A Heroic King

by Helena P. Schrader

  “Where’s Cleomenes?” Leonidas asked in alarm. He had expected his father-in-law to put in an appearance at this critical Assembly. Indeed, he had counted on Cleomenes defending his legitimacy―and revealing his madness at the same time.

  “I don’t know,” Sperchias answered.

  There were seats for the Gerousia, because some of the men were very old. Leonidas turned to Alkander. “See if you can find out from Nikostratos where Cleomenes is.” Nikostratos had taken his seat just one from the end beside Epidydes, the only member of the Gerousia who had been elected more recently than he. Alkander nodded and started to gently excuse himself through the press of citizens.

  The ephors filed in, led by Technarchos. Leonidas thought the poor man looked ten years older than he had when he took office ten months ago. The deposing of Demaratus had been a crisis for him, and to now discover it had been predicated on a lie―that the momentous dismissal of a man who had ruled for a quarter-century had been wrong―had shaken the honest, true-hearted Technarchos to the core. As if that weren’t enough, now voices were calling for the deposing of Sparta’s other king. Leonidas thought Technarchos would be greatly relieved when his term as ephor ended and he could turn the burden of office over to someone else.

  But today he had a duty to perform. He called the Assembly to order, and the traditional ode was sung to Athena. One of the priests from the Temple to the Bronze-House Athena performed the sacrifice of a cock and announced that they could proceed. Finally the Assembly moved to the agenda. Technarchos laid out the facts: irrefutable evidence had come to light proving that King Cleomenes had bribed the Pythia in Delphi to obtain the judgment against Demaratus.

  “That only means we have no valid judgment,” Leotychidas pointed out, in a loud voice that carried to the back of the Canopy. “It doesn’t mean that the opposite is true!”

  Technarchos looked uneasily at Leotychidas, while a ripple of comment swept through the Assembly. Like it or not, most people felt compelled to admit, Leotychidas was right. Apollo had not given any judgment in the issue at all. They were back to where they had been nine months ago―except that Demaratus had fled the country and Leotychidas was sitting on his throne.

  Technarchos continued. “In light of this scandalous abuse of his office, the Gerousia finds King Cleomenes unworthy of his high office. He has broken his covenant with Fair Apollo and besmirched the reputation of our city. The Gerousia proposes that the Assembly find King Cleomenes of the Agiad House guilty of sacrilege and that he be set aside in favor of his rightful heir.”

  Technarchos fell silent. The entire Assembly appeared gripped by the seriousness of the charges and the decision they were about to make, and then Brotus shouted out: “Cowards! You―” Orthryades grabbed Brotus and said something directly in his ear. Brotus shook off the other man and continued in a loud voice: “The world is laughing at us, and we can only imagine what punishment Apollo plans.” There was a general murmur of agreement at this. The citizens were acutely aware of both their humiliation and their vulnerability. “King Cleomenes should never have been king!” Brotus continued. “He is a bastard no less than Demaratus.”

  “We don’t know Demaratus was a bastard!” someone called from the crowd.

  “But we do know Cleomenes was a bastard! Until we throw the bastard out, we cannot prosper. The Gods abhor bastards. We must restore our honor and placate the just anger of Fair Apollo by repudiating this charlatan who calls himself a king!” Brotus’ words succeeded in eliciting a rumble of assent from the Assembly. A quick glance around the crowd revealed that most men were nodding. The success encouraged Brotus. He repeated in a low, confident bellow, “Cleomenes should never have been king!” and added, “My heroic brother Dorieus was the rightful king of Sparta!”

  Calling to mind this paragon of youthful virtue, who had died heroically in Sicily, was clearly a better ploy to win popular support than claiming the throne outright, Leonidas conceded. He wondered who had advised Brotus, and suspected the wily Talthybiades.

  But when Brotus tried to continue with “My brother Dorieus―” a shout of “Dorieus is dead!” cut him off. Leonidas turned to see who had made this salient point, but could not locate the speaker in the crowd.

  Meanwhile, Brotus’ faction ignored the objection and started to chant: “Out with the bastard! Out with the bastard!” The chant rapidly mutated into the simple: “Out, out, out!” as it spread across the Assembly.

  Leonidas’ friends were starting to look alarmed, and stirred uneasily. They glanced repeatedly at Leonidas, until the latter at last raised his voice: “I have a question.”

  Relieved, Technarchos signaled, then shouted, for silence. Gradually the chant died away and a semblance of order returned. Technarchos nodded to Leonidas to speak.

  Leonidas leaned forward and spoke directly to his twin rather than to the Council, ephors, or Assembly. “Just who are you proposing as the rightful Agiad king, Brotus?”

  “Me, of course, you bone-headed dolt! I’m next in line to the true heir to the throne. A bastard’s brat’s babe and a bastard’s wishes mean nothing! I am the oldest surviving son of King Anaxandridas by his legal wife.”

  A cacophonous uproar followed until from the back of the Assembly someone shouted, “Prove you were the firstborn twin, Brotus!”

  “Who said that?” Leonidas asked his companions, surprised, but they didn’t know.

  The ephors were consulting anxiously among themselves, and the eldest member of the Council, Hetoimokles, kept demanding from his fellows an explanation of what was going on.

  Desperate to regain control of the situation, Brotus blustered furiously, “Everyone knows I’m the firstborn twin. Everyone! Leonidas was a little runt!”

  This remark brought guffaws of laughter, particularly from the younger age cohorts, who could not remember when Leonidas had indeed been smaller than his twin brother.

  But Brotus’ followers countered by taking up the chant of “Brotus! Brotus!”

  Technarchos raised his voice above the chant to announce: “We will vote on the motion to depose King Cleomenes for blasphemy!”

  “Not until we know who his rightful heir is!” a voice shouted back from the crowd.

  “I am his rightful heir!” Brotus insisted, and his entourage of young men, led by Bulis, chanted again, “Brotus, Brotus!”

  Leonidas raised his voice and shouted, “Pleistarchos is Cleomenes’ heir!” But no one took up a chant of “Pleistarchos! Pleistarchos!”

  “I told you this would happen,” Sperchias said in a low voice to Leonidas. “Spartans don’t want an infant for their king.”

  “He’s right, Leo,” Euryleon agreed. “No one knows your son is even going to survive to adulthood, much less what sort of man he’ll turn out to be.”

  “They’d be getting me as regent.”

  “We haven’t had a regent since Lycurgus.”

  “Not a bad precedent.”

  Alkander was back. Leonidas turned to him desperately. “Where is he? Where’s my other brother?”

  “Nobody knows. He did not attend the Council meeting. When they sent for him, they were told he did not want to be disturbed.”

  The chants for Brotus were growing louder and stronger, while the rest of the Assembly appeared to be arguing among themselves.

  Leonidas tried again. “My son Pleistarchos is Cleomenes’ heir! Cleomenes has recognized him. He is Agiad on both his mother’s and his father’s side. We should depose Cleomenes in favor of Pleistarchos!”

  This only caused the debate to become more heated still. Men argued with the men beside them, while the chant for Brotus became an incessant drumbeat that was only gradually overpowered by a new chant calling for “Vote! Vote! Vote!”

  “Do something, Leo!” Sperchias urged desperately.

  Technarchos shouted for silence, and amazingly both chants died away and the Assembly fell into a restless silence. “Those in favor of deposing King Cleomenes, say ‘Aye!’”
<
br />   Brotus’ faction shouted wildly, but the rest of the Assembly was remarkably still.

  “Those opposed?” asked Technarchos, apparently as startled as Leonidas.

  “Nay! Nay!” The shouts erupted from all around them, and Leonidas joined in, baffled by the turn of events. It amounted to little more than a vote for a familiar evil over the unknown, but in the face of what Cleomenes had done, it surprised him nevertheless. It was also a clear vote against Brotus, but Leonidas took little comfort from this in the face of the obvious lack of support for Pleistarchos.

  The Assembly started to disperse, but Leonidas found himself surrounded not just by his friends, but by virtual strangers as well. They were saying to him what they had said to their fellows only moments earlier. “The boy’s too young, Leonidas! We can’t afford an infant king in times like these!”

  “I would be regent,” Leonidas again tried to make the point, but the men shook their heads.

  Alkander caught sight of Dienekes toward the back of the crowd. He slipped out of the circle immediately around Leonidas and caught up with the debonair officer. “Dienekes!”

  Surprised, the officer looked over with a raised eyebrow that gave him a haughty look.

  “Were you the one who questioned whether Brotus is really the older twin?”

  Dienekes shrugged and retorted, with a touch of defensiveness disguised as self-assurance, “It’s a fair question, don’t you think?” But then he seemed to remember that Alkander was Leonidas’ closest friend and dropped his voice to add, “Cleomenes may be mad, but Brotus is a man without scruples or honor. I can hardly imagine a worse king.”

  Nodding, Alkander drew Dienekes even farther from the dispersing crowd and dropped his voice. “When Leonidas and Brotus were born, their mother was over forty. She knew she could not nurse them both, so she brought two helot girls to the palace, one for each of the twins. They were present at the birth.”

  Dienekes was listening very attentively, but he said nothing.

  “It would be wise,” Alkander said very softly, “to find those girls before Brotus does ….”

  Dienekes looked hard at Alkander. Up to now he had not taken much note of him, a man known to have been a stutterer as a boy, an unremarkable soldier, and now the assistant deputy headmaster for the little boys―a position that Dienekes did not think important. But Dienekes was rapidly reassessing his opinion. He nodded slowly. “Yes. I think that is a very good idea. Can you tell me any more about these girls? Where are they? What are their names?”

  “Seek me out in five or six days, and I will have all the information you need by then―but say nothing about this to Leonidas.”

  Both men looked back toward Leonidas, who was still surrounded by a crowd. “Does he have any idea of how much depends on him?” Dienekes asked.

  Alkander nodded. “He knows. But he is very stubborn and he likes to do things his way. He does not want to lower himself to Brotus’ level, and he does not want to break the law.”

  Dienekes nodded, then smiled, a smile that women generally found irresistible. “Then let’s be sure he doesn’t have to break the law, shall we?”

  CHAPTER 4

  A SPARTAN EDUCATION

  BY THE FEAST OF ALEXANDRA WORD had reached Sparta that Cleomenes was in Thessaly. While the Assembly had debated his fate, he had slipped out of Sparta, allegedly to go hunting, and had never returned. Cleverer than Demaratus, Cleomenes had traveled light and in disguise. Only weeks later were the Spartans able to trace his trail east to Argos, where Cleomenes had taken to the sea. Ships left no tracks that dogs could follow and no string of witnesses with memories of a passing stranger. Thus it was not until word filtered back to Sparta that their king had been seen, indeed received with great hospitality, in Thessaly that they knew where he had gone.

  Most Spartans were not entirely displeased with the development. Cleomenes’ disappearance removed the madman from their midst and postponed the need to face the thorny issue of determining his successor. Brotus raged and Sperchias worried, but the majority of Sparta’s citizens hoped the problem would somehow just go away.

  Leonidas put his hopes in Pleistarchos growing up. He reasoned that if Pleistarchos was not just an infant but a boy in the agoge, a boy already showing himself mentally agile and physically fit, a boy with obvious promise (as his father was certain he would be), then the majority of Sparta’s citizens would take a chance on him. Gorgo, on the other hand, worried that her father, mad as he was and cut off from his familiar surroundings, would come to harm. Yet there was nothing she could do. Thessaly was hundreds of miles to the north, and she had two small children and a husband in Sparta ….

  On the whole, the Spartans were more distressed by the news that Demaratus had been seen in Sardis. Demaratus, like Hippias before him, had evidently sought out the hospitality of the Persian satrap and, according to Ionian traders, he too had been received graciously. Demaratus, the rumors suggested, had asked to be taken to the court of the Great King. Demaratus wanted revenge on those who had deposed him―and that was the entire Assembly. Among themselves the Spartans asked anxiously, “And what if he was the rightful king after all?”

  Leotychidas countered by pointing out that Demaratus was a traitor. Anyone, he argued, who could befriend a despot like Darius was at heart also a tyrant. Darius, after all, had murdered his predecessor and then slaughtered every Mede in the city just to cover his own tracks.

  Even Leonidas, whose feelings toward Demaratus were ambivalent, found his feelings hardening against the Eurypontid. Leonidas understood that Demaratus wanted revenge on Leotychidas and Cleomenes for their unscrupulous plot against him. He even understood Demaratus’ resentment of his loss of status. Leonidas could have forgiven Demaratus for going to Thessaly as Cleomenes had done, or to Macedonia or Thrace―but not to Persia. Going to Persia was, literally, going too far.

  Leonidas was not alone in feeling this, and it was because Demaratus had gone to Persia that no one suggested, much less undertook, a second attempt to get the opinion of Delphi on Demaratus’ legitimacy. People doubted Leotychidas’ right to the throne, but they were not prepared to beg Demaratus to come back. So they lived with the situation, some more uneasily than others, and trusted in the Gods to keep Sparta from some catastrophe.

  Late one afternoon shortly after the Achilia, the meleirene on duty at the entrance to the Mesoan headquarters reported to Leonidas, “There’s a boy outside asking for you, sir.”

  “A boy?”

  The meleirene shrugged. “He looks about eight―at the most, nine.”

  “Asking for me?” Leonidas pressed the meleirene, amazed. Boys of the agoge did not usually seek out contact with full citizens, much less officers or officials.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, let him in,” Leonidas agreed with a shrug.

  “He didn’t want to come in, sir. He’s out on the front porch.”

  Leonidas frowned, vaguely alarmed. It was really very rare for a boy to want adult attention. Leonidas remembered spending the better part of his childhood trying to avoid it. “I’ll be right back,” Leonidas told Oliantus, and went out to the front porch of the lochos headquarters.

  It was a beautiful early spring day and the air was pleasantly warm. The barracks looked out on one of the smaller squares of the city and faced the main temple to Asclepius. The square was as empty as the porch of the barracks. Leonidas frowned and turned to return inside. Then he spotted, crouched behind one of the pillars and clutching his knees to his chest, a boy with his himation pulled completely over his head and shielding his face. One of the hands hidden in the folds of the coarse woolen garment was trembling.

  Leonidas went down on his heels before the boy. His sword tip scraped the pavement as he asked softly, “You asked for me, boy?”

  A sob answered him, and then a hand was thrust out of the himation. It was swollen twice its normal size and covered with blisters, some of which were putrid.

  Leonidas did
n’t need to see any more. In a single motion, he swept the boy up into his arms and carried him inside the barracks. The boy dropped his head onto Leonidas’ leather corselet and sobbed miserably, the himation still covering his face.

  As he passed his office, Leonidas called into Oliantus. “We’ll talk later. I have to take care of this first.”

  He almost collided with one of his enomotarchs. “Sir—”

  “Later!”

  Leonidas cut across the atrium to the divisional infirmary, calling out to the helot orderlies lounging around in the sunshine, “Get the surgeon!”

  They looked astonished, but hastened to obey.

  Leonidas reached the infirmary. It was empty of patients. He set the boy down on the nearest bed, which was made up with fresh, clean linens. He pulled the himation from the boy’s head. As he’d suspected, it was Simonidas. “I—I only—came—because—” Simonidas was trying to get hold of himself, wiping at the tears with his good hand. “I―I―can’t move―my fingers—and―”

  “Shhh!” Leonidas ordered, pressing him back onto the little pillow and holding his hand on the boy’s forehead. He wasn’t good at these things, but he thought Simonidas had a fever.

  “You sent for me, sir?” the divisional surgeon started, but then he caught sight of the boy. He crossed the room in two quick strides, took one look at the hand, and started calling for his orderlies.

  “Can you save it?”

  “I don’t know. Who is he? How did it happen?”

  “Simonidas son of Alkander, and I wager it was done to him.” Leonidas kept his eyes on Simonidas as he said this. Simonidas said nothing, but he didn’t protest, either.

  The surgeon raised his eyebrows, but he said nothing―just set about preparing his instruments and getting the plants, powders, ointments, and pastes he wanted. Leonidas stood beside Simonidas with a hand on the little boy’s bony shoulder. Simonidas closed his eyes. The tears had stopped. He took a deep breath.