The End of Sparta

breast, waving her left hand above her head, spitting and ululating all the while. “You all need this teat like the babes you are!” she cried.

Neto also had been right in her visions when she had long ago warned that none born in the countryside of Thebes would kill Lichas or his son Antikrates. Dozens were wounded and sixty Theban hoplites dead for this failed mad gambit to defy the prophecy. Proxenos was borne on a bier back to camp, with Pelopidas and Melissos carrying the front corners of his litter. Melon and Ainias did the same at the rear.

Yet none saw behind them the new Proxenos swimming across the eddies of the hot Eurotas. He waved to them all as they turned out of sight on the main road and headed to the camp north of town. He ascended the bank opposite. The Spartan shades, as promised, did the Plataian no harm. So the Olympian gods with their heaven and Hades were real after all? Now too late the Pythagorean Proxenos must concede that-even as he flitted as an empty ghost among the heroes of old who drifted about just as Homer had sung? Proxenos looked in vain for his Neto for help, as if he felt she too were somewhere near or maybe already across the Styx at this very moment. Instead here were the Elysion fields of deep green and the marble homes of the hemi-gods.

So all the fables of the ignorant were true. Where would his soul end up in such a place as an unbeliever in Olympos, as an apostate follower of Pythagoras-down lower next to Sisyphos or Tantalos or in the depths of Tartaros? But then came noise and light. In another eye blink all these fantasies of his first twenty years of life disappeared. The false shades of Kleombrotos and Kleonymos dissipated. Proxenos felt himself in a vortex. He was whirling upward toward a bright sun. There was certainly no Zeus here.

Heat, heat of all things amid the ice, came over him, and in an instant Proxenos was given knowledge of how the plan of it all worked: that the good man alone finds peace and that the end of all things was, as his One God of Pythagoras had promised, not Hades at all, but a return to his very beginning. So Epaminondas had saved him, after all, as he knew he might. He was not in Persia like his father with Xenophon, on the royal wage, drenching his spear arm in blood for Spartans and for gold and land as well. He was not scheming to keep his olives free from the tramp of armies, but down here on the Eurotas for nothing other than his pleasure and the visions of Epaminondas for something called Hellas. For all that his soul had been made deathless a year earlier, and now he would learn that, as he would come no more again to the physical world, even as the crow or dog, but had won the battle for his soul in his brief life as the aristos of Plataia. The last thing he remembered as Proxenos of old was the soft murmur of Pythagoras’s warning, “When you are traveling abroad, look not back at your own borders.” Proxenos searched no longer for Ainias and his funeral march. Not now as he reached the light and became something better than he had been.

Ainias shuddered and almost dropped the corner of the bier. His breath stopped when a warm-hot even-draft from the south swept across his ice-bitten neck. Then he caught himself and whispered, “So it is. So as our holy one promised, my Proxenos.”

But at that moment far away on the other side of snowy Taygetos, Neto shuddered as if an icy breeze had reached her.

She wept. “Our Proxenos crossed the Isthmos, but not the Eurotas.”

CHAPTER 28

Lord Kuniskos of the Helots

Gorgos had not done too badly for himself this past year in the valley between the mountains of Taygetos and Parnon, back home near his gloomy Eurotas. There, as a young man and a freed helot, more than fifty summers earlier, he had once mustered in with the Spartan general Brasidas to join the long marches against the Athenians. He remembered the farmhouses of the Spartan clans of his childhood. Lichas even had given him back his name “Puppy Dog”-Kuniskos. The helot came faster at the sound of it.

Lichas feared that his Sparta suffered the curse of oliganthropeia, an insidious depopulation that was the wage of sending boys into the agoge, separated from women until they were thirty, and deploying the army out on patrol for months at a time-his red-capes training and fighting when they should be sowing the seeds of the Spartan state. That the peers were defined by pure Spartan blood from both parents only made the hoplites shrink farther, as those of mixed and foreign blood began to act as if they were Spartiates themselves. The army had been large at Leuktra, but only because those left at home to defend Sparta itself were now few. So here in a shrinking Sparta a talented freedman like Gorgos found opportunity to reclaim his lost status, not just because he was gifted in the arts of guile and double-cross, but also because there were now few Spartiates in a state desperate for men of his caliber.

At Leuktra Gorgos had not really meant to take the wounded Lophis to Lichas at all-at least not at first. Or so he swore to himself and to others later. Instead, he had wanted to risk his bones to carry the broken body of the son of his master from the fray-back up, as promised, to Neto and their wagon on the hill above the battle. Yet when he found himself near the red-capes and saw Lichas trapped amid a sea of dead hoplites, his Spartan blood warmed and drew him to the lochos of the old guard. Just as it had fifty seasons earlier and more when he had stormed Amphipolis with Brasidas. Most leave a losing cause; Gorgos had just joined one.

After Leuktra, and a third of the way home, the Megarians, as a sign of goodwill, had offered the royal wagon some honey to pack the dead Kleombrotos for the way across the Isthmos and then over the Argive passes back home. Gorgos poured it into the cask and smeared his king, just in the manner he had seen it done as a youth. It was Kuniskos alone who drove the fallen royal home. Kuniskos tended with wool, oil, and honey to the torn ear and bloody thigh of the lame Lichas, as he took back his proper place once again in the service of the high Lakedaimonians. It was as if for the past twenty years and more he had lived in a bad trance, trapped on Melon’s Helikon with rustics, when he should have been serving his betters in Lakonia. As the army made its way back, Lichas in his wounds bellowed from his wagon for help. “Where is my Kuniskos? Kuniskos, how many stadia have we to home?”

After Leuktra, had Lichas not lived, the young regent Archidamos, who met the retreating Spartans with a relief force of old men and the young, would have lost both armies-if not at the Isthmos, then on the road through Mantineia on the way to the slopes before Lakonia. News of Spartan blood at Leuktra was then in the air. But it was Lichas who kept what was left of the army together, sending out patrols, bullying townsmen to offer up food and water, and promising the Argives an invasion should they attack his bloodied rearguard. Hellas needed a man such as that, a copy of Leonidas, a Lichas who had fought the Athenian hegemons and fought the Persians with Xenophon and fought them with Agesilaos; who had fought any who threatened the freedom of the city-states; the true Hellene, the only one left alive who would die for and save Hellas-a far better man to serve than the bent-leg Melon and the rustics on Helikon. Name a battle of the past fifty summers and Lichas had been there, fighting always for Hellas. Or thus now Kuniskos justified his treason.

As the disheartened and stunned men of Lakonia trudged home those long days of retreat, it was also the lowly Kuniskos who assured all that another Spartan army, born from the ashes of defeat, would soon rise. This was not to be a beaten force, but a victorious one with revenge and destruction its creed. “I marched with your fathers. You are the better men, my Spartans. After your Thermopylai will come another Plataia. I know the Theban pig. You will stick him next season.” In these days, Gorgos was more Spartan than the Spartans. He put the wounded Lichas on his back and shoulders and marched through the retreating army, the two chanting as they went.

Kuniskos wrapped his master’s festering wounds and gave him soup and bread when they returned to the wagon to rest. In turn, as the slow-moving army of the defeated reached Sellasia, the wounded Lichas limped out among the demoralized and hit their backsides with his cleaver and slapped the faces of the slackers. At dusk Lichas poked the slow with his spear, sitting in the cart of Kuniskos with the dead king as it wheeled into camp. When most slept, the wounded Lichas stumbled about the camp checking on the sentries, putting the fires out, and always calling out, “Kuniskos, Kuniskos, where is my Kuniskos?”

Lichas no longer called for his son Antikrates. Instead, it was Kuniskos who, Lichas boasted, had saved the army and the body of the king as the helot traitor now charmed the mind of the Spartan’s father. Once the army reached home, Lichas kept this aged servant close by his side, for Kuniskos had proved his fealty on that bitter