on Ithome, cutting and dragging down the gray stone. Another twenty thousand would work the machines to hoist the blocks and guide the iron and lead mongers to fasten the stones. Half the women were to cook, as they hunted down the Spartan stores and the caches in the abandoned Spartan camps. The other half set up tents and shacks for the workers and hoplites. Nikon’s crews already had cut tall spruce timber, forty feet and more. With the help of Ainias, he was planning to build ten tall swiveling cranes, with pulleys and tackle, that would hoist the blocks some thirty feet high and more.
It was a good time to build. The winter of grain had been planted now for over two months and harvest was another five months away, so the oxen were free and could pull the cut stone down the mountain. Proxenos’s craftsmen, a hundred or so in the army, who had worked at Thespiai and advised the builders of Mantineia and Megalopolis, brought from their packs drawings of arches and battlements-as if they had just inked them-and paired off with Messenians to ensure the walls went up straight according to their plumb lines. Now Ainias took up his dead friend’s scrolls and with Epiteles and Epaminondas held parley with the leading helots. Beside the Athenian helots that had come with Alkidamas, there were Doreios, Tisis, and Lelex, who spoke for all, though it was Nikon who claimed preeminence by having done the most fighting against the Spartans. And, of course, he had made the long run to Helikon to fetch Chion and had rescued the corpse of Erinna. He now stepped forward. “We are the leaders of the Messenians. At least until we elect our archons. We’ll vote once the walls are up. Our Athenian helots are drafting the laws. So we are ready to build our city. You, Ainias, tell us of our plans. We want to cut stone. The sooner new Messene is up, the sooner you go home. We want you home by the end of the year’s fifth month for your wheat harvest this spring as much as you do.”
Ainias looked at Proxenos’s master plans that he had gone over for a year, recently dirtied, wrinkled and torn a bit, as though Aritomenes had sketched them at the dawn of the polis. “Look here at these ancient worn scrolls. They say that the wall goes up thirty feet high at the towers, twenty high on the ramparts in between-the tallest in Hellas. It runs thirty stadia from the backside of Ithome’s crown. Then it takes in the crest of Eva to the valley. Look for the guide points. Right here on the mountain. That’s where we put our northwest corner. All the holy ground to Asklepios and Artemis are set aside-and marked up here.”
Then Ainias tried to remember more from all his long talks with Proxenos about this third and best of his citadels, and so went on. “My men are cutting out the traces of the walls with spades. Only a city this big can have your herds and crops inside the walls, along with your houses and temples. All will be out of the Spartans’ reach, but with more inside your walls than either at Mantineia or Megalopolis. You can farm or vote or bathe inside, and care little whether ten or ten thousand Spartans are outside your walls. We put towers on every rise, like the scrolls of Aristomenes tell us, forty and more-and more of them square than round. Yes, four gates, one in each direction. But our busiest entry will be the east one, facing our sister-polis in Arkadia. There we will have a courtyard and swing doors higher than any at Mantineia. Its lintel-well, it will weigh far more than the Cyclopes’ work at Mykenai. Just watch when we slide that stone down the mountain. It will take forty oxen to pull, five hundred men to hold tight the ropes behind.”
Then Pelopidas walked up and warned the leader of the Messenians what to expect this spring. “You can say these plans were buried in sacred pots and come from your hero Aristomenes, or we can say they were the work of Proxenos who died on the Eurotas. It matters nothing to me. All we care is that ramparts go up and go up now. We have only three months for you to build the walls, and for us to keep out the Spartans before their spring campaign seasoning starts and maybe as late as Homoloios. Epiteles promises us a few more days for his Argives. He claims that he followed us to Messenia and will lead us out of here-the last to come and the first to leave. At night Alkidamas’s Athenians give you the laws and constitution. Listen up. You have no choice. The Thebans did not come south to set up an oligarchy. But we don’t want rule by the
For the next month, the helots cut stones at dawn with iron saws and then put them on carts to be guided down the mountain to the trenches. There, all night long, the forges turned out thousands of iron clamps for each day’s work. The fire men kept molten lead in huge iron pots to seal the joints from rust. The Messenians on the rising walls quit only after the lighting of the torches, even as the days lengthened and the spring equinox approached. While the men cut and stacked and the women cooked and weeded the fields, Epaminondas and his Thebans patrolled the countryside. They killed another four hundred Spartan holdouts, making two thousand altogether now dead from among the Spartan overseers and half-helots. Epaminondas knew the number because Ainias wrote the count on a vast scroll and posted it each day on a wood pillar next to what would be the Arkadian gate. No one counted how many Messenians Epiteles executed, for he hung up outlaws and thieves well beyond Ithome, down the Alpheios and all the way to the sea.
But Epaminondas himself had also strung by the heels another eight hundred Messenians, looters and cutthroats who would neither work nor let those be who did. Most were Spartan inside anyway, but not all. The bodies of the murderers and thieves swung in the winter cold afternoon breezes with placards around their necks APEKTENON or EKLEPSA-“I murdered” or “I stole”-followed by APETHANON and “I died.” Some Messenians worried that they had exchanged the executions of Kuniskos for those of Epaminondas. Epiteles talked of his killing in camp at night while Epaminondas kept quiet. “It took us a hundred years and more at Argos, and we started as free, better men than these man-foots. Why do we think that those who were slaves will be masters of themselves and vote? Even if they vote, what’s stopping these hide-wearers from stealing money from the rich and voting themselves all sorts of free this and free that-the way they do it in most of our democracies?” Then he turned gruff. “Let’s find this Nikon fellow, or maybe Lelex over there, give him some spearmen. Let him sit high in a castle on their new acropolis and like a good
Epaminondas laughed at the brute, but sensed also that he was a keen judge of the polis, having survived the killer gangs at Argos to come out on top. “Maybe. But babies can’t walk, yet at five they run faster than those in their seventh decade. Hellas has lots of democracies, my dear Epiteles. But they are old and tired, and need these toddlers and crawlers to keep us young and remind us what we once were. We gave them freedom, and they in turn have saved us from what we might have become, new barbarians of leisure and affluence who won’t put a toe outside of our city gates if there is a cloud in the sky. Now freedom is theirs to keep or lose. Either way it does not detract from our gift.”
Epiteles did not back down. “I and my Argives, we feel no better or worse from freeing them, and hardly think their freedom is a gift. Sparta is weak. Finished as we know it. She has no farmers to feed her phalanx, and won’t march out of Lakonia, at least for a while. That is good enough for me and mine. These helots can do what they like.” Epiteles laughed and for the next few days kept patrolling with his guard to hunt down more thieves who were stealing from the bread carts next to the scaffolds. He knew men by nature to be bad. They would kill and worse if they were not tired from work or scared of punishment. It was not in his nature to build, so he did what he knew best, he punished and hoped he killed more guilty than innocent-and worried little when he did not. “These Thebans can free anyone they please. But then who can’t do that? But they have no idea how to knock heads and keep these half-tamed on their leashes. Zeus in heaven, I think these Boiotians want to be liked rather than feared.” That the helots slacked off from the walls was of no real concern to Epiteles, other than as reason enough to kill those who were probably stealing rather than working. When enough were executed to discourage the no-goods, Epiteles would head home to Argos and the hard life among the murderous factions there. And so he did soon, and passed out of the history of the Hellenes.
Epaminondas thought he had Epiteles right when he had said of him, “Don’t wonder that he will leave us soon, but instead ask why this man in fur has even come. He is a warrior, one who wakes up in the morning promising to cut down Spartans and goes to bed each night in lamentation that he has not killed enough of them. We won’t see his like again in Hellas. He’s the good coin side to Lichas, though both are at home killing and so more alike than we think. Maybe our Chion, if he lives, is a third who could join this cabal of Aiases. But for now thank our One God that Epiteles was on our side.”
The friends of Erinna were also hunting down Spartans with Nikon’s old band, always on what they claimed was the scent of a live Kuniskos. Still, they kept their distance from the trails in the uplands of cloudy Taygetos in
