Killing each other when they can’t find Spartans. Next they’ll turn on us, their liberators. I helped do this. No polis here at all-there never will be. Why, most city-states wouldn’t even let that thug Nikon in the city gate. Here he is an archon. I would burn him up before I would Lichas.”
Melon ignored the rantings from the dirty and unkempt Ainias. He smelled of wine and sweat and wore the blood of Proxenos on his cloak like the victor does the laurel, and went from the middle way to unhinged in a blink- and would yet return to his senses soon enough. Melon the farmer saw something quite different from Ainias. With new eyes he began to perceive a stirring amid the mess, and larger walls than either at Megalopolis or Mantineia. For the farmer who brings the wheat field out of thistle and bramble, his eye is always not on the natural chaos, but on what order can emerge from it. Amid the gallows, and the sewers, and the corpses, he saw majestic stone temples, and houses-and the skeleton of a great polis to come, one that grew flesh each day. And the clouds above it all, this day they seemed now to be as faces, yes faces of Chion and Proxenos both, as if they had become Olympians who smiled down on their subjects.
His mind took in Messenians torching the corpses of the executed and arguing to stop the killing, and young men racing in the half-built stadium, throwing the discus and hitting targets with their javelins, in preparation for the great games of the founding of holy Messene. “Freedom is not so clean. The Athenians have had their democracy maybe a hundred and a half-hundred years, they say. It still is, well, you know, chaos, Ainias; these Athenians who started wars each season and killed Sokrates and slit the throats of the Melians, and all the rest. And us? Has it even been ten years since Pelopidas and his gang dressed up as women and assassinated our oligarchs in their drinking parties? So we are to demand of these helots perfection, our beautiful virgin
In their grief the two hoplites were largely left alone by Epaminondas, who had mustered the army only then to camp it three times and more, reluctant to leave Messenia and face his trial at home. The general instead walked all night, paced the ramparts of the nearly finished walls of Messene, wondering whether his victory would draw out Agesilaos-and whether he should head back east over Taygetos for the summer to attack the lame king.
Pelopidas laughed at his fantasies. “You’ll be lucky, Theban, to get this army home as it is. One hundred and twenty days and more I reckon our men have slept outside and fought the Spartan. Half are sick from the cold. The rest vomit from the bad water. They feel the foul air and the fever it brings. If we don’t leave soon before the summer, they’ll hate the helots more than the Spartans-if they avoid the fevers of these lowlands by the coast.” Pelopidas then pointed to the Boiotians in the camps below the finished ramparts. “They need do no more. You promised a march home thirty days ago. Not even Zeus with his thunder on Taygetos could get them to go back east. They will not go back into the lair of Agesilaos. No, they are tiring of founding cities for ingrates.”
“If you want your Messenians to enforce their laws and finish their walls, then it is time for us to dry up the teat and wean these infants who have grown teeth aplenty. The spring star Arktouros has long ago arisen with our month of Agrionios and winter is past. Even Epiteles knew that and took his Argives home last month-and no less on the advice of Lelex and Nikon, who want their polis to be their own. Do you like your uncle sleeping in your tower bedroom a hundred days after his promise of a short visit?”
Neto had drifted back to the empty schoolhouse of Erinna far above the city, and was said to have gone quiet in the night as the vapors of the goddess had set the other virgin priestesses afire. She could tend the outer sanctuary, and plant her garden, but was not allowed into the temple proper or precinct, not after her stay with Kuniskos. She wished to avoid Melon, ashamed that he would spurn her, for she was soiled and ugly and she walked slower than did her master. She instead talked to Erinna in her sleep, but out of make-believe since the visions of what was to come were gone. Even Doreios, who before her capture had claimed he would make her his own, let her alone now, since he saw that she drew men’s eye for her scars rather than her beauty. The more he had once talked of yoking his Neto, the less he saw of her, for her deer legs were a faint memory and her gait was not a pretty thing to watch.
Neto at last had her free Messenia, but the deaths of Chion, Proxenos, and Lophis, and the looming date of departure of the northerners, Melon especially, bore hard on her-as did the truth that her dream talk to Nikon had almost gotten them all killed on Taygetos. That lamentation turned Neto away from the world of reasoned men and for a time back to the gods of Olympos who alone, it seemed, a day or two each month spoke to her. If a year earlier she had turned all the heads in the agora at Thespiai, now few in Messenia gave her a look, and then only to gaze at her slumped walk and her scarred cheek. Her leg had healed with a bad bow and she favored it like the old women in black shawls with the hump-backs and staffs.
Gorgos had left her a bitter look, as he promised, with her branded scar. Neto for her part wanted no man. Kerberos would not leave her side anyway and she in turn kept him from going back to the wolves. Neto in her shame soon limped more into the deeper hills, even far above the house of Erinna and was seen with the deathless naiads of the glens, now more a phantom than a fleshy mortal. Melon had tried to track her down, but the mountain helots were ignorant of her wanderings, and he had lost his tracker Chion. Finally, he sent out messengers with word to her to come home. But no ranger could find her, not even the hounds found a scent of her Kerberos. Both vanished from the thoughts of the Messenians. Melon remembered her harsh talk to him the previous summer on Helikon and at least figured she was happier in her free Messenia than back in his Boiotia. Or so he told himself.
Finally, not just the hoplites, but their officers also, told Epaminondas to leave. They demanded of Epaminondas that they reach home before the green stalks of the wheat fields of Boiotia turned yellow and heavy. The army took inventory and prepared provisions for the march across the Isthmos. Then Alkidamas appeared again. He had gone north to Olympia, and had news as he returned southward to the new city. “I have called on you too much, Thespian. You have given too much of the earth and water of Helikon for the cause of the Messenians. I ask a final favor, a homecoming gift. I think that when you go north with the new month, we will not see each other again-at least until the trial of us all. So our tiny band of liberators should go homeward toward the gulf, ahead of the army, together as part of one final good deed, to smooth the rocks from the road before Epaminondas arrives with a bounty on his head. Let us get to Thebes first, before Epaminondas arrives, and make sure he sees flowers, not a rope, around his neck.”
So five left ahead of Epaminondas. Alkidamas led with Ephoros, the writer of history. Melissos followed at the rear. Ainias and Melon walked in between, both silent in their hatred of the Spartans who had killed Proxenos and turned Neto feral. After a two days’ walk, the five reached the coast of the gulf of Korinthos. From there they could see the wave-crested sea of Megale Hellas to the west, and the dark cliffs of Aeolis directly across the water where men of the polis seldom went. Soon on their way to the docks, they passed the first huts outside the great walled city of Patrai, city on the gulf, friend to Athens and home to the Achaians of old.
Ainias had grown tired already of the south, of his own Peloponnesos, and was ashamed of his Doric-and now even of himself as well. As promised, he would tend to the farm of Proxenos up on the Asopos River, at least for a while. The sooner he got to Plataia, and away from this southland, the better for himself and his companions condemned to see him in his madness. He would find his cure in the olives and vines of Proxenos. There he would swear off Dionysos, and bathe in the cold Asopos each morning to cleanse his stains. He would teach the sons of his friend to bend the bow and dig the vineyard. Or so he promised once he was north of the gulf and free of his homeland.
The joints of Alkidamas were stiff, and Melon himself was quite lame from his bad leg. His knee was nearly twice its normal size. His foot was blistered and torn from walking on its side. Lame and tired, they were all glad to go inside the city gate of these men from Achaia and walk down between the Long Walls to the port on the gulf rather than continue east to the Isthmos along the shore. Alkidamas laughed, “Ah yes, we take the ferry straight over to windy Naupaktos. No Gaster this time, just an honest ferryman and his barge. We stay the night over there on the high eastern road by the water. Then up a day through the olive groves of Amphissa to Delphi and we will pass along by the snake oracle of Trophonios into Boiotia, coming up on Helikon on her backside. Once across the water we are safe. Done with the deed-at least for this season.”
Melon and Ainias were mostly quiet on the broad-bottomed ferryboat over to Naupaktos. The late-spring sea of the fickle month Theilouthios was choppy. But the aged tiller was no fat one-armed running mouth, but an expert young sailor from Zakynthos with his father’s boat, who crisscrossed to the opposite side despite the white tops on the waves. Even with a strong northern headwind in their faces, they reached the northern shore by the noon, and then made the sixty stadia to Naupaktos in less than a day.
There Alkidamas rented a large common room, an
