The End of Sparta

octopus or two, with four krateres of black wine and greens and spring horta from the well-watered slopes above Naupaktos. He had on either side of him flute girls. Two porters brought in torches and a long low table. “Well,” Alkidamas began as he leaned on his elbow, chewing a tip of raw wild asparagus, “well, well, we have a sort of symposion with girls and couches. Let the wine and eating and boasting begin. I am the symposiarchos, and preside over our talk session. Look. I have bought laurel wood for a roaring fire.” A short Akarnanian girl in a see-through cloak of light linen kept their cups full. Another with a large backside from Ithaka walked around the table with an aulos. On the prompt of Ainias, she took up a soft song of Erinna of Athens. Ainias had no smile on his face as he leaned forward. Rather than drop a raisin in his mouth he threw several across at the beard of Alkidamas.

“So we ended the Spartans,” he growled. “Don’t lie to me that we left something better. You saw the mess at Messene. Lichas was right. We miss him-and can’t bring him back to right things.” Alkidamas wiped a dribble of wine from his chin, clicked his fingers, and the Akarnanian girl-Skylaki, they called her-brought in a new calyx of red, the third of the night, and a towel for his face. “I am hog at the symposion and won’t let any of you speak, no, not just yet,” Ainias announced. “There is an army still left with Agesilaos. Even after Leuktra he is enough alive. He sits safe on his acropolis. I think we will all be back in the vale of Lakonia-and more than once.”

The other four were fidgeting. Ainias looked away from them. They were unsure how much the wine rather than Ainias was talking and looked over to see that his spear was on the floor. They signaled for the music to begin again, in soft fashion, as they heard him out, hoping the five-foot tune would calm him and that they themselves would not be persuaded by his anger. Ainias was a slave himself to Dionysos and would not calm. He kicked up his feet and jumped back up in the lamplight, spilled an entire krater of the white, and almost turned over the table itself. “Will your ox Aias pull the yoke any better, Melon, because there are no more helots? Will that big press work better without a Chion? I think not. Who challenges all this? All vanity. It was all about the vanity of Pythagoras, this notion you could play god, and make some serfs free so to make yourselves feel more something-what I don’t quite know.”

The drunken Ainias knocked over his couch and walked around the table, along the backside of the couches. Not one of the four was reclining. Melon might have agreed with some of this nonsense of Ainias. Now he kept quiet, for he had a half-thought to cross swords with Ainias, and more than a half that he would take down the Stymphalian. The piper Skylaki started on her flute and began to dance and lead Ainias back to his couch. It was the writer of historia among them, the yellow-haired malthakos Ephoros, who challenged the mercenary. How odd that the twig-armed Ephoros cared little about a spear-thrust from the drunken hoplite. He was even redder from the winter sunburn he had acquired on the trip down, but his voice came out through his nose in his affected Attic. There is courage in writers on occasion, especially if there is a story to come of it. Ephoros had learned to endure slights and an occasional slap as he questioned the helots for his great saga of their liberation to come. For all his perfumed locks, he was no coward. Ephoros had said little in fear that the veterans would scorn his white skin and soft hands-and his support for a war that he had not fought in.

He had come late with Alkidamas. So he missed all the battles north or south. His only battle scars? The vomiting from the long boat to the Peloponnesos and some scratches from fighting off a big helot rower on Gaster’s boat. Now he had no intention of letting the friendship of all be turned sour by a good man gone bad in his drink-not now, right before they set out on the last road to holy Delphi at sunrise. So better to prompt the battle of words with Ainias here in friendly Naupaktos. That way their bile would rise and pass. Then they could march east in easy quiet to Delphi. All could enjoy the hike up to Apollo’s shrine. As sober friends once more, the five would descend from the high meadows to Trophonios and the borders of home.

Ephoros poured himself a calyx of warm unmixed wine and began. “Sit down, dear Ainias, just as our dear Akarnanian Skylaki orders. Please, let us all sit down and recline, and show some respect to one another and the idea of a proper symposion, as we do in Ionia. Where is our symposiarchos to impose order? Girls. You two bring in more wine, and play something soft on the lyre as we speak, an elegy perhaps, and do some of your twists and leg raises for the men over there.” To the general surprise, the Arkadian Ainias did just as he was told.

“Is that what Lophis and Kalliphon, the son of our Alkidamas, fell for at Leuktra? Chion, and Proxenos and all the other best men of Boiotia whose names I have written on my scrolls? Did they all die to just kill Lichas, the better man? Was it only to kill Kleombrotos and his henchmen at Leuktra?” He picked up some cucumber relish and spread it on his bread and then again looked up. “The helots are free and yet they squander their liberty in license? My, my-they loot. They steal, Ainias. By Zeus, they even plunder their own temples, or so you shriek.” Ephoros leaned on his elbow and somehow raised his squeaky voice even another notch higher. “We laid out their walls. They sleep on them rather than build them higher. We died for Messenians. And, oh my, they have no government, no laws, no rules on stone. Spartans at least kept order with their kryptes and their chasm of death.” He may have been fragile, this papyrus leaf, but Ephoros nonetheless looked over at the drunken killer Ainias and faced him down.

“This is your writ-that you prefer order to freedom, the rules of the pit of the Kaiadas to the chaos of the unruly assembly? Hah. So you think if we were smart, we would bring back a Spartan harmost, and have Antikrates and Lichas and his braids back again?” Ephoros looked around to his right. He wanted to see if any in their sorrow and drink agreed with the bitter Ainias and might prick his backside with a spear tip. So he went on to provoke Melon right across the table, although he was unsure of his reaction. “Was that the goad for you too Melon, son of Malgis, only to keep Agesilaos on his acropolis and out of the vineyards and wheat fields of others around Helikon? You had no thought of the helots or the cities of the Peloponnesos?”

Now the pale Ephoros broke his own rules of the symposion. He leaped up, but much more violently than even Ainias had. He stalked, yes, stalked to the wall and back. He had feather arms and even smaller legs. Yet he paced to the back of the Arkadian’s couch and took on Ainias, and showed the greater courage for standing right over the reclining killer.

“Ainias, you will return to your old fire soon enough and lead Arkadia onto the path of its old renown-once you hear the voice of your Proxenos and the whispers of your Pythagoras. We are in the north again, across the gulf now, Ainias Taktikos. So obey your oath to the dead. Fill your wine flask with spring water. Cut off your filthy mane and bathe in the nearby Mornos tomorrow, and if you are man enough to go to Plataia, as you boast, go and raise the children of Proxenos. Otherwise keep still and join the other drunkards on the corners and the alley beggars with their coin cups, or go back down to Taygetos and take up where Chion finished.”

Melon finally looked up. “All of us sit down, lounge back, and have some relish and more wine.” Melon spoke rapidly and with confidence. “Neto is not a mere cripple. She is not ugly or feral. No. She is free. She has whispered that it will be this angry Ainias, who alone will become the tyrant slayer of the Peloponnesos, who will deal with Lykomedes yet-who may prove the great traitor of us all as he colludes with old Agesilaos. Yes, in your pride and zeal, you will go south there again-I fear for you-and settle up with our backstabber Lykomedes in Mantineia. You are the biggest liberator of us all.” He went on. “Erinna is not dead. Her song lives on. Epaminondas hums and sings it as we speak. So, yes, all that has been a good thing to die for, Ephoros, for the freedom of the Hellenes. I am at last proud to be a Hellene. I won’t stay on my mountain.” Melon wanted to finish and get it all out, and show that he was one with Epaminondas at last, no difference between the two of them. “Let the others talk of your Pythagoras as the evil daimon that addled the wits of the democrats of Boiotia. Or say that he sent them south on this mad dream of a dead philosopher. What is it for me who has no love for that sect and likes to eat meat as much as beans? It was the freedom of the Messenians that I now know was worth the blood of the Malgidai. We ended the Spartans who marched into the land of others. I have no regrets. Not one. Not ever. Not since I came down Helikon to fight at Leuktra for Epaminondas. For I too was freed from a different sort of slavery, one worse in some ways: a slavery of the mind-and of the soul that once believed in nothing other than itself. Nothing is worse than the cynic who is disappointed by the world about him for not appreciating in his own genius, for being less than perfect. I know that now from years of wilderness.”

Pale Ephoros from across the table, behind his large krater of warm wine, looked over at Melon. “It will be sung a thousand seasons and more from now that the stones that grew out of the Peloponnesos this season prove who was the better man after all-and who the worse. What will they say of Sparta? What will they say when one day when we are ashes, and the Hellenes to come conclude, ‘Why look. There is nothing here, no stones on the acropolis of Agesilaos. The Sparta of song was nothing. But the walls of its subjects,