by Gary Corby
“Who’s that, sir?”
Pleistarchus shuddered. “My mother.”
PLEISTARCHUS DEPARTED TO arrange the interview.
I said, “Quick, Markos, what do you know about Queen Gorgo?”
“Daughter of one king, wife to another, mother to a third,” he replied. “Gorgo’s been the power behind the kings of Sparta for three generations. They say she’s the smartest woman in Hellas.”
“A likely story,” sniffed Diotima, who had her own pretensions in that area. “They always make these claims about royalty.”
“Well, you’re about to have your chance to find out,” Markos told her.
A guard came, and we were escorted, Diotima, Markos, and I, to the tent of Queen Gorgo, in the very center of the camp. I would never have guessed the tent contained royalty, for it looked like any other. The dowager queen of Sparta sat within upon a hard wooden chair, the only concession to comfort an upright back. A guard stood at attention behind her, and it wasn’t merely for show; the man looked ready to kill the slightest threat.
Gorgo was so thin I could count her bones. Her hair was tied back and gray, which exposed the outline of her skull. The image was accentuated by perfect teeth that seemed too large for the rest of her. Her hands were like the claws of a bird. Her dark eyes had the look of an alert and merciless eagle.
Gorgo noticed me, and I felt like some bug crawling underfoot.
She said, “So you’re the ones they say are causing so much trouble.”
I waited for Markos to defend us, but when he stood silent I replied, “I think the one causing the trouble, Queen Gorgo, is the man who murdered Arakos.”
“No need to get uppity with me, young man. I said that’s what people in Olympia are saying. I didn’t say I agreed. My son tells me you need to know about the krypteia.”
“We asked the question,” I said. “An anonymous note claims secrets killed Arakos. Pleistarchus thinks it might refer to the Spartan krypteia, but there are other interpretations. Would the krypteia really murder one of their own citizens? And if so, why? Especially since, except for his ability to fight, there was nothing special about Arakos.”
“Nothing special,” Gorgo repeated, then said, “There’s one thing about Arakos, but I cannot conceive of it as a motive for murder. Did you know that the father of Arakos was one of the Three Hundred?”
“Markos told me.”
“His father fought and died at the gates of Thermopylae, alongside my husband Leonidas. After the war, I personally made sure that the children of the Three Hundred were cared for. If anyone harms a child of the Three Hundred, it’s as if they harmed my own. You understand?”
“Yes, Queen Gorgo.”
“Tell me what you know.”
I did. It was the first chance I’d had to explain to Markos the anonymous note on the ostrakon and its strange message. He exclaimed when he heard it.
I finished by saying, “And so we want to learn whatever we can of this krypteia.”
“I see.” Gorgo was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “There’s a family history …”
“Yes?”
“My father, Cleomenes, was king of Sparta. My father—how shall I put this delicately?—my father went stark raving mad.”
“That’s delicate?” I asked the Queen of Sparta.
“I’m known for speaking my mind.”
“Insanity is sent by the Gods,” Diotima pointed out. “Usually to punish.”
The Dowager Queen examined Diotima head to foot, like an officer examines a soldier. “You are?”
“I am Diotima of Mantinea.” Diotima lifted her chin proudly.
“Your accent says you’re Athenian.”
“Yes, Gorgo. I go by the name of my mother’s city.” I could tell Diotima was favorably impressed by the way she stood a little straighter, as she would before a high priestess.
Gorgo said, “You’re right, Diotima of Mantinea. Insanity is the curse of the Gods. In my father’s case, in the war against the Argives, he dragged prisoners from a temple sanctuary and cut them to pieces.”
I winced. “That would do it.” To abuse temple sanctuary is almost the greatest crime there is.
“So the Gods cursed my father, and his condition worsened until the family had no choice but to put him in chains. Can you imagine the shame? A king of Sparta in chains? Then, one day soon thereafter, they found him dead.” Gorgo sat up even straighter, if that were possible.
“The official story is that, while still chained in his cell, my father obtained a knife from the helot who was set to guard him. My father used the knife to skin himself alive, beginning at the shins, and laid his own flesh in strips beside him, all the way to his thighs. When he was finished there was only the meat and muscles and veins. The feet he left. I don’t know why. It made the sight all the more horrific, to see those normal feet at the end of legs with the meat hanging off.” Gorgo shuddered, her first sign of humanity.
“Then he started on his groin. I won’t tell you what he did to himself there. He died as he sliced the last of the skin from his stomach.”
“This is terrible,” said Diotima, truly shocked.
“The moronic guard claimed my father had threatened him if he didn’t hand over the knife. I didn’t believe his story. I insisted the fool be executed.”
“You said that was the official story,” I prompted.
“Your stress on the word is correct. My father was mad, I don’t deny it, but he wasn’t insane enough to strip the flesh of his body with his own hands. My father’s condition was an embarrassment to the Spartans.” Gorgo waved an arm, almost dismissively. “Something had to be done. I suspect something was done. I have no proof, but I believe he was killed and the death purported to be his own act. The krypteia are the natural suspects. You asked if the krypteia could kill a Spartan. They could. They’d even dare to murder a king.”
I said, “None of this explains why the ephors or the krypteia would target Arakos. The motive escapes me.”
Gorgo laughed, without the slightest trace of humor. “You’re the ones who asked the question. It may be, as you suggest, that these secrets are not Spartan ones. Arakos spent an unusually long time on his own, out of Sparta, on account of his athletic prowess.” She thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t know if it’s relevant, but I talked to him last year, after the Games at Nemea.”
“Yes?”
“He was very unhappy with the result. Well, who wouldn’t be? He came in second.”
“Second’s better than last,” I said.
“In a war, second is last, and Spartans don’t raise losers. Arakos seemed to think there’d been cheating. I put it down to anger at losing.”
“Thank you for telling us this,” I said.
“There’s no requirement to thank me. I do this purely out of self-interest.” Her expression didn’t change as she added, “I’m an ill woman; soon I will depart for Hades, and there’s no telling what those idiot men will do without me to guide them. I need to engineer a period of peace while I still can, but this investigation threatens to destabilize all of Hellas. I need you to find a solution that gives me a chance to keep people calm.”
That seemed to be what everyone wanted. The problem was, everyone disagreed on what constituted the right solution.
“And if we find Timodemus did kill Arakos?” Diotima asked. “What will you do then, Queen Gorgo?”
“Cheer on my men as they lay waste to Attica.”
I nodded automatically. This was the wife of Leonidas, who had led the Three Hundred. She had watched and waved to her own husband as he marched off on a suicide mission. The Queen of Sparta would do whatever had to be done.
“Are there any of these krypteia at Olympia?” Diotima asked.
“If there are, I’ll discover it and let you know.”
“How?” Markos asked. He probably thought that if he couldn’t find the answer, then no woman could, not even a queen.
“I have my
sources, young man, and they’re not for you to question.”
Markos bowed his head.
“The head man at Athens, who is it these days?” Gorgo asked.
“Athens is a democracy,” I said at once. “We’re all the head man. No one’s vote counts for more than anyone else’s, no one can tell us what to do, and we share the decisions.”
“Don’t give me that rubbish,” said Gorgo. “I was doing power politics when you sucked on your mother’s teats.” Diotima stifled a laugh. “Now, tell me who leads Athens.”
“Pericles,” I said, reluctant to admit it to an outsider.
“I’d heard the same,” Gorgo said. “The son of Xanthippus, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“I know Xanthippus. Not as great a man as my late husband, of course, but a good man. He would have made a reasonable Spartan. Tell me, is the son like the father?”
“Pericles?” I was nonplussed for a moment. How would one describe Pericles? “When Pericles talks, people listen.”
Gorgo grimaced. “I know the type. I wager he’s untrustworthy.”
“Er …”
“That’s the problem with these elected rulers,” Gorgo said. “They always make short-term decisions to make themselves look good. The ephors are the same. Now if Athens had a king to run things, no one would be under pressure to get re-elected, and the people could be ruled well for the long term.”
“What if the king’s not too bright?” I objected.
“Then they listen to me. I’ve advised the Spartans since I was eight years old.”
“Eight? The Spartans listened to a child?” I couldn’t believe it. “What could an eight-year-old possibly have to say?”
She smiled grimly, but answered in a matter-of-fact tone, “I advised my father, the king, not to invade Persia, which he was considering. It was my first move into foreign policy. One of my better decisions, too, if I may say.”
“I’m impressed, Queen Gorgo,” Diotima said. “For all your life, the Spartans have followed your advice, while I, who live in a democracy, have no chance of being listened to. How is that you Spartan women are the only ones who can rule men?”
Gorgo turned her eagle eyes on my wife. “It’s because we’re the only ones who give birth to real men.”
Diotima looked Gorgo in the eye. “We’ll see about that,” she said.
There was nothing more to say. We turned to depart.
“Athenian!”
I stopped. “Yes, Queen Gorgo?”
“I like your woman. Bring her back sometime.”
MARKOS SAID HE had things to attend to at the Spartan camp. Diotima went to look for Socrates, whom she’d volunteered to keep an eye on and then neglected. A child was safe enough at Olympia, but she thought she’d better at least confirm he was still alive. I went straight to Pindar. Whatever had happened at Nemea, it was clear we needed to know about it.
Pindar was easy to find, because the afternoon of the second day is reserved for religious rites. I found him in the Sanctuary of Zeus, where he stood upon an unoccupied stone pedestal and declaimed poetry. He might have been a statue himself, the way he stood with his back straight and clutched the front of his formal chiton in a dignified manner.
A small group of men and women had clustered about.
He saw me but ignored my hand waves to come down.
“… Not every truth is the better for showing its face undisguised …”
I waved so frantically that a respectable woman beside me thought I was a madman and stepped away. It had no effect on Pindar.
“… and often silence is the wisest thing for a man to—whoa!”
I dragged him off his pedestal.
“My apologies, everyone,” I told the crowd. “The great Pindar has been summoned.” A few muttered, but there were plenty of other attractions, and the people moved on.
“Summoned by whom?” Pindar demanded. “If it’s anyone less than a head of state, the Furies will be as nothing compared to my wrath—”
“We need to talk,” I said. “I need information.”
“You? You dragged me away for yow?” I led him by the arm. “Where are you taking me?”
“Do you like to drink?” I asked.
“I’m a poet.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
We stopped at the nearest wine cart. Olympia was dotted with the things. They wheeled in at first light, sold wine by the cup at amphora prices, then disappeared when it was too dark to count the coins.
“What’s your best wine?” I asked the man behind the cart. He was dark and covered in warts. From the way he wobbled and his eyes glazed over, I guessed he’d been at his own wares.
“Got some from Lampsacus lying around,” he slurred. “Lampsacus is in Ionia,” he added helpfully.
“Yes, I know.” I bought the wine and didn’t worry about the cost. If Pericles and Pleistarchus were both so desperate to avoid a war, one or the other of them could fund me for a few cups of wine. Pindar followed me while I carried a cup in each hand to the shade beside the Heraion, the Temple of Hera. We sat on a bench that was, miraculously, unoccupied.
I said, “Pindar, I have a question for you. Gorgo says that, straight after the competition at Nemea last year, Arakos complained to her. He said there were irregularities. One-Eye told me to ignore rumors before I’d even heard them. This has come up too many times now. What really happened?”
Pindar fixated on only one point. “Gorgo?” he said. “Queen Gorgo’s at Olympia? I had no idea. You want to avoid Gorgo, Nicolaos. She knows people who kill people. Lots of them.”
“You’re too late,” I told him. “We’ve already spoken to her. She seems quite nice, once you get past her innate feelings of total superiority.”
He rubbed his chin. “Her feelings are well founded. I do have great regard for both her and her glorious husband. I viewed the battlefield, you know, before the bodies were buried. I never saw such carnage before or since, but one thing I can tell you: every Spartan who died sent a hundred Persians to Hades before him.”
There was something I’d always wondered about that most famous of last stands. “Tell me, Pindar, is it true you wrote the epitaph for the Three Hundred? ‘Passerby, go tell the Spartans that here, according to their law, we lie.’ ”
They were the best-known lines of poetry in the world, but no one who’d been present when the memorial stone was raised had ever claimed the credit.
“I’m not going to talk about that,” Pindar said without hesitation. “The late, great Simonides and I were both on the mission to praise the fallen. We agreed the deeds of the heroes were greater than the words of any poet and swore never to reveal the author. It might not even have been either of us; other poets were there too.”
The way he said it, I knew this was a rehearsed line that he’d repeated many times. I wasn’t surprised. Everyone wanted to know who wrote those lines. It told me something else about Pindar: for all his massive ego, the man was a patriot.
“Gorgo’s contribution to the war was as great as her husband’s,” Pindar said. “When the Persians gathered their army to invade, a Spartan then exiled in Persia sent us a warning. The Persians would have stopped him, so he had to write in secret. He scratched his invasion alert on the backing board of a wax tablet, which he covered over with fresh wax, and then sent it home. When an apparently blank tablet arrived in Sparta, none of Sparta’s so-called wise leaders understood the meaning. They took it to Gorgo. She deduced at once that there must be a secret message, ordered the wax removed, and so read the warning to prepare for war. We’d all be Persian slaves today if it weren’t for her clever deduction.”
“Let’s get back to the unpleasantness at the Nemean Games,” I said.
“Why ask me?” he evaded.
“Because you’re the one who first mentioned it. Just before the chariot race,” I said.
“You’ll have to ask the ones involved.”
“Nothing escapes th
e eyes of the famous Pindar,” I wheedled. A little flattery wouldn’t hurt to deal with a man with an ego the size of Pindar’s. “I need to see through your eyes, brilliant Pindar, because you see what other men miss. Surely the greatest poet since Homer would notice the subtle relationships between men: who hated whom, who was jealous, who was plotting. Come on, Pindar, greatest of bards, tell me what really happened.”
“Good Gods, man, are you trying to butter me up?” His tone was angry.
“Er … yes.”
“Listen, flattery will get you nowhere with me. I lay it on thick with honeyed words better than any man alive. I could teach you tricks of sycophancy that would make your eyes water. What do you think it means to be a praise singer?” Pindar stood and drew himself up to his full height to announce, “I, Nicolaos, am a professional flatterer.” He sat down again. “So don’t try to cozen me with your amateur efforts. It would be like attacking a well-armed Spartan with a blunt knife.” He looked me up and down before adding, “A very blunt knife.”
Pindar drained the cup. Again. It was my plan to loosen his tongue with wine, but I was starting to wonder how many amphorae it would take. I took the cup from his hands without a word so I could be ripped off by the wine seller for a third time. “I hope you’re sober enough to answer questions,” I said when I returned.
“You asked about Nemea.” He burped. “Your friend Timodemus had an easy run to the final.” He paused, no doubt for dramatic effect. “A remarkably easy run. Every single man Timodemus faced, he disposed of in short order.”
“Timo’s good.”
“No one’s that good. Pretty soon everyone noticed that all the other bouts were fiercely fought, but against Timodemus, it was as if his opponents lay down for him like weak women. I wasn’t the only one to notice. Accusations were made, of cheating.”
Cheating happened. Men didn’t like to talk about it, but sometimes two pankratists would arrange a result in advance. Then money would change hands.
Pindar continued, “The judges of those Games looked into it. The only problem was, if he’d bribed his opponents to take a fall, then every single man must have been involved.”