CHAPTER 19
Suddenly there was a commotion as a Boiotian loudmouth stood up in the crowd and demanded his say. It was Menekleidas of Aulis again, old Backwash, who had tried to stop the fight the night before Leuktra. After the battle he had appeared on the battlefield, amid the wreckage and corpses, covered with his rubbed-on blood and screaming in pain, he said, from a blow by Lichas himself. How he had been nicked in the fiftieth row from the front, no one quite knew. But that had been more than a year ago, and in the interim Backwash had repeated so often the lie that Leuktra had been his plan all along that the wearied listeners came to half-believe it—and his false wound as well.
He did not believe that Epaminondas could take an army into the vale of Lakonia in midwinter—and moreover the Athenians had given him five pouches of silver to say so. He was as firmly set against fighting now as he had been in the tents of the generals on the eve of Leuktra. Quickly Backwash brawled his way through the crowd in the assembly, turning his head from Mêlon when he got to the front, already chanting “Eirênê, eirênê—peace” before he had even reached the dais. Backwash announced that it was past time for a real Boiotian to speak. Yes—a real Boiotian like himself, one born in the black cow-soil nearby, a man of the people to address his own people. Mêlon remembered why a year and more ago he had kicked the scoundrel into the trash heap outside the tent of the generals. But now there was no Chiôn to be seen, nor a man quick to temper like Philliadas of Tanagra. So Backwash felt safe amid the mob with Athenian mercenaries on his flanks. He ran back and forth at the bêma like a wobbly, webfooted drake who has just lost his head to the butcher.
Despite his smell and his pear-shaped bald head and jowls, Menekleidas was well liked by the Theban town-dwellers to whom he helped spread the obol dole. Now he sought to take up the hammer of his Athenian paymaster Kallistratos and pound down Pelopidas’s peg a bit farther. After Leuktra, the farmers of Aulis had driven Backwash out to Thebes, for they knew his lies and had tired of his tongue. He left his toll taking and took up his kiln work full time. His clothes were usually stained with clay, for this Backwash spun pots in the agora, when the law courts were slow and few paid for his arguments. But he had turned his cloak inside out and felt he was as lordly looking as any horse-owner.
“As a spear-wounded veteran of Holy Leuktra, let me speak not of what is right—for who knows what’s right in a difficult matter such as this? Is not ‘right’ anyway a relative thing, and always dressed up as the ‘good’ by the man with the heaviest fist? So instead, let us of the poorer kind ponder what is expedient for all of Boiotia.” He pointed over to Pelopidas, and he began to shake his body and twist his head in agitation. “Did you listen, men of Boiotia, fellow veterans of the hard fight at Leuktra, to your own Pelopidas—to his appalling madness that will engulf us all and take our sons from the vineyards so that they can rot in the mud of Sparta? For that is where this Arkadian gambit will end up.” None challenged him, so Backwash went on. “Look—men are in armor outside our walls, before our vote. They put a dagger to our throat and then ask if we dare sheath it. Consider the logic of it all. Does this Pelopidas or Epaminondas, does either have a son in the front ranks among the prostatai? Or do they instead talk of war but send your kin to the sound of Spartan pipes, like they did to us at Leuktra? Is not this childless drone, like his master Epaminondas, always buzzing about wars for the children of others to fight in?” He hurried now, just as if he were spinning out a smooth calyx or hydra for his clay kiln.
“What business do our folk have in Arkadia, in Sparta, and in Messenia on the slopes of Mt. Ithômê, in shadowy cold Messenia, far after the Pleiades have set? That’s just where such an expedition of these mad Pythagoreans will all too soon end up, mark my words—with our red blood on their white snow.” He paused again, and was ready to duck. But when no fruit was thrown, he continued. “I have heard that the Peloponnesians wish to have walls; fine, let them build walls. So the Messenians wish for their freedom; fine, let them earn it as we did at Leuktra. I have heard hoplites are needed to surround the Spartan acropolis; fine. But let Pelopidas and his Sacred Band—not us hoplites of Boiotia—leave tonight.” Then his face twitched more and he became louder: “Let us spend money on Boiotians, not helots. We could have a new drain to the agora, some plaster for the columns of the Herakleion, or an extra obol for the dole, for the price of a day fighting down there.”
A few shouted in unison, “No, to war! No to money for the helots! Yes, yes, yes to peace. Stay home. Spend our coins on ourselves. Keep spinning, pothead.” The argument that neither a free Messenia nor a defeated Sparta was worth one more dead Boiotian was good Nemean red wine for many in the crowd, who had already had enough of someone else’s glorious war. That there was a free council of the Boiotians without a Spartan guard on the acropolis—and thanks only to Epaminondas—was forgotten by all.
“The truth,” Backwash said, finally slowing down and walking in tighter circles, “is that Messenians, our so-called allies, are by nature servile folk—every one of those helots fitted for their proper task as serfs to their betters.” He was pointing to the Boiotians in the first row and speaking in the drawl of the Euripos, accented with lisps and nasal drones. “By the gods, the helots are a rural and backward race of tribes and sects who quarrel and kill like savages. They are no better than Homer’s wild Cyclopes.”
“Few of them can read letters. Fewer still know anything of mastery of the sea or the polis. Do they know of anything other than tilling for Sparta in their black soil of the Peloponnesians? They don’t even have their own language or race. Any other people would long ago have built cities and harbors and at least a trireme or two. So let us stay put and far away from such folk. Let us, the heroes of Leuktra, start finishing our own walls in our own cities, and rebuilding our ties with Athens whose friendship Kallistratos here has so ably outlined.” Kallistratos stood up and waved to the crowd. But Menekleidas ignored him and went on, not about to let even his benefactor cloud his moment. He was laughing, and chuckling at his own jest. “As I warned all of us on the night before Leuktra, is Ainias the killer not that fair-weather crane from the shoreline of Stymphalos? Has he not flown back home, cawing and cackling, when his feathers were ruffled that he could not muster our folk to do his own dirty business down south? No, men of Boiotia, let us accept the world as it is—not as we dream it might be. Enough of this mad democracy-spreading.”
Mêlon shrugged. He had come to Thebes to learn what the army of the Boiotians would do. Maybe he would get a word about his Nêto to guide him when he went south to find her soon. But as he heard more slurs from such folk, it had the unintended effect of making Epaminondas, for all his talk of freeing helots a thousand stadia away, only wiser in his own eyes—especially as he contrasted these sophists and windbags with the quiet general facing down Lichas in those moments on the left at Leuktra.
Backwash turned to end his case against the march south. He leaned against the bêma and took the corner of his cloak to wipe sweat from his dry forehead. “Then there is our acquaintance, the ghost of Pythagor—aaaas, who, it seems, is floating always right above this madness. Why all these strange -as names. I am sick of -as this, -as that—these plotters like Pelopidaaas, Epaminondaaas, Alkidamaaas. Yes, this new Pythagoreaaas cabal who have taken over our democracy. They taught not merely the secrets of triangles and the patterns of numbers, but apparently, in between their frolicking with our women, they schemed to take good men from Boiotia and get them killed for the nonsense of Messenian freedom.”
Backwash was using his hands to bring on the hoots, working his fingers, even, almost as if he were at the wheel turning out a grand wine bowl to be painted with red-figured dancers around its base. “So let us next spring find it to our advantage to march when the grain is in ear and food on the march is aplenty. Let us wait until there are strong walls and proven allies to cover our retreat. We should cultivate our alliance at home in soft familiar ground rather than in vain break our plows over barren and rocky soil abroad.” While no one was ready to abandon entirely Epaminondas’s notion of invading Sparta—given their prior sanction for a winter muster—the rough sanding done by Kallistratos was now polished fine by this Menekleidas.
Still, there was always that hope and doom of democracy—what the majority wanted, anytime, about anything, they got in a moment’s notice. The mob cared little for the yoke of the law or the time-wasting of the overseers in the council or the shame of turning a previous day’s vote upside down. Old Herodotus had it right: It is easier to get thousands of hotheads in a democracy to muster than to win over a few stern-faced oligarchs. So Mêlon looked over and watched a grim Epaminondas in his armor and tattered cape slowly stand up, smile, and carefully make his way onto the bêma. As the general passed, Mêlon saw him slap Backwash on his temple, “Phugete, phugete. Foul mouth of the channel, flee, before you get a fist as well. Get back to your clay.”
The small Theban began in a slow style and without anger for the hostile crowd he addressed—since he knew that outside the walls was an army mustering far larger. “Men of Boiotia. These two who have spoken to you can always give a hundred reasons not to act. But never a single reason for taking action.” Epaminondas pointed over to the Athenians and Backwash. “Wait, stop, relax, ponder, consider. What is new about all this throat-clearing and back-stepping? Are you really to be persuaded by a channel bottom-feeder named Backwash? You know all this is only the coddling of Sparta. The man who bows and does the Persian kow-tow, the ground-kisser, always dresses up his cowardice and unconcern for others—in appeals either to collective self-interest or to neutrality.”
Epaminondas went on with a voice louder than any before. “You all have forgotten the battle of Koroneia. You know nothing of Tegyra. Even Leuktra of year last is as old as Troy.” He was pointing his finger at Menekleidas and Kallistratos and the others. “These bought sycophants up here are the foul carrion of hindsight. Their beaks always try to peck away the great deed of Leuktra. No one seems to remember the ancient rule: The more the Spartan army has marched into Boiotia, the more the next year it comes back into Boiotia. Lichas and his sons crow that their dead are always buried in someone else’s earth.”
The general then abruptly grew restless as he reached the end of his address, as animated now as he had been lackadaisical when he began. “As for the slurs, I plead guilty to all the charges brought by Kallistratos. Yes, forty thousand more Arkadians are waiting for us. More in the new cities of Mantineia and Megalopolis that rise. Yes, we will finish their walls in the south. Yes, in the middle of winter we will enter Lakonia. There are twenty thousand of us ready tonight to march out of this city. Look out below. If all this is a conspiracy, then I plead guilty for wishing it and I will bleed for it.” Epaminondas had no ability to out-talk either Kallistratos or Menekleidas. The man in the weatherbeaten thin cloak with his cracked and broken helmet pushed back on his head was appealing not to the heads but the spirits of what he hoped were his unbroken Boiotians.
His shield and spear lay at his feet, and he was pointing with his dagger. “The Boiotarchs and the Boulê already voted for a muster days ago. So I went north and did just that—signed up thousands as you can see from the sea of tents below here. Your coffers are full of silver from allies. The army of our coalition, Phokians, Euboians, exiles from the south, and Lokrians—you know them all—is outside our walls. Eleans and Arkadians wait on us in the south. They are ready to cut the head off the Spartan snake. Unlike us, they care little that it is cold and wet. Those without freedom don’t worry whether the season for campaigning is over. Their eyes instead are on the Spartan acropolis alone. They want to share in the freedom you have—what you shrug at as your tired birthright.”
The Boiotians were murmuring that the angry general seemed like the beggar Odysseus about to throw off his rags and take revenge against the suitors. Indeed just then Epaminondas took off his helmet and began waving it around with his left hand. “Our purpose, you ask? Why, it is to help the men of Mantineia and that means kill Spartans, of course. The more the better until there are no more—or for their part they kill us all. Some talk grandly of war. But war, my Boiotians, is killing all of the enemy who need killing—and there remain thousands in Sparta who do need killing.”
The tiny general then paused. “I swear a great oath to you, men of Boiotia. The Boiotians will march out tomorrow following this vote today to give me command. But I care little whether it is the month of winter Boukatios or summer Hippodromios. Or whether I have thirty days or three hundred days left of my tenure. No, we march at dawn. We will cross the Isthmos. Then if the One God wills it, we keep safe the Mantineians and then go over the pass with the Argives to the heart of Lakedaimon. We Boiotians will hit the Spartans in their own courtyard, the first foreigners to take arms into Lakonia in five hundred seasons.”
Some, maybe half of the Boiotians of the assembly, were beginning to stand and clap in approbation. Epaminondas jumped down from the bêma and walked out. Just then he caught the eye of the Athenian delegation. Then he made a sudden detour in their direction at the front column. The Theban stood not more than a cubit from their noses and stuck his blade in their faces for the Boiotarchs to see. At least he was not clubbing them with his helmet. “As for this Kallistratos and his Athenians here, listen well, Boiotians—especially this Iphikrates that I am nose-to-nose with and his Athenian thugs. At sunrise, I take this army out over Kithairon. On the next day right across your border over Kithairon to Megara.” With that, far more of the crowd was on its feet, hooting and clapping, as they strained their necks to see the hapless Athenians—for they knew their Epaminondas was at times a sort of brute himself, who would beat a man in assembly as easy as salute him. “Join me, fight me, ignore me—that is yours to decide. But should I see a single Athenian hoplite barring the border pass on high Skourta tomorrow, this army of free Hellenes will first turn south to Athens. We will climb up your Acropolis and march right through your white marble Propylaia, Perikles’s unfinished gateway to your city of Athena. We, the pigs of Boiotia, will tear it down, block by block, and cart it back in our wagons back over to Thebes.”
Epaminondas’s voice rang out above the crowd. “We will rebuild the Athenian marble on our own Kadmeia—proof that we are deserving of such a gate to our city. We are the real democrats, you the ghosts who live in a city built by those far better than you. As for you Boiotians, listen to Kallistratos and his lackey potter Menekleidas until dusk tomorrow if it is your wish. But I have an army to muster at dawn and a date to keep in the Peloponnesos.”
“A date to keep in the Peloponnesos!” Mêlon too found himself standing and roaring approval, the first time in his life he had ever clapped for anyone or anything. As the philosophers of old said, it was easy to moralize in your sleep. But he saw that performance, not intent, judges a man good or bad. All this the brawler Epaminondas had taught him at last in his old age—or perhaps retaught him when he came down the mountain. You didn’t have to be perfect—a god on Olympos—to be good, to be a mortal better than others. So here he was like a witless democrat alongside the illiterate stall-sellers and rope-makers. He had been carried away with the current for war by the single speech of a single man—in the manner at which he used to scowl in others. He was headed for the vale of Sparta for Epaminondas and then over Taygetos to help free the helots and bring home his Nêto.
Mêlon found himself almost hoarse. He was the last to stand in sounding his approval, possessed by the wild rush to march out with this army, for Lophis and dead Staphis, and for the safety of Damô and the boys, and maimed Chiôn, too, and always for the dreams of his missing Nêto. For all this and more he yelled out until his lungs nearly were raw to follow Epaminondas. He could not care less whether a wintry katabasis into Lakonia was possible. He only knew that he would rather be on the wrong side with Epaminondas than right with these buskins of the assembly. In a wild mood such as this, he might well go back on the left wing again, even if Epaminondas asked him to cross the Eurotas and storm the acropolis of Agesilaos himself. The cure of Mêlon—the old misanthrope and cynic on Helikon who after the battles of Nemea and Koroneia had hid from the affairs of the Boiotians—was at last complete. Epaminondas had brought him back into the world of men and ideas and belief and off the mountain of his isolation, and the search for Nêto would take him the rest of the way southward.
The applause quieted down, as if the crowd itself had been stunned by their own spontaneous roaring. But what now? Did they know where the ripples of their wild assent would lap? Would harsh Reason goad them back to quiet? Then Mêlon for the first time noticed that the sophist Alkidamas, of all people, not the other Boiotarchs or once again Pelopidas, or the Athenians, was approaching the bêma, both arms upraised with his big open palms to calm the crowd—as if this were his plan, as if it had been his army all along. The Athenians were murmuring and starting to become nervous; they were surrounded by now frenzied Boiotians.
Then Alkidamas spoke: “I take this thunder as a voice vote that we are to march under General Epaminondas in the morning before the frost melts. Pelopidas as his habit will be in charge of the marching order. Look out in the plain below; the muster is nearly complete and only awaits our nod. Let the Boiotarchs sort out the details. The seven generals who had doubts have already ceded their command over to our two leaders. I have nothing to add to the promises of Epaminondas—other than this.” Now Alkidamas himself also grew quiet, not quite sure what he would say next. But speak he did. For the great sophist of the Hellenes was possessed, he would say later, by an inexplicable fire, one from the mouth of Pythagoras himself. So the words came out not entirely his own. “No man is born by nature a slave—this curse that so often makes the strong and wise unfree and the weak and dull their master.”
The crowd was bewildered at these lofty thoughts so out of place in a sermon to march to war, but stayed quiet for more. “Beware of those who say the Messenian helots know nothing of letters as if they were man-footed beasts of dim wits and animal grunts. They are unfree because they live next to the Spartans. So we the Boiotians, and Kallistratos and his fancy Athenians, might well have been as well, had our borders butted such a race of granite as those who wear the red capes. The Messenians will be free thanks to the strong right arms of the Boiotians.” Now Alkidamas waved his arms and yelled to the crowd in far louder fashion than had Epaminondas. “Yes, they will have their free city of Messenê.”
With that, Alkidamas stepped down and abandoned the politics of Boiotia for good, for this man of action also had business himself in the Peloponnesos. As the assembly of the Boiotians broke up, the white-haired sophist lumbered over to Mêlon, who put his hands on the shoulders of the old man and raised his voice over the din, “I hope to be alive to hear all that again, your defense of the Messenians, this no man a slave. I think you have the beginning of a real speech some day from these embers that flared up in your chest as if the One God of ours was working your bellows.” Then he pointed where the general had stalked out of the assembly. “This winter Epaminondas will go beyond his tenure that expires at the new year. Then I wager that we will all be renegades. It will be our choice to be right and dead with Epaminondas or wrong, alive—and growing old—with Backwash. We all go out under the command of Epaminondas who soon will find himself an outlaw general. There will be a death sentence when—or if—we return, earned for the freedom of distant slaves.”
Alkidamas then barked to Mêlon over the noise, “When the law is in service to servitude, and its violation means freedom, then the choice for a good man is not hard. If the helots are freed and we tramp back alive, then our faces will be chiseled in marble on the high temples at Delphi. But if we trip, well, then you know the fate of Epaminondas and all of us who follow. There won’t be a gorge—not even the Apothetai of the Spartans—big enough to hide all our corpses.”
Together they made ready to walk out. Alkidamas turned to Mêlon. “So, are you, ready? To leave your fine press on Helikon? Your newly acquired Makedonian hostage, Melissos, is waiting down by the square. He is already here with your horse Xiphos and two packs. The boy has been walking the entire circuit of the wall, bored to get going. I suppose that he will be not be behind the ox, after all, but at your side with a spear—as I confess I wagered to myself when I so graciously put him into your service. Still, you will be lucky to have him at your side. One more thing. I sensed our general would win over the crowd, and so I asked Chiôn to meet you for a last farewell at Plataia at tomorrow lamp-lighting time—just as you and the army all will enter the borderland of the Athenians. As for your new friend Alkidamas, look for me in the spring down south, four new moons from now at vine bud time when you arrive. I will wait for you under the slopes of a liberated Ithômê, with a board of free helot officials to meet you. Perhaps some of us will find your Nêto. She is a holy woman, or more than that, they say. News has reached me that in the past half-year she has let loose lightning above Ithômê and soon we will hear its thunder. I think you had better go southward to find her.” He stepped away, then almost as an afterthought, Alkidamas turned again.
“The army marches at sunup. But I leave tonight on the road by the sea. There is a young man, though a frail sort at that, I must see on the way. A writer of history, Ephoros, an Athenian born in Kymê, and of some use to us, he may be soon enough. Who knows, perhaps this fellow and I will boat to the Peloponnesos and be in Messenia before you. In any case, as I told your Chiôn two days ago, I go to Aigosthena to meet a ship full of Athenian helots, and a fat one-armed captain.”