For now, we stay put here. We eat-until our Poseidon gives us a winter storm that sinks them. Remember I get paid whether you walk or ride the waves the rest of the way.”
Alkidamas tried to reply over the roar of the surf. “Yes, safe for now-but trapped and still far from Ithome.”
CHAPTER 24
The two women had better sense than to board a winter trireme when Alkidamas had talked grandly of one day taking a boatload of free helots into Messenia to craft a constitution. Instead, months earlier, when Gaster was still mending the
But once inside Spartan-held Messenia, Neto saw that she should have listened to her hide-clad Erinna, who had known the woods and the mind of those like Kuniskos. For all Neto’s talk of helots and Messenia and the visions of Nikon, it turned out she understood very little about life in the south, or indeed life outside the protection of the farm of the Malgidai-and nothing about how to live in the wilds of Ithome. The priestesses of Artemis had offered their precinct to Neto; but she too often was forced to sleep in the light rains and snow of the forests, given the constant Spartan patrols that crisscrossed Messenia on orders of Lord Kuniskos. It seemed odd to Neto that the Athenian Erinna, with no trace of Messenian in her speech, might have turned out to be the better friend to the revolt. Or not so odd, since the poetess had lived up on the mountains of Parnes and Hymettos and knew more of the wilds, how to live on the red berries, skin the rabbit, and drink the cleaner brook water, than did even the helots themselves-and how to put an arrow in a mountain thief and yet be five stadia away in the brush by the time his gang found the dying corpse.
When Nikon’s party finally had climbed over the summit of Taygetos and crossed the borders in the late summer, Erinna went straight up to the highlands along the long spine of Ithome. Her new spot was not far from the holy ground of wild Artemis Laphria and its priestesses of the sanctuary in their hunting garb. Erinna sang out to Neto that the two were finally in holy Messenia and at last insurgents in the war against the Spartans that they so long had advocated from a distance. “Stay here where you are safe, Neto. We are not like foolish men. They blindly walk by the food that can feed us-greens and herbs and berries under their noses. They stalk the bear and deer and are blind as bats to the rabbits and birds that fall into my snares. Up here learn to eat meat again. Pythagoras will forgive the eating of meat for the greater good of Messenia. Take in the peaks around Ithome. Relearn your Doric tongue. Then, and only then, go down to raid the Spartans below. We cannot yet meet their hoplites in battle, and must kill them at night or through ambushes in the woods-where a stealthy woman can fare better than these loud helot men.”
But Neto was driven and would have none of it. “I walked a thousand stadia to fight, Erinna. Not paw the backsides and fondle the
“But Spartan hoplites, Neto, still control the lowlands, far better men than your friend’s ragtag tribe of insurgents. Better to organize up here until all the Messenians have armor and a good general to storm the fort of Kuniskos-otherwise you will end up either tossed into the Kaiadas or nailed up on one of Kuniskos’s poles.” With that Erinna turned and headed to the far side of Ithome with Nikon, while Neto descended to the sanctuary of Artemis below to meet the priestesses.
At the small hamlet of Aitos, there in the woods Erinna set to organizing her school-to teach the orphaned helot girls the rhetoric of Isokrates and the way of Pythagoras, and for relish the poetry of her dear Sappho and the Boiotian Korinna, and as a treat Pindar as well. She would take her rhapsodists up to Olympia and then down to Pylos and thereby learn the news of Antikrates and his new henchman Kuniskos. If Alkidamas were to bring in his Athenian-raised helots to teach the liberated Messenians of good government, she would do better still and ensure that they had tragedy and lyric and epic poetry as well. Erinna’s new Messene would not merely be Proxenos’s walled citadel forever safe from Sparta, but a polis of the Muses as well-a new Athens that would ascend in the Peloponnesos as the old one in Attika faded away.
On a rocky face on the backside of the ridges behind Ithome above a deep gorge, she pitched at first an oiled leather tent. Then word got out that the strange Athenian had silver owls. Soon the rustics were on their way up to sell her pans and shovels and anything bronze or iron they could steal from the Spartans. After Nikon had left her to return to camp on the saddle of Ithome, Erinna had set about with ten or so women, mixing clays and drying them into bricks in the late-summer sun. Then with a donkey and cart they carried in stones for the floor and built the school as a fortified compound. At night they were taught by Erinna to sing and memorize the words of the lyric and melic poets-before going on to Homer, in reverse fashion of the way the rhapsodists did it at Athens. By the end of the fourth month, their baked tiles were on the roof, held up by stout mud-brick walls whitewashed inside and out, with a good stone floor within. The girls were singing the new war song of Epaminondas on wooden benches in her schoolhouse-still more worship of the man she had seen only once. Erinna had put targets-old Spartan helmets that the helots brought her for barter-on rock outcroppings outside the courtyard, so that her helot girls could learn the bow, and how to put an arrow in an eye-slit at fifty paces. She had them wrestling and lifting small stones, so that their arms were as hard as Erinna’s. Most wore small daggers in scabbards that were cinched over their breasts, and their teacher showed them how to seduce a Spartan as they put a blade in his backside. Erinna gave them all felt
These were to be her
She wrote just that and often in letters like this.
Erinna to Neto. Listen. You learn from me.
They know you, Neto. Spartans do. Antikrates and Kuniskos himself. They follow you. You and the priestesses at the low temple in the marshes are easy game. Targets for that helot traitor. His packs of Spartan killers hunt you. He knows the paths of your helots. So come up here for a spell, out of sight. Here you will be in school, safe with my girls. The Spartans fear to come up our slopes, fear the wild and the wolves. Be in good spirits. Erinna of Ithome.
From this new mud-brick school Erinna sent down agents to Neto, who returned each evening from her to the safety of the sanctuary. Always Erinna’s helots went back up to her with stories of the revolt, of Spartan killing, and of a countryside in rebellion-waiting for news of the great army of Epaminondas and the Boiotians’ promised turn to the west, as had been ordained for the first month of the year, Theban Boukatios. The helots sang that this Boiotian first month would see the Thebans finally on Ithome and their Spartan taskmasters gone. Meanwhile in the days of waiting from the first of the year, they kept killing Spartans in ambushes. They hid their wine and grain from the food collectors of Sparta and in threes and fours left the farms to hide in the highlands.
These helot marauders-maybe five thousand were loose, a thousand or more with Neto and Nikon-were fed and kept safe by the temple priestesses, in the shrines and sanctuaries from Pylos up to the falls of the Alpheios. Each night the holy women sheltered the helot Spartan hunters, ever hot after Antikrates and his killer henchman known as Puppy Dog. Meanwhile Erinna far above had taught the girls at her school that the prophecy was nearly fulfilled-the apple would fall again, and seven myriads of hoplites would sweep down from the mountains of Taygetos, all led by her Epaminondas, and Melon, and the blood-crazed Chion, all taught by Alkidamas and the deadly Ainias and the great-hearted Proxenos. Soon these names were in songs and chanted by the girls as they went back down to the markets of the Messenians.
