The End of Sparta: A Novel (36 page)

Proxenos laughed. “You mean you tried to talk
erôs
into Nêto, goat, and got beat by a poetess no less.”

“That too,” Lykomedes chuckled, “that too, for I like a tall woman with ribs that I can see and yet with breasts that flop and the rear of a wide sort as well. But your philosopher Alkidamas already won Nêto over. Why, I don’t know. He has no fun in him, only serious stuff. For all that Erinna’s short hair, I imagine she had some love of men left in her yet. If not, she’s as good as my pretty little Aristôn all the same.”

Proxenos wanted to have his leave of foul Lykomedes and start on the way to Megalopolis to muster more men for Epaminondas. “But she is among her own folk. And Nêto is far wiser from her long walks with Alkidamas, who, to be frank, is a different sort than you, Lykomedes. I hiked with this woman to Leuktra. It was her prayers that brought the gods out of the temples and her portents that the simple folk cheered. Had she not been with me, Epaminondas would have had only half the number needed to stop Kleombrotos.”

The three walked out of the theater. They kept bantering along the grand porticoes of Lykomedes, planning the provisions for the army they all hoped was already marching. It was decided that Ainias and Proxenos would head immediately westward into Arkadia and the new site of Megalopolis. There they would prepare another army of liberators of the south and join the Eleans marching as well. Perhaps Ainias and Proxenos would be back in half a month with a new army to meet the horde descending from Thebes, as well as the Mantineians under Lykomedes. The three armies would meet up for the final descent into the vale of Lakonia itself—if the generals voted to go on.

Proxenos finished with a warning to the plotter at their side. “Be careful, Lykomedes, when you soon meet Epaminondas. He has gotten word that you are to march with us. His spies have told him you have food that he will need. Don’t deceive him. He is not of the sort as we, but has become something far different, far more dangerous. This is a man, after all, who when he kills his sleeping sentries on his nighttime inspections, only shrugs and says, ‘I left them as I found them.’ ”

Two Women

Not long after her summer parting with Mêlon, Nêto had visited Theanô, the widow of Staphis, and prepared to head south across the Isthmos. She thought that she might have a half-year, maybe more, to rally the helots and prepare the way for Epaminondas at the end of the year. Yet Nêto had never been beyond the confines of Boiotia. At least not since her childhood kidnapping and sale to Mêlon at the port of Kreusis. But she was glad to leave the north after her words with Mêlon. Alkidamas had told her the way and arranged for a guide to get her to Mantineia—and then, when near the borders of Messenia, for the helot Nikôn to lead her up to Ithômê. Still, Nêto wondered, how do northerners find a path over the peaks near Korinthos and then catch the trail that leads deep into the Peloponnesos beyond? Then do they go down farther south into Ithômê, and if so, on what road? She needed her Porpax—now no doubt in the belly of the man-bear on Kithairon.

After Leuktra, Nêto had slowly made herself believe that as a freedwoman she was no longer needed in Boiotia, much less on the home estate with the Malgidai. Chiôn with the boys could handle the chores for Mêlon as the master idled in town with Phrynê—while his terraces caved and the bindweed and thistle dotted his barley fields. Instead her new mentor Alkidamas had urged her to go south. “You speak of messages in your head from this Nikôn, whom I know as well from my travels in the Peloponnesos when I was still not considered an enemy of Sparta and walked freely beneath Ithômê. I think you will find him in the new Mantineia, or so he says he will find you should you go there. There are now twenty of you Messenians for each citizen of Sparta, yet no common voice, no plan of revolt. Our Nikôn sounds as if he has the spirit, but not yet the sense, to free his kindred. Use your prophecies and miracles in the temples to aid his cause, and tell him visions, if you have them, of things to come. Hundreds of wayfarers won’t all wait on Epaminondas and the muster of the Thebans. Already in twos and threes these men, our allies, make their way to join the new cities of the Arkadians, and soon you will find me in Messenia as well, and maybe well before the arrival of the army of Epaminondas. Still, be careful in the south. A woman without the black shroud and the toothless mouth is in as much danger on the road with men as she is alone with the man-bear on Parnassos or Taygetos to the south.”

Nêto remembered that Alkidamas had added, “About that guide for you. Well, she is a strange sort, a misfit they say, like you, maybe. I have asked her to join you when the clusters redden and the grapes sweeten. She is a poetess, by name Erinna, a follower of the Muses at Athens, born out at Tenos, where the afternoon waves swamp the fishing boats. Many would-be poets, now and in the past, have gone by that name, both good and bad students of the Muses. But she is the true one who sang of her lament for the dead Baukis, that tale which is now played in the symposia of Athens and Thebes. And she is tired of Athens and its shouting democracy and its descent into chaos. Like you, she is a restless sort, in search of a great deed, and like you she hears songs in her head of Ithômê and the great awakening to come. She claims visions of tall ramparts to rise, and is a devotee of Epaminondas, though I doubt the woman has ever met our general. Men know of her songs and perhaps her name alone will open gates otherwise shut tight. You two women will hike to Ithômê, the blind with a hand on the shoulder of the blind. Both of you will be heading to war ahead of the great throng of Epaminondas.”

All that was after Nêto had left Helikon, and Mêlon had sent no word for her to return to the farm. Now in the Dog Star days and a full year after Leuktra, the young Erinna of Tenos had left Athens to find Nêto. She waited for her for three days at the pass inn near Eleutheria as she hiked up from Athens on the high border road. Soon they were on the summer road to the south, a half-year before the Boiotians would even vote to march.

Nevertheless, the plan of Alkidamas for the two women was to head to Mantineia in seven days, and find a Lykomedes. “A trickster of sorts,” the sophist had warned, “with tusks instead of teeth in his ugly head.” Once there, they were to round up helots and head westward and to send a runner back with news of the preparation for the revolt of the Mantineians. Alkidamas reminded Nêto that she was not alone, but if she and this Erinna could rouse the helots, if Epaminondas and Mêlon could stir the Boiotians, if Proxenos and Ainias could rally the Arkadians, they all might descend like a horde of locusts, converging on the pastures of Lakonia. “Lykomedes may find you useful and so will not have his thugs slit your throat and throw you in his proud new moat. That is the custom for them when they catch a helot on the road—and a pretty one at that. So I gave him some silver Athenian coins. He promises that he has food and a room for you two under the third tower from the main gate. But be out of Mantineia by a day or so with your helots. Prick your ears up to hear word of Proxenos or Ainias, who may be crossing back and forth all year at the Isthmos, though both may not get to Mantineia until you leave. On some winter day the two will be leading an army back from Megalopolis—or so we hope.”

As the month of Theilouthios waned, Nêto and Erinna slept most of the late afternoons. They walked at sunset before nightfall when the Aegean wind came up and the stars and early moon give softer light than did the glare of Helios. In the beginning of their trek southward, it was not hard to find the road out from the border at Boiotia. All Hellas was afire this late summer, even though the congress of Boiotia would not take up the march for months more. Then the army might not set out until the cold and the year was well over. For now, the two could always tail along the mercenaries who headed for the new city of Mantineia, the rumored meeting winter place of the armies. Small parties were camping on the paths to the Isthmos, some in wagons, a few with horses. At daybreak Nêto and Erinna sought out the resting shade of the orchards and groves on the slopes of the Megarid opposite the sea.

From there they peered out at hundreds more on foot, with servants trailing laden with panoplies, all these zealots convinced that Epaminondas would soon be going south and they should wait the summer out for him down in Arkadia. Alkidamas was right. It was good that she had a companion to share the road—especially one like Erinna. From the looks of the warrior poet, she guessed that they could beat away even a determined throat-cutter. The two women made their way south on the Peloponnesos road that Proxenos and Ainias had trod so many times in the year after Leuktra, in their journeys to oversee the building of Mantineia and Megalopolis—and would make one last time after the women, marking out the grand route for the
katabasis
of Epaminondas to come.

As they made their way farther southward, Erinna explained her devotion to the Muses and her worship of the goddess Artemis. She gave Nêto bits and pieces of her long song on spinning and the loom. She was composing as they hiked, and by the second day the two were back walking in the light and returned to sleeping at early night. Her day speech was made with a high Attic pitch that so many of the islanders aped after living in Athens, though she had left Athens for the Boiotians because she wished to believe that men—men like Epaminondas—sought to serve their democracy rather than be served by it. But when she sang at night her song was more Doric, though more often a south Asian strain than from the Peloponnesos. “Hymen! O Hymenaeus, while the dark night in silence whirls about, darkness covers my eyes …” Nêto looked about, worried that robbers might hear Erinna’s strains, and grabbed her knife as the poetess let out loud lines in the night. As they passed the islands below in the gulf, she sang more softly how Nêto was bathed in the scarlet of the huge sun that rose over Salamis out to the east. She went on about a prophecy that a new Themistokles was coming to defeat tyranny—and other such visions that came to her on the road. Nêto dubbed her “Epaminondas” because every third word seemed to be “Epaminondas will …” or “Epaminondas can …”

They stopped at the sanctuary at Eleusis, and then slept at the fountain house at Megara before heading over the pass of Geraneia at the Isthmos. But Nêto would later remember little of the trees and mountains and sea below on their hike to the Isthmos, only that Erinna knew of an entire new universe, of Praxilla, Korinna, and moons, plants, and birds, rather than the serried ranks of men at war. She often avoided the heavy hexameters of Homer and Hesiod, and instead preferred the lighter five-footed elegies of the love poets. Erinna was no longer young but nearly thirty winters, smooth-skinned yet untouched, or so she boasted.

Nêto had heard that the poetess was a Sapphic and avoided the world of men and so was a virgin only of a certain sort. At least it seemed that way, since her songs were often threnodies about her dead friend Baukis, who had married too early and died in childbirth in service to a man not worth the birth pangs. Now as they descended above the flatlands of the Isthmos, Erinna changed her themes and began to sing even more often of the life of Epaminondas, whom she had heard debate just one time in the agora at Thebes. Her Epaminondas, like Erinna, had married no mortal. He sired no children. He left
erôs
to lesser mortals, as he had pledged his years left for the greater good of
eleutheria
and the One God of order and calm. Or so Erinna imagined he did.

At day’s end, when Nêto worried to her as the campfire roared that the Boiotians were only in a war of words, that the great army might not march until days before the tenure of Epaminondas expired, leaving him an outlaw in winter, Erinna began to chant a new refrain of Epaminondas, who would “shear Sparta of her glory” and leave “all Hellas independent and free,” as if the cities of Mantineia, Megalopolis, and Messenê were already finished, the helots beyond Taygetos freed, and the farms of Lakonia on fire, a mounted Epaminondas galloping freely over the Peloponnesos supervising the upheaval.

“I like your ‘all Hellas independent and free,’ ” Nêto answered as she heard the chorus for the fiftieth time. “But I worry that when you meet him, he will not have wings on his heels and golden locks down his shoulders, and so you may find your god merely half-divine, if even that.”

“Well, Epaminondas may need my song as his defense, if he lives and returns an outlaw to Thebes. He will need that answer when he is in the dock before the jurymen of Boiotia, the ingrates who are angry that he has saved them.” When the two could see the looming massif of Akrokorinthos in the evening sky, Nêto finally asked Erinna how they were to cross the Korinthians’ narrow land. Alkidamas has warned her that it was hard for any of the northerners to pass into the Peloponnesos. Erinna only shrugged, without worry as they had hiked up a bit along the mountains away from the Aegean to avoid robbers. There they stopped with a nice fire of dried tamarisk, and heated up a broth of leeks and barley and dried lamb.

As Erinna took off her long cloak, Nêto noticed for the first time in their three days of walking that underneath she wore a heavy leather chiton. There were leather wraps up her legs, and broader hide bands with bronze studs on her arms. Nêto had seen some leather before on a woman, but not this close and with these odd designs of stars around a crescent moon. Strangest of all, she examined in detail a small bow on Erinna’s shoulder, a Scythian type. That explained at least the hide on her arms and fingers. Erinna finally answered, “I have friends who will get us across. But I am more worried that your helots will not lead us into Messenia when the time comes and we cross from Arkadia. You talk of this Nikôn as your guide and yet confess you have never met the rebel; and yet you assure me you speak to him in your dreams. I wager I know more about him than you do. Is that how you convince me that you are not crazy as the Boiotians say, or fleeing Helikon in lovesickness? As for me, I promised your mentor, Alkidamas, I would see you safely to Mantineia, Nikôn or not. If he joins us, fine; if not, I head west anyway. I would start a school on Ithômê. I plan to train young helots to read their letters and know their Sappho, and their Korinna and Myrtis. And yes, Alkidamas gave me some silver Athenian owls to escort you safe to the south—but only half what Phrynê offered me to slit your throat here on this side of the Isthmos.” Nêto looked baffled at that last confession: Should she be angry that Erinna had come along only as a bought guide, or happy that she had refused to be a bought assassin?