“If he can march,” Alkidamas sighed, “if he can march. For three of the seven Boiotarchs want no part of it, no part of dying outside Boiotia for the freedom of others, especially the helots of Messenia. They cannot see that they are safer when Messenia is freed and Spartans are reduced to being farmers rather than warriors. Boiotians like the foul rhêtôr Backwash are not the sort to be taken lightly. I reckon the Athenians may bar the way as well. Who knows what the Korinthians will do at the Isthmos? I can conjure up all sorts of problems that Epaminondas must overcome. So I do my tiny part in trying to ease his burdens. That’s why I sought you out today, since your name alone will be worth a muster of one thousand for the way south.”
The man continued nonstop in a funny sort of Ionic speech and now and then with high Attic mixed, along with the wayfarer talk of Boiotia. “We will see tomorrow whether a council is held.” Alkidamas was turning to Mêlon and shaking his finger in his face. “I don’t wish to leave these folk for our boys up here to clean up. Not now when we are so close to finishing the business for good. But I wished to see you for another reason as well, Mêlon—a small one beside the great one of seeing Mêlon, son of Malgis, hero of Leuktra, blessed of prophecy and fate, once more at the side of Epaminondas as he sweeps into Lakonia and on over to Messenia.”
Alkidamas then quite surprised Mêlon and stopped for a moment in the road. “You have no slaves now, and that is altogether fine and good that you do not after your servants at Leuktra proved themselves better than the free men of Thespiai. But all that does not change the fact you are old, without hair on your head, and with a stagger in your walk—and in need of a servant to carry your bags, a boy like my Melissos here. For all his wild look, he has an air about him of loyalty and duty and could serve you well. And we will call him a hostage rather than your slave if some think liberators should not own others. You would, of course, give him back in the spring, as we promised the Makedonians.”
To convince Mêlon further, Alkidamas finished the story of his own son Kalliphon, who had fallen at Leuktra. “I saw you at Leuktra, Mêlon, as I bore my Kalliphon out. Lichas chopped off his arm. But my Kalliphon was a talker, not a killer. At Leuktra he learned that difference well enough. Lichas and Antikrates cut him down not far from you at the moment the Spartans broke, took his arm right off. So you see we had our own reasons to come to the monument this morning besides the chance of meeting up with you.” Alkidamas lifted his voice a little after he had recalled the ordeal of the Boiotians at Leuktra. “I kept Kalliphon in the symposia and schoolhouse. Kept him away from the muster yard. For that, later he paid quite a price. His hands were polished with scrolls, without the blisters of the plow and spear—learning to counter slurs, never iron. This here Melissos, for all his squinty eyes, knows how to wield a spear in his hands, although I coach him how to master hyperbaton and asyndeton. He is not my flesh. But I want to do him right and make him the man that my son was not, barbarian though he is. I am training him this year to argue some, but to watch more than talk. And if he goes back to Makedon and tells those wild folk that he apprenticed with Mêlon, son of Malgis of Helikon, and was well treated for his work, then all the better will the Makedonians be pleased with the cities of Hellas.”
Mêlon answered back, “I raised my son Lophis to plow and prune, but Lichas killed him as well—and my father Malgis, and nearly me twice. So I think, Alkidamas, the problem was not in our sons or in us, but in Lichas, whom few who breathe and walk can kill. As for the education of your Melissos, perhaps let him ape the Sacred Band. They drill, they say, and take kindly to boys in their midst. Though, to be frank, your spindly barbarian Melissos with his bony nose and foreign tongue might not stir up Erôs in those boy-lovers.”
“The note of contempt in your voice I share, Mêlon, for such folk. I grant Melissos has not yet a look of a hoplite. He is not the horseman that we expect from such northern tribes. But in the year I’ve had him, I wanted his muscles to grow behind the plow in a way Kalliphon’s did not. You, like me, have no son now, you the far better father than I ever was. Why not a young boy to teach as your own, at least until the next grain harvest comes and these northern hostages go back to Pella? I wager as you watch this sapling grow up—for I can see it myself—you too will grow in a sense.”
Mêlon laughed at that prophecy, but warmed even more to this man—a sophist to be sure of smooth talk, but one who, like himself, had already given his only son to Boiotia. But there was something also about this Melissos that gave him a second stare: He had a hard look for all his ugliness and listened more than he should to each word spoken. On occasion the gawky boy blurted out tí’s in his half Hellenic: “What’s that, what’s that? Tell me what that means.” Yes, he was a spy of some sort—but for whom and for what, Mêlon could not guess.
Alkidamas with a wink added, “But of course, as I said, he can carry armor as well as haul out olive limbs. Melissos might prove as good a groom to you and make you into something else as you do the same to him.”
Mêlon laughed. “My manservant Gorgos is gone. But I don’t miss him since there are only vine props in my hands, and I don’t need a shield carrier. Your Melissos will learn all that well enough if he works with me high above Thespiai on Helikon—or if the Boiotians decide to march to the south and I join them to find my Nêto in the south. It is already cold and the season of battle is over. The new year is upon us. Orion and the Pleiades and the Hyades have all long ago set and hid from the sky. I doubt anyone will vote to march anywhere in the coming winter. There is not a stalk of wheat in the fields.”
“Listen, as I said, you may learn as well, old Mêlon, from young Melissos—though in ways you’d rather not.”
Mêlon sensed what Alkidamas meant and now knew not merely that he would take in this Melissos but that something good would come of it as well. For a second Mêlon saw all this in the thistle Melissos, who looked and took in everything and boldly poked his nose into the talk of his masters—this young weed in the field that might just keep growing despite the Spartan scythes to come in the days ahead. He was sharp, as thistles sometimes are. Sometimes the young, the ugly, the outsider—they can see through the smoke and dust far better than those who make it, and so teach their would-be teacher the lessons that the masters had mouthed but forgotten. Besides, even if the army stayed home Mêlon would go on alone and be entering enemy ground soon, in search of his Nêto and without his Chiôn, and so he could not be choosy in his helpers.
Meanwhile Melissos fell about a stade behind the two, looking at the terrain of Boiotia as if he were forty and a general on a horse, scouting a camp outside Thebes for his army of thousands. After the two ahead ceased speaking, Melissos caught up, muttering that the Thebans’ walls did not look so high after all.
The great polis was now before them. At last, all of them quieted as they turned the final corner of the rising road. They passed through the gate of Kadmos and entered the seven-gated city of Oidipous and the heroes of legend.
CHAPTER 18
The Great Debate
The three had taken most of a day of steady walking to reach the high ground of the Kadmeia from the monument at Leuktra. The Thespian had been to Thebes only once before, in the year of the twin musters before the battles at Nemea and Koroneia. But that was more than twenty seasons prior. Mêlon now was bewildered by the unfamiliar sights in the capital of the Boiotians. The Thebans, with the sales from the spoils of Leuktra, were rebuilding the great temple of Apollo Ismenios. Twelve new columns rose along the temple’s long side. Forty men, with scaffolds and block and tackle, levered a huge marble capital on the nearest, a scroll of the Ionian type. This was the great gated city of Kadmos and Oidipous and Kreon, now to be remade as the democratic capital of a new Theban hegemony of equal poleis. Mêlon stared like a country ephebe at the seven arches and hills, as the travelers went over the bridge and through the Onkan Gate and on past the walls.
They made their way to a hut that Alkidamas owned near th
e Borean Gate. There they spread out three cots. Melissos led Xiphos down to the public stalls on the nearby hill of Ampheion, then went quickly back to join the two in this hovel near the tomb of Herakles. The place was more a sty than a house. It was not long until early dusk. The room was already cold and damp and offered little shelter from the winter sleet that was pelting the city. Shouts rose amid the storm. Outside the shuttered window, Thebes was in a frenzy. Strange-sounding foreigners from all over Hellas were yelling and scuffling in their drink. What had Epaminondas wrought? Thousands of hoplites were sleeping in the cold sheds and icy stalls of the agora. More were perched on the turrets and walkways on the city walls. How many were camped beyond the walls all the way to the coast? All boasted they were ready to march against the men of Sparta in midwinter for plunder. As Mêlon fell into sleep, he could almost hear the voices in the assembly.
Mêlon guessed that the Boiotians had no stomach for any more war, despite the cutthroats who were flocking into Boiotia and the muster in progress, and despite the victory at Leuktra. At the debate tomorrow, there would be more of the same rabble-rousing as there had been the previous year on the eve of Leuktra—the usual shouting mess of democracy. That was both the beauty and horror of dêmokratia: No one gave the wealthy or sober or educated his due, but the crowd in a moment could judge what seemed best to most of them and then act on it without pause, even if a scoundrel had proposed the measure. Did Epaminondas hate Sparta and wish it gone? Or was he a more practical sort who wanted to ring in Lakonia, surround the Spartans with the walled cities of Arkadia and Messenia? How better to cut off the murderous lords of Sparta from their helot servants? Isn’t that what the new cities of Proxenos were for?
Of course, if he marched in winter, he might spare his men the heat of the hard summer in the month of Panamos. It was smart, too, to leave right at the end of his tenure. That way the Boiotian high-talkers could not call the army back. And Epaminondas surely knew that should he not preempt now, King Agesilaos next spring would come northward back into Boiotia anyway, as he had so many times before, and make the Boiotians once again the subjects of Sparta. Then again, it was possible that the wild stories of Nêto and Lophis—and Damô’s warnings—were all true: that this Pythagorean Epaminondas really did believe in a wild idea of the “freedom of the Hellenes”; that he wished all of Messenia to be liberated, the very idea of helots—or even slaves as well—to be a thing of the past, for the security of Boiotia and the justice of Hellas and the salvation of their souls.
The hovel was not far from the assembly on the Kadmeia. The next morning Mêlon got up before the snoring Alkidamas and went on ahead to beat the crowd to the assembly hall. But on his way to the ekklêsia, a tall, broad-shouldered stranger greeted Mêlon in the street, a stadium from the assembly seats below. He was somewhere past his fifth decade, with a gray beard, a strange stiff one that tapered into a cone, and he addressed Mêlon in a High Attic that the farmer could scarcely follow. An Athenian no less, he was followed by four ephebes, no more than twenty years each, rich ones, with rabbit-fur collars, bright green wool cloaks, and hob-nailed tall boots, and soft faces with eyes darting side to side. They had all come over the pass with their master to warn the Boiotians of the idiocy of Epaminondas.
“A waste of time, that assembly of yours.” The stranger laughed as if he knew Mêlon well and could start in with him in mid-sentence. He now stopped and pointed his finger. “I came north to learn of these Pythagoreans, to see whether their logos would set them apart from the mob. But from my talks with these Epaminondians, as I call them, Pythagoras has only made them worse. Imagine: our One God of numbers and good Pythagoras twisted up here to serve the Boiotian rabble. Enough, enough of them all. I am on my way home. Why wait for the assembly, when not one of these Theban rustics would even be allowed on the bêma at Sparta?”
Mêlon laughed. He had a sense of who this odd squeak-voiced fellow was. “You’re going to miss a good speech from General Epaminondas, who will rip and chew your Athenians to pieces.”
Now this fellow closed in and put his finger on the nose of Mêlon. “Most know me as broad shoulders, Platôn as they call me at Athens. I have no stomach to see the big fight between my Athenians and your Alkidamas. This is what it is all about anyway, isn’t it—a war of the philosophers, as each plots to get the farmers to march for his idea of a new Hellas? None of that for me.” So this Platôn railed. “Far better to get back over the pass at Kithairon anyway and to civilization at Athens again, before these cutthroats in the hills sidetrack an Athenian. Stranger, your ochlos up here is as bad as ours. Your cobblers and tanners are doing to your good Pythagoreans what ours once did to our Sokrates. That Epaminondas of yours, he demagogues to march southward and destroy a great polis—a city of heroes, one far greater than any of the Hellenes, yours and mine included.”
Then he stopped and looked down on Mêlon, for Platôn was taller and broader than most, for all his scroll reading. “Be careful what you tear down, hero of Leuktra, when you would promote the helots and such rabble. You think that you are torching the limp-wristed aristocrats at Athens or maybe the Spartan lords, with their scarlet cloaks and oiled locks. But you are not doing just that. Turn Hellas upside down, and you scatter to the winds all the good that oligarchy ensures—from the table manners of the refined who don’t soil their hands as they eat their greasy pork, to the Orestia of our dear Aeschylus or the hymns of Dorian Alkman—all that is the cultivation of refinement that the poor have no taste for. Do not imagine your Epaminondas can make the potter in the Kerameikos the equal to the sculptor of the Panathenaic stones on our temple to Athena Parthenos, or that there are thousands of singing Hesiods plodding behind the plows, their geniuses undiscovered only because there is not enough democracy for them.”
Mêlon was no philosopher, but he had these worries as well, and so wanted no word-fight with Platôn of Athens. “Farewell, Athenian. We mean you no evil, none at all—unless of course you block the passes on the way south.”
Platôn laughed at that and muttered as he left, “Oh, they all say that as the tanners and tile-makers take over the assemblies and kill their betters. Pray for some elite guardians to guide you. Put the no-goods to work stacking stones, or mixing clay, anything but letting them loose to vote in an assembly against their betters. The Spartans do us a favor—those good guardians who watch over the helot animals below the Isthmos. So just remember, Thespian, that Platôn, son of Aristôn, an Athenian, and lover of wisdom like his master Sokrates, warns you about turning the Peloponnesos upside down and making the bad good, and the good bad. I hope I’m not here to see the mess that will follow from your march southward.”
With this, the philosopher Platôn turned toward the southern gate and the road to Athens shouting without looking back. “Mêlon, son of Malgis,” he called out, “guardians of hoi polloi you need. Laws in stone. Phulakes and Nomoi.” Then he and his attendants were gone around the corner.
Mêlon soon arrived at the assembly and elbowed his way to the front. The meeting was already filling. Guards were roping off hundreds of attendants, those milling about, eager for a silver coin in pay to attend the voting. Epaminondas had heard of Mêlon’s coming. So his men now, just as on the night before Leuktra, escorted the Thespian through the mob to the front row of the stone theater, open and cold under the gray, wet winter sky.
Pelopidas, wearing his shiny breastplate and flanked by the officers of the Sacred Band, spoke first. Despite his pride, he proved sober in advice, without ever raising his voice. Indeed he talked in near whispers in a deep Boiotian manner, on the cue of Alkidamas, quieting the roar with his hands upraised. His men went among the front rows and smacked down the hecklers. Pelopidas then gave the delegates of the Confederation the story of the events since Leuktra. The mob stopped for a moment throwing crusts and pine cones. Most in the crowd grew still to hear of the long work of Epaminondas to the north in Lokris and Thessaly that had brought allies down into Boiotia on promi
ses of pay and plunder to the south at Sparta. Pelopidas warned—and his voice grew a bit louder—that King Agesilaos had sent his Spartans into the new city of Mantineia. The lame king wanted to stop the fortifications of the Arkadians, who wished to live in grand cities of stone rather than be terrorized and picked off one by one in their many hamlets by the marauding Spartans.
“We, the victors of Leuktra,” Pelopidas then continued, “are worrying whether we can march a mere five days to protect the new polis of Mantineia. Meanwhile, the king of the defeated, why, the aged Agesilaos himself, marches as we speak, wherever he pleases. Winners of Leuktra cower—while losers boast.” Pelopidas had other news of the south as well. The same zeal for this new democracy at Mantineia had spread also in other Arkadian towns. The friends of Ainias had sent word that there was already a friendly rivalry in the south between Mantineia and the western Arkadians laying the stones of an even bigger city, the Megalê Polis—sixty, maybe seventy stadia to the west in hills along the river Helisson. They were to be the twin pillars of a free Arkadia. “They ask,” Pelopidas reported of the leaders of the new democratic Confederation, “only that we join them to keep the Spartan thieves busy until they raise their walls head-high to keep them out.” But grumbles followed him from the crowd. There was already snow on Parnassos. The Megarid was muddy. No crops in the field anywhere along the route. How were they to get through the Athenian guards at the Isthmos? How were they to eat?
The End of Sparta Page 23