored to hold the weight. Subterranean stones stopped the burrower and the miner from pulling out earth from beneath. King Agesilaos could not go over, under, or through these stones, or flood or starve out those inside, either.

Scaffolds still rose above the street. Ainias pointed to them in every direction. Thousands of Arkadians were hoisting cut stones and trays of mud bricks on ropes and pulleys up from booms for the final courses, even as the wind blew ice over the works. Wagons made a continuous trek into the circuit’s gates from the farms beyond, full of household rural folk moving into the still unfinished fortress. Ainias tried to make sense of it all as the sleet began. “Walls reveal a people. You are a Zeus who has taught these Mantineians that they are better than Spartans and can do things because they think they can do things. Yet something more even than Mantineia will soon be rising to the south at Megalopolis, and perhaps in Messenia something greater than Megalopolis. You have turned the men of the Peloponnessos into hemi-gods, and from the barren earth they are building a new Olympos.”