Lykomedes. “A trickster of sorts,” the sophist had warned, “with tusks instead of teeth in his ugly head.” Once there, they were to round up helots and head westward and to send a runner back with news of the preparation for the revolt of the Mantineians. Alkidamas reminded Neto that she was not alone, but if she and this Erinna could rouse the helots, if Epaminondas and Melon could stir the Boiotians, if Proxenos and Ainias could rally the Arkadians, they all might descend like a horde of locusts, converging on the pastures of Lakonia. “Lykomedes may find you useful and so will not have his thugs slit your throat and throw you in his proud new moat. That is the custom for them when they catch a helot on the road-and a pretty one at that. So I gave him some silver Athenian coins. He promises that he has food and a room for you two under the third tower from the main gate. But be out of Mantineia by a day or so with your helots. Prick your ears up to hear word of Proxenos or Ainias, who may be crossing back and forth all year at the Isthmos, though both may not get to Mantineia until you leave. On some winter day the two will be leading an army back from Megalopolis-or so we hope.”
As the month of Theilouthios waned, Neto and Erinna slept most of the late afternoons. They walked at sunset before nightfall when the Aegean wind came up and the stars and early moon give softer light than did the glare of Helios. In the beginning of their trek southward, it was not hard to find the road out from the border at Boiotia. All Hellas was afire this late summer, even though the congress of Boiotia would not take up the march for months more. Then the army might not set out until the cold and the year was well over. For now, the two could always tail along the mercenaries who headed for the new city of Mantineia, the rumored meeting winter place of the armies. Small parties were camping on the paths to the Isthmos, some in wagons, a few with horses. At daybreak Neto and Erinna sought out the resting shade of the orchards and groves on the slopes of the Megarid opposite the sea.
From there they peered out at hundreds more on foot, with servants trailing laden with panoplies, all these zealots convinced that Epaminondas would soon be going south and they should wait the summer out for him down in Arkadia. Alkidamas was right. It was good that she had a companion to share the road-especially one like Erinna. From the looks of the warrior poet, she guessed that they could beat away even a determined throat-cutter. The two women made their way south on the Peloponnesos road that Proxenos and Ainias had trod so many times in the year after Leuktra, in their journeys to oversee the building of Mantineia and Megalopolis-and would make one last time after the women, marking out the grand route for the
As they made their way farther southward, Erinna explained her devotion to the Muses and her worship of the goddess Artemis. She gave Neto bits and pieces of her long song on spinning and the loom. She was composing as they hiked, and by the second day the two were back walking in the light and returned to sleeping at early night. Her day speech was made with a high Attic pitch that so many of the islanders aped after living in Athens, though she had left Athens for the Boiotians because she wished to believe that men-men like Epaminondas-sought to serve their democracy rather than be served by it. But when she sang at night her song was more Doric, though more often a south Asian strain than from the Peloponnesos. “Hymen! O Hymenaeus, while the dark night in silence whirls about, darkness covers my eyes …” Neto looked about, worried that robbers might hear Erinna’s strains, and grabbed her knife as the poetess let out loud lines in the night. As they passed the islands below in the gulf, she sang more softly how Neto was bathed in the scarlet of the huge sun that rose over Salamis out to the east. She went on about a prophecy that a new Themistokles was coming to defeat tyranny-and other such visions that came to her on the road. Neto dubbed her “Epaminondas” because every third word seemed to be “Epaminondas will …” or “Epaminondas can …”
They stopped at the sanctuary at Eleusis, and then slept at the fountain house at Megara before heading over the pass of Geraneia at the Isthmos. But Neto would later remember little of the trees and mountains and sea below on their hike to the Isthmos, only that Erinna knew of an entire new universe, of Praxilla, Korinna, and moons, plants, and birds, rather than the serried ranks of men at war. She often avoided the heavy hexameters of Homer and Hesiod, and instead preferred the lighter five-footed elegies of the love poets. Erinna was no longer young but nearly thirty winters, smooth-skinned yet untouched, or so she boasted.
Neto had heard that the poetess was a Sapphic and avoided the world of men and so was a virgin only of a certain sort. At least it seemed that way, since her songs were often threnodies about her dead friend Baukis, who had married too early and died in childbirth in service to a man not worth the birth pangs. Now as they descended above the flatlands of the Isthmos, Erinna changed her themes and began to sing even more often of the life of Epaminondas, whom she had heard debate just one time in the agora at Thebes. Her Epaminondas, like Erinna, had married no mortal. He sired no children. He left
At day’s end, when Neto worried to her as the campfire roared that the Boiotians were only in a war of words, that the great army might not march until days before the tenure of Epaminondas expired, leaving him an outlaw in winter, Erinna began to chant a new refrain of Epaminondas, who would “shear Sparta of her glory” and leave “all Hellas independent and free,” as if the cities of Mantineia, Megalopolis, and Messene were already finished, the helots beyond Taygetos freed, and the farms of Lakonia on fire, a mounted Epaminondas galloping freely over the Peloponnesos supervising the upheaval.
“I like your ‘all Hellas independent and free,’ ” Neto answered as she heard the chorus for the fiftieth time. “But I worry that when you meet him, he will not have wings on his heels and golden locks down his shoulders, and so you may find your god merely half-divine, if even that.”
“Well, Epaminondas may need my song as his defense, if he lives and returns an outlaw to Thebes. He will need that answer when he is in the dock before the jurymen of Boiotia, the ingrates who are angry that he has saved them.” When the two could see the looming massif of Akrokorinthos in the evening sky, Neto finally asked Erinna how they were to cross the Korinthians’ narrow land. Alkidamas has warned her that it was hard for any of the northerners to pass into the Peloponnesos. Erinna only shrugged, without worry as they had hiked up a bit along the mountains away from the Aegean to avoid robbers. There they stopped with a nice fire of dried tamarisk, and heated up a broth of leeks and barley and dried lamb.
As Erinna took off her long cloak, Neto noticed for the first time in their three days of walking that underneath she wore a heavy leather chiton. There were leather wraps up her legs, and broader hide bands with bronze studs on her arms. Neto had seen some leather before on a woman, but not this close and with these odd designs of stars around a crescent moon. Strangest of all, she examined in detail a small bow on Erinna’s shoulder, a Scythian type. That explained at least the hide on her arms and fingers. Erinna finally answered, “I have friends who will get us across. But I am more worried that your helots will not lead us into Messenia when the time comes and we cross from Arkadia. You talk of this Nikon as your guide and yet confess you have never met the rebel; and yet you assure me you speak to him in your dreams. I wager I know more about him than you do. Is that how you convince me that you are not crazy as the Boiotians say, or fleeing Helikon in lovesickness? As for me, I promised your mentor, Alkidamas, I would see you safely to Mantineia, Nikon or not. If he joins us, fine; if not, I head west anyway. I would start a school on Ithome. I plan to train young helots to read their letters and know their Sappho, and their Korinna and Myrtis. And yes, Alkidamas gave me some silver Athenian owls to escort you safe to the south-but only half what Phryne offered me to slit your throat here on this side of the Isthmos.” Neto looked baffled at that last confession: Should she be angry that Erinna had come along only as a bought guide, or happy that she had refused to be a bought assassin?
Then Erinna noticed Neto’s stare and scoffed. “The bow is not for you, so let down your guard. Leather is not for men alone. Not for a woman’s show, but to protect my arms. How else can I string and fling the arrows? Don’t raise your nose too high about my tools. At least not if you want a fresh rabbit or two for our dinner-and maybe a stag as well before we reach Messenia.” This Erinna was supposed to be, Alkidamas also had warned Neto, something more than a poet, a woman who could strike verse or strike down a good-size man with equal skill. Neto prided herself that she had stacked too many stones with Chion ever to have gone soft, and that her arms were taut after plowing and seeding the fields of the dead Staphis. But Erinna was more manlike, yet not mannish altogether. As she got up to throw some wood on the fire, Neto noticed that Erinna’s limbs were like those of Lophis, lean and stringy, and yet her breasts and backside were full.
Erinna sensed all this, and turned back to Neto. “Don’t believe the poets like Hipponax or Euripides of Athens that we are a helpless sort. Women are not mad like Medea or Kassandra, or bloody bitches like Klytemnestra, or eager to die as was Antigone. Only men like your Hesiod on Helikon or Sophocles and Euripides sing of such nonsense.” She laughed and cupped her hands under her large breasts. “What do I care that men line up in the
