The End of Sparta

by Victor Davis Hanson

  “Not at all.”

  “Always.”

  “Never. I am needed only to keep the farm so you may not, to stay in the orchard, so you can go into town.”

  Mêlon ignored this final chance to show her proof of his devotion and instead offered only lame small talk. “Who will hear my tales of spear play at Koroneia? Now I’m boasting only to the ox Aias and the pigs of Leuktra.”

  Nêto blushed and then laughed, “Even they forgot you. The only pigs you know are the fat men in the halls of Phrynê. Damô runs the agora. When she prances in, they either leave or keep quiet if they know what is good for them. The agora is your home now. Or so Dirkê whom you love so well tells me of this Phrynê. Oh yes, and her soft pipes and full table and more still. Beware of such a woman who will roast you even without fire, who wishes to be mistress on Helikon to the hero of Leuktra and lord over our widow Damô. Each word you utter is known to Lichas in the south. She might as well brand a lambda on her forehead. Peace used to bore you. Beware that victory ruins us as much as defeat.”

  Such a strange thing, Mêlon knew, that those who have no formal bond, and no history of physical love between them, nevertheless expect each other not to taste the flesh of others. Stranger yet that they both understand and honor such a pact though no words are ever spoken and they themselves are resigned to wait for each other—without worry that the wait may prove endless and outlast the flesh. He had half-expected that Nêto knew that he wanted her as his wife, without ever asking her—or even making her his wife. Wasn’t the idle wish of his enough? Did she not know that he had risked his all to stop the Spartans, the oppressors of her dear helots? And had he not accepted Pythagoras on her prompt, and then let her roam over Boiotia, flirting with Alkidamas and Proxenos as they recruited for Epaminondas?

  He grabbed her shoulder and made Nêto look him square in the eye, despite the glare from the stones. Mêlon felt a sort of pity for Nêto. Her ambition put her hopes into something greater than the greatest battle of the age that had just passed—as if to be alive during Leuktra was not enough for any mortal, much less a helot girl on Helikon. Did she know how small her world really was? Or how those far greater than her determined whether she and her kind lived or died?

  Just over a year earlier, when the black clouds of Sparta hung over Helikon, all in town had listened to her prophecies and begged her to repeat her strange promise that the Thebans would be mightier in war. But now? Those were her great days lost. Then Lophis was riding about and Mêlon let her run the farm. Then Chiôn and the dogs were at her side. Gorgos was lusting after her blush, in the long afternoons of the spring and summer of the previous year, before everything had changed at Leuktra. The rich man Proxenos thought he would free and marry her, or so he boasted. She alone was the ear for Mêlon. He was the recluse eager for the news of the world below. She had once been his only conduit to the polis people beneath. Mêlon thought how foolish men lament that the long days are always the same. They are not, he knew. We change even as we speak. So in his folly he judged that the world had passed young Nêto by. In his new fame from Leuktra, and life in town, he felt sorry for her. Or was it that he feared that she might well not need the farm and tower anymore—and that she talked in confidence rather than hurt? Or that she might be as wary of wedding as he? Mêlon’s last words of lament surprised him. “Nêto, come back with us. Theanô can hire Thrattos. She is better off for Leuktra and is no helot, but the widowed hero of a great man Staphis and with coins for his death no less. Come back and let us both avoid town and work the vineyard, side-by-side.”

  He took his hand off her and looked down, “You are the one that all the men of Thespiai talk of—some with many vines and six hundred plethra of the bottomland at their call. They would all yoke you this very summer. Come back to us. Stay.”

  Nêto flashed. “I earn my keep as all free women do: with work. I have no need of the men of Thespiai. Like women they stayed in the theater when we all marched to Leuktra. They watched you and Chiôn and Lophis and Staphis carry the yoke of Thespians. Believe me, I have no love of the Thespians, men or women. Some are like Backwash, the others Phrynê. Their backsides from sitting are wider than the shoulders they never use. They would as soon kill as free a helot. Nêto as you knew her is gone and for good. And so is the old Mêlon of Helikon.”

  Mêlon was drawn to her even more by her defiance. But he saw finally that she was already gone from the farm. She would not come back. Not unless perhaps he would offer her what he would not yet give. He liked the idea that some day they might run the farm as two, but he saw too late that for too long he had liked even more the notion that she would wait for that moment without really thinking it would ever quite come. “Go then. Be the helot you are. Scrub the floor of Theanô. Forget the needs of the boys of Lophis. Go play the Thisbean strain to Lord Proxenos. Sit at the foot of Alkidamas.”

  “Siga, calm, master. You speak only in anger and hurt. What I see and hear of the army to come is not really of my doing,” Nêto quietly countered, “but only what the goddess warned me long ago. I don’t believe in these Olympians. I know only their anger at my treason, and my loyalty to the One God of Pythagoras. So they have put voices, wild ones, in my head. Because of them, I am not leaving you as much as beginning the trip south, where I think we two will see each other a last time and perhaps for good.”

  She continued more slowly. “There is a Nikôn to the south. He is a tanner, a poor man but one who fights. His better helots just talk. But Nikôn kills Spartans. I hear his voice in my head. He says he needs me soon, needs a prophet of things to come as guide for his gangs, needs a voice to counter the lies about us that Phrynê up here sends down there. And Alkidamas says there is a poetess as well that will go south with me before this summer ends. She’s a great charmer who can help stir up the Messenians as well. Helots should help helots free themselves. And you, master? Some day you will stop thinking you, in your quiet arrogance, are not quite part of the world and join us who are in it up to our necks.”

  With that, Nêto passed him by as she made her way down. Mêlon noticed that she had a short double-edged blade, a Spartan xiphos that she had probably taken from one of the corpses the previous summer at Leuktra, to go along with her jagged single-edged chopper. Mêlon left her with, “It is hot today, girl. But your wits were long ago cooked. Be happy with a free Boiotia. Let the Spartans be—unless you must dress up your desire for Alkidamas with talk of trumpets and banners. Unless you have your eye on some helot lord, some tanner Nikôn to the south if it has not been Proxenos already.”

  Nêto kept her head down and moved down the path alone, chattering away, her words heard by no one as Mêlon was already up the trail. She was chanting, stitching together words of a song that came into her head, between Thisbean strains on her reed pipe. “Farewell—until the winter, until the winter when we will meet far away on Ithômê.” But he was already long gone and well around the turn, with only a stade left to the tower and home.

  She missed him at the first bend; and Mêlon for his part began to miss her the very moment she turned away.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Healing of Mêlon

  By mid-autumn, Phrynê was shooing strange customers from her house and angry even as her coin boxes filled with the new business. Their accents were not Boiotian, even in out-of-the-way Thespiai. These bounders were not mere northern pilgrims on their way to consult the Pythia at Delphi. They had no religious business with Apollo of Ptôon. Most were fighting men of scars and dirty leather. Now they camped outside the walls of Thespiai and said little to the natives, as they drilled and sparred in bronze. Thebes would be mustering soon, and thousands of foreign hoplites were spreading over the countryside of the Boiotians. Phrynê sent messengers to Lichas, in silly fashion thinking that after Leuktra there were still enough Spartans left to come north—when, in fact, those who had survived the battle still woke with the night terrors of seeing again Epaminondas, Mêlon, and Chiôn in their ar
mor.

  Some at the campfires danced the Pyrrhic with their shields and spears and bought women. They sang the enoplia war songs in Doric. Their tents and shacks surrounded the walls. Even when sleet showers of winter came, men camped in the cold in the last months of the year, as if the foreigners and xenoi knew more than the Thebans themselves what would happen next. Mêlon had no luck hiring any of these itinerants for the final end of the olive harvest. Many were not like hoplites of the polis, but had the look of hired killers. They talked of money to be made from plunder in the south. What were they doing here—when it was the coming of the cold solstice, and the season of arms long past? What rogue, Phrynê screamed in her halls, had summoned them here?

  Then arrived more winter roadmen, at first all northerners, later from almost every region of Hellas, marching on the trails leading over the northern passes into Boiotia. Lokrians came. Horsemen too rode in from Thessaly on taller ponies. Then trudged in later islanders from across the strait of Euboia and beyond. All of these by the first frost walked in the streets of the Boeotian cities as if they owned the polis. Chiôn saw that his Aegean folk were rowing in ahead of the winter storms. Some came from as far as Lesbos and Samos with accents like the Aeolic Hellenes—maybe his kin from Chios as well, or so a stocky Melian down at Kreusis told him in town when Chiôn hiked over to watch some of these island sorts sail in (and to turn upside down Nêto’s prophecies that he should not view the waves and breakers).

  Even Arkadians from Mantineia were marching northward to Boiotia in twos and threes. All heading now for Thebes, all going over the gulf road near Aigosthena along the water and up through Kreusis. Five hundred Messenians had come east along the coast from Naupaktos. These were the children of the helot refugees in the north freed at Pylos during the Athenian war. Thirty years later they swore to deliver their kin from the Spartan yoke. Most still had their Doric talk. Mêlon tried for a time to race against this great shaking up in Boiotia and finish the olive harvest in his own world on Helikon.

  As the family team worked in the shortening days of late autumn during the month of Boukatios, Chiôn proved the natural father all along to Mêlon’s grandsons. The dead Lophis for all his spirit had had no heart in either the land or its sons. He too often swore when the deep mud caked inside his long fingernails, and the boys tried to mount his sleek charger Xiphos and pile on behind their father. “We are not all men of the soil,” Malgis once had warned his grandson Lophis. “You find keeping this farm for your sons hard, but keep it nonetheless you must. A farm is the stored work of a man’s life. Lose it, and the rope snaps, with you, the weak weave. Then the boys will not have what you were given. You inherit, and see to it that you add to it—so others get more than you did. We Malgidai, we will buy the soil of others, or cut out more from the mountain, but we will not sell, not now, not ever.”

  Mêlon suddenly thought of all that now. How had the gods accomplished that the farm would be saved by a slave that his father had bought in Chios, land that otherwise might have been lost had his own son, who thought of town more than a hillside of olives, lived? Still, he missed his Lophis in the morning. No more did his son climb up bleary-eyed and full of talk from his nighttime rides at the marshes and beyond. When sons die before fathers, it is soon time for fathers to follow. Even if their hair is not all white and their joints are not yet frozen with the swelling and stiffness; and even if their son proved a worse sort than the father, himself a worse sort than his own father Malgis. Lophis had proved just the opposite; as good as Mêlon or better still. He had a year, or maybe two left, and that was perhaps all Mêlon deserved. No need to be greedy and take more than your son had—and so this thought too began to make the Thespian think Leuktra had not been enough and he might go down the mountain to talk to these growing hordes of hoplites who were camping in the orchards and vineyards of Boiotia and do yet one more big thing before the end. Slowly all thought of town soured him. And he felt shame that he had spent even a single afternoon in the Thespian agora rather than with a ladder in the orchard.

  Only out on Helikon did his head clear and could he think again. Wars were not just won by hands like himself and Chiôn, the killers and gray-heads that hold firm in the spear crossing and don’t flinch when iron tips rattle off their nose. There is need of young zealots such as Lophis who could ride head-on into the Spartan horse, with no foreknowledge of the gore of battle and no fear of Hades. Without young men who know it not, there could be no war brought to the land of others. So war is a sort of madness. It requires young men in their pride and recklessness who have no wisdom about how thin the threads of all of us hang—and so are willing to confront evil. Hoplites not yet much beyond their twentieth year believe their fate is a hardened iron chain that can’t be cut by anyone or anything. So they fight even to get into the first bloody rank of the phalanx.

  In the long nights in the shed behind the farmhouse Mêlon grasped how sorely he missed Nêto, whom he now regretted having driven off the mountain—though of course he really had not driven her off. Indeed, only by deluding himself that his words had banished her could he accept that he feared she had tired of him and the farm and the neglect which he had shown for both her and the crops after Leuktra. He was afraid this Nikôn or Doreios—or worse still, the wealthy and landed Proxenos—had stolen his Nêto. Alkidamas had “taught” Nêto, but Mêlon scarcely knew what had been the nature of his lessons. That she had left for her helots, he knew; that she had left to raise her own station, and in that way at last to win her Mêlon, he had not even a small sign.

  Almost as a revelation during the olive harvest, Mêlon now saw the broken terraces, cracked clay pipes, and trellises that had gone unrepaired in the vineyard in his absences down the mountain in the long months since Leuktra. How mad to have played the hero in Phrynê’s house and left his own to decay. Just a year of neglect and nature gets the upper hand. Nature never rests as man sleeps or dawdles in town. Nature gives us mold, rust, and wrinkles as occasional evidence of her silent, ceaseless work—the poisonous mushrooms that sprout out of nowhere after the rain. The farm fights the wild daily, but without man to stem the tide, feral nature reclaims its own in one season of weeds, and insects, and floods. Mêlon rediscovered himself as the land slowly began to heal him and bring him back to what he had once been. Yes, he was a geôrgos of Helikon, a farmer of civilization. He was no wild bacchant on Kithairon. His were not the maenads who danced on Mt. Ida in worship with her cymbals to Kybele. Those fools liked nature in the raw and laughed at the hard work of bringing culture out of savagery. Instead, his gods were the sober makers of things, divine Athena and the bitter Hephaistos. They were not wild and untamed Dionysos of Asia. They were not the Spartans’ huntress Artemis. Yet he was not a townsman either, who in softness had forgotten how to read the south breeze and the storm warning of birds and hoppers in the air. He was not to be a gawker or lay about in the halls of Phrynê, the seductress who had taught him so well that it was the land, not his own character, that kept him at work and away from the idle and slothful.

  No, Mêlon son of Malgis was a mesos, a middle-man, neither feral nor tamed. From now on in these last days before the muster of the army, he would stay up on Helikon and tend to what he had neglected. He would go back to farming, and grow food from scrub and wait for a call from Epaminondas. The way to be ready for another battle was to ignore the talk of it in town, and instead ensure that his right arm was hard from pruning and he was once more used to sleeping on boards rather than reclining on the couches of Phrynê. Yes, that was the key, to be ready for the moment when it arrives even if that rendezvous be distant and unsure. If he wished to see beauty, it would have been far wiser to have gazed at Nêto for a blink between olive pickings than to have stared at Phrynê all day in her house of sloth.

  So Mêlon was no longer hero of Leuktra, big man of Thespiai, but now cured once more and back to bald, lame Mêlon of Helikon, shorn of his slaves, and a mere tiller of the soil. As he stayed up on H
elikon one evening about dusk the new dogs of Damô, Phylax and Hormê, began yapping at noises. But theirs was a different sort of bark. It was the rarer sort of yelp on lonely Helikon that most always foretold the scent of man, and strangers at that. Mêlon stopped the pressing to walk a bit out of the back room of the shed. What would the dog noise augur this time? Dirkê’s new Thrakians, or those left-handed conspirators of Pythagoras? Was the man-bear lurking near? And were the old myths even true, that man-bears still roamed like the half-gods Agrios and Oreios, whose mothers had mated with wild beasts in the high mountains? Were they again sweeping down from the north—now human in appearance, now in their fits assuming the shapes of half-bears with the cunning of men but the claws, fangs, strength, and savagery of animals?

  From the crossbeam of the shed Mêlon grabbed his new Bora, the replacement spear that he had turned out from a log of cornel, with its iron head resharpened. He made ready outside the pressing room to stand his ground. Then to his surprise he met both Proxenos the Plataian and Ainias of Stymphalos—the first he had seen recently in town, the second not so often since the long day at Leuktra. The dogs ceased their barks as they saw the master put away his weapon. The one was well-groomed with his ink-black beard, combed hair, and clean tunic. But Ainias not so. The mercenary’s face was of stubble, and he had stitches and patches all over his leather jerkin.

  Mêlon himself was covered with oil and pith. The king-killer was worn out at his twentieth straight day in the pressroom, having often worked the evenings alone to catch up to the picking of one-armed Chiôn and the boys. The two visitors came through the shed to the backside in the flickering torchlight. Both were shifting baskets of overripe olives to find room to sit on the slippery stone floor. Proxenos the builder stared in amazement at the elaborate machine that Mêlon had built. With the help of Chiôn and the tutelage of the peddler Eurybiades, Mêlon had spent years improving it—finally perfecting the original design of Malgis.