The End of Sparta Read online

  His pteruges—wide leather straps weighted with iron square rivets—hung down from his breastplate, flapping about to protect his lower parts, should the long leather apron on the bottom of his shield fail. The helmet crest of Antikrates—black stallion hair, mixed in with a white mare’s tail—bobbed a foot higher than his head, making him seem taller, more savage still. A bit of beard and two narrow eyes were all that peeked out from his bronze helmet, as if there were some beaded lizard behind the horrific metal mask. Or perhaps there was, since few had seen Antikrates without his helmet. Haima—“blood”—he called his spear of cornel wood with a black iron head that went nine feet from its bronze butt spike up to the sharpened point. The shaft was a thumb or more thick, too heavy for any but his father Lichas to stab with. All this was worth more than five oxen, or a field slave of thirty years. The panoply had once been worn by Lichas in his flower until he passed it on to Antikrates, lest one day the old man fall in battle and have Haima carried off by an Athenian or Theban lord.

  The Spartan even with the weight of his armor was as straight as his father Lichas was stooped. Antikrates scowled and slapped any helot servant who was slow to get out of his way: “Shield against shield—crest against crest we fight. Ares is our god. Artemis and Pan are our henchmen.” While the Boiotian generals across the gully parleyed and bickered and voted, these invaders were united, all eager to raise their spears. They were worried only that the Boiotians might run rather than fight them. The enemy camp told this story of Spartan order well enough. Shields, thousands of them, were arranged in neat concentric circles. Most rested on wooden tripods. A lean-to of twenty spears—not one out of kilter—stood next to every fire. Helots ran from campfire to campfire with pots of oil and jugs of wine. Order governed the camp, so too order on the battlefield—Spartan eunomia.

  As the hoplites prepared their mess, dutiful Messenian slaves had taken out their sheepskin rags. They dipped them in olive oil, polishing their masters’ breastplates and greaves. Others brushed their horsehair crests. Still more braided the long tails of their masters’ hair. Amid them all, Antikrates now left the side of his father. He marched through the camp after an older and toothless red-cape Sphodrias, who liked to sneak into the enemy camp and slit the throats of the snoring. The two kept bellowing out as they stalked past the fires, “Get out your whetstones. Sharpen your cleavers. Our blades will go through these pigs as spits do fat pork. Sharper still. Always file your iron, men. Ready your iron for your king.”

  Finally King Kleombrotos himself appeared and yelled out to his Spartan subjects. He was standing on the back of a wagon surrounded by a throng of his royal hoplites. The lord was a young sort, maybe no more than forty years. As the king of the Agiad line, he had already held his office for the past nine. Kleombrotos had not wanted to fight this day. He had headed north for Thebes only because he feared the wrath of Lichas and the ephors—overseers who audited the king’s campaign—should he slink and file out of the plain without battle. Although he knew his Spartans would win, Kleombrotos did not expect to survive the battle. Even back in the south he had heard of the helot Nêto’s prophecies of his own doom at White Creek where he would meet her master Mêlon. Kleombrotos feared Epaminondas as much as he did Zeus. Now the eye blinks he had suffered since childhood, and his bad head tilt of the past year, made him talk more in the fashion of a slave or half-helot than a king of Sparta.

  “Men of Sparta. Another spring in Boiotia, so another victory over the pigs. Nothing ever changes for us, the better men of Sparta—unchanged since the days of the founder Lykourgos. Right after our breakfast and wine, we go out. You know the Spartan way: We fight each other for targets and enemy hoplites. Pray there will be enough of them for our spears. We go always to the right across the field—rightward all the way to their rear without a break in our stride. Tomorrow we mass twelve deep—not our eight shields of the past. All the better to crush the Theban pigs at the first spear thrust. No worry about our flanks. Men of Sparta, Homoioi tôn Lakaidaimoniôn, we have more good men there than we need. Our army has wide horns, more men than we need on the flanks.”

  But the voice sounded too high, too shrill for a Spartan king. The king spoke as if battle with Epaminondas were to be avoided rather than sought. He finished weakly, “If every Spartan peer, if every ephor, if even a Spartan king should fall tomorrow, so be it. It would be worth that great price to kill Epaminondas and stop his democratic madness. Follow me to victory. Follow me up their Kadmeia.”

  His army murmured. Only a few raised their fists at their king’s notion that any Spartan would need die at all against these pigs. Most of the companions in disgust turned to finish off their wine. Then the pipes took up and the king’s guard took the frightened royal into his tent. Before the men laid out their reed bedrolls, and smothered their cook fires, Lichas the ancient ephor climbed back up on the wagon bed. He bounded up as if he were no more than twenty. The brute Kleonymos, captain of the king’s guard, stood on one side, Lichas’s son Antikrates on the other, his shield still on his forearm. Both were a quarter royal and, better yet, claimed bloodlines from Brasidas himself. The two always had fought side-by-side and argued only over the number of their kills. Yet the sly night-killer Sphodrias came too and towered behind them all, even if he usually sought to hide rather than strut his size as he crawled about the campfires of the enemy. He planned this very night to go behind the lines and bring back a Theban shield—or, better, a hand or foot.

  Lichas was becoming tired of his reluctant king. He could care not a whit whether the odds, or the omens, or the weather, or the battleground favored either Spartans or Boiotians. He was of the old ones, a Spartan like Leônidas. An ephor. In defeat or victory, Lichas, son of Lichas, of the greatest polis of Hellas, in its greatest age. He would fight like his grandfathers at Thermopylai. He would kill Boiotians and he would bring untold misery to them and endless glory to his own. If their own king was fated to die, better to rid them of a royal not fit for the Spartan office. The women of Sparta claimed Lichas was even uglier than Kleombrotos, and they boasted it was due to the scars of battle, not the bad draw at birth.

  “My peers, my equals. We muster before dawn. This time the pigs claim they will go over us tomorrow and on into Sparta. The fools claim they will not slink back into their sties as in the past but will fight for all sorts of silliness under the silliest of all, Epaminondas. They want us to be all the same, to ruin Hellas and to call it democracy—to end our beloved Sparta as we know it. We say the best men are best to keep the weaker ones secure. That’s why we come into pig land to collect our rent for keeping the swine penned up and safe.”

  He liked the sound of his roaring voice. Lichas could not stop. “Whether we have to fight the Titans or Olympians, the verdict is the same, always the same. You Spartans are born, raised for the fight against anyone, at any moment we please. We all will die without it. I ask our seers here—will it be young Kleonymos, the tower of the phalanx, or my boy Antikrates, who breaks the guard of Epaminondas and sends him and his fools to Hades? Which one? Tell us now. Place your bets before sunrise when we throw the knucklebones. As for me, your Lichas here—Lichas, ephor son of the ephor Lichas? I vote for none of them. Only for me. I’m the one, the best killer of them all.”

  He let out an eerie high-pitched laugh, even as more Spartans drifted back from their campfires to hear him. The growing throng was calling out Lichas as loudly as they had been quiet listening to their stuttering king. The more he swaggered and talked, the more the men in their long capes cheered Lichas. Behind such a Spartan, they felt safe. They could boast they were no worse men than those Spartans of old who had followed King Leônidas against the Persians. If there were dikê still in the vale of Lakonia, any justice at all, this man Lichas, without birthright of a king, long ago rightly would have been their king. Or so they mumbled in admiration at the four tall men on the wagon.

  Let the Boiotians talk of the faker god Pythagoras, who preached that all
men were equal to the worm or sparrow. Let them shout for Epaminondas and the new fantasy cities to rise in the Peloponnesos. Let them do all that and more. The Spartans had Lichas, Lichas of the old gods and the ways of the south, and that would be proved more than enough tomorrow.

  But even now Lichas was not quite done. He then roused them with a final taunt, as he seemed to know all the Theban generals and why they had begged Mêlon to come down from Helikon. “So who of us kills the counterfeit Epaminondas? Who then kills the other general Pelopidas and with them their Theban plague of dêmokratia? Who sends this Thespian would-be savior, the broken-down farmer Mêlon who, the hag priestesses say, will kill us all, if he dares to show up—the so-called apple of women’s fables that kills our king. Who sends him to the houses of the dead?”

  “Who? Who?”

  “Egô Lichas. Egô. Not your Kleonymos. No, not my Antikrates. Not even sneaky Sphodrias here. No, I say it will be your Lichas. I am your Leônidas at Thermopylai reborn. The gods say no free man born of a free woman can kill me. Not tomorrow, not ever. You bet on others. I wager on Lichas—on myself. Sparta is as it was always before. We take the power we need and let others worry whether it’s fair. For all we care, these pigs are no better than Persians, and they will die as badly as well.” Then Lichas lumbered down. The other three followed him with a shout. The leaders of the lochoi rushed up to the wagon, pushing and shoving the crowd ahead to touch the old man. They wanted their Lichas as king—Lichas their man of hard oak, by his speech and zeal capturing the hearts of thousands that the green-stick king Kleombrotos had lost despite his birth.

  As Lichas finished, back across the plain in the Thespian camp high across the creek bed, Mêlon and his slave Chiôn were almost finished digging their armor from the wagon, cursing at the frayed straps and patched clasps since they had not put the full bronze of Malgis on in more than seven summers—since the last spear crossing near Tegyra beneath Mt. Ptôon. Finally at late dusk the two began to make their way slowly toward Epaminondas. His tent was in the gully below.

  Gorgos was left back alone with the ox. The helot slave was sitting on the ground against a wagon wheel, happy enough to be alive with Chiôn gone. In vain, he once more strained for even more Doric sounds from his godly poet Tyrtaios, as those sweet melodies wafted in from the Spartan campfires across the gully. The music of old brought dreams of his son Nabis, the beardless boy he had left as an orphan long ago in smoky Lakonia, when Malgis had captured him up here in pig land.

  Gorgos had been more than a helot in the south. He had risen to leader of the helots in Messenia, renamed by his masters Kuniskos, or so he claimed to the slaves on Mêlon’s farm. In his youth he was freed by the house of Lichas for his battle courage and had once become known even as Lord Kuniskos—Lichas’s fixer, the eyes and ears of the Spartan ephor and hero. Gorgos now dreamed that after the victory of Lichas at Leuktra perhaps he would return to Lakonia and be known this time as Kuniskos the Terrible—no longer Gorgos the snake man. Once the two, side-by-side, had spear-charged the Thebans at the great battle at the Nemea River—only to have Gorgos fall stunned, brought down and dragged out by Malgis the Thespian, bound with a rope on his way to servitude on Helikon, land of the pigs. Gone forever from his beloved master Lichas. Now he was old and had ended up as no more than Gorgos the dung spreader, who for twenty and three winters had emptied the slop jars in the vineyard of Malgis.

  With Chiôn gone, Gorgos was soon napping at the wagon amid the flies of Aias. As he dozed, he chuckled out loud, as he went deeply back into the old dreams of his highland hideout, on his beloved mountain of Spartan Taygetos, far to the south in the Peloponnesos, where he was once more Kuniskos meting out justice for his lost son Nabis. Now he was cooking in his own hut, and laughing in his slumber that Nêto, and Chiôn, and Mêlon had just walked into his house, his own house, where his dinner, quite a meal, was ready for them all. There on Taygetos, the slaves were masters, and masters were slaves—though not in the way that his fellow dreamer Mêlon had thought.

  CHAPTER 3

  General Epaminondas

  Mêlon was trying to pick up the soft sounds from the playing of Kopaic reeds as he and Chiôn neared the main tents of the Theban generals of Leuktra. The two were let inside by a few leather-clad sentries with felt caps, stoking the evening fires of Epaminondas.

  At last here was the great Epaminondas. Their general, who would lead all the Boiotians tomorrow, did not look like much. Was this short fellow really the god who claimed he could chase a myriad of Spartans back home and turn Hellas into a single polis?

  Epaminondas seemed to Mêlon dark and wiry, with shoulders almost too broad for his small frame. His beard was flecked with gray. Most of the head was without hair. But it was hard to tell since his scalp was leathery and dark from the wind and sun. Eyes, nose, mouth—they were all dark too, and blended in with beard and crusty face. He was neither old nor young, neither fair nor entirely foul—just burned and wrinkled. He was covered in something that looked more like hide or bark than real skin. No wonder, Mêlon thought, folk like this talk of freedom, and deathless souls and all the other code of the wild Pythagoras. Most ugly sorts on the wrong side of four decades usually do babble of god and the good they will do as their end nears—like the great rationalist Perikles himself, who wore an amulet around his neck and invited in the witches to chant in hopes that they might abate the boils and fevers from the great plague that ate his body away each hour.

  The gear of this Iron Gut—sidêroun splangchon, his hoplites called Epaminondas—was cheap bronze, as dull as the panoply of Antikrates shone in the campfires across the way. The breastplate was cracked and dented. Cheap bronze patches were badly hammered on everywhere. Epaminondas wore no greaves. But he should have. His lower legs were scarred from ugly wounds. A tattered green cloak blew up over his shoulders. Mêlon’s eye fixed on his bare right spear arm. It was nearly as wide as Chiôn’s. A long scar went from his shoulder to his elbow. A worse oulê had reached his neck, right above the edge of his breastplate.

  Mêlon looked for a general’s horsehair crest, a leader’s scarlet cloak, surely a gold sash of the usual Theban stratêgos. There was none—just an old round-topped Boiotian helmet and a cracked wooden shield without worn blazon. All those cuts and scars and he had still ended up a bald man with no money about to die fighting the Spartans. He was no peacock general. Or maybe one so marked by Ares that he more often suffered than gave blows in the mix-up. Whatever he believed in, he had believed in for a long time—and had fought for it, too. The nondescript, the poor and needy looking, these are far more dangerous revolutionaries than those with gold clasps and purple cloaks. Mêlon knew that, but he also sighed to Chiôn at his side, “Poor ugly Theban. He’s a walking wound. They must call him ho traumatias. And he is to lead us tomorrow?”

  Five or six other stratêgoi of the Boiotian Confederation—the elected Boiotarchs of substance and repute—in new armor, were there to urge Epaminondas to start talking with King Kleombrotos. The generals chimed in that it was time to back out of the valley and beg Kleombrotos for peace. The army was outnumbered and out-positioned, the Boiotarchs protested. They offered talk and money as well to pay the Spartans to leave. The best of the Boiotarchs, Ladôn of seventy summers, who owned five hundred pomegranate trees near Anthedon on the coast and was too old to earn a fist for his slurs, threw his wadded-up cloak in the face of Epaminondas and spat out, “Blood will be on your hands, Pythagorean. I figure Lichas would gladly take in payment some cows and grain to leave. Then he might let us be until next year. Unlike you, he prefers to do business than kill us.”

  Epaminondas ignored them. They all had white beards or big bellies, or wore purple cloaks or had hammered silver blazons to their shields, and so seemed to Epaminondas to think that their property mattered more than their honor. The generals were terrified that they would die en masse soon, given that they believed neither themselves nor any in the tent could stand up to the wall of Sp
artan shields and spears. And most liked the sun on their faces in the morning and were not about to give it up for the price of having Sparta ravage their grain each spring or some olive limbs in the fall, and install a few of their bothersome fixers on their acropoleis. Meanwhile the officers of the army looked only at their Epaminondas for a nod to fight or a sigh to go home. One look of hesitation, and seven thousand Boiotian hoplites would pack up their armor and head back to their fields. A fight broke out in back and knocked over two torches. Mêlon drew his curved knife—and wondered whether to unleash Chiôn, who cared little how many trees or years Ladôn claimed.

  It now was almost dark, and the meeting was still little more than shouts and shoves. The Thebans of the Sacred Band, the three hundred elite hoplites who followed their general Pelopidas, were again playing their flutes in disdain, mocking the wavering generals and throwing the brawlers out into the latrine. Now they quietly put them away on the smile of Epaminondas. Mêlon saw again the blazon on the general’s shield propped up on a wooden stand, and could now make out that it was a crude picture of Orpheus—as if this Pythagorean would descend, like the flute player of myth, into the Hades of the Peloponnesos to bring the helots down south out of their serfdom, and thereby ensure their liberators that their souls, suddenly eternal, would be even happier in the hereafter once freed from their brief-lived bodies. Pelopidas and the rest of the Sacred Band, one hundred fifty pairs of warriors in green capes, had now ringed the camp. The uneasy crowd was mostly made up of the lesser officers of the merê from the outlying villages, the boroughs far from Thebes. Mêlon looked in vain for his son Lophis in the tent. But at least he heard horses outside, perhaps on the far hill, where the cavalry and his boy were camping. He noticed the snake eyes of Epaminondas watching to spot a shaking knee or a stained cloak of the trembling among his officers. Find that, Mêlon knew, and then get that man out, before his look swept over the entire group.