The End of Sparta

Spartans who in their wine sang their war songs as they stumbled back home from evenings with their helot women-most of them informers of Neto’s circle.

Soon the Eleans were sending daily more copper and tin ingots and iron from down on the Alpheios, as the helots spread their forges and hammered out new swords and spearheads. Finally, most of the daylight Spartan patrols stopped altogether. As summer waned they were forced to stay mostly in Gorgos’s stockade at Ithome. Antikrates had built a second outer wall, to surround the inner one, with more pointed stakes to keep the horde of throat-cutters out. But for all his warcraft, he began drinking more than commanding and had no stomach for fighting outside the phalanx in the ambushes where the helot renegades might kill their betters indiscriminately from afar with arrows, sling bullets, and javelins. Kuniskos soon ran the stockade, and the son of Lichas went back over Taygetos, ceding Messenia to Lord Kuniskos. Antikrates was hoping at the first of the year to fight as a spearman on the icy Eurotas, to cut down those Boiotians whom he had missed at Leuktra. Better all the way around this way. He would kill Melon and Epaminondas to fulfill his prophecy. The loss of Messenia-well, it would be due to Kuniskos, the old helot who would have proved unworthy as a Spartan overseer when his master had left him in charge-until Lichas and son would return to Messenia from their victory to reclaim what the treasonous helot had lost. Or so Antikrates figured as he rode home over Taygetos and left Messenia to Kuniskos.

As the last month of the year neared, just about the same time that Epaminondas was promising to tear down the Propylaia of Athens as he headed out over Kithairon, the Spartans under Kuniskos could neither leave the stockade at night nor lure any more helots inside its walls with promises of freedom. Kuniskos more often than not spent his days by the fire in drink, as his guards grew soft on the timber ramparts and fearful of the helots who no longer sent their wagons of food over Taygetos to Agesilaos. On these gray days, Gorgos prepared for the worst, and yet he often lamented to himself that life was far too short for a man of his genius, and how unfair it was that he had come into his own at the end of his sixth decade, with talents that had been unrecognized both when he served as the young lackey of Lichas and then for too many years on Helikon when he worked as a farmhand. He reflected that his life had started out well, a helot with Brasidas at ten and six. He had grown to be a man with children and freedom to his name when the great war against the Athenians had ended and been won. Then all had been lost later at the Nemea, when Malgis had caught him and made him a slave again-even as Lord Lichas before the battle at last had made him a king’s servant and with a green cape at that.

While enslaved on Helikon, Gorgos had lost all track of his wife Elaia and his son Nabis to the south. His family was banished-hungry and now dead, or so Lichas had told him. Lichas had said they all had perished when their papa Gorgos, well over forty seasons old, had not returned home to his freedman’s plot among the perioikoi near the Eurotas. Long-gone Gorgos was slandered among the half-helots as a runaway and a trembler, a dirty shield-carrier of the dirtier Boiotians. His family died in shame, or so he was told by Lichas, who often treated those he liked, and his own family as well, more harshly than he did his enemies.

Kuniskos thought, as he stretched out his long legs on his low table in his compound, that he could have created a new Messenia, had he just started at his first beard rather than in his near dotage, had he been given an indentured people at rest rather than being ordered to put down a rebellion. His dead son Nabis could have worn a red cape. He might have been a peer of Sparta, and had a hundred plethra of red grapes. Yes, if only Gorgos had not been captured at Nemea, if only the Spartans had not lied that he had not served his king. Life really was not fair when a man who was more Spartan than the Spartans had seen his genius marooned in the vineyard of Melon. These present triumphs, then, made Kuniskos even angrier. He was not so much grateful for his current renown as furious that it had come so late. He had been betrayed by his Neto, by Antikrates who had left him with the growing revolt, by his master Melon who would soon come to settle up, no doubt to unleash on him the killer Chion. Only his own genius was left.

For a bit longer Kuniskos, fired by wine, about every tenth day tried to go out with his horsemen for a few stadia, to at least make a show of force with his mounted spearmen. In his wake the Messenians later would see an occasional helot with throat slit and arms tied to a post along the road. The few who could read the block letters told others that the placards read-in high Hellenic, no less-“I killed a Spartan and so am dead myself-on orders of helot Kuniskos, lord of the Helots.” Tina Spartiaten apekteina, kai os apothnesko autos. Touto keluei ho helotes heloteton despotes ho Kuniskos.” Kuniskos was after the girl helot seer who was said to be promising a day of freedom for the helots-and who was arming them to fight. Kuniskos was sure that Neto led the helot ambushers from her sanctuary in the temple of Artemis; but he found few who would confirm his suspicions, and he was now as often as not befuddled with drink. So perhaps the chief troublemaker might be this Sapphic Erinna, who, his spies related, was causing rebellion in her supposed school on the high cliff. Kuniskos decided to make his own night raids to catch them both. With his last hundred horsemen, all the cavalry he had there beneath Ithome, he targeted the shrines and rural temples of Messenia and all the farmlands that belonged to the gods, sweeping down on moonless nights to plunder and burn them, and riding off with the priestesses back to his compound by dawn.

Inside the stockade, Kuniskos would have their heads shaved. Then they would be given fur caps and dressed in skins and hides, with leather ropes and long fox tails dangling from their naked waists to their bare buttocks. The guards would chain the captives to serve meals for the kryptes. Kuniskos would keep twenty or so of his “animals,” then when he tired of them, he would send the batch over Taygetos to Lichas and seek more replacements. At banquets, Kuniskos and his peers soon were throwing raisins at the helot servant girls while they danced and sang bare-breasted under coercion. Then, full of wine, Kuniskos and his thugs took whoever they pleased, the more virgins, the better. Life could be good in the twilight of Spartan Messenia.

As the new year approached, all of Messenia was in open revolt, with helots even armored and marching about equipped as hoplites with heavy armor. Theban scouts were rumored to be in the hills around Ithome. Kuniskos’s final batch of captives was small, not more than a few Messenian girls that had hid out near the Alpheios. They were all from the precincts of Artemis of the lowlands, all would-be diviners in training, they said. In their final late-night sweep, the handful of kryptes in service of Kuniskos had brought in seven temple women, to be stripped and to be asked-as they were hung by their toes from the rafters of the great hall-when and where Epaminondas would arrive, and who among them had prepared his way.

Kuniskos did what he pleased with Antikrates gone. If he were to perish in Messenia, then he would do so in a way that lived on in song-and in the terrified hearts of the Messenians. So his men whittled down his stock of prisoners. They sent most over to Taygetos to be thrown into the gorge. A few they roped to the fence post outside the stockade for the crows and buzzards that circled in wait over the house of Kuniskos. Korakon oikos, they began to call the compound of Kuniskos, “House of Crows.” The ugly ones they lopped, sticking their heads on stakes and throwing their bodies in the fire pit.

Soon there were almost no captives left inside the compound and there was no way to bring any more from the outside. Among the last haul of the prisoners from the Alpheios was a woman taller than the rest, who covered her head and kept apart. Kuniskos had told his guards to bring this one in last, and claimed she spoke a half-helot tongue, as if she had learned her speech from others beside helots. His henchman Klopis wanted her, but he drew back when Kuniskos stepped in between him and the helot. She had caught the eye of the drunken Kuniskos, who poked with his walking stick at her thick winter cloak; he wanted some sort of sport with her.

Beneath the folds and tucks of her inner chiton, the old man could see firm flesh and firmer breasts, or so he fancied in his drink. A body it seemed as perfect as he had seen and without scars of torture or the brands of slavery, much less the tears and sags of childbirth-and a priestess unspoiled for his lust. As was his custom with the women, he reminded his men that it was his right to first order anyone into his chambers before they were noosed and dangled on the trusses. There she would first talk and then endure the passion of Puppy Dog. If she gave the name of a rebel or the location of a house of resistance, she would be given back her life, but only after the fire of Kuniskos had been quenched and a hot brand had been burned into her cheek-and if her tales had proved true and had led to the killing of those she had betrayed. But now there were no more fresh captives, and this woman, as ordered, was the last to be brought to Kuniskos.

“Why have you come across the Alpheios?” Kuniskos laughed. “You seem to have the look of the huntress, with your long arms and legs. Are you a Sapphic? There are travelers, they say, from Arkadia, or is it that a few lost Boiotians came your way? Surely you can tell Grandfather Kuniskos something of their talk?” He stuck his hand into her hood and pinched lightly her covered neck. “Where is this foul Proxenos? I hear he has a plan for a new city on top of my house, right here on my mountain. Stranger, do you know a Neto? Or this Amazon Erinna whom you must have heard is in the highlands? Or maybe you’ve mixed it up with this Doreios? Or are you the woman of Nikon?”