“If you don’t drink that, I will think Sparta is populated entirely by women!”
Euryleon at once lifted his kylix, tossed the contents down his throat, and smiled at Leonidas provocatively as he held out the kylix for more, to the approving cheers of the others.
Leonidas capitulated. It was easier to sip it slowly than to remain the focus of attention. So he tasted the wine, nodded his approval to the host, and the conversation moved on.
Kallixenos asked, “Is it true you steal food to keep from starving in your agoge?”
Leonidas opened his mouth to deny it, but Euryleon beat him to it. “Oh, yes, that’s true. We all got quite good at stealing, didn’t we, Leo?”
Leonidas gaped at his countryman and didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to flatly contradict Euryleon, but he didn’t want to confirm such a preposterous assertion either. “Up to a point,” he tried to explain. “During the Phouxir it is quite common, but I wouldn’t say we all do it.” He glared reproachfully at Euryleon.
“Well, I did!” Euryleon told him defiantly, emboldened by the wine, and sensing a way to redeem himself in the eyes of the Athenians. “I did it quite a lot, or the food would have been even worse!”
“And is it true you let yourselves get flogged senseless?” Kallixenos asked next.
“Of course not!” Leonidas hastened to answer before Euryleon could say something foolish.
“The flogging was only if you got caught, you know,” Euryleon pointed out, obviously relishing this opportunity to educate the arrogant Athenian. “One of my mates had stolen this fox, and just when he was about to make off with it, the owner of the estate showed up. So to avoid getting caught and flogged, my friend stopped and chatted with the old man. He had the fox wrapped in his cloak that he was carrying over his arm, as we sometimes do, and he crushed the fox against his stomach to keep it from squirming or yelping. Fortunately it was dark and the old man couldn’t see too well.” The longer he talked, the bigger the eyes of the Athenians grew; while Leonidas started drumming his fingers on the edge of his couch, because he was pretty certain Euryleon was making the whole story up. Euryleon was good at this kind of thing and had often entertained his herd over their campfires with similar “stories.”
“Anyway,” Euryleon continued, “he got away with it. He just stood there and chatted to the old man like he had all the time in the world. But when the old man finally went inside his house, my mate crashed to the ground with a groan. We rushed over to him and discovered that the fox had chewed right through the cloak and his skin and was gnawing at his insides the whole time he had been chatting!”
The foreigners made exclamations of horror and revulsion, although Kallixenos’ face suggested fascination, too, as he asked breathlessly, “And then? What happened then? Did he get flogged for stealing the fox, too?”
“Of course not! That’s the whole point of the story! He hadn’t been caught, so he wasn’t flogged, even though he had obviously stolen the fox!” Euryleon retorted, frowning at the Athenian’s lack of comprehension. Then he shrugged and added, “Of course, he died from his wounds …”
Leonidas choked on his wine, stunned by Euryleon’s audacity in making up a tale like this. He wanted to tell the others that it was a ridiculous fabrication, but the conversation at the other end of the hall had suddenly become heated.
“They are all slaves!” the youngest of the guests near their host insisted passionately. “To bow before the ‘great king’ and grovel at his feet is slavery!”
“Nonsense! Only the tyrants themselves, who have to deal with the Darius personally, have to grovel. Most citizens live no differently than they did before. Perhaps better, since the Persian fleet protects their merchantmen and they can buy grain from the vast reaches of the Persian empire.”
“At exorbitant prices! Don’t think they get a discount because they are subjects of the same king,” another man scoffed.
“It shames all Greeks for our brothers to be subjects of a barbarian race,” the younger man insisted. Leonidas noticed that he was more weathered than the others, and suspected he was a sea captain.
“The tyrants have bartered away the freedom of their citizens,” another man argued in a more moderate tone. “The citizens are largely innocent victims of the selfish policies of the tyrants.”
“That is simplifying the situation. Not all the cities that have paid homage to Darius are tyrannies. But they are too weak on their own to defy him. For the most part, they are small cities with a few hundred citizens. They cannot hope to stand against the might of Persia. Why, all of Hellas, even if united, would not be able to field an army half the size of Darius’ own.”
“And Hades will freeze over before Hellas unites!” an old man with a long white beard and a bald head threw in with a snort of contempt.
“Are you saying we are condemned to being subjugated one by one?”
“Of course not. Why should Darius covet our poor, rocky peninsula? He has enough rich lands elsewhere. If we leave him alone, he’ll leave us alone.”
“You know he has given refuge to Hippias?” the younger man asked angrily. “The Persian satrap Artaphernes at Sardis has received him like a lost son and showered him with gifts and women. Hippias promises to deliver Athens to the great king, if only Persia will give him enough gold to enable him to regain power either by bribes or with mercenaries. If he succeeds in winning Darius’ support, we will not have the choice of ‘leaving them alone.’ We will be fighting for our freedom, not just from Persia but from tyranny!”
“Calm down, Melanthius. It has not come to that yet,” their host advised.
“Mark my words! It will come to that sooner than you think!” Melanthius turned and called down the hall to the Spartans. “And what would Sparta do if the Persians backed Hippias? Would you still welcome him back, although he is not just a tyrant but a Persian slave and would bring Persia into Hellas?”
Leonidas was uncomfortably aware that the strong wine was already having alarming affects on him. He found it hard to focus his eyes, and his tongue felt heavy. He wasn’t sure he would get his words out right and feared he would make a fool of himself.
“Leo!” Euryleon hissed at him. “Say something!”
Leonidas shrugged. “The Assembly will decide.”
“I thought you were an Agiad prince. Can you not speak like the son of kings?” Melanthius taunted.
“No; I am a Spartan Peer.”
Melanthius lost interest in the obviously stupid young Spartan and turned back to his fellow Athenians. “If Sparta is no longer able or willing to lead Hellas, then we must seize the leadership! We must show the Persian despot that we are not afraid of him. We must not leave our brothers enslaved!”
The old man shrugged. “I haven’t noticed anyone rising to rescue our brothers in Messenia.”
There was an awkward silence, and all eyes turned again to look at the Spartans. Leonidas cursed himself for accepting the neat wine. He knew he ought to have a ready retort for this, but his mind and tongue failed him. He licked his lips and swallowed, his mind blank.
Archilochos came to his assistance. “Let’s not be hypocritical, gentlemen. Which of us does not own Greek slaves taken in one war or another, or captured by pirates? The only thing that distinguishes the Spartan subjugation of Messenia from our own enslavement of fellow Greeks is the scale. No other city has dared to—much less succeeded at—conquering one of its neighbors. But we all keep Greeks enslaved on a smaller scale.
“The issue,” Archilochos continued, “is whether we can allow substantial portions of Hellas to be conquered by a barbarian power without endangering our existence in the long run. Democracy is a fragile plant, and while it can survive—indeed, thrives upon—rivalry and competition and small-scale wars among ourselves, I doubt it can endure if it falls under the shadow of an oppressive foreign power like Persia. The Persians are nothing like us, and they have different gods. Yet the Persian Empire has grown so strong
that it can crush us anytime it chooses to. If the Persians are indeed persuaded to support Hippias, then we will have no choice but to fight them. The alternative would be the slow obliteration of our Gods, our way of life, and our very civilization. We will have to fight Persia or allow our entire culture, our heritage, and our hopes for our sons and grandsons to be obliterated.”
Leonidas was relieved when the symposium ended and he could slink away to his bed. He felt unsteady on his feet, and he desperately needed to relieve himself. When he at last made his way back up to the nursery he remarked to Euryleon, “Kallixenos is an ass, but you shouldn’t have accepted that first cup of neat wine!”
“You didn’t have to follow my example,” Euryleon replied, flopping down on the bed.
“Of course I did. That was solidarity. You broke the line.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Euryleon turned his back on Leonidas.
“And what was that nonsense about the fox?” Leonidas demanded. “I’ve never heard so much bullshit in my whole life! Who the hell would want to steal a fox in the first place? I can’t believe they swallowed it!”
Euryleon giggled and turned back to face Leonidas, propping his head on his hand. “I couldn’t, either—but when they didn’t question me, I just couldn’t resist going on.”
“Did you have to go to such extremes? We may be able to set Lychos straight, but Kallixenos will be telling that silly story to all his friends—not as an example of how tough we are, but rather how stupid!”
“Well, you know it did sort of happen. A couple of years before you joined us, Xenos trapped this fox cub and tried to tame him, but one day when he was holding him he bit deep into his stomach! He had to go to the surgeon, and he nearly died.”
Leonidas just shook his head in disgust and turned his back on Euryleon.
Euryleon yawned and lay on his back. Then abruptly he lifted his head and remarked, “And you have to admit the wine tasted delicious. Just like the food. I’m never going to be able to enjoy black broth again.”
Leonidas sat up in bed. “Euryleon!”
“What?”
“Swear you won’t drink neat wine ever again.”
Euryleon didn’t answer, as if he were already asleep.
“Euryleon! Swear!”
Euryleon sat up to glare at Leonidas. Then he nodded. “I promise never to drink neat wine again.” He lay down, turned his back on Leonidas and added, “After we leave Athens.”
Leonidas was out of bed and on top of him. Euryleon didn’t have much of a chance—being weaker, smaller, and taken by surprise—but he struggled enough for them to both fall off the bed. The sound of them crashing onto the floor brought their attendants from the adjacent room and shouts of alarm from below. “What’s happening? Are you all right? What’s going on up there?”
“Now you’ve made fools of us!” Euryleon hissed to Leonidas, while trying to stop laughing.
“I’m disciplining a ranker for insubordination!” Leonidas called back to his host. Then he gave Euryleon another cuff and got up off him. They returned to their beds and fell quickly asleep, contented.
Leonidas and Euryleon slept later than ever before in their lives. There was no changing of the watch ringing out the hours, and the sun was hidden from them by the high walls of the city. Consequently they had no sense of time, and they only staggered out of bed when the call of nature roused them. To Leonidas’ astonishment, the sun stood so high in the sky that it was shining directly into the small courtyard, and the slaves had evidently been up for hours. Savory smells wafted out of the kitchens, washing was hanging out to dry, manure recorded the coming and going of delivery carts, and an old slave woman was spinning in the shaft of light that spilled in over the high walls. It struck Leonidas that she was the first woman he had seen here, and he felt a little embarrassed that he had not yet had an opportunity to pay his respects to the hostess. Maybe today.
Mantiklos had found out where the household bath was, and he took his master there to wash and change. He had been up earlier and had already accompanied some of the household slaves on a shopping expedition. “You’ve got to go to the agora,” he advised his master eagerly. “You’ve never seen anything like it. It doesn’t matter what it is: shoes, belts, cloaks, shields, cooking pots, buckets and barrels, even glass! They’ve got dozens of craftsmen selling it—not just one or two, but dozens! And everyone carries coins around with them on their belts and buys what they fancy. And the pottery! It’s beautiful, like you wouldn’t want to eat from, like paintings.” Leonidas knew what he meant; he’d noticed it the night before at dinner.
“The food isn’t half bad, either,” Leonidas remarked, remembering dinner.
“What you get, you mean,” Mantiklos answered tartly.
“What do you mean? Didn’t you get the leftovers?”
Mantiklos snorted. “I expect someone got the leftovers, but not the household slaves. We were given slops worse than anything I’ve ever had before in my life—campaigning included.”
Leonidas gazed at him. In the army, the Spartans always shared their meals with their helots. The Spartiates got served first, and the helots ate afterward. That meant the food might be cold and the best bits taken already, but it was not intrinsically less nutritious or tasty. Helots on the estates ate as well as they liked—Laodice certainly made sure her family ate better than many Spartiates!
“The women get different food, too,” Mantiklos added. “They don’t get any wine at all, no meat, no fish, no spices! Just the same slops we got, only with white bread and more butter and cheese.”
“That was just the slaves.”
“No, it wasn’t!” Mantiklos insisted. “It was the meal they made specially for the old and young mistresses.”
“What do you mean, the old and young mistresses?”
“The old man and his son are both married and their wives live here. The young mistress is pregnant with her first child and due in a month or two.”
Leonidas supposed that might explain why he hadn’t seen her. Some pregnant women preferred to live secluded in the last months; but he was surprised she was living with her mother-in-law. Spartan wives generally stayed in their father’s home until they set up their own household on their husband’s kleros.
“Let me give you a shave and trim your hair, sir. You look shaggy.”
Leonidas gladly submitted to Mantiklos’ barbering. The Messenian had become quite good at it. Besides, it was a good opportunity to gather more intelligence. “What else have you seen here?”
“The slaves live rotten lives,” Mantiklos told him bluntly.
“Don’t tell me worse than Messenians?” Leonidas opened one eye to observe his squire.
Mantiklos grimaced. “I hate to admit it, but they do. Can you believe it? Slaves are not allowed to testify at a trial of a citizen unless they have been tortured! So anytime a citizen gets accused of one thing or another—as they are all the time around here—the slaves of the household are tortured either by the prosecution to make them testify against their masters, or by their own masters to make them vindicate him! Everyone in the household is terrified that in these unsettled times, their master will get into some lawsuit, and they will be put on the rack and stretched until they come apart at the joints or hung over a fire until the skin falls off their feet. The former housekeeper was put to the rack a couple of Olympiads ago, and he can hardly walk anymore. It’s the most barbaric custom I’ve ever heard of! At least you Spartans only kill us outright for what we have done or not done, not for what you accuse each other of doing!”
Leonidas laughed at this conclusion, but Mantiklos only glowered at him more furiously and continued, “None of them are allowed to marry. They are locked up at night to keep them apart from the women—like animals.”
“I don’t expect that’s terribly effective,” Leonidas remarked, thinking how easy it was for lovers to meet at other times and locations.
“But if a slave girl gets pregnant, the
child belongs to the master, not the father. Usually, if the master doesn’t want it, he leaves it in the agora for anyone who does, or puts it to death right away. And the young Athenian men are no better about keeping away from the slave girls than the Spartans in Messenia. The young master here has had all the women at one time or another, except his old nurse.”
“I thought you said his wife lived here.”
“She does, but that doesn’t stop him from taking his pleasure with the slaves.”
“She must be a singularly stupid woman. Imagine what Hilaira would do to Alkander if he looked sideways at one of the helots on her kleros!” Leonidas laughed at the thought, because it was unimaginable that Alkander would look at another woman—but if he did, Hilaira would make his life hell!
Mantiklos, however, only shrugged. “What should the poor girl do? She’s only just turned fifteen, and according to the slaves she hardly dares say a word to anyone, though she’s been here almost two years. I caught a glimpse of her and she is very frail and sickly-looking—pale white skin and an enormous belly. In fact, she seemed to be all eyes and belly. I don’t expect she’ll survive childbirth. She’s too little and weak for it.”
Leonidas stared at Mantiklos. He had been raised on Lycurgus’ laws, which required that girl children be fed like their brothers and that they exercise in order for them to grow into healthy mothers. The laws furthermore said that no girl should be married before she was “old enough to enjoy sex” because, the lawgiver had reasoned, she would otherwise give birth to sickly children. Leonidas had been raised on that philosophy without thinking about it particularly.
Mantiklos, however, had moved on to the next subject. “The worst thing about the slaves here is that they are all cut off from their families. They have been bought and sold—sometimes more than once. They don’t know who their fathers or brothers are. They don’t know the stories of their ancestors or the names of their household Gods. They are all just individuals struggling to survive in a strange place. They don’t even all speak the same language. There’s a slave here who came from someplace in the far north and knows only a few broken phrases of Greek, and another who is from Africa and talks to himself all the time in his own barbarian tongue. It drives the others crazy, because he is vicious and they are afraid of him. They say he once carved up a man—first killed him and then carved up his body into little pieces and cooked them in a big pot.”
A Peerless Peer Page 25