The End of Sparta (46 page)

Nikôn raised his tone. “No, no. I sense it, even if the Spartan rumors are false. The soul of Nêto speaks to me, warns me of our danger. Gorgos at least lives. He’s alive but gone from here. He’s with Antikrates. Both are fated to no good unless we kill them now. They will lead an army against new Messenê. Ask the souls of your Proxenos and our Erinna; they’d be alive now if those two were dead. Doreios and I will go back out, one last time, and scour the valleys from the altis at Olympia to the summit on Taygetos. We can smell him from here. I will come back before Epaminondas leaves with news of your Gorgos or the head of our Kuniskos.” Nikôn went back up to Taygetos and all word of him went as well.

The builders from Thebes had taught the helots how to cut and dress stones, and how to swing their block and tackle over the walls’ rise with cranes mounted on oak beams. After the bloody work of Epitêles, there was no need for patrolling any more for bandits as spring came on, and the blue lupin of the month of Agriônios began to bloom amid calm. The helots stacked their stones, and it was agreed that the Spartans were all either dead or on the other side of Taygetos. Ainias sat atop the first tower and with a clay-baked cone barked out orders to those below. Epaminondas was drilling Messenian hoplites and teaching them the spear work of the phalanx—just in case Agesilaos came before the seventh or eight circuit was finished.

Alkidamas had reclaimed his hostage servant Melissos. The boy, for all his tough talk of armies and killing, was quieter as he took in the rising walls of Messenê—as if the stones held him in a trance and were no longer ramparts to copy, but almost had voices that spoke to him about the power of democracy. He, like Ainias, had thought the helots would only kill and loot, but was learning that they were better wall builders than the men even of Mantineia and Megalopolis—and wondered why the Spartans themselves could never build a citadel like Messenê. Alkidamas and Melissos took Mêlon and Ephoros up to the high perch of Ainias, where the five could see the entire circuit of the new polis and the terraced fields of the spring-green valleys beyond. Off in the distance they could spot Epaminondas at dawn, coming back into the valley of Ithômê, after a final march from Pylos by the sea with his new army of Messenian hoplites. They saw the outline of an entire city—the people of Messenia in constant motion, up and down Ithômê, as walls rose higher by the day, the towers elegant with dressed stones and polished embrasures. Pelopidas’s men were leading hundreds of teams of oxen, bringing down the latest batch of gray blocks from the mountain crest. Alkidamas pointed in every direction, as if he were charting the stars, in a slow methodical circle. “What are we to call all this, my conspirators in democracy? Has any in Hellas ever seen men working on through the dark—and yet back sweaty as well by the sunrise? No wonder the men of Sparta ate well with slaves like these. But how much harder they work when their fruits are their own. They are Hellenes all along, better than any of the free Peloponnesians.”

Ainias kept pacing around the parapet, unsure himself whether to be proud over Proxenos’s city or angry that in his mind it rose so slowly—or madder that he was here at all. But for now, he was confident that the helots would at last shackle the Spartans and keep them home for good. “There is a natural law, Alkidamas, at work, that always winnows out the chaff from wheat. So now with these fields and stones, all the Hellenes can see cities of the Spartans and Messenians side-by-side, and determine who are the better folk after all.”

Alkidamas laughed. “So Ainias is now won over to our side? The good cities are the work of the
dêmos
, just like when our Boiotians settled all their own affairs. What has oligarchy ever brought Hellas? If we are in the age of stone, it is because these vast new cities marshaled the people, who alone decide how it will protect itself. It is the people, always the people who both loot and yet alone create lasting cities of stone.” Ainias ignored him. But Mêlon was troubled hearing that praise of the
dêmos
, inasmuch as he was in deep thought about Nêto and Chiôn, and wondered what his son Lophis had died for. In this new age of Hellas, where walls and democracy made all alike, there were no longer to be men like the son of Malgis, Epitêles, and Ainias—and, if the truth be known, Lichas too, who had warned them all of what they had done at Leuktra in the parley after the defeat of the Spartans. There would be no more Chiôns either? No, the age of the hoplites, of a few exceptional men in bronze, who would decide the fate of states in an afternoon of hard war, was now over—destroyed by a few exceptional men in bronze. Perhaps Alkidamas was right after all about the good future ahead for the helots, but in a fashion he hardly imagined. The people had their bellies full of war and the songs of battle, and the armored men who owned land and could alone afford bronze. So they had built themselves walls to avoid fighting, at least fighting in the fashion of hoplites and phalanxes. Perhaps the people would stay snug in their high stones, and settle their quarrels with the new machines that flung iron arrows over the ramparts, or draw on the book knowledge of Ainias and Proxenos how to mine, and countermine—how to do anything other than march to the sound of crashing wood and bronze. What would the stone-bound do if they met folk like Melissos and his Makedonians, his tribes from the north who were weaned on horses and carried on their belts bright badges that marked the number of men they had cut down in battle?

Mêlon woke up from his day trance and noticed that Alkidamas and the dour Ainias had been talking the entire time as they moved all over to the highest ramparts of a section of finished walls. Ainias now continued: “Come over here, Mêlon, we can talk and I can point to you the stones as they rise. You can see that by month’s end all twenty towers are finished. Look at the streets of the city. They’re all paved with flat stones and drains, and all in a grid, with corners square. Look at the city of Proxenos. He drew it from the mind of Hippodamos, who got his odd and even streets, his straight lines from the voice of the One God himself. And the childish Messenians followed his plans only on the silly myth they were not really Proxenos’s ideas, but those of their ancient hero Aristomenes who supposedly three hundred years earlier had prophesied that his people would build a city far grander than the Spartan hill and then buried his plans in a jar. When a Spartan goes to battle, he leaves a mess, a labyrinth of clutter on his acropolis. When a Messenian rushes out to meet enemies, he now runs down a broad way to a square agora. His phalanx falls together in the manner in which his city was planned, his field surveyed, and the seats of his council hall divided up. Every hoplite, every house, every farm, every bench will be equal to another, none greater, none smaller—daily reminders that there are no more Spartans, no more harmosts, only the square corners of square thoughts.”

By the fourth month of the new year, the capstones of more than half the walls of Messenê were nearly finished—even though the Argives and Boiotians had forced the Messenians to add ten stadia to ensure that the circuit ran up the slopes to the crests of Mt. Ithômê. Rumors of a Spartan army on the move against the new helot state proved fantasy—as did more stories about Nêto and Chiôn alive on Taygetos hunting down Gorgos. In truth, Agesilaos was still hobbling along the banks of the Eurotas and waiting for his Spartan stragglers to get back home safely over the high passes of Taygetos as the spring snow melted and with it the last guard of the Spartan-held Messenia, never to return. When King Agesilaos finally drew up his muster lists, he discovered that few of his Spartans in the west had made it back alive from Ithômê. Shepherds had brought him more news of the arrival of the wild shape-changer—not a god, or even a half-god like Herakles, but a man-wolf, or mountain bear, yes, more a man-bear—hunting down all winter long the Spartan packs in the mountains, and hanging the
kryptes
by their capes. For some he was surely some
daimôn
of legend. Perhaps he was wily Sinis, who tied his prey between two bent pines and watched the trunk split the legs, now come up from Epidauros to find new prey. Others swore they had seen the killer Skirôn who tossed his victims over the gorges of high Taygetos. Many thought the monster was grizzled and lame Korynetês of widows’ tales come back alive who smashed the brains of wayfarers and shepherds with his iron club. The helots, however, knew him as the Great Deliverer, the shape-changer that ensured no Spartan dare return home over the passes of Taygetos. Nikôn, who alone went up to the summit and who alone came back, knew the man-bear as the real bulwark of Messenia, the demon that came late and from nowhere and had so scared the Spartans that they dared not muster to stop the rising walls below. And yet as for Nikôn and his rangers, the monster let all of them be.

Lichas, still on the east side of the mountain in Sparta, promised to send his best of the Spartan royal guard up to Taygetos to find this
daimôn
. The Spartans would drag him down—demon or not—to the gorge and throw him onto the rocks. If he were some enormous bear or freak wolf-dog, he would surely bleed; if a ghost they could get priestesses to cast spells and incantations to send him back into the crevices below. If a black god in human shape, Lichas would wrestle him down to Hades. So he sent word for Antikrates and the sword man Klôpis, and tall Thibrachos as well, and the mother of Thibrachos, fiery Elektra his latest wife whom he bedded in her tall tower despite her four decades and more—all eager to kill helots and their friends and mount the severed head of this man-bear monster among the trophies of the Menalaion at Sparta. The best of the Spartans would kill the man-bear. Agesilaos would see that the passes were open and the silly stories of old women about monsters and demons were no more than the babbling of the unhinged. Then the way back to Messenia would be open.

Even as the small band of Spartans plotted to find news of Kuniskos and scout a way for Agesilaos into Messenia, the time of departure for the army of Boiotians neared. The walls were finished, and there grew talk against Epaminondas, both among his own men who wanted to leave immediately and among the freed helots who almost had their circuit and wished the foreigner gone. A free people, their new demagogues proclaimed in the assembly, no longer wanted to feed three myriads of “friends.” Anyway, the camp of Epaminondas stank and fouled the field near the Arkadian Gate. The Boiotians drank at night and sang of their spearing in Lakonia and took all credit for the end of Sparta, and laughed at the helots for their pretensions of being men of the polis. Too many of them spoiled the sanctuary of Asklepios and were bathing in the holy waters of Klepsydra.

As he readied to leave, Epaminondas wished to remind all of the good done, in this his first and last public address to the helots in the half-finished stadium of the Messenians. All the citizens of the new polis filed into the stade-long course at the south of the city, near the Messenian Gate. There were forty thousands on its earthen seats, and maybe as many more on the field and on the walls above. Epaminondas spoke in front of a new iron statue of himself near the entry to the stadium and an altar of thanks that the women of Messenia had raised for the Boiotians and Argives.

“A great plague has passed, men of Messenê. Those who crossed their borders to enslave others are themselves surrounded. The Spartan hunters have become the hunted. Yet I remind you only that freedom won after these hundreds of years can just as easily be lost again in one—should the nerve of your newfound democracy fail and you let your shields slack to your knees. It is the nature of all men in peace to become soft and scoff at the prior hard work of their fathers who gave them such bounty. Beware the real enemy is the smoother second thought that always mocks the rougher first. You tire of us, we of you. Such is also the way of peace. So be it. Enjoy these last days of spring. Soon when your hair is white or gone, the remembrance of these great days alone will give you comfort when all else is gone.”

This was no audience of jaded Thebans who usually hooted and pelted their speakers with fruit, but one of recently freed men who slowly grew silent in renewed appreciation of their liberator as he finished and would soon depart. Now this Epaminondas took them all back to the first days when he and Epitêles came off the mountains, and the Spartans fled in terror at the mere rumors of their descent, and the helots and their liberators were one.

“We are seeing the new age of walls under holy Ithômê, worthy of Mykenai or Troy of old when only the Cyclopes could build such stout ramparts as these before us. But men of Messenê, do not trust solely in such rock or oak. It is not towers or the new machines that cast stone from afar that keep men free. Only the right arms of those willing to meet the enemy shield to shield and spear to spear will keep the Spartans out. Now the time comes for us to return to our families in the north below Helikon and Kithairon. Farewell, men of Messenia, and do not forget what those heroes of Hellas did on your behalf to make you the best men of the Peloponnesos.”