milk ripe, not quite in full ear-just as Epaminondas had promised the previous winter when he assured the men they would be home from Ithome for high harvest in Boiotia. The other three said little at their parting, for Ainias wished to see Arete of the yellow hair, the widow of Proxenos, by nightfall. He had at last bathed as promised in the icy Mornos above Naupaktos, and then shaved at the inn below Parnassos. Each in Boiotia and beyond would now talk up the virtues of Epaminondas and ready the countryside for his return.
Ainias knew that he always would be a mere day’s walk from the farm of Malgis and that he and Melon were yoked as the twin oxen team who, for all their grunts, would still once more, side-by-side, willingly pull the hard plow of Epaminondas. Ephoros and Alkidamas were anxious as well to get to Thebes by dark. Ephoros had to meet two Athenian scribes and was ready to dictate from his dirty scrolls all that he could remember and all that Alkidamas could relate of the great march to the south. He was soiled with mud on his chiton and his cloak was thick with burrs. The writer wanted a long bath to wash and pleat his hair and get the road stink off before he took a carriage over Kithairon to his salon at Athens, the lone brave voice to take on Platon and his friends on behalf of Epaminondas. The great adventure that had begun so long ago with a marching into the spears of Kleombrotos at Leuktra ended quietly in the spring sunshine a few stadia away. Alkidamas told the Thespian, “I wish you would come to Athens to hear my speech on the liberation of the Messenians. I could use a strong arm since I have no friends at Athens and I hear a number of enemies would like this head off its shoulders. Their democracy is much more of a free-for-all than anything at our Thebes.”
“No, not Athens,” Melon laughed, “I would rather go back to Sparta than that. So good-bye to you three and farewell. I will see you at our trial. Don’t listen to the signs of your doom this year, Alkidama. I wager you will die in your sleep in your eighth decade.” Melon slowly made his way up the winding road to the flanks of Helikon. He was alone, just as he had begun on that cold day five months earlier when he had made the long detour to the monument of Epaminondas on his way to the great debate at Thebes. And Neto? He had left her somewhere at Ithome, lost in the forests above the schoolhouse of Erinna. He should have stayed, even if he had sensed that she could see him through the glens and glades and would not come out and not come home.
He recoiled at the thought of the disorder of the farm. Would it be worse than the mess that he left when he had loitered in town with Phryne? Of course, it must. After his half-year of neglect, there would be chaos-the weeds choking the fields, mud clogging the great drain. Perhaps the stones of Chion’s walls fallen to the ground. The worst of it? There would not be even a one-armed Chion to make right what would take other lesser men years to finish. The three boys of his dead Lophis had only the half-wit Myron to guide them. Damo was twice-widowed now with a young son. She would be locked in the tower as before, now with two husbands to mourn-and, with her young Chionikos, now four children to raise. The tower’s roof probably leaked and its whiteness had probably long since peeled off. In her frenzy, Damo would blurt out the cold voice of reason: Why die for helots far to the south? Still, Melon remembered that there was at least no more Dirke. No more Thrattos or Medios, or Hippias or maybe others like Hipponichos, who had coveted the farm of the Malgidai or even plotted it harm. The final rage from the outlaw Chion had settled those accounts. He had played Zeus on Olympos-as Melon had feared both Chion and Gorgos might have if they had been freed-meting out final justice to any of those he thought had lived far too long.
Melon felt how hard the great ideas of Epaminondas, noble as they were, had fallen on the household of Malgis. He wondered what he would do as he aged, with the bad leg and without the arms of Chion, or even the bitter obedience of Gorgos-and with the pipe-playing of his Neto a distant memory. A wretched farmer without son or a wife finally grows decrepit by the tiny fire and alone ends in hunger on the floor, without the energy to fetch even a light twig for the last flame. Melon half-expected to meet around the next turn of the road the Spartan Antikrates in his armor and tall crest to take a life for the life of Lichas. Or maybe Dirke’s satyrs and centaurs had come down from the high slopes of Helikon and overrun his vineyard, as it went back to the wild savagery of the strawberry trees in his absence, as in the days before Malgis had cut it out from Helikon. Or would the ghost of the hag herself float up with tears and rents on her chest and arms, howling at the night for the knife work of Chion? Nothing is worse for a wayfaring farmer than that last day before home when the mind conjures up thoughts of ruin and mayhem of the long absence.
But none of this proved so. One hundred fifty days and more had it been since the army had left Sparta to march into Ithome. On each, it was Myron, freed at Leuktra, who had stomped about with manure between his toes, and earned the scars and cuts from the slapping canes as he tied the pruned vines back onto the trellises and lifted the stones back onto the walls after the hard rains. In the evenings as soon as the winter freezes ceased, Myron had begun whitewashing the tower, perched on a long ladder, but bending his neck often backward, always toward the south and east to catch at least a glimpse of the homeward trek of the Boiotians. So in the last months the farm, it turned out, had improved with the absence of Melon. That so often happens when those of the land, the petty tyrants of our ground, think they are irreplaceable and learn on return that the truth is even far worse than that for them. Things often prove better with their departure, as liberated dependents learn to fend for themselves without the overbearing hand of the worried overseer. Or perhaps it was the work of Pythagoras all along that made the farm thrive as it did-as its symmetry entranced all who worked in it, and for their toil gave them calm in return. Myron at last found that farm work suited him, and that he was not as dull as his long arms and stooped back made him appear.
The wheat was already drooping with the weight of the ripening grains. The olive pressing that Melon had left before the new year was long finished, the oil safe in the vats with another even heavier new crop on the trees. The sons of Lophis would meet their grandfather in the courtyard-since they wagered Melon at least for now had survived the Peloponnesos and come home safely. They would be eager to boast that Myron had laid out the new pressing room on the slope near the first threshing floor as Chion had once envisioned.
After his first night back on Helikon, Melon said little in the morning to the boys, who were accustomed to rise with the sun if they were to eat one more day. Myron, it seemed, was more himself on a level with the boys. He worked alongside them rather than, like Chion, leading the sons of Lophis to the fields. He knew far better the lore of the neighbors and was liable to go off the farm to listen and stop the rumors that had grown up with the death of Lophis and the flight of Chion.
Melon only now grasped that folk like Chion and he are the worn hobnails that finally ruin the boot and hurt the wearer from the inside. In the end they must be either pulled out or hammered down, however much they have once softened the cruel wear of the hard road for others. These two were the goads of war that are useful only to stop men like Kleonymos or Lichas when such brutes threaten to run amok and hurt the weaker sort. But in peace? They must be watched or better yet kept at a distance, until bloody Ares crashes in and the more civilized and frightened call them back to bar the gate. So Melon noticed the worried glances of his own kin at his scars and grim look that had not yet left him. On the second night back in his bed in the shed behind Damo’s tower, Melon finally pulled off his old cloak, and then saw the tiny scroll that fell to the dirt-the proof of sale of the
Melon got ready to put it in the flame of the lamp, but for some reason unrolled it to see how much that scoundrel Nikon had made off the exchange of Alkidamas’s ship, if there were even a bill of sale rather than a blank scroll. Yet there was writing, but it was no receipt at all.
Nikon salutes the men of Boiotia.
The secretary Helos, grammateus of the Boule writes this. You are home safe if that one-armed Gaster gives you this papyrus. Rejoice. We are free now. In a free Messene, under a free Ithome-with gratitude only to grandfather Alkidamas, and our father Epaminondas, and you, our apple, Melon, and dark-eyed Ainias and the souls of Chion and Proxenos, and wandering lame Neto, and all you others from the north. Don’t be cross with us. The polis Messene is better. This month looting stopped. The helots will soon be Messenians. We were worthy of your blood sacrifice. Free men elected me first citizen of the Messenians, archon Basileus, friend of the Boiotians, friendlier still to the men of Helikon. Know that we Messenians, as long as I am archon, are the first and last friends of the Boiotians.
Nikon, son of Nikostratos, archon of the Messenians.
And Helos wrote this too.
Melon rolled back the tiny paper, tied it carefully, and put it in his small wooden box on the three-legged table next to the bed, where he could find it in his evenings by his lamp and so reread the letter from the archon of the greatest city of Hellas-who could neither read nor write. In half a month’s time as the summer solstice came on, Melon wondered whether he had ever been south at all, so well the farm looked as the grain harvest was continuing in the lower fields and the goats were ready to eat the stubs bare. No one came to disturb him from town. None asked who was free and who not. Melon’s fame from Leuktra had passed on in his absence. That Chion was dead
