The End of Sparta

by Victor Davis Hanson

  “Is that what Lophis and Kalliphon, the son of our Alkidamas, fell for at Leuktra? Chiôn, and Proxenos and all the other best men of Boiotia whose names I have written on my scrolls? Did they all die to just kill Lichas, the better man? Was it only to kill Kleombrotos and his henchmen at Leuktra?” He picked up some cucumber relish and spread it on his bread and then again looked up. “The helots are free and yet they squander their liberty in license? My, my—they loot. They steal, Ainias. By Zeus, they even plunder their own temples, or so you shriek.” Ephoros leaned on his elbow and somehow raised his squeaky voice even another notch higher. “We laid out their walls. They sleep on them rather than build them higher. We died for Messenians. And, oh my, they have no government, no laws, no rules on stone. Spartans at least kept order with their kryptes and their chasm of death.” He may have been fragile, this papyrus leaf, but Ephoros nonetheless looked over at the drunken killer Ainias and faced him down.

  “This is your writ—that you prefer order to freedom, the rules of the pit of the Kaiadas to the chaos of the unruly assembly? Hah. So you think if we were smart, we would bring back a Spartan harmost, and have Antikrates and Lichas and his braids back again?” Ephoros looked around to his right. He wanted to see if any in their sorrow and drink agreed with the bitter Ainias and might prick his backside with a spear tip. So he went on to provoke Mêlon right across the table, although he was unsure of his reaction. “Was that the goad for you too Mêlon, son of Malgis, only to keep Agesilaos on his acropolis and out of the vineyards and wheat fields of others around Helikon? You had no thought of the helots or the cities of the Peloponnesos?”

  Now the pale Ephoros broke his own rules of the symposion. He leaped up, but much more violently than even Ainias had. He stalked, yes, stalked to the wall and back. He had feather arms and even smaller legs. Yet he paced to the back of the Arkadian’s couch and took on Ainias, and showed the greater courage for standing right over the reclining killer.

  “Ainias, you will return to your old fire soon enough and lead Arkadia onto the path of its old renown—once you hear the voice of your Proxenos and the whispers of your Pythagoras. We are in the north again, across the gulf now, Ainias Taktikos. So obey your oath to the dead. Fill your wine flask with spring water. Cut off your filthy mane and bathe in the nearby Mornos tomorrow, and if you are man enough to go to Plataia, as you boast, go and raise the children of Proxenos. Otherwise keep still and join the other drunkards on the corners and the alley beggars with their coin cups, or go back down to Taygetos and take up where Chiôn finished.”

  Mêlon finally looked up. “All of us sit down, lounge back, and have some relish and more wine.” Mêlon spoke rapidly and with confidence. “Nêto is not a mere cripple. She is not ugly or feral. No. She is free. She has whispered that it will be this angry Ainias, who alone will become the tyrant slayer of the Peloponnesos, who will deal with Lykomedes yet—who may prove the great traitor of us all as he colludes with old Agesilaos. Yes, in your pride and zeal, you will go south there again—I fear for you—and settle up with our backstabber Lykomedes in Mantineia. You are the biggest liberator of us all.” He went on. “Erinna is not dead. Her song lives on. Epaminondas hums and sings it as we speak. So, yes, all that has been a good thing to die for, Ephoros, for the freedom of the Hellenes. I am at last proud to be a Hellene. I won’t stay on my mountain.” Mêlon wanted to finish and get it all out, and show that he was one with Epaminondas at last, no difference between the two of them. “Let the others talk of your Pythagoras as the evil daimôn that addled the wits of the democrats of Boiotia. Or say that he sent them south on this mad dream of a dead philosopher. What is it for me who has no love for that sect and likes to eat meat as much as beans? It was the freedom of the Messenians that I now know was worth the blood of the Malgidai. We ended the Spartans who marched into the land of others. I have no regrets. Not one. Not ever. Not since I came down Helikon to fight at Leuktra for Epaminondas. For I too was freed from a different sort of slavery, one worse in some ways: a slavery of the mind—and of the soul that once believed in nothing other than itself. Nothing is worse than the cynic who is disappointed by the world about him for not appreciating in his own genius, for being less than perfect. I know that now from years of wilderness.”

  Pale Ephoros from across the table, behind his large kratêr of warm wine, looked over at Mêlon. “It will be sung a thousand seasons and more from now that the stones that grew out of the Peloponnesos this season prove who was the better man after all—and who the worse. What will they say of Sparta? What will they say when one day when we are ashes, and the Hellenes to come conclude, ‘Why look. There is nothing here, no stones on the acropolis of Agesilaos. The Sparta of song was nothing. But the walls of its subjects, why over at Messenê are they looming over the Peloponnesos?’ ”

  Melissos twitched. He for some reason was not tired of these talkers. He liked them and what they said. What was this Hellas, this notion of no city-state, but one people—one language, the same gods, from Thessaly to Crete? “Please, don’t speak of our ruin. Think of the ruined at Sparta. They feel their own misery far more. Isn’t that enough? The world is split between those who apologize for killing their enemies and those who take pride in it. What we did was good, right as you say. Surely you taught me that much.” Gone was his half-Makedonian slang. He had wanted to fight with Mêlon at Taygetos, die even if need be. So he had earned their attention. Now he spoke as clearly as any Boiotian three times his age.

  “Antikrates is not feasting with Agesilaos. More likely the two are serving their own table. They drown their tears in bad wine of their own bad making—with a dead king Kleombrotos, and a dead Lichas, and a dead Kleonymos, and all those others dead at Leuktra. Their helots are gone. And bald Kuniskos is ash in the high aithêr.” This new boy Melissos was making good sense, as he turned and signaled the girl from Ithaka to sit by his feet and rub his upper leg. He turned to the Akarnanian who continued with her lyre and grabbed her cloak. He scarcely had a beard but he had known such women since his second teeth had grown in. The year of apprenticeship of this Melissos was coming to an end. Alkidamas had told the young man, on the word of Pelopidas, that there was a ship waiting for him at Kirrha over the hill, below Delphi. They would fight the wind out of the gulf and then battle more of it northward along the coast, and row him home up the west side of Makedonia.

  The treaty had held through the late spring as summer approached. None of the northern Makedonian folk of Melissos had attacked them from the rear when the Boiotians went south. So the northern kings had kept their word—at least for now—and the year of his guaranty and truce was honored. Melissos, along with the other Makedonians held at Thebes, was once again a free man. He was already feeling once more his privilege and birth rank, and yet he was learning from these Hellenes who bled and died so well for nothing other than helots, than helots no less. Alkidamas jumped up from his couch, then clapped his hands and dismissed the servants. He ordered all to get ready their beds and end this symposion, since it had gone just as he had planned. The once surly and tired banqueters had let their daimones out, and would return with one story as friends, with four empty kratêres as proof of their amity. Ainias, he knew, would shortly bathe and cut off his matted hair of mourning. Mêlon had come down at last from Helikon and would never really go back up again. Ainias nodded at Alkidamas and put away his wine, the goblet half full. He felt relieved that his own bitterness had at least not spread to others. He pointed at Ephoros and then picked up his own spear and broke it over his knee as if it were a tooth-picker.

  “For a while longer,” Ainias promised, “I will be your captain. Sleep and wake sober. We have a long march to the port of Delphi. Then there is a steep climb up to the temple. There we can gaze down at the pass into Boiotia. On our last day we pass through the hill of the Sphinx and near that dreadful snake goddess at Lebadeia. Like it or not, the age of Epaminondas, and of men like Lichas, and of Chiôn—and us here tonight—is
over with.”

  The returning veterans left the lodging the next morning and set out into the hard winds of the mouth of the gulf, pressing to get on the road to the east and home. The travelers fell in soon with yet another band of Messenians along the coast road. These were the children of free men. Forty years earlier they had settled in Naupaktos to the north, when they fled Pylos during the Athenian war. The helots walked briskly as if for the first time in their lives it was a thing of pride to be known as Messenians and not mere helots of Sparta. All seven of these wayfarers were stonecutters and likewise were climbing to Delphi. Or so said their leader Artemidoros. He boasted to the Boiotians that the new assembly of the Messenians, under the direction of the rebel Nikôn, polemarchos of Messenê, right after the liberation had sent them on a ship with black marble of the type the Athenians quarried at Eleusis. The transport was at the dock in Kirrha. These Messenians were to guide the rough stones with the teamsters up the mountain to the Sacred Way of the sanctuary. There they would set up the great altar of the liberated Messenians. This work was, as Ainias knew, the last design of Proxenos, the final scroll found in his pack after his end on the Eurotas, so confident had he been that there would be a need for a victory monument of a free Messenê at Delphi. None of these helot folk now at his side even knew the name of the benefactor who had perished to plan their new city; much less had they any idea of the hide-clad Nikôn who once had poached his way to freedom on the slopes of Ithômê.

  At the notion of a Messenian polis with a sanctuary at Delphi, Mêlon now thought as they hiked that it was the Boiotian farmer, the horny-handed plowman who had hated war and had drunk his cool red and napped beneath his arbors, who had nonetheless gone willingly southward for the freedom of these helots. These lowly men from the marshes of Boiotia had chased the Spartans, the very taskmasters of war, across the Eurotas. With Epitêles they had marched amid the high ice into Messenia and built a city out of stone. Now they were ready to go home and blend back into the black soil of Boiotia, in hopes the great shaking-up in the south would mean that the northerners would never again worry about Spartans, who would instead always worry about the Messenians. These were the true Hellenes, the geôrgoi, these rocky stones like Philliadas, and Antitheos and Staphis, who, immovable on the banks that anchored the poleis, kept it alive a bit longer, while the city folk joined the deluge that was carrying all the lesser pebbles headlong over the falls. For a while longer they would trudge into town and warn their betters that their right spear arms, not walls, kept the enemy distant, that the Makedonian and the Persian would always come from the north unless stopped, and that the more gymnasia and palestrai the city built, the softer the citizens became. Yes, the burning of Lakonia to the south was the win of the farmers, the mesoi who had proved stronger than the lords of Sparta, who had shown they could hold their shields as high as those at Marathon.

  Mêlon himself remembered little of the next day’s trek along the coast to Kirrha—other than that for most of this last leg of the march he worried as he stared at the familiar massif of Parnassos. His farm: Had it been overrun or abandoned in these few days following the death of Chiôn? Was it even his farm anymore, with Malgis long gone, and Lophis dead, and himself absent? Who would the Boiotians charge with treason for fighting well past the new year: the five Boiotarchs who followed Epaminondas and Pelopidas? Or perhaps Alkidamas and Ainias, who, the jurymen would allege, had planned the campaign? Surely he too as well would be stoned or cut down for joining? A democracy—or so Mêlon well knew Backwash would allege—could not survive should its leaders trample the laws as they pleased. And they were all lawbreakers of their own as much as liberators of others.

  Once the band reached the Delphians’ harbor at Kirrha and could look up the Gorge of the Pleistos and far to the right at the shadows of the peaks of Arkadia across the water, the four finally took leave of their hostage Melissos. As arranged, the youth would go back on board the Messenian ship—Eleutheria—to sail out of the gulf. It would row up the coast on the west side of Hellas to Epiros. The crew, after dropping their marble at Kirrha, had planned to continue north past Akarnania to fetch more Messenians who were eager to reach their liberated homeland. None of these Messenian seamen seemed to mind taking the boy along for ballast, especially as Mêlon flipped them four silver owls for their trouble.

  At the docks, Alkidamas first saw a fat man grab the silver from his steward—and with his one hand, no less—even as he called back from across the boarding plank. “Old man. I thought you’d be dead now, you, my partner, and your Spartan-killers.” It was Gastêr. Gastêr who never aged, and never worried, and cared not a whit whether you were Athenian or spoke Doric, won or sat out the great war, if only you had four-piece silver owls from Athens in your palm. Yes, Gastêr was here, the anti-Epaminondas. “I’m afraid I sold our Theôris to the Messenians, Alkidamas. Or at least sort of. Why, that cutthroat Nikôn and his council, they gave me this merchant boat instead. I got marble and ferrying business with it to boot. Not a bad trade. Some shiny coins came with the ship swap. Those helots of yours learned to row and stayed with me on this boat too, better sailors than they proved wise men. So we meet again. I took the risk. You don’t want a cut out of my Eleutheria, though the rhêtôrs might argue it came from your money to begin with. I have proof of sale. Here, take it.”

  Alkidamas took the rumpled tiny papyrus and gave it to Mêlon without thinking to throw it away. “Fine, fat man. No need of proof. You beat those Korinthians out to the gulf, and we all got to Messenê as bargained for. As for your trade for the Theôris—well, there’s money to be made even in Messenia, it seems. Take it as the spoils of war.”

  “I already have,” announced Gastêr as he waved for their passenger to board his deck. Alkidamas then escorted the Makedonian to the quay and laughed. “You remind me of clever Kuniskos, Melissos, if you don’t mind me saying. Now that you’re both gone, as it were. Like him, you were not like you seemed—with your rickety thin bones and bad eyes. Or maybe you’re a Gastêr, as smart as you are ugly, who can tiptoe on a rolling deck with one arm and a pot belly. Yet I think you see better than the rest of us who don’t squint so. Tell the kings of Makedon that Alkidamas took good care of you, as you did him.”

  The four gave their ward a final good-bye. Melissos walked on board, just as Ainias called out across the gangway. He had thought he disliked this half-Hellene and had not believed in his eye blurs or even his stutter, but instead had studied his airs and darting eyes. Now he was not so sure, and he wanted others to see the boy’s true insides here at the end, since they were more good than bad. Indeed, Ainias would not slit the Makedonian’s gullet, even if the voices in his head warned him that thousands of Hellenes not born would live if only this buzzing bee from the north were swatted right here before he ever began.

  Ainias grabbed his sword. “Not so fast up on your hind legs, our little Makedonian upstart. One last order. It won’t require you to carry our shields any longer. Just tell me a final thing, down-beard northerner. What exactly did you learn from your year with our Alkidamas, and with us as well?” A wind came up, so Ainias yelled out even louder to the departing ship. “So hostage boy, give me something that I can tell our general on his return. You claim to be half-blind, but like no-eyes Oidipous you see more than the seeing can.”

  Melissos sensed that Ainias meant him more good than bad. On the final walk along the gulf he had been going over just such questions and how to answer them when his father King Amyntas at home pressed him for wisdom—and for the walls and passes and armies of the Hellenes they would soon conquer in the south. He was safe, and even Ainias would not kill him now. The boy thought that he wanted to say that they were all second-thoughters like Mêlon, who would hesitate to strike the first, or maybe even the second, blow—dreamers who thought we had souls and so died for something other than loot and fame; makers of grand walls and bronze armor, but without the sense to put them to proper use. But that was not at all what came
out from the departing Melissos, not at all.

  Melissos turned to Ainias and spoke no longer in the role of hostage servant of Alkidamas and Mêlon, but as the future king of a warrior tribe who was coming of age. Melissos stared at the Arkadian. “I figured out many things, Taktikos, as you will soon fancy yourself as you write down your exploits for the rest of us. Of your democracy, it is not so silly as I thought—even if the dirtiest and loudest like Backwash shout down their betters. There are, I learned, lords like poor Nikôn and Nêto and cowards like well-born Antikrates. How would we know that if birth trumped merit? Any of those who whined in the hall of the Thebans we would have strung up, and yet they fight for something far better than my father’s wage, though he would have kicked them into the barns for their braying.”

  They laughed at that boy’s high talk. Then even Ainias stopped, for he saw that this new Melissos was no fool, and was no longer what he had been before the great march. He went on with the airs of the Makedonian prince that he was again: “Was there some gold or a secret shipment of slaves in the bargain for you? I think not, though I was once convinced that there must be cartloads. Instead, I think here of Proxenos and your Chiôn and lame-footed Nêto and all the wild men like Nikôn and the rest who rot, who taught me, their slave, that I was as good as they with no idea that I was supposed to have been born far better than them all. I too in Lakonia and in the hut on Taygetos would have died for the dream of all them, and for crippled Nêto and my crippled master Mêlon, who taught me that I was the real cripple, after all.”