The End of Sparta

over the gorges of high Taygetos. Many thought the monster was grizzled and lame Korynetes of widows’ tales come back alive who smashed the brains of wayfarers and shepherds with his iron club. The helots, however, knew him as the Great Deliverer, the shape-changer that ensured no Spartan dare return home over the passes of Taygetos. Nikon, who alone went up to the summit and who alone came back, knew the man-bear as the real bulwark of Messenia, the demon that came late and from nowhere and had so scared the Spartans that they dared not muster to stop the rising walls below. And yet as for Nikon and his rangers, the monster let all of them be.

Lichas, still on the east side of the mountain in Sparta, promised to send his best of the Spartan royal guard up to Taygetos to find this daimon. The Spartans would drag him down-demon or not-to the gorge and throw him onto the rocks. If he were some enormous bear or freak wolf-dog, he would surely bleed; if a ghost they could get priestesses to cast spells and incantations to send him back into the crevices below. If a black god in human shape, Lichas would wrestle him down to Hades. So he sent word for Antikrates and the sword man Klopis, and tall Thibrachos as well, and the mother of Thibrachos, fiery Elektra his latest wife whom he bedded in her tall tower despite her four decades and more-all eager to kill helots and their friends and mount the severed head of this man-bear monster among the trophies of the Menalaion at Sparta. The best of the Spartans would kill the man-bear. Agesilaos would see that the passes were open and the silly stories of old women about monsters and demons were no more than the babbling of the unhinged. Then the way back to Messenia would be open.

Even as the small band of Spartans plotted to find news of Kuniskos and scout a way for Agesilaos into Messenia, the time of departure for the army of Boiotians neared. The walls were finished, and there grew talk against Epaminondas, both among his own men who wanted to leave immediately and among the freed helots who almost had their circuit and wished the foreigner gone. A free people, their new demagogues proclaimed in the assembly, no longer wanted to feed three myriads of “friends.” Anyway, the camp of Epaminondas stank and fouled the field near the Arkadian Gate. The Boiotians drank at night and sang of their spearing in Lakonia and took all credit for the end of Sparta, and laughed at the helots for their pretensions of being men of the polis. Too many of them spoiled the sanctuary of Asklepios and were bathing in the holy waters of Klepsydra.

As he readied to leave, Epaminondas wished to remind all of the good done, in this his first and last public address to the helots in the half-finished stadium of the Messenians. All the citizens of the new polis filed into the stade-long course at the south of the city, near the Messenian Gate. There were forty thousands on its earthen seats, and maybe as many more on the field and on the walls above. Epaminondas spoke in front of a new iron statue of himself near the entry to the stadium and an altar of thanks that the women of Messenia had raised for the Boiotians and Argives.

“A great plague has passed, men of Messene. Those who crossed their borders to enslave others are themselves surrounded. The Spartan hunters have become the hunted. Yet I remind you only that freedom won after these hundreds of years can just as easily be lost again in one-should the nerve of your newfound democracy fail and you let your shields slack to your knees. It is the nature of all men in peace to become soft and scoff at the prior hard work of their fathers who gave them such bounty. Beware the real enemy is the smoother second thought that always mocks the rougher first. You tire of us, we of you. Such is also the way of peace. So be it. Enjoy these last days of spring. Soon when your hair is white or gone, the remembrance of these great days alone will give you comfort when all else is gone.”

This was no audience of jaded Thebans who usually hooted and pelted their speakers with fruit, but one of recently freed men who slowly grew silent in renewed appreciation of their liberator as he finished and would soon depart. Now this Epaminondas took them all back to the first days when he and Epiteles came off the mountains, and the Spartans fled in terror at the mere rumors of their descent, and the helots and their liberators were one.

“We are seeing the new age of walls under holy Ithome, worthy of Mykenai or Troy of old when only the Cyclopes could build such stout ramparts as these before us. But men of Messene, do not trust solely in such rock or oak. It is not towers or the new machines that cast stone from afar that keep men free. Only the right arms of those willing to meet the enemy shield to shield and spear to spear will keep the Spartans out. Now the time comes for us to return to our families in the north below Helikon and Kithairon. Farewell, men of Messenia, and do not forget what those heroes of Hellas did on your behalf to make you the best men of the Peloponnesos.”

A roar followed the general’s finish. Even the dour Pelopidas and Ainias were struck by thousands of these folk who stood on the walls and towers shouting in their trust of Epaminondas-this tiny man who in a few days after all would be put on trial for his life when he arrived back at Thebes. The great war for Messenia was at an end. The great war to live in safety as free people had begun. All that was left was the cleanup, and the muster of the Boiotians as they broke camp. For one hundred and twenty days the men of Epaminondas had worked without a break, despite the furor of Epiteles and the whines of the Sacred Band. Vineyards and orchards were to be planted inside the walls, and two thousand plethra of barley and wheat. Five thousand head of stock roamed in open pastures beneath the walls. The grape land was black heavy land, watered by ten great springs on the slopes of the mountain-all taken from the Spartan clan of the royal Agiads whose helots had sent its harvests for four hundred years back to the royal family of Sparta.

In thanks for the health of the demos, the Messenians had laid out a temple to Asklepios, the healing god. In front was a marble statue of Nike, the goddess of Victory, which they had erected to honor their Nikon, now strategos of the Messenians, with his deputy Doreios, the first archon of the people. Inside the half-built temple was a model of clay that Ainias had made from the maps of Proxenos. At last the city and this model were one. There were thirty stadia of walls, ten feet thick, fifteen high, all faced with gray limestone and filled with rubble in between. The courses ran up and nearly encircled the crest of tall Ithome. Thirty towers-two square for every round-rose thirty feet. They had put two stories in them with embrasures below their sloped roofs and, thanks to Ainias, the new belly bows aimed out the windows. Four gates, the tallest, the Arkadian in the north, shut the city tight. They left standing in the agora the hated log house of Kuniskos, a reminder to their children not born of their past bondage and the cost to free Ithome from the likes of Antikrates and his Gorgos. His timber stakes were red with blood and gore and Nikon had ordered the horrid poles stay up-until the head of Kuniskos could become their last trophy and they could be burned.

CHAPTER 33

The Reckoning

When Epaminondas finished his speech, he headed to his muster yard outside the city, between the walls and the hamlet of Andania, in the stony ground between the great olive groves of the city. Yet even before the crowd broke up, Nikon at last appeared as promised. He had missed the words of Epaminondas and just come down his accustomed path from the summit on Taygetos. But this time the helot headed for the generals in a frenzy.

Nikon pushed in among them and announced loud enough for the entire Sacred Band at their sides to hear, waving a walking crutch. “Kuniskos lives! The killer of our Erinna is alive. He’s not dead. Not yet. I saw Neto as a daimon in a dream two nights past as I slept in Artemis’s shrine and breathed her vapors. Her ghost told me of Kuniskos, just where on the vast mountain he was. Then last night up at the house of Zeus Ithomatas, I saw the hut in dreams. Just now, just this very morning on my return, one Scorpas, a half-breed uplander, came over the mountain and in through the east gate following a patrol. He said the same thing as what I had seen from the goddess. And then he handed me this crutch, Neto’s walking stick, he says. She once lived in the jail of Kuniskos on Taygetos, crippled and leaning on a stick, or so he swears.”

Nikon went on and retold his conversation with half-helot Scorpas. “His words, those of this trader and go- between Scorpas, went like this as I remember it: ‘Your lost helot traitor-he is up there in the high mountain glen. A mad bear hunts him or something worse. The monster can’t find Kuniskos-at least not yet. For he’s safe enough in the high house in the deep woods. Up there I saw him. He was holed up in a hut. On the crest of Taygetos, the dark mountain of death. Fifty stadia and more he was from the high road. An upland trader I know saw him two nights ago. He brings him food for gold coins. Brought back this crutch, a woman’s cane. Or so Kuniskos said it is and wanted those in Messenia to have it. Still, Kuniskos will not get far. Up high near the pass, he is cut off by the fear of the man-bear or the helot rangers amid the highest trees on Taygetos. Your Gorgos cannot get home to Sparta. Yes, I know his real name. He cannot go back to his eastern side of the mountain. He is holed up. Waiting for the