The End of Sparta

why over at Messene are they looming over the Peloponnesos?’ ”

Melissos twitched. He for some reason was not tired of these talkers. He liked them and what they said. What was this Hellas, this notion of no city-state, but one people-one language, the same gods, from Thessaly to Crete? “Please, don’t speak of our ruin. Think of the ruined at Sparta. They feel their own misery far more. Isn’t that enough? The world is split between those who apologize for killing their enemies and those who take pride in it. What we did was good, right as you say. Surely you taught me that much.” Gone was his half-Makedonian slang. He had wanted to fight with Melon at Taygetos, die even if need be. So he had earned their attention. Now he spoke as clearly as any Boiotian three times his age.

“Antikrates is not feasting with Agesilaos. More likely the two are serving their own table. They drown their tears in bad wine of their own bad making-with a dead king Kleombrotos, and a dead Lichas, and a dead Kleonymos, and all those others dead at Leuktra. Their helots are gone. And bald Kuniskos is ash in the high aither.” This new boy Melissos was making good sense, as he turned and signaled the girl from Ithaka to sit by his feet and rub his upper leg. He turned to the Akarnanian who continued with her lyre and grabbed her cloak. He scarcely had a beard but he had known such women since his second teeth had grown in. The year of apprenticeship of this Melissos was coming to an end. Alkidamas had told the young man, on the word of Pelopidas, that there was a ship waiting for him at Kirrha over the hill, below Delphi. They would fight the wind out of the gulf and then battle more of it northward along the coast, and row him home up the west side of Makedonia.

The treaty had held through the late spring as summer approached. None of the northern Makedonian folk of Melissos had attacked them from the rear when the Boiotians went south. So the northern kings had kept their word-at least for now-and the year of his guaranty and truce was honored. Melissos, along with the other Makedonians held at Thebes, was once again a free man. He was already feeling once more his privilege and birth rank, and yet he was learning from these Hellenes who bled and died so well for nothing other than helots, than helots no less. Alkidamas jumped up from his couch, then clapped his hands and dismissed the servants. He ordered all to get ready their beds and end this symposion, since it had gone just as he had planned. The once surly and tired banqueters had let their daimones out, and would return with one story as friends, with four empty krateres as proof of their amity. Ainias, he knew, would shortly bathe and cut off his matted hair of mourning. Melon had come down at last from Helikon and would never really go back up again. Ainias nodded at Alkidamas and put away his wine, the goblet half full. He felt relieved that his own bitterness had at least not spread to others. He pointed at Ephoros and then picked up his own spear and broke it over his knee as if it were a tooth-picker.

“For a while longer,” Ainias promised, “I will be your captain. Sleep and wake sober. We have a long march to the port of Delphi. Then there is a steep climb up to the temple. There we can gaze down at the pass into Boiotia. On our last day we pass through the hill of the Sphinx and near that dreadful snake goddess at Lebadeia. Like it or not, the age of Epaminondas, and of men like Lichas, and of Chion-and us here tonight-is over with.”

The returning veterans left the lodging the next morning and set out into the hard winds of the mouth of the gulf, pressing to get on the road to the east and home. The travelers fell in soon with yet another band of Messenians along the coast road. These were the children of free men. Forty years earlier they had settled in Naupaktos to the north, when they fled Pylos during the Athenian war. The helots walked briskly as if for the first time in their lives it was a thing of pride to be known as Messenians and not mere helots of Sparta. All seven of these wayfarers were stonecutters and likewise were climbing to Delphi. Or so said their leader Artemidoros. He boasted to the Boiotians that the new assembly of the Messenians, under the direction of the rebel Nikon, polemarchos of Messene, right after the liberation had sent them on a ship with black marble of the type the Athenians quarried at Eleusis. The transport was at the dock in Kirrha. These Messenians were to guide the rough stones with the teamsters up the mountain to the Sacred Way of the sanctuary. There they would set up the great altar of the liberated Messenians. This work was, as Ainias knew, the last design of Proxenos, the final scroll found in his pack after his end on the Eurotas, so confident had he been that there would be a need for a victory monument of a free Messene at Delphi. None of these helot folk now at his side even knew the name of the benefactor who had perished to plan their new city; much less had they any idea of the hide-clad Nikon who once had poached his way to freedom on the slopes of Ithome.

At the notion of a Messenian polis with a sanctuary at Delphi, Melon now thought as they hiked that it was the Boiotian farmer, the horny-handed plowman who had hated war and had drunk his cool red and napped beneath his arbors, who had nonetheless gone willingly southward for the freedom of these helots. These lowly men from the marshes of Boiotia had chased the Spartans, the very taskmasters of war, across the Eurotas. With Epiteles they had marched amid the high ice into Messenia and built a city out of stone. Now they were ready to go home and blend back into the black soil of Boiotia, in hopes the great shaking-up in the south would mean that the northerners would never again worry about Spartans, who would instead always worry about the Messenians. These were the true Hellenes, the georgoi, these rocky stones like Philliadas, and Antitheos and Staphis, who, immovable on the banks that anchored the poleis, kept it alive a bit longer, while the city folk joined the deluge that was carrying all the lesser pebbles headlong over the falls. For a while longer they would trudge into town and warn their betters that their right spear arms, not walls, kept the enemy distant, that the Makedonian and the Persian would always come from the north unless stopped, and that the more gymnasia and palestrai the city built, the softer the citizens became. Yes, the burning of Lakonia to the south was the win of the farmers, the mesoi who had proved stronger than the lords of Sparta, who had shown they could hold their shields as high as those at Marathon.

Melon himself remembered little of the next day’s trek along the coast to Kirrha-other than that for most of this last leg of the march he worried as he stared at the familiar massif of Parnassos. His farm: Had it been overrun or abandoned in these few days following the death of Chion? Was it even his farm anymore, with Malgis long gone, and Lophis dead, and himself absent? Who would the Boiotians charge with treason for fighting well past the new year: the five Boiotarchs who followed Epaminondas and Pelopidas? Or perhaps Alkidamas and Ainias, who, the jurymen would allege, had planned the campaign? Surely he too as well would be stoned or cut down for joining? A democracy-or so Melon well knew Backwash would allege-could not survive should its leaders trample the laws as they pleased. And they were all lawbreakers of their own as much as liberators of others.

Once the band reached the Delphians’ harbor at Kirrha and could look up the Gorge of the Pleistos and far to the right at the shadows of the peaks of Arkadia across the water, the four finally took leave of their hostage Melissos. As arranged, the youth would go back on board the Messenian ship-Eleutheria- to sail out of the gulf. It would row up the coast on the west side of Hellas to Epiros. The crew, after dropping their marble at Kirrha, had planned to continue north past Akarnania to fetch more Messenians who were eager to reach their liberated homeland. None of these Messenian seamen seemed to mind taking the boy along for ballast, especially as Melon flipped them four silver owls for their trouble.

At the docks, Alkidamas first saw a fat man grab the silver from his steward-and with his one hand, no less- even as he called back from across the boarding plank. “Old man. I thought you’d be dead now, you, my partner, and your Spartan-killers.” It was Gaster. Gaster who never aged, and never worried, and cared not a whit whether you were Athenian or spoke Doric, won or sat out the great war, if only you had four-piece silver owls from Athens in your palm. Yes, Gaster was here, the anti-Epaminondas. “I’m afraid I sold our Theoris to the Messenians, Alkidamas. Or at least sort of. Why, that cutthroat Nikon and his council, they gave me this merchant boat instead. I got marble and ferrying business with it to boot. Not a bad trade. Some shiny coins came with the ship swap. Those helots of yours learned to row and stayed with me on this boat too, better sailors than they proved wise men. So we meet again. I took the risk. You don’t want a cut out of my Eleutheria, though the rhetors might argue it came from your money to begin with. I have proof of sale. Here, take it.”

Alkidamas took the rumpled tiny papyrus and gave it to Melon without thinking to throw it away. “Fine, fat man. No need of proof. You beat those Korinthians out to the gulf, and we all got to Messene as bargained for. As for your trade for the Theoris-well, there’s money to be made even in Messenia, it seems. Take it as the spoils of war.”

“I already have,” announced Gaster as he waved for their passenger to board his deck. Alkidamas then escorted the Makedonian to the quay and laughed. “You remind me of clever Kuniskos, Melissos, if you don’t mind