Below, Neto was seeing visions almost nightly of Epaminondas on the pass in Sparta. There he was addressing his men, staring down at Lakonia with seventy thousand soldiers at his back. Eight or ten days after the winter solstice, runaways from Lakonia came over Taygetos with more stories like Neto’s dream warning that a tide of grasshoppers would some winter day sweep over the passes north of Sparta, stripping everything in its path, and on the way south growing larger still. So Neto, convinced that Melon and the army would be in Messenia within the month, took more risks, attacking with Nikon’s men the Spartans in broad day, and closer always to the Spartan base at the foot of Ithome.
Finally as the days neared to the middle of Theban Boukatios more rumors spread over Taygetos with the high shepherds that the Thebans had already left Boiotia, determined to reach Lakonia before the new year. They might even have reached Mantineia. There they would join Lykomedes to burn all the farms and towers of the Spartans, turning their whitewashed homes black with soot. Soon Spartans, either in fear of the Boiotians to come or answering the call of King Agesilaos to hurry home to defend the city from Epaminondas, began leaving Messenia, swarming the short high road atop Taygetos. A few Spartans left behind in Messenia stayed in their compound under orders from Antikrates; otherwise they would be ambushed by the growing mob of helot fighters who fought at night and from thickets, and with missiles and arrows, rather than lining up in the phalanx. The Spartan rearguard under Antikrates had built a final redoubt, a log stockade on the spur of Eva on a lower hill beside Ithome. It had a timber wall, two men high, with half a thousand Spartan hoplites trapped inside who could not stomach the notion that helots had driven them out of their Messenia.
Their captain was the renegade Kuniskos. Even in the twilight of Spartan power, he sallied out at night with two hundred horsemen to burn and level the helot hamlets on the northern borders, before riding in at dawn to hunker down at his compound. Finally even Antikrates had fled back to Sparta to join his king. He had left Messenia to his helot Kuniskos because the black soil, he knew, was lost, and his Spartans were to be better used defending their women in Lakonia in the battle to come. “Leave Antikrates,” Kuniskos told him, “leave and let the real lord of Messenia at last be the better Spartan that he always was. For you, Messenia has fallen and so is better abandoned; but for me it is rising-at last in the hands of a child of its soil, a man better than both the whipped helots and the Spartans who lashed them.”
Then Erinna heard no more about Neto and her band of raiders. Had she disappeared? Even Nikon had lost her. The temple of Artemis of the lowlands was razed and the priestesses scattered or killed-or sent to the gorge on Taygetos. Neto might be dead or worse. Kuniskos had warned the helots that he would never flee like Antikrates had. Not he, the last good helot, who would kill all on sight who were not in the fields weeding the barley and wheat-would kill and kill before his stockade was overwhelmed. Even on Ithome, Erinna heard reports of these final boasts from the last of the helots, all the bolder as his last band shrank and his enemies increased.
A
It was Nikon who brought word that Neto was now five days a captive with Kuniskos-with an offer of a ransom. “No surprise that these Spartan gold-lovers wish to be bought off. He knows there is silver on Helikon, so he won’t kill her just yet. He wants ransom and perhaps more. Klopis his henchman left a scroll at the first column of the ruined Artemision, and my Helos read it and told me the threat of Kuniskos:
“You robbers of Messenia-listen! The rebel Neto, she remains inside the fort of Lord Kuniskos, first man of Spartan Messenia. He says to the rebels and to the Malgidai in the north to fetch her with their silver. A talent wins her freedom, but only before the northerners come over Taygetos. If no silver, no Neto and she dines in the Kaiadas.”
Nikon was desperate now, trying to get Erinna to bring her girls down the hill. “Get all these holdouts under Ithome to collect silver to keep her alive. But better still, tell me, woman-how goes the road to Helikon in the far north? Which way? How many days away is this farm of Melon, the home of our Netike? Those she left behind have money. So I run, Erinna, to the north and to this Helikon across the gulf. Maybe in ten days I am on this Helikon and then back on Ithome with money for Neto-if she lives, if she lives. Ten days, no more. I run hundred stadia, maybe more, each day. Maybe I’ll know the way, at least from the dreams that come at night.”
Erinna now told the helot how best to go north to the farm of the Malgidai. “No, no, Nikon-don’t go north in the way of the army. That is the long way.” Erinna with a long knife drew a map in the dirt at their feet. “We are already far to the west, far closer from here to Helikon. Run up the Alpheios road, up to the long walls of Patrai, and across the gulf-not the way Neto and I came to Mantineia. Cross the gulf here in the west. Then the helots of Naupaktos will show you the sea-cliff path to Parnassos and then over by Sphinx Hill to the backside of Helikon. Go now. See me here in your ten days. By then I’ll know where our Neto is, and where Kuniskos is to pay-again, if she lives.” Then she wrote on tree bark more directions with lines and arrows for the letterless helot once he arrived on Helikon.
So it was that Nikon, the nimble-foot, found Chion just before he was to leave by sea with Alkidamas, and in time for him to warn Melon. Both were on their way southward, by both land and sea, and with heavy sacks of silver, to free their Neto if she lived. Nikon was back to Ithome in seven days with the news that the army of the Boiotians had already left. Nikon had wanted the money, to take it back with himself, the swifter runner. But Chion reminded the stranger that the coin was his master’s and that he himself must find Melon at Plataia, before Epaminondas and Melon got over Kithairon. Better yet, the Spartan-killer Chion promised Nikon that he himself would be coming with his sack of silver by sea to ransom his Neto and settle up with Kuniskos, and he would be there well before the army of Epaminondas.
But now where were any of them? No army yet. No Alkidamas and his boat. No Chion-who sat on the
CHAPTER 25
The army of the Boiotians was already crossing atop the mountain ridges between Argos and Mantineia. In the middle of the month of Boukatios, as Erinna sent more scouts to find the imprisoned Neto, and as Nikon returned with news of Chion and the silver to come, and even as Chion argued with Alkidamas on the beach near Delphi, two haggard Arkadian scouts ran into the north gate of Mantineia far to the south in the Peloponnesos. “He’s here-Epaminondas is well across the Isthmos. Break open your stores. The northerners-with others too to join-already are over the pass. A mob, an entire city from the north is coming down here.”
As the crowd swarmed, the taller ranger, Lykander, went on. “We heard singing, and men marching in their strange sounds of the sort they speak above the Isthmos. Two myriads and maybe more. Yes, yes, with the sound of Thebes in their voice, but almost as if they were Bacchants in their song and zeal rather than an army on the march to war. Now on the downward slopes of Parthenion, covering all the trails, they come-and their tramping is heard three stadia and more before they appear on the passes. Already the men of Tegea are out of grain from feeding that horde. We will need even bigger ramparts to house them all. Thousands of them are heading this way.”
But even these Mantineian scouts of crafty Lykomedes were not the first to hear of the arrival of the Boiotians into the south. The Arkadian shepherds of the high
