They were fortunate not to be seen. The theory in Laconia was that familiarity breeds contempt, and contempt sickly children, so the bride and bride-groom in a Lacedaemonian marriage were not supposed to be acquainted. The Spartan male’s most important spouse, the one to which he gave the first thirty years of his life, was the state. The betrayal of this matron was necessary to propagate the citizenry, but was not to be taken lightly.
Until her father returned no formal arrangments were possible. Over the next months he and Andreia were obliged to be discreet, stealing time together in his empty farmhouse. Dramatic, she dropped her clothes on the beaten floor and stepped free like Aphrodite striding from the surf. She was pale and thin for a Laconian girl, with the breasts of an adolescent, but when he took her in his arms her forehead rested flush into the crook of his neck, and his fingers precisely encompassed the angles of her shoulder blades. Smelling her, he felt a sensation within like a sweetness on his tongue that could never melt, the dripping of a fluidity into his core—impressions, he had to grant, that bore advantages over lying with old Zeuxippos.
She stripped him with impatience and swung astride, raking his chest with dirt-flecked nails and an expression of feline voracity on her face. He watched her with her eyes screwed shut, face turned up, away, anywhere but facing him. It struck him that giving this performance was somehow more comfortable for her than the act of looking into his eyes. When she was done, which was often before he was, she took the reclining posture of a symposiast and tried to ensnare him in discussions of politics and philosophy.
“You have been farther abroad than me, so please tell me—for what are the ways of the Spartans?”
Having been prepared for this question during the Rearing, he replied with all the confidence of the best student in the class: “Freedom, of course. And joy.”
She laughed. “You recite that as if the boy-herd taught it to you!”
“He did. What of it?”
“What of it, dear Antalcidas?” she exclaimed, then kissed every one of the knuckles on his right hand before she added, “Look at us here, hiding in this house. Are we free?”
“We are, in the ways that are proper to mortals.”
She shook her head as if bidding him to explain. For anyone else, he wouldn’t have tried.
“For those as imperfect as men, there is only a choice of miseries. But so far as it takes nothing to excess, the Lacedaemonian system is the envy of all the Greeks. Our aristocracy has stood for a thousand years without tending to tyranny. Every one of our citizens may vote in the Assembly; anyone can become an ephor or earn a place on the Gerousia. What, then, can the rantings of democrats teach us? All states will pass away in their time—some sooner than others. But I promise you that men will always look back on the Spartan constitution with wonder.”
She was looking at him agape. It was the longest contiguous string of words he had yet produced in her presence.
“The one you should speak to is Doulos. . . .” he concluded. “The boy is very content to waste his time in debate.”
She laughed. “Doulos, your helot? I wonder what freedom he claims.”
“Is it so bad to have his fate? What helot ever starved, or was ever denied mastery over his own house?”
“You seem so confident you know what the helots want!”
“Why didn’t your father take you with him to Cythera?” he asked, bidding against hope to change the subject.
She sat up, grasping her knees against her chest. “I don’t know . . . except maybe that he never trusted a Nigh-Dweller in his life. He probably believed there was no more wholesome place for me than here. . . .”
As if to add perversity to irony, she ran her fingertips up the inside thigh of her lover-not-her-husband.
“You sound alike, you and my father. So certain of yourselves, when you’ve seen nothing else of the world!”
“And your precious Athenians, with their mobs and demagogues. Is that what you want to praise? Come, be plain!”
Standing, he pulled her to her feet and into his arms. Electing to be languid again, she let her head fall to the right and exposed her neck. Antalcidas jerked her back to attention; meeting his eyes for only an instant, she slid off to the left. He pushed her back to front and center—face to face at last, she stared at him with an expression of gathering fright.
“What is it?” he asked.
She shuddered, jumped up, and ran from the room without pausing to retrieve her clothes. He went to the door to watch her go: stitchless, she walked down the road, straight toward an old man in a hay cart. As Andreia threw back her shoulders in determined nonchalance, the old man did not turn his head at first, waiting until she was past to take in the view of what followed.
4.
Mystified by her behavior, he made no move in the next few days to find her. After that he was in the field training for a week, preparing for the next invasion of Attica under King Archidamus. Experts from Syracuse were brought in to demonstrate the craft of sapping fortifications. The Lacedaemonian army was brought up by battalions to watch the Syracusans undermine a makeshift wall erected out of old ashlar blocks. Though their techniques worked well enough, the mood in the ranks was contemptuous. Digging in the dirt was for slaves and barbarians. Nor did the Syracusans show how they might bring down Athens’ Long Walls with the enemy raining arrows down on the sappers.
When he returned, his idle time wore heavier on his hands than ever. The table conversation among the Hill Wolves struck him as more than typically inane—it centered not on whether Athens would be defeated, but how long it would take. The diners reasoned that if the enemy wanted to stay inside their walls it was a sign that they were desperate. It was further held that if the Athenians came out to fight it was also evidence of desperation. Antalcidas thought that even in Lacedaemon there must be some rule against accepting two mutually exclusive propositions at the same time. Or was he infected by Doulos, prattling on about the sophists and their logic?
Andreia was waiting for him in the farmhouse. When he took her, she seemed to go to pieces in his arms, this part shaking with desire, that aquiver with loathing. He tried to soothe her by stroking her cheek like Zeuxippos had once done for him, when he was despondent for losing a footrace. But this tenderness only unnerved her further. “Don’t do that!” she cried. “Don’t ever do that!” Then she retreated to the far corner of the room to bury her face in her hands.
How to question a woman about her feelings was not part of the kit of Spartan manly virtues. Antalcidas did his best, though, by declining to give up on her. Taking her upset to be like an elusive sort of animal, he decided to wait until it broke cover. The vigil went on and on—she did not look up until the turtle-doves fell silent in the eaves and the bats began to stir. When she spoke her voice was calm, as if she had been marshaling her words for a long time.
“I don’t know why you must look at me like that.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“If you would only have me without looking at me, without touching. You’d think you’d never had a woman before, the way you use your eyes to look at me!”
“What else should I do?”
“What everyone else does. It is not for the men of Sparta to see so much, to touch me like you do! To fuck and be fucked—that I understand. Want to take me like one of your boys? I expect that. But all this sweet gazing, this patience, these whispers in my ear that I love so much . . .”
Her voice unsteadied. Collecting herself, she finished:
“I can’t help but think of it all as . . . indecent.”
Antalcidas laughed out loud at her. And so because the Lacedaemonians were not known for making tender love to their women, she was unnerved at his devotion? How ridiculous! So at last she stood exposed as all noncomformists must be—conventional to her core.
He seized an ankle and dragged her across the floor to him. On her face was an expression halfway between weeping and relief; when he came close to ki
ss her again, as dearly this time as he’d seen his mother caress Epitadas, she shed blissful tears that streaked both their faces.
“Don’t laugh at me,” she said, blushing as he set back on his haunches to admire her. “It’s easy for someone like you to break the rules—a Spartiate through and through.”
“Is that what I am?”
She leaned forward to shove him.
“You’re cruel!”
5.
The hunters bounded through the undergrowth in breechcloths and buskins, their eyes showing the same lethal fixity Lacedaemonians always brought to the killing business. The boar, which had been on the run for more than an hour, had tried to slip away into a thyme thicket. The scent raised by its movements betrayed its position to the other hunters standing downwind, their spears ready. Whooping and clapping slats of wood together, pulling their line together into a moving wedge that would further confine their prey, the helot beaters drove the animal downhill.
A gloom fell as a storm front rose over Taygetus, frowned, and loosed a steady rain on the foothills. The hunters waited visorless, drying their eyes with forearms spotted with blood drawn by brambles and the resinous bark of pines. Epitadas listened to the cacophony descending toward him, with the boar somewhere ahead. A willow nearby caught the edge of the unsettled air and seemed to sigh over the bloodletting to come.
“Epitadas, take my shield side,” commanded Ramphias, though he held no shield and Epitadas was not obliged to follow his commands. With his deep, stentorian voice and round-faced jollity, the old governor had the charm of everyone’s favorite uncle. Epitadas took position on his left.
“But where is my future son-in-law?” Ramphias asked.
“Antalcidas follows his own commands.”
The governor had organized the hunt to acquaint himself with the family of his daughter’s betrothal. With the patriarch an invalid, he paid his respects to the widow with mixed feelings: the lady Damatria controlled a vast estate, but there was also something not quite couth about her, with her unflinching gaze and her Asian embarrassment of jewels. Oddly, she confessed to know nothing of Antalcidas’ intentions, yet she was far from irate at her ignorance. She showed only the most perfunctory interest in the qualities of the woman who would share her son’s house. Her biggest concern, it seemed, was over whether Ramphias had any other daughters who might suit her youngest.
The brother struck him as exactly the kind of young man of which the city needed more. Good-looking, fearless by all accounts, and hungry for approval, Epitadas already understood all the code words of Spartan political discourse, such as “security” (domination), “piety” (license), and “patriotism” (when to shut up). He knew how to laugh at the right jokes, and wink at the wrong ones. Truth be told, he wished Andreia was worthy of a groom of his quality, but when it came to disposing of daughters, one couldn’t be particular.
His first impressions were not changed by their experience on the hunt. Epitadas knew how to flatter and how to accept the generosity of his betters. He knew to stay on the shield side of his host, and would certainly allow the older man the honor of the kill. Antalcidas, by contrast, was a cipher; at the campfire he said nothing, and on the trail he tended to wander off with no warning. Ramphias had heard that he had acquitted himself well in battle. If this was the best of the new generation, the governor thought, then Lacedaemon was in serious trouble.
He heard a commotion in the buckthorn above; something was charging, heavy-footed but fast, up the slope. In the instant before they charged after it, he met eyes with Epitadas: both knew that the boar was backtracking on the beaters, who had begun to scatter in fear. In another moment the animal would break through their line and escape.
Ramphias followed the younger man over a goat trail in the direction of the melee. The noise reached a climax just as Epitadas glimpsed a gathering of helots through the brush. Bushwhacking, it seemed to take an eternity as the action unfolded in obscurity ahead of them. “Stand fast, boys!” the governor cried as he tore his spear from vines that seemed to reach out to entangle the point. “Don’t let him through! We’re coming!”
They broke into a small clearing ringed with vertical cypress. Like the trees, the beaters were standing quietly in a circle. Epitadas stopped, allowing his host to take command of his servants; Ramphias plunged ahead, expecting to hear excuses about how the boar was allowed to slip away. But when the helots parted for him he saw the boar was not gone, but lying dead at Antalcidas’ feet.
“What happened?” the governor asked, his voice laced with more disappointment than he could help.
This man who would marry his daughter was in the center, still out of breath, with the ashwood shaft of his spear—the one Zeuxippos had given him—broken in his right hand. The rest of the weapon was sunk into the neck of the boar, which lay in a slick of its own blood like a great ship aground on the rocks. Its mouth was open in midgasp; the tongue a wine-colored bulb, tusks gleaming, great ears spread wide like the wings of some bristle-haired bird. The boar’s legs, meanwhile, were bent in an almost delicate posture, as if he had just stooped to nuzzle some tender morsel in the dirt.
Ramphias regarded Antalcidas. The latter was still out of breath, his eyes flashing white as his excitement ebbed. The governor could see that he was clenching his left hand in a fist, and that it was bleeding—probably because the boy had gripped the spear too far up the shaft as the boar thrashed on the point. But such injuries were part of the reward for hunting boar on foot. It was a good kill, it seemed; one he would have been glad to witness.
They agreed that it would be best to send the boar to the table of the Eurypontid king as he prepared to lead the invasion of Attica. Ramphias’ servants had brought in enough other game to sustain them in camp: a dozen hares, a red deer fawn, and a stork. As the three of them sat around the fire, metalware chimed from the governor’s tent as the valet made the preparations, Antalcidas looked up and saw the glow of a half dozen Spartiate camps scattered across the lap of Taygetus. A constellation of five more twinkled on Parnes across the valley. A twelfth flame, a reflection of their own, danced in the eyes of the boar as it hung otherwise invisible in the gloom.
“Crowded up here tonight,” Ramphias remarked at the distant fires. Indeed, there seemed to be more citizens in the mountains than in the city, which looked dark by comparison. But Antalcidas knew that this was an illusion; the cressets on the ridge of the Acropolis were only obscured by trees, and the wives of Laconia were almost certainly not idle that hour. In all, the view comforted him—a Spartan cosmos to mirror the immortal one above.
They served the stork first, roasted with a sauce of rue, pepper, raisins, and honey. This was a finer sort of dining than he had ever known in the city—so good that, in other contexts, it would qualify as subversive. Yet it was not uncommon for Spartiates to eat better on the trail than at home. It was the guilty little secret behind their passion for hunting.
After stripping the bones Ramphias and Epitadas discussed another sort of gratification. The governor’s second wife, it seemed, was quite a bit younger than he, yet had failed to bless his house with a boy. Proceeding elliptically, as if he was stalking a large bear, Ramphias worked his way around to a proposition:
“. . . If you value your manhood you should avoid the trap of bureaucracy. . . . With every dispatch I write I can feel my balls shrinking. . . . The Cytherans are on the sea-lanes, so they are too close to the Asians. . . . I’ve heard it on good authority that they prefer to chew their wives’ privates . . . climate most dispiriting . . . we need a little new blood in the house. . . .”
As he took the governor’s meaning, Antalcidas felt an impulse to recede into the darkness. Ramphias, misreading him, raised a hand to reassure him. “Not that I wouldn’t ask you to stand in for me, dear son . . . though we feel you are already a part of the family, so you can understand, I think!”
“What is your wife called?” Epitadas asked.
“Areté—and I
think you will find her quality befits the name. She came to me genuinely spotless.”
Epitadas looked into the fire, betraying no sense of surprise or anticipation, his perfect ease saving the moment from awkwardness. It was as if the governor had asked him to borrow his sharpening stone. In fact, his cocksmanship had become something of legend among the older Spartiates, many of whom turned to their younger countrymen as need arose. Epitadas’ looks and connections made him a popular choice.
“As for your elder brother here, I say we can expect great things. Don’t worry about losing that old spear, my boy—I’ll find you a better one from my own collection. One that has pierced the hides of a few helots over the years, you can be sure!”
He clapped a hand on Antalcidas’ shoulder, meaning to praise him honestly. Yet as Ramphias rhapsodized over the old-fashioned helot-hunting that was once so popular, a vault seemed to be sealed behind the young man’s eyes. It was too late—as the excitement of his kill receded, he faded beyond reach again. Ramphias then understood, as surely as he knew anything, that while he and Antalcidas might become aligned by marriage, it would never be as friends.
6.
On the appointed day Andreia consecrated her shorn locks and all her girlhood dolls to Artemis; the bride’s procession led to the fountain of the Temple of Aphrodite-in-Fetters, where Andreia purified herself with her marriage shift billowing in the water around her like a saffron cloud. Antalcidas likewise performed all the rituals expected of him—the ritual bath, accepting the insults of his messmates—until the time came for the banquet at Ramphias’ house. As Damatria would be there, he made only the briefest of appearances, excusing himself right after the sesame cakes were distributed. He declared his virtue according to the formula, “I have forsworn the good and found the better,” and made his escape as his mother made her approach. From her expression it seemed she wanted to tell him something, but he didn’t wait to hear her out.
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