by P. K. Lentz
As Styphon drew up in front of her, the slave turned her head aside with lips drawn tight in an angry, prideful frown.
“Who put you here?” Styphon demanded.
Defiantly, she refused to look at him.
“I am not a master who looks for any excuse to beat a slave,” Styphon said. “But do not test me.”
It was harsh, yes, but expected of him, and besides, Eurydike was new to his household. Who knew how well the soft-bellied Athenians did at breaking in their servants.
“A neighbor saw her spill water at the well.”
The familiar yet unfamiliar voice that turned Styphon's head came from behind the woodpile on one side of his house. The speaker, Andrea, stepped out of the shadows there. The eleven-year old's long brown hair was tied back, and the black eyes she shared with her father caught the first twinkling starlight. She had been hiding, watching him since he came into sight.
“He was right to punish her,” Styphon lectured. Like all goods in Sparta, slaves were communal property, and every citizen therefore had the right to discipline one. “How long has she been thus?”
“Six hours,” Andrea answered with a vague note of disapproval. “He said he would return to let her down. I'm sure he's forgotten.”
Styphon growled. Such domestic nuisances as this one to which he had returned were perhaps part of the reason Equals were forever eager to set off on another campaign.
Fortunate, then, that wars never seemed to be in short supply.
“Did you put the rock under her?”
Far from assuming the cowed demeanor of a child caught in transgression, Andrea held her head high and narrow shoulders back to answer without shame: “Yes.”
“Then you should be punished, too.” It was another lecture, not a threat. “How will this one learn her lesson if you interfere?”
Willful Andrea held her ground. “She was my friend in Athens, and remains so here.”
Styphon stepped closer to his daughter, looming over her. She did not retreat but only stared up.
He scoffed. “Seems that preener Alkibiades and the rest failed to make an Athenian out of you,” he said. “You are a Spartan girl. Now get her down and come inside.”
“I'm not tall enough.”
“Then be resourceful enough.”
Passing strung-up Eurydike like the object that she was under city law, Styphon entered his house. The hearth burned gently in one corner, and the simple floor of planks was clean, the earthenware neatly stowed. The hard pallet on which he slept when not on campaign was made up with its single blanket and pillow of straw. The two smaller, softer beds by the wall opposite had not been there on Styphon's last visit. Then, Andrea had been in Athens, kidnapped and taken there. Prior to that, she had dwelt in the home of her dead mother's now-dead sister.
Thalassia was responsible for the kidnapping, and the death, but Styphon could hardly bear a grudge. He bore partial guilt himself, having asked the witch to protect Andrea, back when his daughter seemed destined for the miserable future that awaited any Spartan child whose father was marked as a coward. It would have been a decent choice, had his fortunes not turned.
Styphon set down his pack, removed his cloak and lowered himself to the floor by the crackling hearth. He rested his head in one hand and nearly began to nod off. He would have, had not Andrea entered, alone.
“Where is your friend?” He teased, rather than mocked.
“She will come in when her tears run dry.”
Andrea seated herself cross-legged on Styphon's pallet. The short skirt of her chiton barely covered her. Athens had not infected her with modesty. Neither had it changed her speech, which was proper country Doric.
“Are you two living here alone?”
“Yes.”
Another domestic nuisance. He had sent instructions to Andrea's mother's cousins to have them looked after. He told Andrea as much.
“Lost, I guess,” the girl said dismissively. Then, “Eurydike is eager for news of Demosthenes. And Thalassia. And Alkibiades.”
“The first two she can request of me herself,” Styphon said. “As for the third, are you sure it is she who wishes to know?”
Once more Andrea, when caught, made no excuses. “He might be your enemy, but Uncle Alki was good to me. He never tried to make me Athenian. He taught me our laws and the life of Lykurgos. His wet nurse was Lakonian.”
Styphon suppressed a fresh growl. “Be that as it may, I do not wish to hear him referred to as uncle under my roof. Understood?”
Now Andrea looked more like a child ought to when scolded. “Yes.”
“Yes, father,” Styphon corrected.
“Father,” she added blankly.
In a silence filled by no more than the crackle of flames, Styphon considered deceiving his daughter, telling her that Alkibiades was imprisoned in Athens or some such. Not dead, for that would cause her needless grief. But the chance she might learn the truth from other sources was too great, even were she not half as clever as she truly was.
And so, sighing, he surrendered the truth: “Alkibiades is here in Sparta, a prisoner. He recovers from a wound.”
To her credit, Andrea's reaction was suitably Laconic, showing neither joy at the good news nor grief at the bad. She asked with apparent disinterest, “Will he be tried?”
“That's up to the Gerousia,” Styphon said. More likely up to Brasidas and Eris, he did not add, even if rightfully the decision did rest with the elders.
Andrea nodded, grateful acknowledgment of a favor rather than approval of the statement. Styphon met the opaque eyes that were so much like his, and he marveled at what went on behind them. He had scant experience of eleven-year-old girls, but surely this one was wise beyond that age. She had always been to some degree, but he noticed it more now that she was his responsibility and not some little creature hiding behind the skirts of female relations.
“Put away what's in my bag,” Styphon said to her. “And I'll tell you what the slave wants to know.”
His emphasis on Eurydike's proper role in his household was deliberate. No good could ever come of a citizen befriending a slave.
Andrea rose to accept the bargain, and while she knelt and opened his pack, Styphon fulfilled his end.
“Eris slew Thalassia, then Eris herself was slain,” he reported. “But they are immortals, or something like it. My own eyes have since seen Eris walking again, and I am all but certain the other does, too. As for Demosthenes, he escaped from Dekelea and is at large. Presumably he is with Thalassia.”
Placing Styphon's threadbare bedroll in a bin for laundering, Andrea froze and said mournfully, “Brasidas should not have killed the wife of Demosthenes.”
Eurydike had witnessed the woman's death and nearly shared her fate. Doubtless the slave had already spoken of that event to her 'friend.'
“She had his baby in her,” Andrea went on, returning to Styphon's pack. “It was not an honorable act. It was murder. He is unclean.”
“That is no matter for a young girl to be concerned with.”
There was acquiescence in Andrea's nod as she next pulled from his pack an item he had bought in the agora of Athens with an obol coin found underfoot in the street: a short length of red silken ribbon. She raised it between thumb and forefinger.
“What's this for?”
“You're cleverer than that.”
“For me?”
“Unless you think it would suit me better.”
Andrea draped the frivolous adornment across two open palms for examination.
“No doubt your uncle provided you with better,” Styphon said, suddenly embarrassed by the feeble gift.
“I always dressed as a Spartan,” Andrea snapped, then added by way of apology, “...father. His house was full of silk and gold, and I could have indulged, but I did not.”
Grunting his approval, Styphon removed his sandals, crawled onto his hard pallet and stretched out upon it to welcome sleep.
Andrea looked tho
ughtfully at the ribbon. “If I wore this, I would get a beating from the other girls.”
“Then I suppose you must not let them see you,” Styphon replied absently. His lids were heavy, but he kept them aloft just long enough to see Andrea tie the ribbon into her hair.
“No,” she said. “I want them to try.”
* * *
2. Gerousia
Leaving morning mess on the third day after his return, Styphon heard his name called and turned to find that the caller was no less than a king.
Halting, Styphon waited patiently for Agis to catch him.
“You are wanted before the Gerousia,” the king declared.
Such a summons was rarely occasion for the smile with which Agis delivered it. The disparity gave Styphon pause.
Agis clapped him on the shoulder. “I know. Since when do the old men send a king as their page? I volunteered for the task. Come!”
Together they walked the arrow-straight, stone-paved Hyakinthian Way, through crowds of thronging Spartiates emerging from mess. All parted readily for Agis.
“You shall meet my cousin today,” the king said en route. “Two days since your homecoming, and she tells me you have yet to call on her. Hippolyta is not one whom a man should keep waiting.”
“Apologies, sire.”
“Be sure you do not apologize to her,” Agis scolded. “If I know her, and I do, the silence has only made her wetter.”
Styphon gave the king a half-hearted smile which faded at first opportunity. Hippolyta, who was no mere woman but a cousin to the Eurypontid king, would be Styphon's second unplanned encounter of the day, after the Gerousia. And the day had scarcely begun.
He was not sure which appointment caused him the greater concern. He had begun to picture Hippolyta as an ill-tempered dog-face. Agis swore to her beauty, but then he was her blood.
The crowd thinned, and conversation became easier as they left the Hyakinthian way and found the well-pounded dirt path to the agora, where sat the meeting hall of Sparta's administrators, the ephors.
“There is a matter you might help me with, sire,” Styphon ventured en route.
“Name it,” Agis said with enthusiasm. “And stop calling me sire. Zeus willing, we might be family in a month.”
“Zeus willing,” Styphon echoed faintly.
Knowing that it could only increase the pressure on him for a successful match, he stamped down pride and doubt to pose his favor.
“My daughter, Andrea, excels in her learning,” he said, “so much so that her teachers dissatisfy her. Yet they will not allow her to study with the older girls. I am loath to ask, but for her sake—”
“Say no more.” Agis raised a hand adorned with its plain iron ring of kingship. “I shall find her a private tutor myself if need be. She studied in Athens, did she not? I should hate to see her run back there at first opportunity claiming that we stifled her intellect. Our system works, but allowances must be made from time to time.”
“Thank you, si—” Styphon began, and corrected, “Agis.”
A pity the gods could not hear silent prayers, or Styphon would have sent them one just then that at least one or the other of Hippolyta's face and personality proved not to be completely objectionable.
* * *
The administrative building in which the elders of the Gerousia convened was, like all the structures of Sparta, a plain thing. The laws laid down long ago by Lykurgos forbade grand, columned halls of government full of gilded statues that might distract those within from the vital business of running a state. The ephors might not have met behind walls at all, but beneath the open sky as did the citizen assembly, the Apella, which elected them, except that the Apella gathered out in the country. Here in the bustle of the agora, walls were a necessary evil.
Well, that and the fact that the governance of Sparta was perhaps not always as transparent as the Lawgiver intended.
They reached the whitewashed box at the agora's edge, with a single door and small, high windows set, likely not by coincidence, well above the height of prying eyes. The unarmed Spartiate at the door, more gatekeeper than guard, waved them inside.
Arranged in a single row on a slightly elevated platform at one end of the single chamber were the current crop of twenty-eight men of the Gerousia, all past the age of sixty and serving until death. With the power to overturn the decisions of kings, it was effectively the highest law-court of Sparta. In the current contest for power underway between the reform-minded supporters of Brasidas and the traditionalists, the Gerousia was strongly on the side of Agis and tradition, but a shift was not out of the question. In the past year, two elders had died of natural causes and been replaced by men who showed signs of favoring Brasidas.
Brasidas already had on his side an arguably more important ally in the form of three of the current year's five ephors, the annually elected magistrates who reigned supreme in the affairs of the Spartan state. Since they reached decisions by majority vote, the favor of three was as good as that of all five. It was those three votes (or one vote, it might be said) which had stripped command of the attack on Athens from Agis and placed in Brasidas's hands.
As one of Sparta's two kings, Agis was counted a member of the Gerousia regardless of his age, and so after arriving in the hall with Styphon, he went to take his rightful place on the platform.
Sparta's second king, the bland and unpopular Pleistoanax, was present, too. He stood as far apart from Spartan public life in spirit as he stood physically now from the body of elders. His father had been a disgraced traitor, and Pleistonanax himself had been convicted and sent into exile twenty years earlier for accepting Athenian bribes. But the Gerousia, on the insistence of a vaguely worded Delphic oracle, ever wary of inviting the gods' wrath in the form of an earthquake or a Helot revolt, had lately reversed the exile. Since then, Pleistonanax had been a king in name but in practice a pariah, arguing for peace with Athens now and then, lest Sparta suffer a defeat and decide to blame it on him.
Since Sparta was not that big a place, Styphon also recognized nearly all of the other men packed into the room, conversing in clusters. Most were from prominent families, since it naturally was such men, here as in other cities (democracy or not) who dominated affairs. In those other cities, such men would possess wealth and be called aristocrats. Here, they were just men to whom others chose to yield out of respect—until some relative disgraced his family name and another rose to replace him. Although one Equal was not supposed to be more equal than the next, the reality was different.
Several of these men, strangely, nodded to Styphon and greeted him by name, almost as though he were one of them.
Absent from the hall's audience of fifty or so men were Sparta's five most powerful and prominent, the ephors themselves. Technically, the five magistrates presided over all gatherings of the Gerousia, but in practice they only made an appearance when the matters under discussion were particularly momentous. Evidently, this day's meeting did not qualify.
The man who had the favor of three of the sitting ephors, Brasidas, who once had been an ephor himself, was present. Styphon had not seen Brasidas since their return from Athens, but now the polemarch treated him to a raised hand and welcoming look from across the room.
The chairman thumped a ceremonial staff on the wood to bring the room to silence, a prayer to Zeus was invoked, and the gathering commenced. Matters that were perhaps important, perhaps not, were raised, discussed, and finally dismissed, referred to the assembly or the ephors, or otherwise deemed worthy of action. Even if he grasped the necessity of such proceedings to the healthy function of the Spartan state, Styphon could hardly help but allow his ears to fall halfway shut. If the higher-born for some reason wished to claim that their birthright included having some additional meetings to themselves, that seemed just fine.
Styphon's ears opened again at the sound of the word, “Lastly...” It was spoken by the elder who kept charge of the agenda, and Styphon gave the man his focus.
Hearing no more than that, Styphon flushed with the realization of why he had been summoned today.
“Styphon, son of Pharax, in battle against the last Athenian holdouts at Dekelea, took it on his own initiative to shift the ranks of his enomotos to ensure that his best men, and not ones as old as I, received an enemy cavalry charge. Five of those best men were fortunate enough to give their young lives in stopping the charge cold, and it is thanks to their sacrifice that the enemy's hipparch now sits in a cell just yards from this place.
“Outsiders are fond of saying we have a system which rewards only obedience, but we know this is not so. Sparta prizes quick thinking and the taking of risks, too, and these qualities are what Styphon displayed at Dekelea. For that, following the recommendation of Agis, who held command that day, Styphon hereby receives official commendation on behalf of the Gerousia of Lakedaimon, along with the thanks of all Sparta.”
The few eyes which had not already turned upon Styphon did so. Styphon did not acknowledge the attention, did not smile or speak words of gratitude, and no round of applause filled the small chamber. Nor would there be any tangible reward apart from this brief recognition. The white-bearded elder lowered his hand, and Styphon's moment in the sun reached its end.
Shame in Sparta lasted a lifetime, glory but an instant.
But the elder was not done: “However much we value quick thinking,” he went on, “the fact does remain that Styphon acted without orders, an offense punishable according to its severity and the history of the offender. The sanction decided upon by this body is a fine of ten medimni of barley per month, for six months, over and above his normal contribution to the mess. I have no doubt that as an Equal in good standing, he shall make the payment with pride.”
The staff thumped wood, a clerk at a writing desk in one corner entered a final note on parchment, and the meeting was adjourned. As all began to stand and file out into the midmorning sun, Styphon found himself the recipient of not a few subdued words of congratulation. Just outside the door he found Brasidas, who managed to seem as though he had not been waiting for him.