The End of Sparta

which the Arkadian patted as he swore and slurred.

They marched up through the storm to the passes over the mountain. The army grew as more helots in furs and leather capes began to come out of the snowy pines, and followed along at the rear of the columns. A few Spartans spied down at them from the tallest heights, but quickly fled as some freed helots hiked up the cliffs after them. The red-capes in threes and fours were too late heading home on rumors of the enemies pouring into Messenia, and so gave Epaminondas and his army their road below-terrified of the Boiotians and more scared of the rumored man-bear loose the past month on Taygetos who hunted down Spartans alone and left others be.

Few of the liberators knew what to expect when they crossed the summit into Messenia and down to the Spartan fort beneath Ithome. Would there be a helot version of Lykomedes, or a Messenian Backwash, to undermine their arrival?

CHAPTER 31

All Roads to Messenia

Chion was roaming on Taygetos-right now no more than a hundred stadia away from the army, camping alone in the tall icy firs with a bright fire, hunting for Gorgos and his guard. He had come too late to ransom Neto, and heard only that Erinna had failed to rescue her as Gorgos fled into the highlands. Chion now followed Gorgos in his flight to the upper reaches of Taygetos, since there was of yet no trace of Neto back in his abandoned compound nor word of her with him in the upland. He assumed that her corpse had been either burned or buried, but he kept quiet and again promised only that he would come down the mountain with the head of Gorgos and a live Neto by the time Melon arrived with Epaminondas.

For Neto’s fate, Chion blamed Alkidamas, and Gaster, and cursed the Korinthians for the foul ship and the delay with the Phokians. On arrival, he had given Nikon all the ransom money of Malgis for his men, to keep them forging swords and fed as the helots left the farms in revolt in hopes of the arrival of Epaminondas. So now Chion was free of his obligations, and free to play out the finishing of Sparta to its end.

The Messenians had enough men in the valley to pursue the red-capes, but not enough mountain folk on high Taygetos, who knew the ways of woods and streams and how to live like the bear and the panther, to hunt down the packs of the fleeing Spartans and find the dead scent of Gorgos’s hideout. So Chion was hunting on the mountain, always on the heels of Kuniskos and his band that had left Ithome two days before his arrival. These Spartan kryptes boasted that they were scouts of the wild who could live on berries and game and slit the throat of the wayward helot. But they had never met a true wild man, never an animal like Chion who felt he at last had found his proper place-not a slave, not a free man, but a wild one now, beyond the rules of the polis, yet more free than any of the city-state. He was no polites, as he once dreamed but an agrios, an omos who did not cook his food, but instead drank the milk of the wandering goats he strangled. He forgot Pythagoras and began eating meat again, raw, on the sly among the no-man pines. Soon all mention of Chion of Helikon ceased in these days as the Messenians figured he had perished among the wild animals on the mountain. Indeed, the shepherds told of a new nameless, half-human beast who broke the necks of Spartans and left them dangling by the heels from their trees, tied tight with their capes, and with a red beta smeared on their bare backs.

Finally the leaky Theoris of Gaster pulled into Korone, the port of the Messenians. Alkidamas and Ephoros headed to Ithome with the helot crew, both the unarmed rowers and the ten marines. Gaster followed from the docks a half day later, cursing that he had to put his feet on dry soil. He had expected to find dock men at the port, but now had to hike over to Messene, in a war no less, to find a new cargo, and maybe a better ship and, of course, a new crew. He soon found Nikon. “Who’s in charge, helot? Who to deal with? I need outgoing rowers and I am the man to hire to fetch your helots from up north. Ten owls per head from anywhere along the gulf. Give me a cargo for the north, and I’ll come back here in the south with more helots.”

It was the work of the philosopher Alkidamas now to stop the killing of helot traitors who had served the Spartan. He was determined that with his Athenian helots sensible statesmen might stop the chaos and plan out the infant government of a new Messenia. “We came to find our Neto, and Erinna, but it would have been better to stay with Epaminondas for all the good we slow-foots have done. Pitch our camp, and muster the helots here to start the building of Proxenos’s third city. We can at least show Epaminondas when he arrives that we are Hellenes of the polis, not tribesmen in hides.”

Meanwhile, Melon had kept quiet as the army snaked through the icy flat ground on the summit of Taygetos, going over his plans to find Neto, or at least bury her. He hoped that Chion, if he lived, had found her scent, and maybe even done away with Gorgos if it had come to that, or at least paid him for her release. Finally, Melon turned to Epaminondas. “There will be few Spartans on this side of Taygetos, General. Our largest problem will be feeding the thousands joining here and convincing them to start on their walls as we arrive. This mob will be worse than the three armies that met up in Mantineia.”

“No,” Ainias broke in, “our task is reading the scrolls of Proxenos. He is Messenia, not the helots. Still, his plans for the city alone will not build Messene. Somebody will have to stack the stones.” As the army marched, the captains squabbled over what to expect when they came down off the other side of the mountain, whether they were to be fighters or builders, for after the ravaging of Lakonia no one knew whether the Spartans would flee before their entry or had red-capes ranging over Messenia to stop them. On the third noon from the Eurotas, the army descended through the olive groves on the gulf of Messenia, following the road that led on to sandy Pylos. But few in the army looked that way, since all had their eyes on the cone of Ithome that now was thirty stadia to their right, as they still chanted their slogan Eleutheria, happy to be off Taygetos. Where was the enemy? Where the Spartans? Epaminondas ordered the army to strap on their breastplates and pull their helmets down. Why no Spartans?

The wagons and pack animals slowed and brought up the rear of the column. Melon felt the first pangs of his aristeia in battle returning as Melissos handed him his armor, heavier in the old style than that of most, long patched and hammered flat after the blows of Leuktra-the shield, spear, helmet, breastplate, greaves, and sword of Antander his grandfather. By dusk they were coming down to the plain before Ithome, uncertain whether Lichas himself would be barring the way with the survivors of Leuktra who had beat them over the pass. But even on the rough plain below there were no Spartans. Instead the hills were covered with plain folk in leather and rags, all calling for the Boiotians, shouting out the names of Epaminondas and Epiteles-as if it were spring Dionysia and not the cruel, cold beginning of the new year. “Look and keep your silence,” Epaminondas yelled out to his generals. “Look at the helot clan. There is not a Spartan to be seen. They did not face us in armor in Lakonia. Not now in Messenia either. The cowards over here have run home to the safe side of the Eurotas.”

The sun fell and the army of the liberators paused, as they looked down at the plains of Messenia, bathed yellow in the winter sun’s dying light. Helots dotted the spur of Ithome. Some spilled out from Eva onto the lime- green valley below. There was the flotsam of a recent battle, corpses and weapons strewn over the ground. Ainias spotted the Spartan dead in twos and threes in the gullies and ditches beside the Lakonian road as it went up toward Taygetos. He spoke to Melon. “Who knows what happened? I doubt we ever get much word of it. But the end seems to have come quickly. When they heard we were on the crest of Taygetos, the Spartans just ran, and the rebellion fled after them. A house of straw, this Spartan colony of Messenia was. When Epaminondas blew, it simply collapsed in his wind.”

“Thank the god in heaven,” Pelopidas declared. “Look. Take in these hills and valleys of men, and old women, and children as well-ten ten-thousands below. If we give them stones, they will have the biggest polis in Hellas.”

Melon saw the same. “Not one Spartan, but likely twenty some thousands of armed helots. Where and how they came I don’t know. But someone has not been idle. Someone has planned all this. I hope there is food for us. But these locusts may well have eaten the green leaves off the olives and be living now on snails and roots. Perhaps one of them knows where my Neto is.” He stared at every Messenian girl they passed to see if one might be his freedwoman and then called out her name in hopes strangers might know of her fate.

Nikon had already mustered two myriads of helots to meet Alkidamas. They had begun their attacks when days earlier a runner from the east had arrived to cry out that seven ten-thousands under Epaminondas were just