The End of Sparta

by Victor Davis Hanson

  A spear’s length away, Chiôn on this hard-baked ground this night now saw these same images, but he had more of his own dreams and memories before Leuktra that would not easily give way. Malgis, he knew, had roped the slow-moving pursuing helot Gorgos in the free-for-all after the Theban phalanx had broken at the Nemea and the battle lines had been crossed. The prisoner Gorgos had squirmed on the ground and whimpered that he was the prized shield carrier of a Spartan noble. Maybe the manservant to the big ephor, to Lichas himself he was. Now the Messenian slave was somewhere around six tens, maybe more, or so he claimed, though his arms seemed too hard for a man that old. On feast nights for the two meat-eaters, Chiôn saw Gorgos crush a piglet’s head like he did a squash. Gorgos said he was nearly blind—though the helot saw more than others the bad spots and crooks of the farm. Most days he shuffled about and was just worth the food to keep him going, although Gorgos talked as if he owned the estate itself. Chiôn’s dreams now stayed on Helikon.

  Nêto did more work than the Messenian. But she never stayed put as she wandered throughout the hamlets of Boiotia. Years earlier Mêlon had bought her as a twelve-year-old; he’d put down twenty good Boiotian silver coins, the new minted ones of the Confederation with the stamped shields. Down at the harbor at Kreusis some Spartan renegade had sneaked in at night in a leaky boat, eager to barter her away along with four other helots and a bronze breastplate. The trader had charged more for her than for the others, and had spun stories that she was the aborted daughter of a fallen virgin Messenian priestess. Artemis, he said, had struck her mother when she had found her pregnant. Then the goddess had cut out Nêtikon alive from the shaking womb and had bellowed, “You live and are cursed to be damned when you reveal today what will happen tomorrow.” Mêlon told Chiôn he had bought her to help Gorgos; but he told also the tale of her birth, because, he reasoned, if she thought she was a priestess, well, then that was better than a slave after all, was it not?

  The girl was more than twenty seasons now. Gorgos had tried to poke her twice. But Mêlon had beat him hard with his stick both times. A third time was even worse when Mêlon slapped him with the shaft of his spear, the heavy one of ash—even though the helot had fancied his Nêtikon would not fight back once she had had a taste of his horn. The last time his back bled from the hit so much that Gorgos dared to snap back at his master that he was beating the saddle rather than the willing mount. Yes, he’d try to settle up soon enough, Chiôn suspected, and with all of them if he could. Chiôn had heard Gorgos boast that Nêto needed a brand on her soft face to take her down two pegs—just like the one on Chiôn’s own cheek.

  Nêto had whispered to Chiôn, “For all his singing of lions, Gorgos has no thought of what floor he will end up on—or that he will die one day at the hand of another helot. But that is what the divine whispers say.” She warned Chiôn to either kill or free him. The bit of freedom that the master Mêlon gave him, she knew, made the slave hate them all the more that it came late and in such small measure. At least that was how Nêto accounted for what she saw as the unaccountable, since the petulant Gorgos was treated as if he were free, and fared far better than any down in the Peloponnesos. Always Chiôn watched them from the high grain fields, as he pried up an oak stump with an iron bar and ax. Kill this broke-back now, Chiôn had thought. Or later, as Nêto foretold? For sport here—or soon in battle, no difference. Why just him? Why not even the score, since one killing makes the murderer as much as five or so. The neighbor below, Dirkê, and her slaves, the Spartan-lovers, would those traitors be good relish too? All this Chiôn went over in these dreams, just as if each choice were a different stone to be stacked and fitted into his grand terrace on the upper five plethra, or another notch on the windlass of the new olive press. When you live to kill the bad, you can do more good than the good, or thus Chiôn claimed his own ideas had the sanction of Pythagoras and called his plans to kill the god’s wisdom to save his own soul.

  Chiôn had been told that Malgis, the slave collector, had picked him up cheap—for almost nothing—at age three, when Malgis was on the way home from the wars in Asia. Malgis had once marched with the Ten Thousand and then stayed on to fight for better pay with the lords of the Spartans. Before Derkyllidas and the Spartan fleet sailed west, the Egyptian plague swept the islanders. Most island clans were selling off their scarred orphans—those few survivors who were free for life from the boils—for an owl coin or two from Athens to the ships as they passed to the Peloponnesos.

  Chiôn also had been told that Malgis had paid only three obols—a half Athenian owl—for the pox boy with the ugly Spartan brand. It was a lambda burned into his cheek. Scars covered most of his face and arms from the nosos. “This sick worm, not much to be sure,” the Spartan pilot had offered when he sold him to Malgis. “He’s an ugly white toddler, too, maybe a snowy Thrakian. But then three obols is not much of a gamble either, is it, for a raggedy thing splashing about the currents of death?” Malgis had made the exchange. Only then the Spartan had grumbled, “No buyer’s second anger for poxy boy—but the priestess of Artemis on Chios told me to kill this half-dead thing, since the pox and the hungry belly couldn’t. She says he is a killer of Spartan royalty, Lichas’s bane. Beware—or be happy—over that.”

  The words of the island trader had been forgotten, even if Chiôn had heard them enough. What was pock-marked and yellow soon grew on Malgis’s farm into a near giant. Six-cubit Chiôn he was, with the stone shoulders of the Titans of old. Just like the vines on the high trellises that got stronger with the more sunlight, Chiôn had taken off on the mountain, and his remedy for a day behind the ox was “More work.” He chanted no Tyrtaios as did Gorgos, but strains from Helikon’s native Hesiod as he pulled Nêto’s plow: “Ergon epi ergô, ergon epi ergô—work on top of work.” As the great year of settling up with invading Spartans approached, Chiôn often went out alone to the sycamores on the crests of Helikon. He stalked the wilds, eating berries and killing game for the poor for days at a time—as if he were a hunter, perhaps a hunter of men with no need of the polis or even the meat for his own belly. “The Panther Chiôn,” Nêto called him, the all-beast panthêr. With that, the dreams of Chîon ceased and black sleep held him a while longer.

  But not so Mêlon, whose mind still saw visions as he snored. For all the tranquility of the farm, rumors of a new war had bored deeply into Mêlon. He knew that. They never really left him in peace again. It was not a mere battle anymore to showcase courage but something quite different—a struggle to overturn the ancient order itself that needed a hoplite like himself who could put his lore to good use for thousands of democrats. That bothered—but intrigued—him. Worried him that a man who promised to change the world would enlist a broken-down man like himself, and yet goaded him on that Epaminondas might see in Mêlon, sore back, and a deaf ear, and a locked knee, something he sensed untapped in himself as well. Now Mêlon joined Chiôn in a final slumber, blank and without memory, as if both were ordered by the One God to banish both dark and light dreams and rest for Leuktra and the sunup.

  Up on the hill above, Nêto was not dreaming of Helikon, but still awake. Proxenos, the Plataian, was sleeping under the wagon nearby, sent there by Mêlon after the meeting to guard against Gorgos, who grew reckless as he neared his Spartans. The One God had this night sent to her the dreams of Chiôn and Mêlon, and now at last she too would sleep, relieved that they would fight and battle well, as the images of those on Helikon reminded them both of who they were on this eve of battle. What a strange clan, these men of the soil of Helikon, Nêto thought. Richer than the rich who despised them—and yet rich from Malgis’s killing in Sikily rather than from the great bounty of his vineyards on Helikon. Gorgos and Chiôn were as free as their master—two forgotten slaves out on the uplands of mountain Helikon with no need of town who yet boasted to themselves that they were gods who would shake the very cities of Hellas. Damô, the wife of Lophis, and Nêto more like men of action than wives or servants. Mêlon, the center
of it all, the savior of the Boiotians, said to be the apple of the prophecy about to fall on the Spartans who knew not how to farm, the master whose slaves acted as his master, the great farmer with but a single son, neither all Pythagorean nor Olympian—and with his bad leg and bald head somehow pledged to Epaminondas, although why or how he hardly knew. All this, Malgis had wrought from the word of Pythagoras and booty from Sikily, even as Nêto assured them all that they had been chosen to be carried along according to the order and plan of Pythagoras.

  CHAPTER 5

  Spartans

  Mêlon and Chiôn roused themselves right before daylight.

  Chiôn woke up pondering all the grand talk of fifty men deep. True, fifty pushers should have more power than twenty-five. If they did, why not a hundred or a thousand? Better, Chiôn thought, to mass four or even eight deep, and then outflank the Spartans. That way each man could fight his way into the enemy rather than be pushed through. Better to forget all this taktika and instead remember that spirit, arête, alone would get him to Kleombrotos. “Kill him,” he muttered, “and then nothing else much matters.”

  Mêlon heard the waking Chiôn at his side mumbling. He too had his own fears about this ragtag army of Boiotians. Some had cloaks, some did not. The men on his line were supposed to have the club of Herakles on their shields, but some had betas for the Boiotians, others their own family and tribal blazons—poorly painted crabs, and flies, and birds and the like. Sloppy men fought sloppily. They feared all the more those who looked like real hoplites, the Spartans most of all. There were dozens of different helmets in the army of Epaminondas—crest, no crest, cone shaped or flat on top, open, or close-faced. His peers should have the old-style bronze on their chests—but most had only linen with some metal woven inside. Those in the middle and some at the back had little at all. Only the officers of the lochoi wore greaves. Not all from the outlying towns had a sword on their shoulders, and their spears were of all lengths and types. Could such a rabble—little more than a people’s army—stand up to the red mass of Spartans across the battlefield, where every man was outfitted identically to thousands of others?

  This day of battle had begun oddly dark for the summer. Now it was humid as well. A few gray clouds even drifted over the battlefield. Now and then the gray cut off the early sun entirely. Beneath the clouds there were only brief flashes from the bronze of the Spartan phalanx, a twinkling from the shields and helmets of the Similars, all shined to a high gloss with oil. Suddenly, thunder rumbled in the hills.

  A chestnut filly galloped across the Theban line out between the two armies—only to be roped by five hoplites of the Sacred Band. Pelopidas ran out. He cut the horse’s neck. Then for the army he offered a prayer to the Olympians. He called out that Poseidon had sent the equine gift to the Thebans to show them the way of victory. At that, the Thebans began to regain their senses and yelled in approval to this other general bathed in horse blood.

  The Spartans as expected marched out first. Lichas put on a show for thousands of rural folk who had flocked to the nearby hills to gaze on the spectacle. Each man filed into neat rows to the sounds of pipes and the signals of flags. The teeming crowd of their camp was slowly unfurling into a red line that grew ever deeper across the gentle rolling plain of Leuktra. One by one, files of twelve deep walked out—and halted on the crest of the low rise to the blare of trumpets. Slowly, side-by-side, these columns filled out the phalanx. Hoplites in long lines raised their bronze-coated shields, with even their red lambdas, the insignia of Lakedaimon, visible in the distance. The army was stretching fifteen stadia along the crest above the streambed.

  Suddenly on a trumpet blast, helots of Sparta ran among the ranks and stripped off their masters’ cloaks. The bronze fronts twinkled now and then in the darting sunlight—outlined at the shoulders, and arms and waists, by their red chitons beneath. Mêlon focused on the battle line where the enemies’ tall black-and-white crests bobbed. Now they lowered their spears and jostled shields just a stade away. Spartans had no pause in their walk. They seem to have emptied their whole damn city.

  Then, for a blink only—the first and final time at Leuktra—Mêlon lost his nerve, as he thought about their spear work to come. Dying was no dread, he thought, not even losing Chiôn or Nêto, or even his son Lophis with the horse. No, the rub was the sound, and especially the look, of the death-bringing Spartans across the way. The bristles of their phalanx and the pitch of the music made all afraid, if just for that moment, about how they were to die, the pain and cutting to take them into the final sleep. Are these killers even human as other hoplites? he wondered. His bowels rumbled and his bladder felt full. The men from the south across the way looked like hemi-gods on the high stone altars who did not tremble, drink, or tire as other men did. No living thing could get between their solid line of shields. There was no reprieve from their spears. These men did not lag or slow. It would take a god, he feared, to stop their onset. No, they came on at a steady pace—always to the tune of pipes, never too fast, but never slow, either. They stopped only when cut down.

  Then the terror vanished as quickly as it had come. The madness of the war god Pan had no more hold over him, a god that left the glens at the sound of bronze and the chance to confuse thousands. In hopes the madness would not infect his men, Mêlon stared back at the ghost of the hoofed god in front of him in anger. “Be gone, foul god. Back to the herds and flocks!” Mêlon took in the Spartan line opposite him, ever nearing and now little more than two hundred paces away. He imagined that he could see these brutes smiling, even in their helmets, stomping their stiff legs on the ground in unison, in their eagerness. He looked at them with reason rather than fright. Spartan targets offered little open flesh. Maybe a spot beneath the shield in the upper groin, maybe some skin of the neck between the breastplate and the chinstrap. Always there was a peep of bare flesh or an open fold of their chitons when they turned, on their sides between the front and back plates.

  For all his efforts, Mêlon could not calm all the men at his side. Too many other young Boiotians at his side shuddered at such killers. They had let the shade of clever Pan into their ranks as the ghost god galloped toward the front lines. They trembled at the shrieking of the horned spirit, of the wild goat god in their ears who struck men dumb before the crash with his screeches—oooha, oooohaa, ooooohaaa. And they for a moment ignored their officers who went among them answering the god. “No fear,” bellowed Pelopidas. “No fear of these red-shirts. Forget the mad goat-horned ghost of Pan who gallops across the field and strikes your shield with his back kicks. Forget him and watch him vanish back into the woods where he belongs. There is no panika, no panic here. Forget the Spartans. It is show—all show, their pipes and shine. Herakles the strong is our god, always the stronger god. Herakles of Thebes. A better god by far. He fights in our ranks. Hold your shields high. Take up your spears. We file up and go out now.”

  Across the way Lichas, waiting for just this moment, trotted on a black stallion in and out of the wings. Kleombrotos was king, but all looked to Lichas to form up the phalanx. For a moment he reared his horse on its back legs and waved his helmet in his right hand, motioning for the Boiotians to come and take it from him. “They’re already upon us. The pigs are here at last. Wait until the horsemen are through before marching out. Let me and my cavalry fight first, you later.”

  For all his bellowing, Lichas worried that the Boiotian army had formed up too quickly and had caught his red-capes unawares. The Spartans had wine in their mouths from the late breakfast, and a few were unsteady from too much. The ranks were not as tight as usual, and already enemy horsemen were charging from across the way. Too much drink, too much hubris this time. How could these pigs be more ready to charge than his own taskmasters of war? No, this was not the Spartan way, Lichas knew—and with a coward like Kleombrotos at the head of his army and drunken Dionysos, not Ares, their god this morning. Nonetheless, his hoplites raised their shields high and hit their spear shafts agains
t the bronze shield blazons. The clash bellowed across the vale of Leuktra.

  Mêlon across the field could smell the stench, as if in reply to the Spartan spectacle too many Thebans in the line had soiled their legs in terror. He noticed piss too in the dirt. Even some of the older ones emptied their bladders in the ranks. Their ground was becoming a sewer. Mêlon hit Chiôn on his broad shoulder as they found their slots on the left wing. “Our time, islander. You and I, we will stand firm—always the lead geese who break the wind for the weaker flyers behind.” He was talking as if he were Epaminondas.

  Chiôn paid his master no mind—even though he heard well with his helmet up on his forehead. He tapped his spear on Mêlon’s shield. He was full of the good spirits, the daimones of courage and audacity. The slave was entheos, a god was inside him. As for Spartans over there preening to the mounted Lichas, he would kill plenty and rout the rest—happy to teach the Hellenes that there were men at Thespiai still. If he were killed? Well, nothing—he knew that well enough—nothing bad, no kakon. Nêto had promised him that: nothing bad would come to the souls of the good. He would return in his own fashion, fly back out of the whirl to his haunt on Helikon in a shape and with a voice he could hardly imagine—a free soul as an ant or leaf with no memories of who or what it had been as the slave Chiôn of Helikon.