The End of Sparta (23 page)

Melissos backed off out of slapping distance, and then interjected, “His son fell at Leuktra, not far from the Spartan king. Lichas killed him. Where is this Lichas? Will we ever meet him? I have no fear of this man. We in Makedon have no fear of the Spartans.”

“Enough, Melissos, before you become too familiar with my right arm.” Alkidamas was encouraged by all the free talk, and pointed his finger at Mêlon’s chest. “Ignore his babble. Just three days ago we came through the Oropia from Athens. The boy and I sat on the Pnyx beneath Athena’s temple. The Athenians sent an embassy that should be in Thebes ahead of us—to stop Epaminondas from marching south any way they can, to save their dear Sparta. Old silver-bags Kallias will come. I know these Athenian folk. Some of them are my pupils. I had better be there with you to counter their lies. I saw windy Platôn himself and his longhairs as they went out on the Panathenaic Way toward Thebes. In any case, a word-fight will come tomorrow in the assembly of the Boiotians. Remember, Mêlon, that the Athenians are a tired folk. They have no belly to fight Sparta, much less to worry about Persia and Makedonia. They are exhausted from their long war of the past with Sparta, and simply wish to curry favor with whoever they believe is strongest. Athens is a dead city that believes in nothing other than finding the foe of its foe useful. Do not believe they are now a democracy, if they ever were. They are a mob, an ochlocracy that votes themselves free this and free that that they have not earned. As the orators dress up their greed with purple words once again, they seek to shake down their allies abroad to pay for their sloth at home. They damn the Spartans for their helots, but once in the days of empire had far more helots of their own that they called ‘allies.’ And the beauty of it all is that they still call themselves ‘the school of Hellas,’ as if wiping out the Melians or the men of Skionê, or trying to enslave the polis of Syracuse, is a fine and noble deed because it was done on a vote of the ‘people.’ No wonder they drove out the good men like Euripides and Sokrates and welcomed back the bad like Alkibiades.”

Mêlon had begun to like this rant, for he hated the Athenians as much as did any Boiotian, and Alkidamas put all that venom in much better speech than he ever could. So, Mêlon thought, at last, here was the great speaker Alkidamas in the flesh. The clever teacher of his Nêto, who had put thoughts enough into her chest for her to leave Helikon altogether. The more he examined the
rhêtôr
, the more Mêlon had no bile at this man. The stranger, by a second look at his hands and shoulders and the wear on his frame, seemed that he’d been behind the ox perhaps, or maybe stood his time in battle as well. When the winter sun hit Alkidamas’s worn face at odd angles, Mêlon could see beneath the wrinkles and creases a fighting man of stout nose and broad chin. And best of all, this man of Asia hated both Athenians and Spartans as if he had been born on Helikon.

So as the probing eye had seen, this Alkidamas had once been a grand man of action. That he said nothing to Mêlon about his own high station made their first meeting seem even more remarkable. For indeed this was Alkidamas, the most eloquent of the sophists of Hellas and a man known in Thebes as the student also of Lysis and Philolaios, the inheritor of the rhetorical style of Pythagoras himself, whom the best men at Thebes and Athens asked for advice, the sole philosopher of Hellas who had called for the serfs of Messenia to be freed and all men of Hellas to be judged on their talents rather than their birth. Mêlon was speaking to the greatest persuader in all the city-states, right here on the road to Thebes. Yet he did not quite fathom that this meeting was by design rather than chance, and that it could prove to be of more consequence than it now seemed.

Alkidamas had won a companion for the short journey to Thebes. “Well, can we join you then, Mêlon, on our way back to the main road? We have some things to talk about. Boiotia is a free country for wayfarers. Or so they say of our new democracy of hoplites, so unlike the mob who votes in Athens. The three of us will find the walk quicker with company.” Mêlon was surprised by his own new friendliness to strangers, but he seemed to be at home with both. Better to hear news than the snorting of Xiphos. He grabbed the reins and led Xiphos on. The three made their way back onto the road and headed to the hills of high Thebes in the distance. “I know your Nêto as well. She told me much of you, Mêlon. Or I should say much of your doubts. This day I don’t find you the legendary
misanthrôpos
at all. But they say after Leuktra you began to revisit the world of men, or rather so Phrynê has told me.”

Melissos was squinting and followed the two as they kept talking. Mêlon had slung their packs over the horse and passed the reins to the boy, who was chewing some dried figs in bliss at being relieved of the weight. The three were moving at a brisk walk. The road was quick after they had hiked across some green barley fields on a shortcut back to the main Theban way. They had about fifty or so stadia to go. The winter clouds parted over Parnassos and the sun shone through. For all the good winter weather, Mêlon had at first frowned at mention of Nêto. He had remembered back on Helikon that Nêto had talked of meeting with this great
rhêtôr
. It had pained him, her devotion to a stranger, and a sophist at that. But now that he had met this Alkidamas it no longer quite did, since he seemed a different sort from most of the sophists at Thebes. He certainly was not young nor rich nor handsome, like Proxenos.

Alkidamas turned to his new friend. “Well, Mêlon, master of Nêto who learned much from you before she left us—from the look of your pack and the shield on top, you are preparing for a longer march than today’s hike to Thebes.”

“Perhaps, but I am ready for robbers all the same, and strange folk who accost me on the road,” he replied.

Melissos quickened his pace. With a shrill accent, he broke in, “Oh, no, Mêlon of Helikon. We are not to hurt you, but to learn from you. Or at least my master says we are. We are not robbers at all—we are students, watchers. No one more than I.”

His northern speech grated on the ear. Mêlon immediately had been uneasy that the servant with them was a Makedonian. Behind all this Boiotian talk of helots and Sparta and Lichas, he had heard rumblings of far worse tribes to the north. He used to talk with his Gorgos of this Theban folly, this silliness of Epaminondas of fighting Spartans when they were needed to unite to stop the horse-lords from the north who were half-Hellenes at best and wanted to enslave all those to the south of Thermopylai. Yes, the boy was a Makedonian. Still, Mêlon laughed back, “Learn? But I am going to Thebes to listen. Strange people like you come in from the islands and the north. What this is all about, I suspect. For in battle I have sized up this Epaminondas well enough. I have heard his plans for his own
katabasis
to the south.”

“If he can march,” Alkidamas sighed, “if he can march. For three of the seven Boiotarchs want no part of it, no part of dying outside Boiotia for the freedom of others, especially the helots of Messenia. They cannot see that they are safer when Messenia is freed and Spartans are reduced to being farmers rather than warriors. Boiotians like the foul
rhêtôr
Backwash are not the sort to be taken lightly. I reckon the Athenians may bar the way as well. Who knows what the Korinthians will do at the Isthmos? I can conjure up all sorts of problems that Epaminondas must overcome. So I do my tiny part in trying to ease his burdens. That’s why I sought you out today, since your name alone will be worth a muster of one thousand for the way south.”

The man continued nonstop in a funny sort of Ionic speech and now and then with high Attic mixed, along with the wayfarer talk of Boiotia. “We will see tomorrow whether a council is held.” Alkidamas was turning to Mêlon and shaking his finger in his face. “I don’t wish to leave these folk for our boys up here to clean up. Not now when we are so close to finishing the business for good. But I wished to see you for another reason as well, Mêlon—a small one beside the great one of seeing Mêlon, son of Malgis, hero of Leuktra, blessed of prophecy and fate, once more at the side of Epaminondas as he sweeps into Lakonia and on over to Messenia.”

Alkidamas then quite surprised Mêlon and stopped for a moment in the road. “You have no slaves now, and that is altogether fine and good that you do not after your servants at Leuktra proved themselves better than the free men of Thespiai. But all that does not change the fact you are old, without hair on your head, and with a stagger in your walk—and in need of a servant to carry your bags, a boy like my Melissos here. For all his wild look, he has an air about him of loyalty and duty and could serve you well. And we will call him a hostage rather than your slave if some think liberators should not own others. You would, of course, give him back in the spring, as we promised the Makedonians.”

To convince Mêlon further, Alkidamas finished the story of his own son Kalliphon, who had fallen at Leuktra. “I saw you at Leuktra, Mêlon, as I bore my Kalliphon out. Lichas chopped off his arm. But my Kalliphon was a talker, not a killer. At Leuktra he learned that difference well enough. Lichas and Antikrates cut him down not far from you at the moment the Spartans broke, took his arm right off. So you see we had our own reasons to come to the monument this morning besides the chance of meeting up with you.” Alkidamas lifted his voice a little after he had recalled the ordeal of the Boiotians at Leuktra. “I kept Kalliphon in the symposia and schoolhouse. Kept him away from the muster yard. For that, later he paid quite a price. His hands were polished with scrolls, without the blisters of the plow and spear—learning to counter slurs, never iron. This here Melissos, for all his squinty eyes, knows how to wield a spear in his hands, although I coach him how to master
hyperbaton
and
asyndeton
. He is not my flesh. But I want to do him right and make him the man that my son was not, barbarian though he is. I am training him this year to argue some, but to watch more than talk. And if he goes back to Makedon and tells those wild folk that he apprenticed with Mêlon, son of Malgis of Helikon, and was well treated for his work, then all the better will the Makedonians be pleased with the cities of Hellas.”

Mêlon answered back, “I raised my son Lophis to plow and prune, but Lichas killed him as well—and my father Malgis, and nearly me twice. So I think, Alkidamas, the problem was not in our sons or in us, but in Lichas, whom few who breathe and walk can kill. As for the education of your Melissos, perhaps let him ape the Sacred Band. They drill, they say, and take kindly to boys in their midst. Though, to be frank, your spindly barbarian Melissos with his bony nose and foreign tongue might not stir up Erôs in those boy-lovers.”

“The note of contempt in your voice I share, Mêlon, for such folk. I grant Melissos has not yet a look of a hoplite. He is not the horseman that we expect from such northern tribes. But in the year I’ve had him, I wanted his muscles to grow behind the plow in a way Kalliphon’s did not. You, like me, have no son now, you the far better father than I ever was. Why not a young boy to teach as your own, at least until the next grain harvest comes and these northern hostages go back to Pella? I wager as you watch this sapling grow up—for I can see it myself—you too will grow in a sense.”

Mêlon laughed at that prophecy, but warmed even more to this man—a sophist to be sure of smooth talk, but one who, like himself, had already given his only son to Boiotia. But there was something also about this Melissos that gave him a second stare: He had a hard look for all his ugliness and listened more than he should to each word spoken. On occasion the gawky boy blurted out
tí
’s in his half Hellenic: “What’s that, what’s that? Tell me what that means.” Yes, he was a spy of some sort—but for whom and for what, Mêlon could not guess.

Alkidamas with a wink added, “But of course, as I said, he can carry armor as well as haul out olive limbs. Melissos might prove as good a groom to you and make you into something else as you do the same to him.”

Mêlon laughed. “My manservant Gorgos is gone. But I don’t miss him since there are only vine props in my hands, and I don’t need a shield carrier. Your Melissos will learn all that well enough if he works with me high above Thespiai on Helikon—or if the Boiotians decide to march to the south and I join them to find my Nêto in the south. It is already cold and the season of battle is over. The new year is upon us. Orion and the Pleiades and the Hyades have all long ago set and hid from the sky. I doubt anyone will vote to march anywhere in the coming winter. There is not a stalk of wheat in the fields.”

“Listen, as I said, you may learn as well, old Mêlon, from young Melissos—though in ways you’d rather not.”

Mêlon sensed what Alkidamas meant and now knew not merely that he would take in this Melissos but that something good would come of it as well. For a second Mêlon saw all this in the thistle Melissos, who looked and took in everything and boldly poked his nose into the talk of his masters—this young weed in the field that might just keep growing despite the Spartan scythes to come in the days ahead. He was sharp, as thistles sometimes are. Sometimes the young, the ugly, the outsider—they can see through the smoke and dust far better than those who make it, and so teach their would-be teacher the lessons that the masters had mouthed but forgotten. Besides, even if the army stayed home Mêlon would go on alone and be entering enemy ground soon, in search of his Nêto and without his Chiôn, and so he could not be choosy in his helpers.

Meanwhile Melissos fell about a stade behind the two, looking at the terrain of Boiotia as if he were forty and a general on a horse, scouting a camp outside Thebes for his army of thousands. After the two ahead ceased speaking, Melissos caught up, muttering that the Thebans’ walls did not look so high after all.

The great polis was now before them. At last, all of them quieted as they turned the final corner of the rising road. They passed through the gate of Kadmos and entered the seven-gated city of Oidipous and the heroes of legend.