The End of Sparta

Yes, his eyes were full of color and his ears of flute music. Proxenos could hear the voices to come of the demogogues at the trial of Epaminondas back home, swaying the judges to kill the general as he sat in the dock on the Theban Kadmeia. Did Ainias not see this-their general dragged into the bema to be jeered before being hanged? Yes, there would be the bickering on their return; but then, as the envy and jealousy cooled, maybe also would come applause for the magnitude of the Theban achievement when fully grasped, no doubt only after they were all dead. He, Proxenos, the lord of a vast estate overlooking the Asopos, would have to stand in a Theban court while the rabble cobblers and tanners pelted him with fruit and jeered at his half-Attic speech and damned him for joining Epaminondas-only to be found guilty of designing the three greatest cities of Hellas and freeing the men of the Peloponnesos and making the Boiotians all safe.

Such is the way of men, Proxenos reckoned in these final moments, when given a great gift, to complain about the quality of the present or the motive of the giver or the circumstances of the largesse, all to lessen the need for gratitude and indebtedness-and fouler dependence. Proxenos in his delirium saw that there would be a need for more invasions to the south to come. Sparta was hard to break and helots were harder to free. Allies would switch and join the enemy if their deliverer became too powerful, or if he seemed too weak. He knew Lykomedes was already half with the Spartans, half with Epaminondas, unsure which side in the end would win and thus he should join. It is a human habit to relax in triumph and take the boot off the neck of the wounded foe who has not quite expired. Soon Epaminondas would have to lead out the army to finish what he could not quite this morning.

Would he, Proxenos, wish to spend the rest of his life trudging down here on the tail of Epaminondas, to end Sparta? Leave all that marching each summer to Melon and all the other zealots who had made the conversion to the cause of the helots. A Plataian, as Neto warned, had no business in the ice of Lakonia. All this was too much, this monotony, this predictability. Now no matter how Proxenos tried to keep in step with the hoplites, he could not fight off a new tightness that was rising into his chest and neck at the same rate it had crept down his thighs. Since he knew all that was ahead, why the need to put off what was foreordained?

Ainias gave up trying to stop Proxenos and so instead hit his breastplate again. “Wake, do not let the ghosts take you, man. Not now, not when we are to burn the wasps in their very nests.”

Proxenos, through his helmet that had fallen back down over his face, mumbled to Ainias, who heard him clearly-strangely so, as if the gods had stopped the river roar and muzzled the grunts of the hoplites and the clatter of their bronze, “Do you like Sophokles, Ainias?”

“This is no time for that, man. But if you must know-no. He was a pompous old man. But keep to the river, not the words of the dead poets.” Ainias thought that if he kept Proxenos talking, the Keres would stay away.

“Do you know his Aias, Ainias, his Philoktetes? I never cared to watch Oidipous or Antigone, especially to see us Boiotians on stage as eye-stabbers and woman-killers.”

“Yes, once, at the big theater in Korinthos. But Aias was a suicide. I never put much faith in his ‘Live nobly or nobly die,’ not when it was by his own hand.”

“But you do, Ainias! That is why you march with Melon and me-because so do we. All three of us are Aiases of sorts-here far from our homes, no friends of the Thebans or the Messenians, but merely for the idea of it all, the last breed of the Hellenes, with no expectation that we are to live through it. We live for a code that sets us apart, and now the toll comes due as it must. Why else would a Stymphalian, a man of Thespiai, and a Plataian all be near this accursed river in winter-for the helots?”

“It helps to hate the Spartans. Or have you forgotten that, my dear Pentheus who rages as he sees two suns and the sky in a swirl.”

Ainias stopped the mad Sophokles talk because he knew where it led-as if a Proxenos were an Aias without a future or a Philoktetes who with wound was exiled by those who needed his skill. As the two argued, the mist was lifting. Most of the army had stopped and was drawing back up on the riverbank. All were stunned at last by the sight of Sparta itself, the city that they had heard of only in widows’ tales to frighten young Boiotians to come inside from the courtyard. Not a wall to be seen, just countless hoplites on the banks opposite to provide ramparts of flesh against the invader. Some of the faces of their own hoplites at the head of the Boiotian snake were white, but not just from the cold. It was a terrible thing to look across the icy Eurotas at a long line of red-caped hoplites kneeling with spear and shield. Epaminondas saw this terror and worried it had already ruined his army this day.

So he threw off his green cape and mounted his red Boiotian pony. The general galloped up and down the column and ordered his men as he reined his mount and for a moment pranced it on two legs. “No fear. No phobos. To me. Ford into Sparta with me.” Five thousand of his hoplites thronged the banks and hit their raised shields with their spears. “Shields high, men, as we get wet. Hold them over our heads as these Spartan cowards try to hit us in the water. The water will touch our waists but not our chins. There are no stone walls over there. Cross the river here at the ford. The Eurotas is cold, but not deep. Wade it-and we are inside Sparta. She is ours for the torching. Who is afraid of a little water, a little wet?”

But as Epaminondas charged back and forth along the high banks of the river, the lame Spartan king yonder across the water was also visible to the Thebans through the whirling mists. Agesilaos limped along the Eurotas, always shadowing Epaminondas, pointing this way and that with his spear, sending companies of spearmen anywhere he saw a possible ford. What a small man he was, Melon saw-half the size of the Agiad king Kleombrotos at Leuktra. Smaller even than short Epaminondas. Were these Eurypontid kings dwarves? The king limped far worse than Melon did himself. So this lame-foot man was all that kept Epaminondas from storming Sparta? Not quite all- for there was something else on the far bank, a figure standing next to Agesilaos. Melon, who was at the side of Proxenos, yelled out to his aide Melissos, “There, look. There, boy, there is the killer, Lichas. Look at that foul spearman. Bare-headed, with his white braids. No helmet.”

The bleary eyes of Melissos thought he saw nothing other than the fuzzy shapes across the water. But he sensed the furor in Melon, who faced Epaminondas and called out again, “He’s there, our Lichas, near the king Agesilaos. He is the one who dares us.”

Then the king was gone, as quickly as he had appeared, into the hedges across the river. In his place ran his granddaughter, hair in the winter wind, with a black sword in her right hand. Now there was no mistaking her. She darted across the line of crouching Spartan spearmen, her klopis hitting their wooden shafts as she reminded them, “Your king and my Lichas are with you. Stand fast and spear the pigs from the north. Leave Epaminondas to me.” Her voice easily carried across the water.

Melissos cried out to his master, “I can hear them, Thespian, I can hear your Lichas and the king in their fury on the other side, and his demon bitch, all cursing our Epaminondas. Can they see us as well? Why not cross and kill them? I can help, I can do that.” But Melon grabbed the Makedonian by the neck and drew him back from the water where the arrows were beginning to hit near their shins. The last bridge had been destroyed by the king, enraged that a Theban had shut his men inside his city when they were used to marching a thousand stadia abroad into the lands of others. Still, this Melissos was proving to be as brave as any in the phalanx.

Agesilaos came back out of the bushes and bellowed to the Thebans when he caught sight of the mounted Epaminondas. A wind came up and all the Thebans could hear his slurs from across the river. “O wild man” the king pointed at Epaminondas, shaking his spear, “you will not cross this ford, fool, you cannot without a bridge. Never touch the polis of Leonidas. You can’t cross, not now, not ever. We are the better men. Our Elektra is a man, and you are women.” For once the aged royal spoke true, as the army froze at the water’s edge, stopped there by the fog and sleet and ice combined with arrows and javelins hurled from the Spartan side.

Melon spoke to the boy Melissos, as if he were a general like Epaminondas, as they both watched the throng across the wide cold river. “This morning is not our day. It is not fated, Melissos. I see that now. We are not to kill Agesilaos and Lichas today. Too high the water, too cold, too many Spartans on the banks.” Even if they got across the current, the Thebans would be inside the hornets’ nest. To fight in the streets of Sparta was a battle few welcomed. No wonder the Arkadians, the Eleans, the Northerners, even the Argives wanted no part of this. It would mean being pelted by roof-tiles and hit by the pots tossed down by frenzied women, as the Boiotians got caught in winding and dead-end streets and trapped in courtyards. Lampito, younger sister of Lichas, along with Elektra, his wife, had organized the women into lochoi, ten to a roof, sixty houses among them each. The Boiotians remembered the stories of their grandfathers. They had told of the Thebans who had once stormed into the streets of nearby Plataia. Few had made it out alive as the women and boys of the town had buried them with hard clay from the rooftops.

Until the sun broke through the heavy fog around noon, each time Pelopidas and the Sacred Band reached a