The End of Sparta

well. Most had a savage look about them. Some of the men were pointing at the big breasts of the poet herself and beginning to smile.

Erinna laughed as she took two steps back. “We will go safer for your company-at least until we can see the peak of Ithome.”

Nikon turned and pointed his sword at Erinna. “Our trip is for us, woman, to decide-since we hear only a trace of bad Doric in your talk. Neto we know of. She knew the password. But as for you, Amazon, only Alkidamas pledges his word. Where is he now? We watch-so you don’t earn silver from a Spartan krypt, or any other helot hunter. Don’t bristle; plenty of Messenians have done just that. Kuniskos was once a helot, we hear. We have been killing Spartans, lots of them, while you sing of our fights from a distance. Our fifty have become five hundred. And then again five thousand. Soon ten times that.”

Nikon, as the light confirmed, was a dark sort, with an eye that gave off bad intent to anyone it caught. Still, once he started, it was hard to quiet him down. He was a runner as well as a cutthroat, who flitted about Taygetos with messages for plotters and firebrands. Nikon went always with this short fellow Helos, who carried a long scroll and wrote down orders and messages, one of the few of the helots who could write the block letters and yet believed his illiterate master was far smarter than any of the bastard helot leaders who in private boasted of red- caped fathers. Nikon wore no helot leather, no fur cap. But he had a black wool cape on his shoulders-and a looted Spartan breastplate beneath.

In silence Nikon and his helots at last set out of the main road from Mantineia with the two women. As they neared the western gate of the city, Neto was already staring at the cut square stones and bull-nose-edged corners of the foundations, and at a new course of rectangular stones that had been freshly laid. They were just like those at new Thespiai-and what she had seen at Plataia. So the proud aristocrat Proxenos had not heeded her warnings but had long been down in Arkadia supervising the finishing of the ramparts, even after her visions at the generals’ tent before Leuktra. The scent of the stone-man Proxenos was already spreading all over the Peloponnesos, as if he had stamped a beta for the Boiotians on every wall that rose. Without Proxenos, Neto reminded her travelers, there would be no freedom here in the south.

In another day on the trail westward, Nikon’s band passed through the stones of the sprawling Megalopolis farther down the Arkadian road, heading south over the low mountains to ford the Alpheios. They refreshed at Lykosoura. Then they all went up the side of Lykaion to the cave of Pan for the night. Soon Neto could see the dark, gloomy shape of Ithome, the mountain of myth, home to the gods of Messenia. At dusk on the fourth day from Mantineia they crossed into Messenia toward Andania, with a larger throng of armed helots of Nikon’s band-maybe a hundred now, the first invaders of the great war to come. “Look at it, Erinna. Black Ithome at last, home to Aristomenes of legend, the great refuge of the helots. The mountain rises as the beacon to all Messenians, of all helots for a thousand stadia in every direction.” Neto had not noticed the bands of helot rangers who had been shadowing them from the woods.

These new companies of Messenians were wearing Spartan breastplates and carrying heavy willow hoplite shields with double grips. The helots had come to welcome the newcomers and escort them to the ruins of Thouria. They had often trailed the Spartan kryptes to harvest the stragglers and strip their panoplies up on the higher passes. The Eleans had sent breastplates and shields as well, so this was no ochlos but a well-outfitted phalanx of hoplites. Finally Erinna, as she neared the slopes, found her voice and began chanting her own new poem of her Epaminondas. She had added a new line about this second great city, holy Megalopolis that they left behind as they headed farther west still: “By the arms of Thebes, Megalopolis was girded with walls.”

Neto asked, “Sing of Messene, my Erinna. It is past time to look for the third, the greatest, the tallest of all the fetters of Sparta to rise.”

Erinna smiled. “Not yet; not until the city of our helots is free.”

PART THREE The March Down Country CHAPTER 22

The Great Muster

With the vote to go south before the new year, and the breakup of the Theban winter assembly, Melon made his way through the noise and elbows to a small shrine on the Theban Kadmeia. Still in the high city he stopped by two laurel trees that grew out of a stone outcropping, a viewing place with benches and a fountain. For the first time as he gazed below he understood just how many thousands of winter fighters were camped outside the walls of Thebes. A myriad? Or were there two and more ten-thousands?

How could Menekleidas with his two-pointed shoes prance around the hall as if he could stop what already was started? As the rhetoricians had been warning that very morning, thousands below were sharpening their blades and oiling their shield blazons a stone’s throw from Iphikrates and his thugs in the assembly-and all this at the onset of winter. They looked more like mercenaries than liberationists, scarred with blade nicks, lame from spear jabs, clad in leather and bronze, eager for pay, more eager still for Spartan booty, with not a worry about their icy breath and sleeping on snow. These islanders and northerners cared little whether the Boiotarchs voted for their war, only whether Epaminondas was to be at their head with plunder promised. All had their grudges with Spartans. All could claim that a harmost or a Spartan admiral had ravaged their land or killed a cousin or friend in battle.

The law of Boiotia or the freedom of the helots meant not so much to them; the hatred and loot of Sparta everything. Melon saw tents and midday smoke rising all the way to Kithairon to the south and then even more camps northward up to the spurs of Parnassos and even toward the gap at Chaironeia. As he left his lookout point, the Thespian fought his way through the crowd. Then Melissos finally caught him on the back of his cloak. The boy had just tied Xiphos nearby to a plane tree. He was in high spirits due to the wild eyes of the delegates that had filed into the assembly-and what he had heard from the grove above the theater, where the poor and slaves listened in.

For all Melissos’s bad sight, the boy was counting tents below and already numbering loudly the size of the army to be. “Two myriads,” he gasped, “maybe more still if we could see all on the foothills to the south. Even our armies to the north are not this size.” Suddenly the two were called over by Pelopidas. The general had a bright green cloak on, and a heavy leather tunic beneath. He was allotting scrolls in leather pouches to a group of young ephebes. By prearranged signals, well before the actual voting, the Theban already had sent out runners throughout Boiotia. The general was ordering more messengers to the marshes to ensure that the tardy and stubborn Boiotians of Orchomenos and Helikon showed up in the morning as they had promised. The eleven districts had had less than two days to send in their allotted lochoi-five hundred hoplites each and as many light- armed were the orders. The tribes in all the districts were to fill their quotas by daybreak, as the army would be on the passes outward within two days.

Pelopidas turned to Melon. “If we can get even a half-myriad of those Boiotians who stood firm at Leuktra, we will be doing well enough. That would give us altogether on the morrow almost two ten-thousands, with these volunteers from Euboia, Thessaly, Lokris, the islands, and even the men of Phokis who are still trailing in. And, of course, there are mobs in the south that will join us. So your Thespiai will send troops this time, even if they are not like those of the Malgidai or Chion?”

“Yes, some Thespians may march in. I am a Thespian, and pledge I will go south with you, and then over to Messenia to find my servant girl, whether alone or once again at the van of the army of Epaminondas. The fame of Chion and the big talk after Leuktra count. But mostly they will be the hill folk on Helikon, those in the backcountry all the way to Parnassos. Together with all these foreigners, I reckon that we may set out from Boiotia with more than Kleombrotos had when he came up here, at least.”

Then Pelopidas continued. “You know that the larger the army is, the larger it will become. That’s why you see out there wagons pulling in from over the pass. The mob has decided it is a fine thing to march southward. But