“That was decades ago, under Cyrus. The new generation is soft.” Aristagoras dismissed Cleomenes’ objection and pointed to the map again. “Look, here is Lydia, a fine, rich country where the noblemen have houses filled with gold; and then Armenia, rich in cattle; here are Assyria and Cilicia and Media; and here Arabia, rich in spice, Phoenicia, the master of the Mediterranean, and Egypt, with all the riches of the Nile; here is conquered Babylon and humbled Media. Here, beyond the banks of the Choaspes, is Susa.” He pointed to a star on the map. “This is where the Great King lives and keeps his treasure—the tribute paid by all these subject states and peoples. But beyond is still half the Empire—there is Parthia, Bactria, and India.” He paused again and looked at Cleomenes’ face. Cleomenes’ eyes were narrowed, and he appeared to be calculating.
“Look!” Aristagoras drew his attention back to the lower left-hand quarter of the map, where the Greek peninsula was etched onto the bronze. “Isn’t it time you stopped squabbling over this insignificant rocky scrap of land and turned your attention—and your superb army—to places of great fertility and wealth? Why do you shed the blood of your beautiful young men in interminable skirmishes with the Argives and Arcadians? Why not set before them a task worthy of their skills and courage? There is no gold or silver to be taken from Messenia or Arcadia—poor, rocky places that they are. But here!” He pointed again to Persia and Susa. “Here are treasures beyond imagination, and all waiting for whoever is bold enough to seize them.”
Cleomenes’ eyes were swinging from Greece to Susa and back again. At last he asked, “Just how far is it from Sparta to Susa?”
“Your troops, I am told, march very fast. I was told that they can be in Messenia in a day or Athens in three. So if they were to set off from Miletos marching at that pace, they could reach Susa in three months.” Aristagoras was being generous. Even Persian royal messengers using relays of horses took a month. He did not really think a Spartan army could cover the distance in three months; but he thought this sounded plausible enough to impress upon Cleomenes how vast the Persian empire was.
Cleomenes, however, took a step back from the map, which he had been examining closely, and announced sharply, “Stranger! Your proposal to take the Lacedaemon Army three months’ journey from the sea is highly improper! You must leave Sparta before sunset!”
Aristagoras had not been prepared for such an abrupt dismissal. Things had been going so well up to this point. How could this one fact overturn all the rest of his arguments? But Cleomenes had already turned and stormed out of the throne room.
Aristagoras, seeing all his hopes retreating with Cleomenes, grabbed a small branch of the potted olive tree and tore it off. He hastened after Cleomenes, carrying this symbol of reconciliation and calling for him to stop. Cleomenes paid no heed. He stormed into a courtyard—where the girl Aristagoras had seen at the baths the previous day jumped up to greet him, announcing breathlessly, “Father! Uncle Leo says I can ride his mare Cyclone in the Gymnopaedia! I’m—”
Cleomenes laughed and threw an arm over the girl’s shoulder, pulling her to him in a gesture of paternal indulgence and pride. “So I can lay wagers on you, can I?” he teased, ruffling her disorderly red hair as he asked.
“Sire, please hear me out,” Aristagoras begged stiffly, embarrassed to be witness to such an unseemly domestic scene.
Cleomenes turned around to look at Aristagoras, dropping his arm from his daughter’s bony shoulders and instantly becoming serious. The girl, however, stood beside him, also staring at Aristagoras—evidently too stupid to understand she had been dismissed.
“Send the child away,” Aristagoras snapped irritably, gesturing with his head to the girl.
The girl looked at her father.
“Say what you wish and pay no attention to my Gorgo. She knows how to be silent,” Cleomenes retorted with a stern look at his daughter, warning her to behave. Gorgo bit her lip and held her breath.
Aristagoras was furious. He felt ridiculous, standing like a supplicant with an olive branch in one hand in front of this half-wild girl, dressed in a short chiton that exposed her legs from the knee down. Part of him wanted to turn around and leave them both standing, but then the image of that immaculate escort flashed through his mind. He reminded himself of the brilliant maneuvering of the larger units this morning, and his desire to control such splendid troops overcame his sense of dignity. “You need not march all the way to Susa to see your own reward, sire.”
Cleomenes raised his eyebrows.
“Your rewards would start at once. I could, from my own treasury, advance you ten talents. I have it with me at this very moment.”
Cleomenes shook his head sharply.
“Twenty talents, then—but that is all I have on me at the moment.”
Cleomenes shook his head again.
“Twenty talents, as I said, is all I have with me; but there would, of course, be another twenty waiting for you when you reached Miletos.”
Cleomenes could be heard taking a deep breath, and the girl looked from him to Aristagoras and back in alarm.
“That’s forty talents for you alone, sire, just for coming to Miletos with an army to liberate your Greek brothers from the Persian yoke. The other riches would then be yours for the taking—merely by sending your splendid bronze youths against the Persians in their silk pants.”
This time Cleomenes did not shake his head. He frowned as if tempted.
“Make it fifty talents, then,” Aristagoras conceded. “Twenty now, and thirty when you reach Miletos with an army at your back to bring freedom to Ionia.”
“Father! You had better go away, or the stranger will corrupt you!” Gorgo burst out, unable to keep quiet any longer.
Cleomenes turned and looked at her as if he had forgotten she was there. Then, swinging back to face Aristagoras, he ordered, “Leave Sparta at once, stranger! I will not receive or listen to you ever again!” Then he stormed off through the next door, slamming it behind him.
Aristagoras was left in the anteroom with the despicable girl-child. These Spartans—so martial and masculine to the eye—were indeed ruled by their women! Even a girl-child, who in any proper home would have been ashamed to be seen, let alone heard, in the presence of a strange man, could tell a grown man—a king!—what to do!
Aristagoras was filled with rage and hatred for both the men, who were so weak and foolish, and even more these unnatural women. He was angry that he had come here, and furious that he had humiliated himself by asking for Spartan help. He burned with shame, and wanted nothing more than to be gone as quickly as possible. He turned on his heel and rushed back to his own quarters, angrily tossing away the olive branch as he stormed out.
Gorgo was left alone in the courtyard with a chilly feeling of having done something wrong. The stranger’s look of hatred had been like a spear thrust to her gut. She sensed that he hated her not because she was ugly and had said something wrong, but just for being alive. And her father was angry with her, too. He had taken her advice, but he would not thank her for it. It occurred to her that she had come in the middle of something, and maybe she hadn’t understood all that was going on. Her father had explicitly warned her to be silent. She had behaved like a child—blurting out the first thing that came into her head. Although it was summer and hot, she shivered—and decided she had better go tell her grandmother and Nikostratos what she had done. Maybe they could find a way to put it right.
Chapter 15
Trial by Fire
It was the driest, hottest summer in memory. The crops were slowly parching in the fields, baked daily by the blistering sun and brittle from thirst. The helots tried to irrigate, but many of the smaller creeks and brooks had dried up altogether and some of the springs had run dry, while the level of the wells sank alarmingly. Men looked more and more anxiously toward the western sky, hoping for a cloud that would presage rain, but the sky was clear.
Laodice was terrified. She could not sleep at night for liste
ning and praying for rain. She began each day with an inventory of what was left in their pantry. Why had she wasted so much flour on pastries and bread to sell in the market just so they could buy useless luxuries? She should have hoarded it instead. If they had no harvest this year, they would not make it through the winter. They would have to slaughter all their livestock just to have enough to eat. But what would they do without the oxen when it was time to plow and plant again?
Pelopidas, Polychares, and the youth Kleon worked themselves mercilessly in the oppressive sun to dig a ditch to the Eurotas, and then built a crude pump powered by an ox. With this they managed to get a trickle of water up to the lower field. They took turns driving the ox to power the pump, while the others raked or funneled the water to first one row of barley and then the next, and so on, until this one field came back to life. But Laodice watched her husband, her son, and Kleon shrink as they sweated away flesh. At the end of the day they fell into their beds, exhausted beyond thought or conversation.
At least Pantes’ shop was prospering and, as Laodice had expected, he had taken a wife. Yet while Pantes no longer worried her, her concern for her daughters had grown. They were now at that dangerous pubescent stage when they were moody and boy-crazy. More than once she had caught them sneaking down to the Eurotas to watch the boys of the agoge swimming.
Laodice had lived in Laconia long enough to know that the sexually active youths of the agoge considered helot girls “fair game.” Not that many of the youths of the agoge would actually rape the girls (though it happened now and again); most knew that using force against the helots working for another Spartiate could get them into serious trouble. The fact that Laodice’s girls were Leonidas’ helots made the situation even clearer. It was well known that Leonidas would not tolerate any abuse of his helots, and any youth who went too far would lose his hide.
The problem was that Laodice’s girls seemed to have picked up the Laconian attitude toward these youths—namely, that it was an honor to be deflowered by a true Spartiate. The neighbor girls candidly argued that there could be nothing better than a Spartiate lover who paid you in game he had hunted or trapped, or even made the girls pretty trinkets with rolled stones and carved figurines.
Their mothers had nothing to say against the practice. It seemed they had all done it in their youth, and could point proudly to this or that item that had been a gift of this or that Spartiate—now respectable citizens with wives and children and honors. So the mothers encouraged their daughters’ promiscuousness, saying that it added to the family diet and income, while the girls themselves loved being courted and bedded by the “golden” youth of the agoge.
The smarter girls even built up a dowry from the gifts of their Spartiate lovers to make them more attractive to their own class. To Laodice’s incomprehension, the offspring of such unions carried no particular stigma. They were simply raised like other helot children, either by the girl’s family or by the girl herself after she married.
To be sure, helot youths sometimes resented the deflowering of their future brides by their masters if they already fancied a girl, but there wasn’t much they could do to stop it. Mantiklos had gotten into a terrible fight because he caught the girl he was courting with a meleirene. He’d attacked her in his rage, provoking her brothers to come to her defense. Mantiklos had ended up with a broken nose, several cracked ribs, and more simmering hatred toward the Spartiates than ever. But Laodice knew that the more mercenary helot youths actively encouraged their sweethearts to get as much material gain from their lovers as possible.
Laodice, however, sided with Mantiklos on this issue. She found the Laconian customs disturbing. She thought it was wrong and unhealthy for a girl to sleep with anyone other than her husband, and she wanted her girls to go to their marriage beds as virgins—as she would have liked to have done herself. So she fretted about her daughters and about finding them husbands before they got seduced by one of the Spartiate youths, while she anxiously watched the radiant blue sky for some hint of rain.
As the summer progressed, even the Eurotas shrank to a ghost of its normal self. With baskets of washing on their heads, the helot women had to cross the mud flats left behind on the riverbed as the water retreated. The mud clung to their legs and drew them deeper into the morass with each precarious step. When finished, they had to trudge back with the wet laundry on their heads, and sometimes women lost their balance in the treacherous quagmire, spilled their laundry, and had to start all over again.
For the youths of the agoge, the low water meant they had to wade through the stinking mud just to go for a swim at all—and then wade through the mud again afterward, getting dirty and sweaty again. The boys therefore chopped down trees and built a precarious walkway across the mud to the deeper parts of the river; but this only led to fierce fights between gangs of boys defending the bridge and those trying to take it. Generally they all ended up in the mud flats on either side of the bridge, coated in mud like piglets.
Disgusted, the teenage girls withdrew and found their own swimming hole farther downstream. The currents of the river, flowing over the roots of some ancient plane trees on a little island, had carved out a deep pool. The girls could reach the island with dry feet, because the channel on the eastern shore had dried up and the girls could leap across the narrow gully. The maidens stripped down, hanging their chitons on the trees, and with squeals and giggles of delight slipped into the cool water. They sank under the surface and let the water sweep their long hair downstream, then popped up again to catch their breath and wring the water from their hair. Their high-pitched chattering and giggling seemed to carry for miles.
The girls were soon discovered by some off-duty meleirenes, who didn’t bother with the detour around the eastern shore and plunged right into the river, chasing the girls back to their island and their clothes. It was a silly game, as far as Gorgo could see. Disgusted with the brainless behavior of her friends, she grabbed her things and fled. One of the meleirenes tried to cut her off at the gully, but she gave him a kick in the direction of his groin that he just managed to deflect and told him bluntly, “I’m not interested!” Her tone of voice was too decisive for him to mistake it as flirting. He let her go.
Gorgo ran barefoot across the floodplain, which was now starting to bake and crack, and scrambled up the far bank, pulling herself up on dusty saplings. Only when she reached the road did she untie her sandals from around her neck and put them on her feet. She started tramping at a good marching pace in the direction of her grandmother’s kleros. When she arrived half an hour later, the staff greeted her with exclamations of dismay. She usually rode over, and today she looked much the worse for wear. “Good heavens, girl! You look like something the cat dragged in!” her grandmother’s old housekeeper exclaimed with humor.
Gorgo was reminded of the way her mother had always said that to her. She snapped unkindly at the old helot woman, “Maybe I am something the cat dragged in! Leave me alone!”
Overhearing this remark as she arrived, Chilonis exclaimed sharply, “Gorgo! You’ve no right to use that tone of voice to poor Irene! Apologize at once!”
Gorgo was in no mood to apologize to anyone. “Why should I?” she retorted. “She says I looked like something the cat dragged in, and all I said—”
“I heard what you said! It’s not what you said but the way you said it! What on earth has got into you? Apologize to Irene and then come with me.”
Gorgo had been late to mature. At thirteen, many had mistaken her for a child of ten or eleven. She had not started her monthly flux until this past spring, as she turned fifteen, and her breasts were only just starting to develop. Chilonis had therefore already diagnosed teenage moodiness and insolence, and she doubted if there were much she could do but wait for Gorgo to grow out of this unpleasant phase.
Gorgo turned to the helot and said in an angry, uncontrite voice, “I’m sorry if I was rude to you, but I don’t think it’s particularly nice to call someone ‘so
mething the cat dragged in.’ I’m sure you wouldn’t like it if I said it to you!”
The woman opened her mouth, flabbergasted, and then looked at her mistress, who sighed and said simply, “I’ll deal with her, Irene. You go back to your work.”
Chilonis then led the way out of the kitchen to her own study and sat down to face the now sullen Gorgo. “If you’re going to go around dressed like a boy of the agoge, with your hair hanging unkempt about your shoulders and your feet filthy, you deserve to be told what you look like.”
“Well, what do you want me to do? Sit around combing out my hair and oiling my skin for all the boys to see, like Nausica and Alkyone and Phaenna?”
Chilonis noted that now Phaenna, Gorgo’s one and only friend, had apparently joined the clique of girls who were taking a pronounced interest in the opposite sex. That was normal. But she understood Gorgo, too.
Gorgo plopped herself down on the bench by the door, her long, lovely legs thrust out in front of her, but with her shoulders hunched and her head hanging as she picked absently at her frayed belt, and complained, “The only thing they can talk about is boys, boys, boys—who’s won what race, who’s had to go down to the pits, who’s been caught with some helot girl. It drives me crazy!”
“Um,” Chilonis commented. It could indeed be tedious—but it was also biological and inevitable. “Aren’t you interested in any of them?”
“The meleirenes?” Gorgo asked, horrified. “A bunch of pimply little runts, whose only interest in us is sex! And they don’t care which of us they get their hands on, either!” Gorgo shot back.
Chilonis laughed—because it was so true.
“I don’t see what’s so funny!” Gorgo demanded, her green eyes flashing and her lips thrust out in a stubborn pout. “You’re the one who always said a woman isn’t just a bedmate or a breeding factory—not to use the language they do!”
Chilonis sighed. It wasn’t easy being fifteen. So she suggested simply, “You’re right. Why don’t you come with me to my geometry lesson?”
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