The End of Sparta

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Mêlon had been told all this by Malgis, his father, and how the old man had once planned their farm on the number principles of his god, who explained how the perfect world beyond is revealed to us through the eternal laws of the arithmoi. On a rocky expanse of about a hundred plethra, the farm’s 720 olive trees and 5,040 vines spread across the terraced ground in a careful grid. He had dug in all the cuttings and rootings himself. The holes of the pattern he marked out with chalked rope. The farm spread all the way up the slope—terraced grain fields on the rich black soil, the wine vines higher up to catch the cooler breezes, olives on the poor rocky soils atop, each crop suited for each step higher up the mountain, no soil idle, no change in temperature or wind wasted. The harvests were serial, as the clan moved through the year from grain to vines to olives—the Malgidai busy always, slack in their labor never. No ice storm could kill their triad, as the harvests of the diverse crops and their leaf-break dates were never the same. A spring frost hurt the grapes, but not the barley—in the way a fall rain cracked open the grapes, but did nothing to the unripe olives. And the farm was the goddess Amalthea’s horn of plenty, as Malgis called it: olive oil for the light in the clan’s lamps and for cooking on the stoves, or even to lubricate the wagon’s axle; grapes for raisins all winter, for fresh fruit in summer, for wine all year round; barley and wheat for their bread and gruel. Who needed anything more? Only war could stop the farm—by sending in Spartans to burn their wheat or trample their vines, or, worse yet, letting the foul Kêres harvest the farm’s harvesters.

  Walk into the orchards and vineyards anywhere on the slope, and the symmetry brought forth the voice of Pythagoras. On the farms of others, chaos reigned as three vines encircled a crooked row of four olives, or goat pens were plopped down amid apples. No order in the farms of others—and no reminders of the perfect world that we all must strive to glimpse and at some point enter. Malgis, the creator, told his son that in matters of great things, such as this carving out of an entire estate from the flank of Helikon, men tend to look only at the finish. The envious never remember the hard beginning or even the worse middle of doubt and remorse. Instead, without shame onlookers come to covet what they used to mock. “I can see them below from here, and that’s close enough for me. Soon the Spartans will turn on them, and they will climb up here looking for our spear arms.” Malgis taught the household to distrust the superstitious majority and to join it only when it acted in according to the precepts of Pythagoras—in other words, rarely at all. Even though the son Mêlon doubted that creed, he kept to his father’s admonitions to shun the crowd and keep it away—and earned both the advantages from the ensuing tranquility of solitude and the dark moods that resulted from thoughts and suppositions untested and unquestioned that grow unchecked by others.

  Freedom—Malgis added in his daily sermons to his son Mêlon—wars with equality. Always. The fathers of the polis had once marked out the grid of bottomland farms. Originally they were all equally sized and portioned out to the hoplite farmer citizens of equal wealth. Within a generation those belonging to the luckier, or better, farmers were larger, while some of the poorer or unfortunate farmers lost their portions altogether. Mêlon still dreamed on this early morning before Leuktra that his father had warned him of those who demand equal slots in both the end and the beginning: Beware of the phalanx, the agrarian grid, and the assembly hall, where all are declared to be equal who in fact are not. So beware of those in the phalanx who look equal but do not protect their position as do others. They can kill you.

  The farm craft of Malgis gave the vines’ canes, high up and long in the air, the full sun for the entire day. That was why his grapes made the sweetest wine on Helikon. Malgis got the idea of the arbors from a farmer outside Syracuse he met who read and wrote block letters on long scrolls. “The sun makes the grapes, and the grapes the wine,” this Sikilian Lysis told Malgis. He showed him charts and graphs, and when he returned home to Thespiai, Malgis translated all those lines and letters into plethra of arbors and pergolas, roofed with grape canes twenty feet long and more. But then Lysis also had lectured on the right dirt, the perfect elevation, the type of water, and so Malgis thought it wasn’t just the arbors that made his vintage. Good wine needed sparse soil. Grapes liked just a little water. Crisp mornings were good for color. A cold nip at night gave taste, as did the hot sun on the leaves of the vine. Vineyards would be planted above the wheat and below the olives.

  The Malgidai themselves produced the bounty, not just prayers to Dionysos or cries of the Bakkhai that the ignorant shout who are without the reason of Pythagoras. When a man fails in body or soul or wisdom, he always prays to the Olympians. Or so as Mêlon kept dreaming before battle he remembered all that Malgis once had said. For fifty and more harvests before Leuktra, the Malgidai rarely came off Helikon except to fight for the Boiotians. They had enough coins and enough grapes, wheat, and oil to need none of those below—and no more desire to die in the phalanx of the Boiotians on the doomed left wing in the battles against the Spartans. So they were a confident bunch, and came to forget that the wages of hubris are nemesis.

  Finally in the year before Leuktra, Mêlon had opened his ears a little to Pythagoras. For he tired of meat, and found his left arm as strong as his right, and no longer felt himself better by birth than his slaves, all in the manner of Pythagoras. He wanted to believe that he had an eternal soul that would be judged in the hereafter by its brief entrapment and struggle within an all too human body; or so he also told the believer Chiôn, who was determined not to return as a sparrow or snake, but to free his soul forever with deeds he deemed good. And yet Mêlon had hesitated until now, worried by the rumors that Epaminondas might make the worse better and so replace the tyranny of Sparta with the chaos of freedmen.

  For all their farming expertise, the Malgidai’s strongboxes were heavy with coins that had not come entirely from the soil. No one ever quite makes a living on farming alone, although all always insist that they do. Instead the money had come from Malgis’s campaigning when he once sailed for fifteen days to Sikily to join a Spartan attack on Athens. He came back a rich man with the loot of the dead at the Assinaros River. His new strongbox, with the lumps of gold beneath the coins, proved so heavy that he finally sent young Mêlon for a chain at the town forge to haul it up out of the well. No mere hemp rope would bear all the weight of his profits. War, it turned out, was a good way to make or lose money. But profit depended on what side of a war you ended up on. Always it was the wiser choice to fight on the side of the Spartans—even if that meant halfway across the ocean in Sikily or Asia. The Spartans would enrich Malgis for most of his life. At his end, they would kill him when he broke his own rule.

  Mêlon remembered how Malgis, in the days after Athens had lost its great war with Sparta, liked to talk deep into the night with the big men from Thebes. Years before Mêlon came of age, the Theban friends used to walk on his farm’s paths, talking of spurning earth’s pleasures. Most of these city-folk were like Alkidamas, all self-acclaimed peripatetics who thought they were the true children and stewards of Pythagoras keeping the master’s teaching alive in the backwaters of Boiotia, as they lectured amid trees and shrubs.

  The dream of Helikon continued as the sleeping Mêlon tried to make sense of this night at Leuktra. Like all who renounce wealth and the tawdry pursuit of it, the philosophers who trudged up to the farm often came to enjoy its fruits all the more. Affluence adds a veneer of authority to knowledge—if it can be displayed without the ugly scars of its acquisition. Mêlon knew that as well, and how someone else’s money had allowed him to think he could keep himself away from the mob below. He was at Leuktra this morning for yet one more reason as well: not just because of the prophecy of the apple, or to keep Spartans off his ground, or to replay the battle of Koroneia with a different ending, but also to prove, as he had at Nemea and Koroneia, that money gave him no exemption from the ordeal of the phalanx, and that he at last did believe men, even his Boioti
ans, could in a season or two set right the wrongs of ages.

  The hoplite had thought that his senses, which had saved him so many times in the melee, had been dulled by age. They had not. Smell, hearing, even touch were all heightened this summer before Leuktra as never before. The light off Helikon had been much clearer, the hot wind of late afternoon through the shiny leaves of the olives stronger. Ever since word of Epaminondas and the failed peace at Sparta had spread and war had neared, everything had turned crisp. Nothing was as before. War was in the air. In this lull before the spearing, his touch, nose, ears, and eyes were burning and told him he alone was standing still as the world moved beneath his feet.

  What was this mystery of Epaminondas, Mêlon asked in his dream? Whence came his zeal to face down the king of Sparta and then march south, down one thousand stadia into the heart of the Peloponnesos to build new cities of freedom for others finer than their own? These Pythagoreans, with no doubt, no second ideas, thought they had ushered in the new age of Hellas. All the city-states would become one state, one community of equals. All would worship the god Logos, and would teach that there are no masters, no slaves, no right hand better than left. No man would be better than woman—but all with free will to play the fool or the good man—and suffer the consequences at the blink of death. That was the power of Epaminondas to save the souls of the would-be saviors of others for the judgment to come. So these Pythagoreans had become the godfathers of Epaminondas, well before Leuktra. When Mêlon came down to fight in the year of Leuktra, he knew well enough where the fight of these men would finally lead.

  This was also the arrogance of the Pythagoreans, Mêlon saw in these pre-battle visions. They thought they alone knew the good and alone could implement it among the Hellenes. They taught that everything we do—eat, sleep, crap, talk—must be in measure, according to meson, the golden mean. Once a man knew the rhythm of living—and he could not without the help of Pythagoras—then work was not work. Money was only for independence from the mob, never to be used for indulgence. Women and slaves were to be as free men; and dumb animals, who had inside them the souls of the departed, were to be untouched. Maybe even the olives and grapes were the stopping stations of the souls seeking to reform this time around.

  For most who improve their grandfather’s house or ancestral vineyard, this temptation is never distant—to destroy and start over from the beginning rather than to correct the wrongs and burdens of the long dead. Malgis the killer was given a great gift not to farm the plot of his father Antander, but to start on the wild Helikon anew. This was the creed of creation of the Pythagoreans. The restlessness was also the danger residing in an impatient Epaminondas—to tear down all the ancient good along with the old bad and start over afresh. Sparta was a tired city of crooked streets and cobbled-together plots. But Messenê, the capital of free Messenia to come? This dream of Epaminondas’s new city would be a grid. All new streets and blocks as perfect as the new vines and trees to be planted around it, their city to practice on with the newly freed helots—like the famous farm of the Malgidai, but for thousands.

  After his father Malgis had terraced the hillsides, fashioned the big courtyard with a view of Boiotia below, planted the vines and trees, leveled and smoothed the wheat fields, built the pens and threshing floor, got the big press working, lined the farm’s paths with flat stones, and worshiped his god of Pythagoras—after all that, three things that no seer imagined had followed. First, he ended up not with a man’s refuge, but with the finest-looking farm in Boiotia. The orchard and vineyards proved better even than those on Sikily that he had copied so well. Malgis the founder became not just an idiotês—not just a recluse—but a wealthy one at that, whose wine and oil brought in gawkers and buyers alike. Then he buried his young wife, Kephesia. She died ten springs after the battle of Delion, from the stiff-jaw right after giving him a single son up in their new house on the mountain. Last of all, at sixty years still hale, Malgis himself fell.

  Fell? Hardly. Malgis was gutted by the Spartans—knocked down by no less than Lord Lichas himself, at the spear clash at Koroneia, ten seasons after the great war with the Athenians—caught in the final mad Theban crash against the king Agesilaos. There the Boiotians in folly threw away the fight they had earlier almost won, losing thirty years after they and Malgis’s Thespians had won at Delion. But, of course, they were now fighting Spartans, not Athenians any longer. This last muster at his age was Malgis’s death sentence. But still at Koroneia, Malgis did all that the Theban generals wanted, as a lochagos leading his son Mêlon and six hundred Thespians head-on against the Spartan king Agesilaos in the battle’s bitter finale—on the Boiotians’ weak left against the choice Spartan royals on the enemy right wing. At first he was blocked from nearing the king, but he soon found a way over them, as the men from Thespiai behind pushed their front files through. These images came more quickly now to the dreaming Mêlon as sunlight neared and with it the approach of battle.

  Malgis had hit the royal guard under Lichas, who stabbed better with the spear than any on either side of the battlefield. Malgis had first wounded Sphodrias. Then he took on Deinon as well, and got close to King Agesilaos, almost through the last circle of the king’s guard under Lichas. Finally, with the king’s crest in sight, Malgis in desperation had thrown his thrusting spear—and it had hit the royal thigh itself. The wound would cripple Agesilaos, but not kill him. Malgis could not withstand the fury of a stunned Lichas. No man could. The Spartan caught Malgis without his spear and stabbed him right under the chin, above his breastplate. Then Lichas called in vain for his henchmen to strip the Thespian and take the gleaming armor that had once belonged to the Spartan general Lysander.

  Mêlon saw his father collapse in the dust. Now he battled his way forward to keep the murderous Spartans from desecrating the body of Malgis; somehow he carried the body away from the fray. Lichas stabbed him above the knee and almost took him down, too, but the royal guard fell back and circled Agesilaos. They carried their king out rather than go after the Theban vanguard under Mêlon. The next day Gorgos, the captured helot, packed dead Malgis back to the farm, and he wrapped the leg of Mêlon as he drove the cart to Helikon with his dead and wounded masters. The Thebans set up a small black stone hidden away on a corner of the Kadmeia in the center of town, reading just as the Boiotarchs promised: Tode mnêma Malgidi, Antandros huiô, tô Thespiaô, hon Spartiai eidon kalon en Koroneia. Eis Hadas elthe makairpistos tôn Helikonidôn hina Boiotia pasa ê eleuthera. (This memorial is for Malgis, son of Antander, the Thespian, whom the Spartans knew well at Koroneia. He went down to Hades, most blessed of those Helikon way, so that all of Boiotia might be free.)

  The Spartan iron had bored in a palm’s width above the back of Mêlon’s knee. To the bone and deeper Lichas had driven his spear tip to roll up his tendon. If he were to meet Lichas this coming day at Leuktra, then the reckoning had been yet another reason to follow Nêto’s prophecy and come down at last from Helikon. But Lophis had filled him with talk of Epaminondas, and freedom from Sparta, and something greater still. The result was that he thought himself not so old and crippled as much as wise and experienced—and needing to settle with Lichas. But even before that for twenty years and more, he picked up his spear Bora, put on his panoply every other evening behind the shed—bronze breast- and backplate, concave round willow shield, banged-up greaves, slashing sword, and heavy helmet—and then did his ten or so jabs and set moves. Right foot forward with the spear thrust; right back to bring the enemy in off balance; the shield bash with the left foot leading; the underhand stab to the groin; the overhand thrust down into the enemy’s neck; the wild right hand cross slash with the cleaver; the sword chop down on the helmet; the crouch to one knee behind the shield; the right-wing drift; the steady walk ahead; the double-time trot. These were all the moves, the hoplomachia, that his Theban drill masters had once taught him before the battles at the Nemea and at Koroneia, and that he had repeated three thousand times and more these ye
ars so that perhaps one day he would come down his mountain and kill Spartans without end.

  At fifty Mêlon was on the downhill course without a rock or stump in his way, with a better farm for his boy Lophis than what Malgis had given him—and with a better son in Lophis than he himself had been. Lophis riled Mêlon with new talk of helots and Epaminondas and grand marches and Lichas and how he must come down to fight the Spartans if he were to claim he was a citizen and a man of the polis. But shortly after making his decision to fight, Mêlon had begun to see black visions sent from the gods—the dream changing on alternating sleeps. He always saw two cities to the south, far beyond the Isthmos, and now at Leuktra those old dreams came back and turned his mind from Helikon.

  The first one was a rising city of tall stones, with ladders of men at work, and black cut rock stacked everywhere amid the growing ramparts. Two big levers with pulleys and hooks lifted squared blocks on a temple wall. A theater was half-finished. Workers swarmed on the embrasures, singing with the oxen-team drivers in a thick Doric. An agora was crowded. Farmers in peace flocked in to sell their wares. Squabbles were settled in a large dikastêrion by swift-mouthed rhêtôrs and voting jurors. Women brought their men apples in baskets. They sang to them as they hauled stones. On a bêma, a tall orator lectured to his listeners, who jeered and clapped—but then voted in peace and praised their freedom as their walls always rose higher. Calm and order reigned.

  On the other gloomier nights when there was no moon, Mêlon saw these same towers and walls, but unfinished, with many more black blocks ready to be stacked. This other vision of the city was longer, darker and louder. There were rotting Hellenes hanging in nooses from the gates. Dogs and birds fought over even more corpses in ditches and refuse piles, pulling on their putrid ankles. There were more bodies half-eaten outside the towers, clubbed and knifed, with their purses and packs stolen. Men were killing and raping at will, and packs of cutthroats in the chaos of the city’s license roamed over the unfinished city that was full of trash and worse, as slaves dumped their slop jars into open pits. Always upon waking Mêlon asked himself how could this same city be two different cities, and which dream was the real, which the false. Somehow he put himself in the answer: His presence in the south could ensure the good city of this Epaminondas, holy Messenê to come—while his absence would mean its failure and descent into chaos. But, he asked himself, would Gorgos, would Chiôn stay or go with him, and if they went, who would keep the farm and the family of his son Lophis safe?