From their position on the left, Xeuthes and Cleinias looked at each other, captain and oarsman united in mutual amazement. Neither had to ask if the other had seen the Lacedaemonians behave in such disorder, so ordinarily, in a set-piece battle. Was it not common knowledge that Spartans never raise their hands in surrender?
Antalcidas burst from his hiding place, spear leveled at no one in particular. “Don’t listen to that man!” he cried. “All of you put your hands down! I’ll kill the next man who disgraces us . . . !”
But Frog had already let the Athenian hoplites inside the fort. There was a sharp struggle, metal crunching against metal, as Antalcidas and a handful of other diehards clashed with them. As the sound reached Cleon, he became alarmed, thinking perhaps that the enemy had drawn the Athenians into a trap. Demosthenes, on the other hand, was serene—his troops were now pouring into the fort, and most of the Spartans had already thrown their spears to the ground. The end was foregone.
It was the sixteenth day since Cleon made his promise to the Assembly. If he got word north to Elis by the next evening, he could have runners deliver the news to the archons before his twenty days were up.
The solution presented itself. Of course he would not do anything as crude as display the heads of fallen Spartiates. Instead, he would take the platform with a round object wrapped in burlap. He would defy expectation by refusing the wreath, and refusing it again, until the cumulative buzz over what he carried hit a fever peak, and he tore the burlap cover away. The captured Lacedaemonian shield would blaze in the rising sun, shining as a Spartan shield ought, the great crimson lambda splashed like blood against the polished metal. He would hold it over his head for all the time it took for the waves of acclaim to roll through the Assembly, and wash over him as they chanted his name—“Cleon, CLEON, CLEON . . .” Victory would then wing her way down from the clouds, bearing a crown of olive leaves for setting upon his head. Nike had the face of the little brunette chippy from the Chersonese who served the relish at his drinking parties; her feathers were dark too, like raven’s wings, and her chiton thinner, almost like a whisper, pressed down so flat by the wind that it cratered within that little dimple at her midriff. The goddess would give him that same little fetching smile the slave gave him when she finished blowing on his stubby flute. . . .
His assurance restored, he turned to Demosthenes.
“As I told you, dear Demosthenes,” he said, “the Lacedaemonians have seen it our way.”
16.
The 292 Lacedaemonian survivors, including 120 Spartiates, marched down the hill between the divided halves of Demosthenes’ army. Epitadas, who had been unconscious through the final assault, was carried to the shore on a litter rigged out of two spears and some sailcloth. Antalcidas went by his side, not looking at the Athenians around him. Since he had been the recalcitrant face of the Lacedaemonians earlier that day, the Athenians focused their scorn on him, staring with smug grins, whistling and hissing at him as they would to some down-at-heels tart in the street. In their shame, the Spartans marched with their shields reversed, crimson lambdas hidden.
Frog, who went behind, was still not satisfied with his day’s work. It struck him as unfair that Antalcidas would receive all the notoriety for leading the Spartans; the decision to surrender, after all, was his. His only gratification came late in the day, when he was about to join Altalcidas and Epitadas in the hold of the fleet’s fastest ship, the Terror. Just before he ducked into his new prison, Patronices, the deck man, shouted out an impertinent question to him.
“Capitulators! Shall we suppose your dead comrades are the real Spartans?”
Frog stopped, and with barely a moment to consider an answer, replied, “Athenian arrows would be wiser than the Athenians, if they could choose to fall on good men instead of cowards.”
Frog and six others were shackled to separate posts in the bowels of the ship. The holds of Athenian triremes were not capacious, with the most clearance available atop the keel, between the rows of the bottommost oarsmen. If there was a place on a ship more disagreeable than the seats of the hold men, it was where the Lacedaemonians were imprisoned: a mere crawl space, with no more than three feet of headroom, among stinking blocks of cobble ballast and the unkempt feet of sixty exhausted, sweating men. Nor were their miseries private ones, with those in the lowest stratum of Athenian society able to peep down between the thwarts at the conceited Spartans, free to try out all the insults their frustration had inspired over seven years of war.
The hold rode well below the waterline, so Antalcidas could see nothing of the outside world but the glow of reflected daylight from between the oarsmen’s seats. A scratching sound along the keel told him when the ship reached ground at Koryphasion. The Athenian oarsmen, who never seemed to shut their mouths, complained about the miserable meal they were about to eat, as they disembarked by sections.
From his vantage in the semidarkness, Antalcidas watched as an Athenian doctor came down the ladder. When they learned that the original commander of the Spartans was not dead but only wounded, the Athenians spared no effort in making certain their adversary reached Athens alive. Cleon’s personal doctor had extracted the arrow and cleaned the wound before they left the island. When he came down to inspect Epitadas’ dressings, Antalcidas addressed him, saying, “You would be better off letting him die, friend.”
Scratching his bearded neck, the doctor spared him barely a glance before vanishing up the ladder. His charge, apparently, did not include tending the wounds of the other Lacedaemonians.
The Athenians seemed to be in a hurry. After only a few hours the hull was refloated and the oarsmen, only half-rested, filed back to their seats. There was much noise on the deck as the masts were stepped and sails bent on them. Soon they set off again; the ship adopted a rocking motion that suggested they had entered open water. It was then that Stilbiades, the bosun, served the prisoners their first meal in days: a husk of bread and one half-blackened onion for each man, and a sip of water from a common canteen. As Frog’s lips touched the water before Antalcidas’, the latter refused to touch it, though he was cotton-mouthed with thirst.
Frog produced a bitter smile. “So I see we should add spitefulness to Stone’s list of faults.”
Antalcidas ignored him. He had nothing to offer tremblers but his scorn.
Epitadas roused sometime during the first day at sea. He tested his shackles, then took a long look at his new surroundings.
“Is this Hades?” he asked.
“Not yet, Brother.”
He stared in Antalcidas’ direction, his expression blank, as if he could not recognize the figure sitting there. “You sound like my brother,” he said. “But that can’t be true. Antalcidas affirmed his loyalty to his family upon his honor as a Spartiate, and so must be among the virtuous dead in battle, not chained like a dog.”
The words cut deep into Antalcidas. Closing his eyes, he replied, “By the gods, I swear that I kept my word. It is not my choice that we are here.”
Frog perked up at this exchange, anxious once again that his role not be overlooked. “I can barely see you, Epitadas, but your ignorance marks you well enough.”
“I don’t remember leaving Frog in command, but you, Brother,” said Epitadas.
“I was in command.”
“Then the fault is yours. There is nothing more to say.”
“No, keep talking!” interjected Cleinias, the hold man, who was listening the whole time. To hear dissension among Spartans was most entertaining during long, dull days at sea.
Antalcidas tried to appeal to Epitadas through the day and later that night, when the ship was beached southeast of Methone and the prisoners were unshackled for a brief turn on the top deck. Epitadas did not rise when Stilbiades removed his chains; after trying to rouse him with his boot, the bosun said, “Suit yourself,” and shackled him again. In his haste to escape the stench, Stilbiades missed the six-inch long shard of wood Epitadas had torn from the post during th
e few moments when his hands were free.
The next day his brother’s silence began to weigh on Antalcidas. He spoke to him in monologues, hoping he might stumble on some combination of words that would unstick Epitadas’ tongue. He tried reminiscing about good things, such as the beauties of Laconia, better days on the battlefield, stories from the Rearing, and the joy of festival days. But as time passed, and Epitadas persisted in his silence, Antalcidas’ tone became more bitter. At last, when he thought he could stand it no longer, he flung the rebuke he had longed to make for more than twenty years:
“So this is the thanks you give for the favor I did you!” he cried. When Epitadas’ eyes shifted to him at last, he went on, “Yes, you remember, don’t you? The way you killed that other boy, and how you got away with it because Thibron took the blame. And why was he exiled? It was on my word!”
The other gave nothing but a sour smile and a chuckle, a little contemptuous hack, as he turned his face away.
“As you sit there you may ask yourself how many brothers would take such a risk. And yet here you are, stinking with a murderer’s pollution, presuming to pass judgment on other men! Isn’t it you who should feel shame, Epitadas?”
Frog jerked his chains with his excitement. “Yes, I had always wondered about that story! So Thibron was innocent, was he? Poor fellow!”
The oarsman, Cleinias, stuck his face down below his seat again, declaring, “Betrayal, recriminations, regrets . . . this stuff is precious! Pure gold!”
Epitadas was dwelling on his shame, to be sure, but not over Thibron. He was mulling instead over the fate of old Cleomenes I, the Agiad king from before the time of the Persian Wars. Cleomenes was one of the great kings in Spartan history—the scourge of the Argives at Tiryns, shrewd manipulator of Lacedaemon’s enemies. When Darius of Persia demanded tokens of earth and water to signal Sparta’s submission, Cleomenes had the Persian emissaries thrown in a pit, bidding them find their earth and water there. The king suffered his downfall shortly after, when he bribed the Delphic oracle to proclaim illegitimate his rival, the Eurypontid king Demaratus. When the sacrilege was uncovered, he fled the country and attempted to organize the Arcadians against Sparta; word of the revolt moved the Gerousia to invite Cleomenes back, but a life of intrigue had already taken a toll on his mind. The king went mad, lashing out with his staff at anyone he could reach. His family was at last compelled to imprison him.
Cleomenes decided he could not live with his shame. He was guarded by a helot with a knife. The king, using his natural talents of command, compelled the weak-minded man to hand it over. After ordering the helot from the room, he used the blade to flay himself alive, cutting the skin from his legs, working his way up his body until he carved bolts of flesh from his abdomen. When he had half disemboweled himself, Cleomenes called the guard back, returned his knife, and died.
Cleomenes’ end was a popular story among the boys of the Rearing, presenting as it did both a gory tale and an implicit challenge: under similar circumstances, would any of them have the courage to make his end just as emphatic? Epitadas had always declared that he had. Branded now by defeat, locked in the bowels of an enemy ship, surrounded by tremblers and low-caste Athenians, his time now seemed at hand.
He grasped the wooden stake in his sweaty palm, cherishing the prospect of his release. Until then, he would refuse every comfort, shut his ears to the words of friend and foe, and wait for the dark to prove his virtue.
X
Ekphora
1.
No effort of Cleon’s was necessary to spread word of the surrender at Sphacteria. It swept by horseback over the breadth of the Peloponnese, by foot messenger, and donkey deep into the roadless hills of Phocis, Aetolia, and Epirus, and by ship all the way to Italy, the islands, and Asia Minor. Wherever Greeks lived, men stood in the marketplaces and shook their heads—how could such a thing happen? Laconian wet nurses, who were popular amongst the nobility everywhere, were summoned to explain the news to their puzzled masters; where the Lacedaemonians fought the allies of Athens, such as in Thrace and Sicily, they found renewed spirit on the part of their enemies, who now saw them as fallible, even beatable. Some dismissed the story, preferring to believe it was Athenian propaganda. But the skeptics were hard put to explain how, if the story was a lie, Cleon was in a position to dedicate thirty full Lacedaemonian panoplies—a tenth of the spoils—to Apollo at his sanctuary in Delphi, and another thirty to Zeus at Olympia.
In Laconia, word of the disaster plunged the people into a common funk. The quiet orderliness of Sparta became a stifling silence, as if a great, invisible blanket had been laid on everything. The Gerousia met in emergency session, but no resolutions were passed, and no word of the deliberations leaked out. The Spartiates, meanwhile, kept watch on the helots, anxious for any sign of revolt. But most of the helots knew better than to display their true feelings. Instead, among those with a temperament for it, there was a deep, hidden flush of spiteful satisfaction.
Matters took a bizarre turn when a foreign trireme approached the Spartan port at Gytheion, its sail bearing the insignia of the Athenians, ΑΘΗ. The sight of it pulling into the roads sent the town into a panic. Had the enemy decided to capitalize on their victory at Pylos by burning down the port? The population—composed of mostly Nigh-dwellers and helots—rushed to find any Spartiate from whom to take instructions.
But it soon became clear that this was no invasion; the trireme was not the vanguard of a fleet, but came alone. Closer, and a flag of truce could be seen flying from a jackstaff. The helmsman worked the tillers with an expertise rare among the Peloponnesians, picking his way through the crowd of merchantmen and penteconters, turning the hull broadside just as the crew withdrew their oars from the water. By force of momentum, the ship came to rest against the wharf with a gentle bump.
The Acharnians on the Terror’s outriggers kept their seats, eyeing the Lacedaemonians with smoldering contempt. The latter glowered back, hands on their spears and swords, until their attention was diverted to activity on the deck. Xeuthes leapt ashore first, wearing a leather corselet and boots but weaponless. After surveying the crowd around him, he turned to receive the handles of a stretcher that had been carried up from the hold. The stretcher had the figure of something like a man on it, covered with a blanket soaked through with blood.
With Stilbiades handling the other end, they bore the stretcher down from the deck and lowered it gently to the wharf. The Nigh-Dwellers’ eyes followed every movement, their curiosity beginning to outweigh their hostility. Xeuthes faced them.
“Tell your masters that we declare, by the gods, that we did this man no harm.”
He held up the splinter—a stake, really—that Epitadas had used to cut himself. It was dyed now with the purplish blue of congealed blood, with strings of skin and muscle still embedded in it. Xeuthes placed it on the blanket as he would the sword of a gallant warrior beside his corpse. Then he turned to Stilbiades, whispering, “We should go while they’re preoccupied.”
As the crowd closed around the stretcher, Patronices the beam man, gazed out at the town. “It’s the port of Sparta, boys! Take a good look now—we’ll never see it again.”
“Speak for yourself, defeatist!” countered Dicaearchus.
“Suit yourself . . . while you’re busy here your mother will be playing my flute.”
“I’m just happy to get that carcass off the ship,” said Oreus from the deck. “The way that Spartan went—that kind of thing can spoil everything.”
On that none would disagree. That evening, after grounding the ship on a sandy beach at Cythera, the crew performed the ablutions that would purify it, scrubbing the decks with sand and seawater just like a family cleansing their house after a relative had died. The griffin figurehead was likewise washed, and the very bodies of the crewmen, all of whom were every bit as polluted by Epitadas’ act.
Lastly, the Spartan prisoners were tossed rags with which to clean themselves. Frog and the oth
ers complied, but Antalcidas did nothing, having yet to banish the stupefying image that had met his eyes when he woke that morning. He ignored Stilbiades’ order to wash, and Xeuthes’ as well, until the captain ordered a gang of oarsmen to bathe him forcibly. They set upon him while his arms were shackled, scouring his skin with dry sand until he bled. He then sat in the hold, covered with a cement of sand and dried blood, for the rest of the trip to the Piraeus.
It was some time before the first Spartiate arrived to take charge in Gytheion—a junior officer who had been hunting in the hills above the town. Looking down at the mass that had once been Epitadas, Rehash commanded, “Get away from him, you dogs!” He then re-covered the body, which had been exposed by the curious onlookers, with a tenderness worthy of a true hero—for anyone who had gone through the Rearing could recognize at once a death befitting the legend of Cleomenes.
Patronices was not entirely correct. A decade later, some of the men of the Terror would look out from their seats and glimpse the Spartan port again, albeit at a great distance. They would see it as part of a force of forty thousand men and two hundred ships, on their way west for Alcibiades’ great, doomed expedition against the city of Syracuse.
2.
A deputation of Spartiates came to Kynosoura to inform Damatria of the death of her son. It was the moment a noblewoman prepared for all her life—the culmination of her son’s education, in a sense, and the apogee of her personal honor. The fact that he appeared to take his own life gave her pause, to be sure, but like the other Spartiates she understood and accepted the special circumstances of Epitadas’ case. The death of a man who preferred self-mutilation to confinement, who would make a spectacle of himself before the Athenians could do it for him, was a model for the generations.
The mother of the heroic dead was expected to reflect the magnitude of her good fortune. She displayed the remains of her son, anointed with imported oil, dressed in a linen chiton of purest white, on a flowered bier in the men’s quarters of her house. For two days Damatria sat next to him in a condition of carefully arranged dishevelment: fingers stripped of all but one fine gold ring, ashes demurely scattered in her finely combed hair, a single picturesque scratch scoring her alabaster cheek. The male relatives of Dorcis came to her in cheerful procession, bearing congratulations. Their wives and daughters came in somewhat smaller numbers, but with plates of honey cake, making the customary pleas for the bereaved to eat, to sustain herself. At the proper intervals, and with conspicuous preliminaries (for she loved this part), Damatria would let loose a piteous shriek. The guests would stand around her, admiring the perfection of her mourning, looking as if they might burst into applause. On the last day even Dorcis was carted into public view for the first time in years—fatter, as helpless as ever, but beaming in the reflected glory of his son-in-law’s honor.
The Isle of Stone Page 29