The End of Sparta

wore glued fabric with small metal plates. Freedmen and the poor had neither the thorax nor even greaves. Many, Melon noticed, were the hide men from the mountains on the north shore of the gulf. These carried small Thrakian leather crescent-shaped shields and long javelins or bows across their shoulders-the tribes of Aitolians, Akarnanians, and Ambrakions for whom ambush and outlawry in the hills alone won honor. Thessalonians and Lokrians rode on past atop shaggy ponies, with long fur capes and quivers and javelins strapped to their saddles. The looters of Delphi, the Phokians, came with good bronze armor-no doubt lifted at night from the votive racks in the temples.

“No worry, Master, about how they look. The uglier the better, yes?” Melissos stammered. He went on. “As for us, up in the north, we pay any who will fight. And Master, when they fall, we burn their corpses, without charge for the timber to their families, as promised. That’s enough. These are men who have strong right arms; why worry why they fight? For now, aren’t they on our side?” He went on with an eye on Melon to see whether his new master was ready with a slap to quiet down. “Who cares any more whether spear-men own land or meet your census? Our poor men from the hills, why, they can kill a lord with his five hundred plethra of wheat land just as easily as they can a snake. Watch when this army pours into Lakonia. One of our landless robbers from Ambrakia will jump on the back of a Spartan ephor. Cut his throat without any music or two-step or any of those other things the Spartans drill at. These are the wages of demokratia of your new Hellas, a real equality-in killing. Why dye your cape scarlet when it keeps you no warmer?”

Melon laughed at his new talkbox servant. For a blurry-eyed boy he knew too much about the darker nature of men-and how much better it is to use than be disappointed by it. Yes, this Melissos was hardly the gangly servant that he had dismissed in his mind just three days earlier. He had grown up royal in the rough north, it seemed. There the Makedonians grunted rather than spoke the Hellenic tongue. They poked or killed anything that they wished to in their wine halls after battle. They fought for women, or gold, or land, not for ideas, and much less for helots. So how odd, Melon mused: These northerners like Melissos and his brood flocked to civilization to enjoy the finer life that the law and justice would bring, even though, like the flat worm in the gut, they would eat enough holes to starve and kill their life-giving host. Odder still, the more the Hellenes adorned their cities in marble and wore gold clasps and purple cloaks, the more they lost their stomach to get into the muck and fight those like Melissos who thrived here in the mess and would storm their gates. No wonder Epaminondas dressed in rags and drank gruel and had no children-no concerns for the safety of kin that so blinds men, no worry whether he would tire of ice baths in the river. To keep his soft Hellas free, Epaminondas would shun its softness. When a man gives up gold and land and family, he’s halfway living in the other world anyway. But then so were men like Proxenos, and Ainias-and Melon himself. Was not that why they followed Epaminondas in the first place? Melon thought of all that-and how this Melissos might be a good servant to have in the days ahead.

The sun rose just as they trudged up the mountain, and they soon passed through the forests of spruce and pine of Kithairon and the high plains among the woods. The army was already moving at a brisk walk, along the road that would lead them out of Boiotia through the mountains down into the Megarid and onto the Isthmos. Without the usual August heat, a winter march was far easier on the men-at least if the weather held and the ground stayed firm. Melon and Melissos were at the van during the ascent to Kithairon’s summit. So they fell in with Pelopidas and Epaminondas at the head. Both at intervals already were sending out runners ahead to watch for Athenian archers and horse who might try to waylay and whittle down the army in hopes that the war between Thebes and Sparta might be more evenly matched and more lethal for both. Some had already spotted the red stakes-the ones that Proxenos and Ainias had set out a few days earlier to mark the way where the Megarian tribes of the mountains had supplied food. The idea of the Boiotarchs was to skirt the Athenian border. The army would take the mountain fork and avoid the Eleusis road. That way they could get to the Megarid along the Oinoi path between the watchtowers to the plain across Salamis, with the summit of Mt. Pateras on their right. They could sleep up on the pass on this first night and be tented around Megara and its market on the afternoon of the second day.

At noon on the third day from Thebes, the army would cross the Isthmos-Korinthians and Athenian guards not withstanding. Then by noon on the fourth or fifth, Epaminondas would market outside the aspis of Argos. In two more days from there they would be coming down from the hills of Parthenion and spreading over Tripolis. On the seventh or maybe the eighth morning, when they joined the Argives, fifty thousand of them would be camped at new Mantineia. Or so was the plan that Epaminondas and Alkidamas had worked out when they sent Proxenos and Ainias ahead.

Lykomedes had promised good stocks in his new city, and they had pledges of twenty thousand to join them from Elis and Arkadia, all to meet at Mantineia. Ainias and Proxenos along the way had bought in advance a thousand goats, five hundred cattle, and two thousand sheep to be picked up by the army as it moved, some of them paid in Elean silver in advance to the Megarians and Nemeans. The two already had purchased five hundred medimnoi of barley and five hundred of wheat in measures of a hundred stored in dry cisterns every other day past the Isthmos. Ainias had posted a warning to the plainsmen of the Megarid and those beyond the Isthmos that Epaminondas would take what he had paid for, should the towns not produce what was bought, especially since Ainias had agreed to the high winter prices and put down two talents for the grain stores.

Before the high noon of this first day of the march, the generals parleyed over the food and route-snow in the shady ravines, with some ice in the low spots under gray skies. Even with the sun out, the morning was windy and cold, and the oncoming low clouds from the north made Melon worry that this huge muster was star-crossed or cursed by barren winter. He had marched for thirty years but never in winter, and never under strategoi with less than a month left on their tenure. Yet his farming sense told him the wind would let up and they would see the sun before they crossed the Isthmos. Epaminondas noticed the Thespian’s silence. “Worried about becoming an outlaw, son of Malgis-a hungry phugas or an adikon even? Don’t. Don’t give in to your fears. The army will march at the pace of your limp. If we don’t make it by the new season but decide there are other things to clean up in the Peloponnesos, well then I will gladly stand trial, not the men who follow. But I doubt the talkers in the agora wish to execute ten thousand of their own Boiotians in armor for the crime of humiliating Agesilaos.”

Suddenly, at the summit, the sky in the distance became blue and clear, and the storm clouds blew on by out to the Aegean. Looking back they had a clear view of the horde following them. Epaminondas resumed his own talk. “Take in all these men tramping in the cold of winter. Think of it all, Melon.” Even on this eve of winter the land looked lush with month-old green barley and some sprouting wheat stands. It all prompted a gasp from Epaminondas as they headed into a dark bend in the pines. “Farmland like no other, ours is. No wonder Kleombrotos tried to take all he could of it from us. I would too, if I were from parched Lakonia.”

Without warning Melon grabbed his arm as they marched, worried that his general did not know war for all of his years of bleeding in it. “Did he really only want that, my general? Doesn’t the king have green land enough from the water that runs down from the ridges of Taygetos? Or do you think Spartans starve and are without the twenty thousand plethra of bottomland in Lakonia and Messenia?” The farmer, who knew something about land and the fight over it, wanted to let these generals know what they were about to march into. “Is this what we are marching about? Who will own the great plain of Boiotia? Is that all you think wars are about? Taking what you are in need of from someone else? This greed, real or imagined-this pleonexia?” Suddenly Melon felt a daimon had infused his thoughts. He could not stop. His tongue ran on. He even forgot where his feet took him over the pass. Now his stiff leg eased, and the words poured out. It was as if for those last ten years of thought in his vineyard alone, he could claim his due to speak with a hundred captains about him as recompense.

“But why do the Athenians fight us over the salty marsh at Oropia or the scrub oak of Panakton when they had a vast rich empire in the Aegean? Why do men die for such trifles?” He was warming in the winter midmorning sun. For the first time in his life he thought he felt a larger truth coming out of his mouth that powerful men knew less than he and would listen to his logic-if only he talked even more. Melon was in the world of leaders now, not alone in his orchards, so his ideas grew sharper as they met frowns and nods among those who heard him. “O yes, tell me, my general, why do the Spartans mow down the Argives over that worthless methoria of high rocks and thistle? Why, when all the black soil of Messenia is already theirs? Or do you really think we Hellenes-or for that matter the Persians or Skythians up north-go to war only when