The End of Sparta: A Novel (32 page)

Kallistratos once again lowered his voice, and he extended his arms with his palms open to the audience, now and then grabbing the folds of his outer cloak. It was easy for the crowd to say they hated Athenians, but more difficult to jeer at such mellifluous Attic speakers who sounded far better than their own, and were offering peace rather than war. A few Thebans now rose and cheered him on. “He makes more sense than our own warmongers. Give him more time, tell us more.”

In response, Kallistratos now threw out his enormous belly. He cared little that he was already bathed in sweat in midwinter. He wanted these enraptured Boiotian pigs to see just how rich was his table, and how much high-priced food from Attika went into his gut that alone could fuel such deep cadences. “There are many faces in this crowd—not the least this tame Pelopidas himself—that I recognize from their sanctuary in Athens. We the men of Athens once took them in, all so hungry and all on the run. Then no one else would—we did so at great danger to ourselves from our newfound Spartan friends. But these renegades would turn their flames on their benefactors by scorching friend and enemy alike. Gratitude and—magnanimity—
xenia
, I would have thought, are attributes not lightly thrown away by the Hellenes.”

To scattered applause, Kallistratos now frowned and took on a melancholy tone. “We Athenians are magnanimous folk. From the time of Theseus the men of Athens have come to the aid of you Thebans. Learn from us. War, after all, has proven a great leveler. We have had our fall. So has Sparta its own
ptôsis
. Beware that you of Boiotia do not trip up as well.” Slowly the sadness began to leave Kallistratos, and then with an increasingly contorted look, as if he had a bone in his throat, or had a stinky tooth, he began to raise his voice a notch. “We should patch our tears, and pull up over our heads our shared stitched Hellenic cloak to fend off the harsh wind from Persia. A new order has emerged after the war: No one city of Hellas, in this balanced world, dictates to another. My Theban friends, stay within your borders. Do not put the democracy at Athens in the unenviable position of having to censure its cousins across the mountain.” Kallistratos felt the crowd hush. Only one Theban, no more, yelled out, “When did Athens ever stay within its borders—or is our Delion in your Attika now?”

Kallistratos ignored him, but began to worry that the fickle farmers five rows back were tiring of his Athenian oration, as they groaned, then clapped, then hissed, then laughed, depending on the skill of his performance. “Now I address men of substance and prudence and dispense with you of the mob. My dear Boiotarchs, men of moderation and sobriety, ponder this wise counsel and put off action until after the new year. Then once more when the weather warms and the buds break can we bring matters to the council of all the Hellenes in peace, without the disruption of firebrands who as infants soil their diapers and crawl out of councils when they do not get their way.” At the end, Kallistratos’s voice had once again turned soft, as soft as Pelopidas’s, but by far the more polished. Had he not been an Athenian, the Boiotians would have perhaps preferred his mellifluous speech to that of any of their own. As Kallistratos began to slowly walk away, he stopped in the aisle amid the shouting. “A final warning. You are not talking of war thrust on you, as happened on that dark day of Leuktra when a red-caped king crossed your borders.” He pointed his finger at the front row where sat the longhaired estate owners who owned the horses of Boiotia. “No, lordly men of Boiotia, you are pondering a war of choice. This is a preemptive act. Why an optional war? Why lose the goodwill of the victim to earn the antipathy of the aggressor?”

Kallistratos went on even louder, eager to win back the crowd. “Epaminondas will just say he wants to go to Arkadia. When he gets there, he will just say he wishes to go on to Sparta. Then once there, that he wishes yet again just to cross Taygetos into Messenia—and there he gets killed any still alive. We supported your first good war at Leuktra. But not this second, unprovoked, bad war against the Spartans, this we cannot stomach. Preemption and unilateral aggression—these provocations are not in our Athenian natures.”

The assembly grew silent at that, after having laughed at his girth and been entranced by his oratory. Now they were simply confused by his warning that they might die in an unnecessary war that would have no end. Mêlon, however, saw that the real message, the only constant, from this rogue was whatever the men of Thebes did, the Athenians were against. The former was a young, a fresh democracy of farmers, the latter an old democracy of the jobless and those who looked to the dole. The one was as confident as the other was fearful. Perhaps what wily Kallistratos really had meant to say—or so Mêlon barked to Alkidamas above the shouting—was that Sparta once in the great war had beaten Athens badly. Now Athens feared that Thebes might do the same to Sparta. After all, it would be a bitter blow indeed to Athens, the self-proclaimed school of Hellas, if Epaminondas could do to Sparta in a single season what Athens had not been able to in twenty-seven.

No Man a Slave

Suddenly there was a commotion as a Boiotian loudmouth stood up in the crowd and demanded his say. It was Menekleidas of Aulis again, old Backwash, who had tried to stop the fight the night before Leuktra. After the battle he had appeared on the battlefield, amid the wreckage and corpses, covered with his rubbed-on blood and screaming in pain, he said, from a blow by Lichas himself. How he had been nicked in the fiftieth row from the front, no one quite knew. But that had been more than a year ago, and in the interim Backwash had repeated so often the lie that Leuktra had been his plan all along that the wearied listeners came to half-believe it—and his false wound as well.

He did not believe that Epaminondas could take an army into the vale of Lakonia in midwinter—and moreover the Athenians had given him five pouches of silver to say so. He was as firmly set against fighting now as he had been in the tents of the generals on the eve of Leuktra. Quickly Backwash brawled his way through the crowd in the assembly, turning his head from Mêlon when he got to the front, already chanting “
Eirênê
,
eirênê
—peace” before he had even reached the dais. Backwash announced that it was past time for a real Boiotian to speak. Yes—a real Boiotian like himself, one born in the black cow-soil nearby, a man of the people to address his own people. Mêlon remembered why a year and more ago he had kicked the scoundrel into the trash heap outside the tent of the generals. But now there was no Chiôn to be seen, nor a man quick to temper like Philliadas of Tanagra. So Backwash felt safe amid the mob with Athenian mercenaries on his flanks. He ran back and forth at the
bêma
like a wobbly, webfooted drake who has just lost his head to the butcher.

Despite his smell and his pear-shaped bald head and jowls, Menekleidas was well liked by the Theban town-dwellers to whom he helped spread the obol dole. Now he sought to take up the hammer of his Athenian paymaster Kallistratos and pound down Pelopidas’s peg a bit farther. After Leuktra, the farmers of Aulis had driven Backwash out to Thebes, for they knew his lies and had tired of his tongue. He left his toll taking and took up his kiln work full time. His clothes were usually stained with clay, for this Backwash spun pots in the agora, when the law courts were slow and few paid for his arguments. But he had turned his cloak inside out and felt he was as lordly looking as any horse-owner.

“As a spear-wounded veteran of Holy Leuktra, let me speak not of what is right—for who knows what’s right in a difficult matter such as this? Is not ‘right’ anyway a relative thing, and always dressed up as the ‘good’ by the man with the heaviest fist? So instead, let us of the poorer kind ponder what is expedient for all of Boiotia.” He pointed over to Pelopidas, and he began to shake his body and twist his head in agitation. “Did you listen, men of Boiotia, fellow veterans of the hard fight at Leuktra, to your own Pelopidas—to his appalling madness that will engulf us all and take our sons from the vineyards so that they can rot in the mud of Sparta? For that is where this Arkadian gambit will end up.” None challenged him, so Backwash went on. “Look—men are in armor outside our walls, before our vote. They put a dagger to our throat and then ask if we dare sheath it. Consider the logic of it all. Does this Pelopidas or Epaminondas, does either have a son in the front ranks among the
prostatai
? Or do they instead talk of war but send your kin to the sound of Spartan pipes, like they did to us at Leuktra? Is not this childless drone, like his master Epaminondas, always buzzing about wars for the children of others to fight in?” He hurried now, just as if he were spinning out a smooth calyx or hydra for his clay kiln.

“What business do our folk have in Arkadia, in Sparta, and in Messenia on the slopes of Mt. Ithômê, in shadowy cold Messenia, far after the Pleiades have set? That’s just where such an expedition of these mad Pythagoreans will all too soon end up, mark my words—with our red blood on their white snow.” He paused again, and was ready to duck. But when no fruit was thrown, he continued. “I have heard that the Peloponnesians wish to have walls; fine, let them build walls. So the Messenians wish for their freedom; fine, let them earn it as we did at Leuktra. I have heard hoplites are needed to surround the Spartan acropolis; fine. But let Pelopidas and his Sacred Band—not us hoplites of Boiotia—leave tonight.” Then his face twitched more and he became louder: “Let us spend money on Boiotians, not helots. We could have a new drain to the agora, some plaster for the columns of the Herakleion, or an extra obol for the dole, for the price of a day fighting down there.”

A few shouted in unison, “No, to war! No to money for the helots! Yes, yes, yes to peace. Stay home. Spend our coins on ourselves. Keep spinning, pothead.” The argument that neither a free Messenia nor a defeated Sparta was worth one more dead Boiotian was good Nemean red wine for many in the crowd, who had already had enough of someone else’s glorious war. That there was a free council of the Boiotians without a Spartan guard on the acropolis—and thanks only to Epaminondas—was forgotten by all.

“The truth,” Backwash said, finally slowing down and walking in tighter circles, “is that Messenians, our so-called allies, are by nature servile folk—every one of those helots fitted for their proper task as serfs to their betters.” He was pointing to the Boiotians in the first row and speaking in the drawl of the Euripos, accented with lisps and nasal drones. “By the gods, the helots are a rural and backward race of tribes and sects who quarrel and kill like savages. They are no better than Homer’s wild Cyclopes.”

“Few of them can read letters. Fewer still know anything of mastery of the sea or the polis. Do they know of anything other than tilling for Sparta in their black soil of the Peloponnesians? They don’t even have their own language or race. Any other people would long ago have built cities and harbors and at least a trireme or two. So let us stay put and far away from such folk. Let us, the heroes of Leuktra, start finishing our own walls in our own cities, and rebuilding our ties with Athens whose friendship Kallistratos here has so ably outlined.” Kallistratos stood up and waved to the crowd. But Menekleidas ignored him and went on, not about to let even his benefactor cloud his moment. He was laughing, and chuckling at his own jest. “As I warned all of us on the night before Leuktra, is Ainias the killer not that fair-weather crane from the shoreline of Stymphalos? Has he not flown back home, cawing and cackling, when his feathers were ruffled that he could not muster our folk to do his own dirty business down south? No, men of Boiotia, let us accept the world as it is—not as we dream it might be. Enough of this mad democracy-spreading.”

Mêlon shrugged. He had come to Thebes to learn what the army of the Boiotians would do. Maybe he would get a word about his Nêto to guide him when he went south to find her soon. But as he heard more slurs from such folk, it had the unintended effect of making Epaminondas, for all his talk of freeing helots a thousand stadia away, only wiser in his own eyes—especially as he contrasted these sophists and windbags with the quiet general facing down Lichas in those moments on the left at Leuktra.

Backwash turned to end his case against the march south. He leaned against the
bêma
and took the corner of his cloak to wipe sweat from his dry forehead. “Then there is our acquaintance, the ghost of Pythagor—aaaas, who, it seems, is floating always right above this madness. Why all these strange -
as
names. I am sick of -
as
this,
-as
that—these plotters like Pelopid
aaas
, Epaminond
aaas
, Alkidam
aaas
. Yes, this new
Pythagoreaaas
cabal who have taken over our democracy. They taught not merely the secrets of triangles and the patterns of numbers, but apparently, in between their frolicking with our women, they schemed to take good men from Boiotia and get them killed for the nonsense of Messenian freedom.”

Backwash was using his hands to bring on the hoots, working his fingers, even, almost as if he were at the wheel turning out a grand wine bowl to be painted with red-figured dancers around its base. “So let us next spring find it to our advantage to march when the grain is in ear and food on the march is aplenty. Let us wait until there are strong walls and proven allies to cover our retreat. We should cultivate our alliance at home in soft familiar ground rather than in vain break our plows over barren and rocky soil abroad.” While no one was ready to abandon entirely Epaminondas’s notion of invading Sparta—given their prior sanction for a winter muster—the rough sanding done by Kallistratos was now polished fine by this Menekleidas.

Still, there was always that hope and doom of democracy—what the majority wanted, anytime, about anything, they got in a moment’s notice. The mob cared little for the yoke of the law or the time-wasting of the overseers in the council or the shame of turning a previous day’s vote upside down. Old Herodotus had it right: It is easier to get thousands of hotheads in a democracy to muster than to win over a few stern-faced oligarchs. So Mêlon looked over and watched a grim Epaminondas in his armor and tattered cape slowly stand up, smile, and carefully make his way onto the
bêma
. As the general passed, Mêlon saw him slap Backwash on his temple, “
Phugete, phugete
. Foul mouth of the channel, flee, before you get a fist as well. Get back to your clay.”