The End of Sparta

what does it matter if I die old but famous?”

Antikrates had followed his father out of the mess at Leuktra. On the flight from the battlefield he had killed two Boiotians from Kithairon, both stabbed in the throat for sport as the mountain men tried to block the passes. Then Antikrates had topped that boast by reminding all that he had sliced off the arm of Kalliphon, the son of the rhetor Alkidamas. “I would have gnawed on it if it had tasted any good,” he laughed. Antikrates added, “The Boiotian fool was a softie. I’ll kill the father to keep company with his son in Hades. Yes, that blowhard sophist I’ll gulp down as dessert the next time around.”

Before Leuktra, Antikrates had just finished with his barracks life. Now at three tens, at his acme, he was given a full lochos of kryptes and told to cross the high pass and patrol Mt. Ithome out in Messenia to rein in the helots. Yet still over there rumors of war and killing grew: A firebrand helot named Nikon was murdering red-capes at night, some as they slept in camp. With him the priestesses of Artemis were harboring the insurgents to hammer weapons in new forges on Ithome-killers and cutthroats who were afraid to face the tall men of Sparta in phalanx battle. “I need a helot I trust,” King Agesilaos told Lichas. “Send that helot man of yours with your Antikrates. Plug this leak before it takes the dam itself.”

“Kuniskos,” Antikrates said in turn, “you better than I know the Spartan way-how our grandfathers put a lid on the helot kettle during the great war with the Athenians. So we do the same. Come with me across Taygetos to put down these thieves and murderers.” So it was almost a year to the day before the great muster of the Thebans to come that Kuniskos set out over the high pass of Taygetos in the snow. He followed Antikrates and the young kryptes all on their way to Messenia to patrol the mountain of Ithome where the word was that a free Messenia was first to sprout.

In two days the new partners and their cadre were over Taygetos, descending through olive orchards near the coast en route to the dark Ithome, the volcano mountain that loomed off in the distance. This peak was the holy silhouette of song that every helot looked to in his moments of hope-and so beneath it was the best place to build a new Spartan camp that would put down the growing insurrection. There all could see the looming peak. Gorgos planned well. He wanted walls of all timber, with sharp stakes at the top. Antikrates talked at length with the helot who had already told him much of the landscape of Taygetos and where the best black soil of Messenia lay and the richest helots, and where the precincts of Artemis were, and the nature of this Nikon and his brigands-and later rumors of a Neto and a poet Erinna who were hiding in some tall mountain pass. The Spartan pressed Kuniskos for knowledge of the hard methods of Brasidas. He wanted to know just how in the great war of fifty years past the legend of the Spartans had armed the helots to fight the Athenians and thereby gone northward in victory nearly to Makedonia on his wild marches of liberation. The lash? Women? Gold? Freedom and more? “How did a Spartan get its helots to fight, to beat back and then nearly destroy the democracy? Speak to your Antikrates, helot. How can we do that again?”

“We helots believed,” Gorgos grunted, as he watched carefully the knife hand of Antikrates. Indeed Kuniskos had all sorts of ideas that the young Antikrates was all ears for-drawn from the wise ways of his youth, fifty years and more earlier when all those now dead had held their shields high for Sparta. In fact, Kuniskos walked straighter than he had ever in the vineyards of Helikon. Gone entirely was his stiff gait. Old sprains had already begun to fade on the hill above Leuktra. He spoke his old Doric again, the grunts and cadences that only the elder few had remembered hearing, but in long tirades and with words only the sophists knew. Rule, he knew, rather than service suited him-even though in the house of Melon he had worked far less than he did in traversing the countryside of the helots. Epaminondas once talked of how freedom could cure anything. Now Kuniskos agreed.

Soon he pranced in his fine robe, with a scarlet stripe and a rabbit-fur collar, and messed with the red-capes in his compound, spurning Spartan vinegar water and demanding unmixed wine as he passed on the black bread and barley gruel of the hoplites, for finer wheat fare and red-blooded lamb. Kuniskos kept barking promises and lies to the helots out on his travels from the coast near Pylos to the border with Arkadia far to the east. “Spartans freed the few deserving it,” Kuniskos assured all. “We-and I a helot like you-fear no Dorians, our brother Dorians.” Then he used his learning from Helikon to lecture to the assembled helots about how men born into Messenia all have a place in the empire of Sparta. Helots must feel that they are in debt to those who can guide them best-however unhappy they are to be told that they are not all by birth deserving of equal portion. If Neto and Nikon could lie to the Messenians about freedom, Lord Kuniskos would counter-talk to the helot unfree about why and how they were already free under Sparta.

Kuniskos reassured himself that an upstart of little talent like the empty-headed Neto, who could wiggle her high-rigged ass in front of Melon and the hungry Chion, would never survive down there where men earned rather than whined about freedom. To hide her dullness, Neto talked the high empty talk. But men of the stuff of Kuniskos put their lives into the service of the Spartan order. His was the natural way of men, the phusis, that let them find their station by will and talent and not mere nomos and convention and long speeches. But Neto again, why did he always wander back to Neto? Did he wish to kill her or take her for pleasure or both or neither? Why Neto everywhere, always? Kuniskos was troubled that he saw the revolt caused by Neto alone, although he knew a single woman could no more stir up twenty myriads in a half-year than could Zeus himself on Olympos.

Kuniskos would stamp out wild helot stories of a liberation to come, hunting down this Nikon and Neto and rooting out their prophecies of a philosopher in arms invading from Thebes. All this prattle and more after Leuktra, Kuniskos soon discovered, the Messenians had gathered, exaggerated, and spread. Epaminondas had caused this revolt, after decades of obedience and tranquility in Messenia. Women were said to have sown these lies about liberation. The priestesses of Artemis of the lowlands had given seers and poetesses the power to see the minds of the Spartans. Or so they said, as the insurrectionists went from precinct to precinct, begging bread and sanctuary in exchange for wild tales of a new Pythagoras to come down from the north, with freedom and money for all. By late summer, Kuniskos discovered that the enemy was not just helots, but also xenoi, strangers like the new priestesses of Artemis, and another even higher up in the hills-this Erinna and her Amazons who spread lies that Spartans were fleeing even before the arrival of Epaminondas.

Kuniskos often instructed Antikrates at night that he, the young son of Lichas, could be killed by no free man. Yes, Kuniskos had gotten that out of Neto long ago back on Helikon and he knew it to be true. Once spoken, it would give this indomitable Antikrates even more strength to make it true. Kuniskos patted Antikrates on the side of the head and went on, “None of the Lichadai has the nod of the gods like you do, Master. That is worth all that they had and more still. No free man, no helot, no slave can fell you. Not one.”

At first Kuniskos had limped into the hamlets disguised as an old Argive traveler. He walked about with a walking stick and heavy wool hood, asking for shelter and news of robbers and the safety of the roads. Sometimes he wanted a meeting of the elders, as if he were a runaway helot in his thick Doric speech. A few claimed Kuniskos was also a farmhand, stripped to the waist, with wide shoulders hoeing the olives and learning of the strongest of the helots. But once he learned the nature of the towns and farms, Kuniskos came back on a horse with a phalanx of mounted spearmen behind him. “Kuniskos eimi, akouete pantes, akouete e apothanete. I am Kuniskos. You listen up or die.” Two hundred young kryptes rode fifty steps behind him. On his ululation, they galloped to cut down any he pointed out. “Join me or die. Epaminondas and his murderers, his rapists, and his thieves will soon shear you. Your Spartans alone can save you. Join me or die- proschoreite moi e apothanete.”

As the weather grew hot in the next summer after Leuktra, Gorgos was looking for the troublemaker Erinna. He had reports of a she-man poetess who plotted with Neto-always Neto, always her-who had joined wild Nikon and the other gang of Doreios in organizing the helots in tens and twenties. Yes, he must find Nikon and this Erinna, who had borrowed his Neto and never given her back, as the two helped expand the revolt. Two hundred and more Spartans under command of Antikrates were found every month rotting in the countryside. Most were gutted in the byways by these breakaways-many with black-feathered arrows in their necks, a red letter mu for Messenia swabbed on their backs with their own blood. Whole tribes of Messenians were living free in the mountains and had since abandoned their farms. They even had a forge and bellows to make blades of black iron and bronze breastplates. Neto had taken Nikon to her temple and had his scribe Helos draw on an enormous hide map of Messenia, showing where the Spartans had forts and guards. Then she parceled out regions to Nikon’s helpers and he in turn had given them killing quotas each month. These helots rarely fought in daylight, but instead swarmed the Spartans at night, throwing pitch torches on their timber stockades and flinging arrows as they bolted out from the flames, or they hid in the forests and picked the red- capes off on the narrow paths. Or sometimes they would lie in ditches all night and cut the throats of drunken