wound, even as his friend had pushed him away. So he was not so puzzled now that the Plataian lingered in the moments before the great fording. Proxenos had begun to walk even behind the lame Melon and the slow-cart servant Melissos who carried a shield and pole and pack. Ainias hoped that Proxenos’s sloth meant, as his friend had once laughed, that the lack of stone here no doubt bored the architect of ramparts. The plains of Sparta were aflame, and its hoplites were running or hiding. Did that mean Proxenos was not so much hurt as bored, since here were no stones to set or tear down? Ainias asked again, “Why do you fear the River Eurotas, man? Stop here for a blink and let me see whether your bandage is bloody.”
Proxenos ignored him and whispered again, “Did you hear me-are we to the river?” He waited for no answer. “Is it really to be the water, the black Eurotas?”
Ainias was relieved that his friend was at least talking and still walking, though he did not like the sound of the “black Eurotas,” since the river ahead was icy and white but not dark. Still, Ainias went on to try to cheer his friend as they slowed and brought up the rear of the column. “Let them go ahead, Proxenos. We will stop up ahead, since your brow is wet and your face flushed. I’ll wash the wound and salve it with the honey in my pouch. But I also wish we’d leave the crippled king alone over there. Since there are no bridges left over the river, and the fords are all guarded. Even Megas Epaminondas cannot cross what you call the black Eurotas in this weather.” Ainias mistook the silence of his friend as a friendly nod to go on. “Now I see that even without Spartans on the other shore, we couldn’t ford this icy water. Then climb the mud of the banks? Impossible. I agree. But do not tell our Iron Gut that. Oh, no. Many will die trying. Many who shouldn’t. Instead we should be marching westward to free right now the helot folk-or better yet just go back to camp and let me at last take a look where Antikrates nicked you.”
Proxenos smiled at the thought of going home to the Asopos and his own orchards and vineyards near Plataia. Then when they were close enough to hear the roar of the swollen river, he finally spoke a bit more to his friend Ainias. “Oh, no bother. The wound closed. My breastplate keeps it warm. I slow you down, because I’m not sure why we are heading to the river, or why it is so cold so far south. You know that our strings are measured. A man can no more extend his own than he can stretch dry rope.”
Ainias at first ignored his babble, and planned to force him to stop near the bank ahead, even if it meant holding him down and, with Melissos, tearing off his heavy breastplate. Proxenos talked more now as if they were lounging at the symposion than marching to battle the Spartans. Had the Spartan Antikrates knocked the sense out of Proxenos when he nicked him earlier at the farmhouse of the Lichades? Gone was the boasting of the wall builder of the past year that men are the measures of things and live or die according to their own merits. So Ainias countered him with a frown as they waited for a column of northerners that had joined their own phalanx at the crossroads to Gytheion. “If your wound does not bleed, and there is no fire on your brow, then at least clear your head. This black bile does not suit you, Plataian. We have men of bronze and iron to cut down. You have a city to found. A third one for the helots. Raise your shield. Show us what Plataia can do.”
A sense of finality had come over Proxenos after his run-in with Antikrates. As he staggered along, Proxenos was measuring a life up before the black clouds above his brow closed in. His children were near grown. His Arete had a good dowry of a house, one with three stories inside the very walls that he had rebuilt. Their two hundred
At somewhere more than thirty seasons, his wife, Arete, Proxenos figured, if she avoided the summer riverbank fevers, the Egyptian pox, and hot-face Helios that blisters the face and arms and spins the head, had a good ten years left. He had made Ainias, when they set out southward, promise to visit her in Plataia, as they joked over the rantings of Neto and her warning that Proxenos was not to cross the Isthmos. The breasts of his Arete were deep, her hips firm-as Ainias, he wished, would soon learn. And himself? His teeth were still white and all there, his beard black as the raven’s wing. His muscles were firm without the sagging of flesh in men half his age. But there was no life force. Proxenos felt no different from the collapsed puppets in the agora once the strings of their masters had been put away.
All his land, the height of his tower, the beauty of his wife-all that meant nothing in the snow of Lakonia. Or perhaps less than nothing here in the mud of the Eurotas far to the south where he was soon to be just another rotting spearman too far from home. Proxenos, although he had volunteered to come south despite the fears of Neto, still thought it unjust-no, a real madness-that he, the man who had crafted the three great cities of the Peloponnesos, was a mere soldier in the ranks, for whom a single spear-jab to his gut meant no walls of Messene or a wrong tower in Megalopolis. So in his delirium he thought Epaminondas or at least his friends should have kept their holy Proxenos in camp, a man of genius like Daidalos of old not to be wasted in cheap battle. But he also knew that often we are hardest on those we love most, and treat the friend roughly either because we demand his company in shared danger, or out of friendly envy want him to remember in our shared risk that he is no better than us. So Proxenos, the architect of the greatest cities of new Hellas, was but a common hoplite at the Eurotas. If here was where they wanted him, so here he would stay.
The two hoplites were soon standing at the rear of the column. They had kept falling farther behind the Thebans as the phalanx was nearing the banks of the Eurotas. Ainias tapped his silent friend with a light blow to his helmet to see whether he flinched from his stupor, and took off his pack. He wanted to force him down and probe his cut, but Proxenos was still standing and slapped away his hand. Ainias now sensed his friend was waning, and that he could do little to cure either his body or his soul, and perhaps should play this final act out until the end of the drama. Nonetheless, he wanted Proxenos of Plataia to show the army that he was a hoplite of the first rank who took his wounds in front and fell in the first rank. “Wake up, man. Even lame Melon has passed us up and waits at the fore with Epaminondas. Pelopidas needs our counsel at the spear tip. He has no spirit to fight ice and Spartans together. Hey, Proxenos.
Proxenos paid him no heed. Instead he continued to limp in the direction of the Sacred Band. But now his head sagged and he felt a strange urge to fall asleep, armor and all. At some point failure became pleasure. Resistance to the creeping ice inside him meant only pain. He felt a funny kinship with thousands gone-with tens of thousands unseen-but less affinity with the hundreds he could make out at his side. Where to find his knot of strength? It had vanished out of his mouth, left him unstrung. Cold voices of the dead began to whisper in his ears. The warm talk of Neto was not among them to drive these furies out.
Proxenos, Ainias knew at last as he glanced at his friend, was doing the arithmetic of death. This starts when a man of the middle age begins to add up what he has done and what lies ahead-and sees that the climb up was far better than the trudge back down. He saw the Plataian gasping, breathing out steam that rose from his sagging helmet, and noticed there was blood at the corner of his lower lip and foam as well. For those who dare to do such summing up, even without a wound, the life force itself can sometimes vanish and leave nothing but empty flesh in its wake-a lyre fallen silent without a song or player. He wanted to throw Proxenos down and cleanse his wound, but he also wished for his friend to stand tall with his spear at the Eurotas rather than drift into sleep here on the march.
Proxenos sensed his wound was behind all this mad thinking, but its full malignancy was still not quite clear to either him or his friends. So the Plataian was unsure whether this sudden waning of his strength was not a failure of his own will. Had he any courage left, he could have been at the forefront with Epaminondas, despite the spear poke that Antikrates had given him. Chion and Melon had suffered worse wounds and yet were always at the van. Had he incurred a bad
Neto had no power against the deathless ones to change or honey-coat her pronouncement of the doom he would face after crossing the Isthmos. The Plataian, through strange voices along the river’s edge, was given a final gift of visions of things to come, majestic sights in hues of purple and soft yellow, all to the music of the pipes of Thisbe. Now pictures came to him of the finished Megalopolis, and of Epaminondas standing guard as the new gates of Messene rose, then leading the army back home in triumph across the Isthmos.
