CHAPTER 35
There were more guards on the streets when the five reached the torches of the new city. They brought in Chiôn to the houses of the dead, put him on a table, and then went to sleep in the tent by the Arkadian Gate. Mêlon kept his distance from this Nikôn, and wondered once more whether his city was the calm or nightmare of his nightly dreams on Helikon. The helot in turn was babbling about more bad helots to hang. Epaminondas turned. “Quiet, Nikôn, we have a better dead man than all your men alive. We mourn Chiôn as he burns. At least torch those you hang. Don’t leave them for the dogs. We are better than the men of Sparta. Kill the looters if you must. Hang the traitors. Hunt down the Spartans left, though I wager there are no more than a handful alive and none on Taygetos. But do it on the vote of your dêmos. Burn them outside the gates and let their womenfolk collect the ashes.”
In the days after the deaths of Lichas and Gorgos up on Taygetos, Mêlon and Ainias said little. They kept busy on a hero shrine outside the Arkadian Gate where their hired Messenians had erected two gray limestone lions. Proud heads roared in stone over the ashes of Proxenos and Chiôn. Each sat on his haunches and seemed to be bellowing out to the southeast, “The end of Sparta.” Ainias took up the chisel himself, and wondered again as he cut the stone what had driven two northerners to come so far south to die for those who had never known them. When he was done, something of the faces of Proxenos and Chiôn stared out from the lions’ manes and whiskers. For a bit he was angry again for the end of his friend, the death of Chiôn and the laming of Nêto, angry at the once-grand idea to free the Messenians, and so he could not keep quiet even among the helots around him. “Look at us, Mêlon. Making stone beasts roar like our Chiôn and Proxenos. Look at what they died for—a city of crooked towers, of thieves, of looters and worse. Proxenos planned their city and we cannot even give him credit, so we lie about some faker Aristomenes who envisioned it so that these child helots won’t have hurt feelings that they could not even plan their own city. Now look at them, drunk on the freedom we gave, all in need of the Spartan lash. Killing each other when they can’t find Spartans. Next they’ll turn on us, their liberators. I helped do this. No polis here at all—there never will be. Why, most city-states wouldn’t even let that thug Nikôn in the city gate. Here he is an archon. I would burn him up before I would Lichas.”
Mêlon ignored the rantings from the dirty and unkempt Ainias. He smelled of wine and sweat and wore the blood of Proxenos on his cloak like the victor does the laurel, and went from the middle way to unhinged in a blink—and would yet return to his senses soon enough. Mêlon the farmer saw something quite different from Ainias. With new eyes he began to perceive a stirring amid the mess, and larger walls than either at Megalopolis or Mantineia. For the farmer who brings the wheat field out of thistle and bramble, his eye is always not on the natural chaos, but on what order can emerge from it. Amid the gallows, and the sewers, and the corpses, he saw majestic stone temples, and houses—and the skeleton of a great polis to come, one that grew flesh each day. And the clouds above it all, this day they seemed now to be as faces, yes faces of Chiôn and Proxenos both, as if they had become Olympians who smiled down on their subjects.
His mind took in Messenians torching the corpses of the executed and arguing to stop the killing, and young men racing in the half-built stadium, throwing the discus and hitting targets with their javelins, in preparation for the great games of the founding of holy Messenê. “Freedom is not so clean. The Athenians have had their democracy maybe a hundred and a half-hundred years, they say. It still is, well, you know, chaos, Ainias; these Athenians who started wars each season and killed Sokrates and slit the throats of the Melians, and all the rest. And us? Has it even been ten years since Pelopidas and his gang dressed up as women and assassinated our oligarchs in their drinking parties? So we are to demand of these helots perfection, our beautiful virgin Dêmokratia, all in Parian white, without a blemish or chisel mark on her bosom?”
In their grief the two hoplites were largely left alone by Epaminondas, who had mustered the army only then to camp it three times and more, reluctant to leave Messenia and face his trial at home. The general instead walked all night, paced the ramparts of the nearly finished walls of Messenê, wondering whether his victory would draw out Agesilaos—and whether he should head back east over Taygetos for the summer to attack the lame king.
Pelopidas laughed at his fantasies. “You’ll be lucky, Theban, to get this army home as it is. One hundred and twenty days and more I reckon our men have slept outside and fought the Spartan. Half are sick from the cold. The rest vomit from the bad water. They feel the foul air and the fever it brings. If we don’t leave soon before the summer, they’ll hate the helots more than the Spartans—if they avoid the fevers of these lowlands by the coast.” Pelopidas then pointed to the Boiotians in the camps below the finished ramparts. “They need do no more. You promised a march home thirty days ago. Not even Zeus with his thunder on Taygetos could get them to go back east. They will not go back into the lair of Agesilaos. No, they are tiring of founding cities for ingrates.”
“If you want your Messenians to enforce their laws and finish their walls, then it is time for us to dry up the teat and wean these infants who have grown teeth aplenty. The spring star Arktouros has long ago arisen with our month of Agriônios and winter is past. Even Epitêles knew that and took his Argives home last month—and no less on the advice of Lelex and Nikôn, who want their polis to be their own. Do you like your uncle sleeping in your tower bedroom a hundred days after his promise of a short visit?”
Nêto had drifted back to the empty schoolhouse of Erinna far above the city, and was said to have gone quiet in the night as the vapors of the goddess had set the other virgin priestesses afire. She could tend the outer sanctuary, and plant her garden, but was not allowed into the temple proper or precinct, not after her stay with Kuniskos. She wished to avoid Mêlon, ashamed that he would spurn her, for she was soiled and ugly and she walked slower than did her master. She instead talked to Erinna in her sleep, but out of make-believe since the visions of what was to come were gone. Even Doreios, who before her capture had claimed he would make her his own, let her alone now, since he saw that she drew men’s eye for her scars rather than her beauty. The more he had once talked of yoking his Nêto, the less he saw of her, for her deer legs were a faint memory and her gait was not a pretty thing to watch.
Nêto at last had her free Messenia, but the deaths of Chiôn, Proxenos, and Lophis, and the looming date of departure of the northerners, Mêlon especially, bore hard on her—as did the truth that her dream talk to Nikôn had almost gotten them all killed on Taygetos. That lamentation turned Nêto away from the world of reasoned men and for a time back to the gods of Olympos who alone, it seemed, a day or two each month spoke to her. If a year earlier she had turned all the heads in the agora at Thespiai, now few in Messenia gave her a look, and then only to gaze at her slumped walk and her scarred cheek. Her leg had healed with a bad bow and she favored it like the old women in black shawls with the hump-backs and staffs.
Gorgos had left her a bitter look, as he promised, with her branded scar. Nêto for her part wanted no man. Kerberos would not leave her side anyway and she in turn kept him from going back to the wolves. Nêto in her shame soon limped more into the deeper hills, even far above the house of Erinna and was seen with the deathless naiads of the glens, now more a phantom than a fleshy mortal. Mêlon had tried to track her down, but the mountain helots were ignorant of her wanderings, and he had lost his tracker Chiôn. Finally, he sent out messengers with word to her to come home. But no ranger could find her, not even the hounds found a scent of her Kerberos. Both vanished from the thoughts of the Messenians. Mêlon remembered her harsh talk to him the previous summer on Helikon and at least figured she was happier in her free Messenia than back in his Boiotia. Or so he told himself.
Finally, not just the hoplites, but their officers also, told Epaminondas to leave. They demanded of Epaminondas that they reach home before the green stalks of the wheat fields of Boiotia turned yellow and heavy. The army took inventory and prepared provisions for the march across the Isthmos. Then Alkidamas appeared again. He had gone north to Olympia, and had news as he returned southward to the new city. “I have called on you too much, Thespian. You have given too much of the earth and water of Helikon for the cause of the Messenians. I ask a final favor, a homecoming gift. I think that when you go north with the new month, we will not see each other again—at least until the trial of us all. So our tiny band of liberators should go homeward toward the gulf, ahead of the army, together as part of one final good deed, to smooth the rocks from the road before Epaminondas arrives with a bounty on his head. Let us get to Thebes first, before Epaminondas arrives, and make sure he sees flowers, not a rope, around his neck.”
So five left ahead of Epaminondas. Alkidamas led with Ephoros, the writer of history. Melissos followed at the rear. Ainias and Mêlon walked in between, both silent in their hatred of the Spartans who had killed Proxenos and turned Nêto feral. After a two days’ walk, the five reached the coast of the gulf of Korinthos. From there they could see the wave-crested sea of Megalê Hellas to the west, and the dark cliffs of Aeolis directly across the water where men of the polis seldom went. Soon on their way to the docks, they passed the first huts outside the great walled city of Patrai, city on the gulf, friend to Athens and home to the Achaians of old.
Ainias had grown tired already of the south, of his own Peloponnesos, and was ashamed of his Doric—and now even of himself as well. As promised, he would tend to the farm of Proxenos up on the Asopos River, at least for a while. The sooner he got to Plataia, and away from this southland, the better for himself and his companions condemned to see him in his madness. He would find his cure in the olives and vines of Proxenos. There he would swear off Dionysos, and bathe in the cold Asopos each morning to cleanse his stains. He would teach the sons of his friend to bend the bow and dig the vineyard. Or so he promised once he was north of the gulf and free of his homeland.
The joints of Alkidamas were stiff, and Mêlon himself was quite lame from his bad leg. His knee was nearly twice its normal size. His foot was blistered and torn from walking on its side. Lame and tired, they were all glad to go inside the city gate of these men from Achaia and walk down between the Long Walls to the port on the gulf rather than continue east to the Isthmos along the shore. Alkidamas laughed, “Ah yes, we take the ferry straight over to windy Naupaktos. No Gastêr this time, just an honest ferryman and his barge. We stay the night over there on the high eastern road by the water. Then up a day through the olive groves of Amphissa to Delphi and we will pass along by the snake oracle of Trophonios into Boiotia, coming up on Helikon on her backside. Once across the water we are safe. Done with the deed—at least for this season.”
Mêlon and Ainias were mostly quiet on the broad-bottomed ferryboat over to Naupaktos. The late-spring sea of the fickle month Theilouthios was choppy. But the aged tiller was no fat one-armed running mouth, but an expert young sailor from Zakynthos with his father’s boat, who crisscrossed to the opposite side despite the white tops on the waves. Even with a strong northern headwind in their faces, they reached the northern shore by the noon, and then made the sixty stadia to Naupaktos in less than a day.
There Alkidamas rented a large common room, an andron with six wooden couches and reed mats. He had ordered food brought in to sup together a final time—olives, garlic, some dried fish, and an octopus or two, with four kratêres of black wine and greens and spring horta from the well-watered slopes above Naupaktos. He had on either side of him flute girls. Two porters brought in torches and a long low table. “Well,” Alkidamas began as he leaned on his elbow, chewing a tip of raw wild asparagus, “well, well, we have a sort of symposion with girls and couches. Let the wine and eating and boasting begin. I am the symposiarchos, and preside over our talk session. Look. I have bought laurel wood for a roaring fire.” A short Akarnanian girl in a see-through cloak of light linen kept their cups full. Another with a large backside from Ithaka walked around the table with an aulos. On the prompt of Ainias, she took up a soft song of Erinna of Athens. Ainias had no smile on his face as he leaned forward. Rather than drop a raisin in his mouth he threw several across at the beard of Alkidamas.
“So we ended the Spartans,” he growled. “Don’t lie to me that we left something better. You saw the mess at Messenê. Lichas was right. We miss him—and can’t bring him back to right things.” Alkidamas wiped a dribble of wine from his chin, clicked his fingers, and the Akarnanian girl—Skylaki, they called her—brought in a new calyx of red, the third of the night, and a towel for his face. “I am hog at the symposion and won’t let any of you speak, no, not just yet,” Ainias announced. “There is an army still left with Agesilaos. Even after Leuktra he is enough alive. He sits safe on his acropolis. I think we will all be back in the vale of Lakonia—and more than once.”
The other four were fidgeting. Ainias looked away from them. They were unsure how much the wine rather than Ainias was talking and looked over to see that his spear was on the floor. They signaled for the music to begin again, in soft fashion, as they heard him out, hoping the five-foot tune would calm him and that they themselves would not be persuaded by his anger. Ainias was a slave himself to Dionysos and would not calm. He kicked up his feet and jumped back up in the lamplight, spilled an entire kratêr of the white, and almost turned over the table itself. “Will your ox Aias pull the yoke any better, Mêlon, because there are no more helots? Will that big press work better without a Chiôn? I think not. Who challenges all this? All vanity. It was all about the vanity of Pythagoras, this notion you could play god, and make some serfs free so to make yourselves feel more something—what I don’t quite know.”
The drunken Ainias knocked over his couch and walked around the table, along the backside of the couches. Not one of the four was reclining. Mêlon might have agreed with some of this nonsense of Ainias. Now he kept quiet, for he had a half-thought to cross swords with Ainias, and more than a half that he would take down the Stymphalian. The piper Skylaki started on her flute and began to dance and lead Ainias back to his couch. It was the writer of historia among them, the yellow-haired malthakos Ephoros, who challenged the mercenary. How odd that the twig-armed Ephoros cared little about a spear-thrust from the drunken hoplite. He was even redder from the winter sunburn he had acquired on the trip down, but his voice came out through his nose in his affected Attic. There is courage in writers on occasion, especially if there is a story to come of it. Ephoros had learned to endure slights and an occasional slap as he questioned the helots for his great saga of their liberation to come. For all his perfumed locks, he was no coward. Ephoros had said little in fear that the veterans would scorn his white skin and soft hands—and his support for a war that he had not fought in.
He had come late with Alkidamas. So he missed all the battles north or south. His only battle scars? The vomiting from the long boat to the Peloponnesos and some scratches from fighting off a big helot rower on Gastêr’s boat. Now he had no intention of letting the friendship of all be turned sour by a good man gone bad in his drink—not now, right before they set out on the last road to holy Delphi at sunrise. So better to prompt the battle of words with Ainias here in friendly Naupaktos. That way their bile would rise and pass. Then they could march east in easy quiet to Delphi. All could enjoy the hike up to Apollo’s shrine. As sober friends once more, the five would descend from the high meadows to Trophonios and the borders of home.
Ephoros poured himself a calyx of warm unmixed wine and began. “Sit down, dear Ainias, just as our dear Akarnanian Skylaki orders. Please, let us all sit down and recline, and show some respect to one another and the idea of a proper symposion, as we do in Ionia. Where is our symposiarchos to impose order? Girls. You two bring in more wine, and play something soft on the lyre as we speak, an elegy perhaps, and do some of your twists and leg raises for the men over there.” To the general surprise, the Arkadian Ainias did just as he was told.
“Is that what Lophis and Kalliphon, the son of our Alkidamas, fell for at Leuktra? Chiôn, and Proxenos and all the other best men of Boiotia whose names I have written on my scrolls? Did they all die to just kill Lichas, the better man? Was it only to kill Kleombrotos and his henchmen at Leuktra?” He picked up some cucumber relish and spread it on his bread and then again looked up. “The helots are free and yet they squander their liberty in license? My, my—they loot. They steal, Ainias. By Zeus, they even plunder their own temples, or so you shriek.” Ephoros leaned on his elbow and somehow raised his squeaky voice even another notch higher. “We laid out their walls. They sleep on them rather than build them higher. We died for Messenians. And, oh my, they have no government, no laws, no rules on stone. Spartans at least kept order with their kryptes and their chasm of death.” He may have been fragile, this papyrus leaf, but Ephoros nonetheless looked over at the drunken killer Ainias and faced him down.
“This is your writ—that you prefer order to freedom, the rules of the pit of the Kaiadas to the chaos of the unruly assembly? Hah. So you think if we were smart, we would bring back a Spartan harmost, and have Antikrates and Lichas and his braids back again?” Ephoros looked around to his right. He wanted to see if any in their sorrow and drink agreed with the bitter Ainias and might prick his backside with a spear tip. So he went on to provoke Mêlon right across the table, although he was unsure of his reaction. “Was that the goad for you too Mêlon, son of Malgis, only to keep Agesilaos on his acropolis and out of the vineyards and wheat fields of others around Helikon? You had no thought of the helots or the cities of the Peloponnesos?”
Now the pale Ephoros broke his own rules of the symposion. He leaped up, but much more violently than even Ainias had. He stalked, yes, stalked to the wall and back. He had feather arms and even smaller legs. Yet he paced to the back of the Arkadian’s couch and took on Ainias, and showed the greater courage for standing right over the reclining killer.
“Ainias, you will return to your old fire soon enough and lead Arkadia onto the path of its old renown—once you hear the voice of your Proxenos and the whispers of your Pythagoras. We are in the north again, across the gulf now, Ainias Taktikos. So obey your oath to the dead. Fill your wine flask with spring water. Cut off your filthy mane and bathe in the nearby Mornos tomorrow, and if you are man enough to go to Plataia, as you boast, go and raise the children of Proxenos. Otherwise keep still and join the other drunkards on the corners and the alley beggars with their coin cups, or go back down to Taygetos and take up where Chiôn finished.”
Mêlon finally looked up. “All of us sit down, lounge back, and have some relish and more wine.” Mêlon spoke rapidly and with confidence. “Nêto is not a mere cripple. She is not ugly or feral. No. She is free. She has whispered that it will be this angry Ainias, who alone will become the tyrant slayer of the Peloponnesos, who will deal with Lykomedes yet—who may prove the great traitor of us all as he colludes with old Agesilaos. Yes, in your pride and zeal, you will go south there again—I fear for you—and settle up with our backstabber Lykomedes in Mantineia. You are the biggest liberator of us all.” He went on. “Erinna is not dead. Her song lives on. Epaminondas hums and sings it as we speak. So, yes, all that has been a good thing to die for, Ephoros, for the freedom of the Hellenes. I am at last proud to be a Hellene. I won’t stay on my mountain.” Mêlon wanted to finish and get it all out, and show that he was one with Epaminondas at last, no difference between the two of them. “Let the others talk of your Pythagoras as the evil daimôn that addled the wits of the democrats of Boiotia. Or say that he sent them south on this mad dream of a dead philosopher. What is it for me who has no love for that sect and likes to eat meat as much as beans? It was the freedom of the Messenians that I now know was worth the blood of the Malgidai. We ended the Spartans who marched into the land of others. I have no regrets. Not one. Not ever. Not since I came down Helikon to fight at Leuktra for Epaminondas. For I too was freed from a different sort of slavery, one worse in some ways: a slavery of the mind—and of the soul that once believed in nothing other than itself. Nothing is worse than the cynic who is disappointed by the world about him for not appreciating in his own genius, for being less than perfect. I know that now from years of wilderness.”
Pale Ephoros from across the table, behind his large kratêr of warm wine, looked over at Mêlon. “It will be sung a thousand seasons and more from now that the stones that grew out of the Peloponnesos this season prove who was the better man after all—and who the worse. What will they say of Sparta? What will they say when one day when we are ashes, and the Hellenes to come conclude, ‘Why look. There is nothing here, no stones on the acropolis of Agesilaos. The Sparta of song was nothing. But the walls of its subjects, why over at Messenê are they looming over the Peloponnesos?’ ”
Melissos twitched. He for some reason was not tired of these talkers. He liked them and what they said. What was this Hellas, this notion of no city-state, but one people—one language, the same gods, from Thessaly to Crete? “Please, don’t speak of our ruin. Think of the ruined at Sparta. They feel their own misery far more. Isn’t that enough? The world is split between those who apologize for killing their enemies and those who take pride in it. What we did was good, right as you say. Surely you taught me that much.” Gone was his half-Makedonian slang. He had wanted to fight with Mêlon at Taygetos, die even if need be. So he had earned their attention. Now he spoke as clearly as any Boiotian three times his age.
“Antikrates is not feasting with Agesilaos. More likely the two are serving their own table. They drown their tears in bad wine of their own bad making—with a dead king Kleombrotos, and a dead Lichas, and a dead Kleonymos, and all those others dead at Leuktra. Their helots are gone. And bald Kuniskos is ash in the high aithêr.” This new boy Melissos was making good sense, as he turned and signaled the girl from Ithaka to sit by his feet and rub his upper leg. He turned to the Akarnanian who continued with her lyre and grabbed her cloak. He scarcely had a beard but he had known such women since his second teeth had grown in. The year of apprenticeship of this Melissos was coming to an end. Alkidamas had told the young man, on the word of Pelopidas, that there was a ship waiting for him at Kirrha over the hill, below Delphi. They would fight the wind out of the gulf and then battle more of it northward along the coast, and row him home up the west side of Makedonia.
The treaty had held through the late spring as summer approached. None of the northern Makedonian folk of Melissos had attacked them from the rear when the Boiotians went south. So the northern kings had kept their word—at least for now—and the year of his guaranty and truce was honored. Melissos, along with the other Makedonians held at Thebes, was once again a free man. He was already feeling once more his privilege and birth rank, and yet he was learning from these Hellenes who bled and died so well for nothing other than helots, than helots no less. Alkidamas jumped up from his couch, then clapped his hands and dismissed the servants. He ordered all to get ready their beds and end this symposion, since it had gone just as he had planned. The once surly and tired banqueters had let their daimones out, and would return with one story as friends, with four empty kratêres as proof of their amity. Ainias, he knew, would shortly bathe and cut off his matted hair of mourning. Mêlon had come down at last from Helikon and would never really go back up again. Ainias nodded at Alkidamas and put away his wine, the goblet half full. He felt relieved that his own bitterness had at least not spread to others. He pointed at Ephoros and then picked up his own spear and broke it over his knee as if it were a tooth-picker.
“For a while longer,” Ainias promised, “I will be your captain. Sleep and wake sober. We have a long march to the port of Delphi. Then there is a steep climb up to the temple. There we can gaze down at the pass into Boiotia. On our last day we pass through the hill of the Sphinx and near that dreadful snake goddess at Lebadeia. Like it or not, the age of Epaminondas, and of men like Lichas, and of Chiôn—and us here tonight—is over with.”
The returning veterans left the lodging the next morning and set out into the hard winds of the mouth of the gulf, pressing to get on the road to the east and home. The travelers fell in soon with yet another band of Messenians along the coast road. These were the children of free men. Forty years earlier they had settled in Naupaktos to the north, when they fled Pylos during the Athenian war. The helots walked briskly as if for the first time in their lives it was a thing of pride to be known as Messenians and not mere helots of Sparta. All seven of these wayfarers were stonecutters and likewise were climbing to Delphi. Or so said their leader Artemidoros. He boasted to the Boiotians that the new assembly of the Messenians, under the direction of the rebel Nikôn, polemarchos of Messenê, right after the liberation had sent them on a ship with black marble of the type the Athenians quarried at Eleusis. The transport was at the dock in Kirrha. These Messenians were to guide the rough stones with the teamsters up the mountain to the Sacred Way of the sanctuary. There they would set up the great altar of the liberated Messenians. This work was, as Ainias knew, the last design of Proxenos, the final scroll found in his pack after his end on the Eurotas, so confident had he been that there would be a need for a victory monument of a free Messenê at Delphi. None of these helot folk now at his side even knew the name of the benefactor who had perished to plan their new city; much less had they any idea of the hide-clad Nikôn who once had poached his way to freedom on the slopes of Ithômê.
At the notion of a Messenian polis with a sanctuary at Delphi, Mêlon now thought as they hiked that it was the Boiotian farmer, the horny-handed plowman who had hated war and had drunk his cool red and napped beneath his arbors, who had nonetheless gone willingly southward for the freedom of these helots. These lowly men from the marshes of Boiotia had chased the Spartans, the very taskmasters of war, across the Eurotas. With Epitêles they had marched amid the high ice into Messenia and built a city out of stone. Now they were ready to go home and blend back into the black soil of Boiotia, in hopes the great shaking-up in the south would mean that the northerners would never again worry about Spartans, who would instead always worry about the Messenians. These were the true Hellenes, the geôrgoi, these rocky stones like Philliadas, and Antitheos and Staphis, who, immovable on the banks that anchored the poleis, kept it alive a bit longer, while the city folk joined the deluge that was carrying all the lesser pebbles headlong over the falls. For a while longer they would trudge into town and warn their betters that their right spear arms, not walls, kept the enemy distant, that the Makedonian and the Persian would always come from the north unless stopped, and that the more gymnasia and palestrai the city built, the softer the citizens became. Yes, the burning of Lakonia to the south was the win of the farmers, the mesoi who had proved stronger than the lords of Sparta, who had shown they could hold their shields as high as those at Marathon.
Mêlon himself remembered little of the next day’s trek along the coast to Kirrha—other than that for most of this last leg of the march he worried as he stared at the familiar massif of Parnassos. His farm: Had it been overrun or abandoned in these few days following the death of Chiôn? Was it even his farm anymore, with Malgis long gone, and Lophis dead, and himself absent? Who would the Boiotians charge with treason for fighting well past the new year: the five Boiotarchs who followed Epaminondas and Pelopidas? Or perhaps Alkidamas and Ainias, who, the jurymen would allege, had planned the campaign? Surely he too as well would be stoned or cut down for joining? A democracy—or so Mêlon well knew Backwash would allege—could not survive should its leaders trample the laws as they pleased. And they were all lawbreakers of their own as much as liberators of others.
Once the band reached the Delphians’ harbor at Kirrha and could look up the Gorge of the Pleistos and far to the right at the shadows of the peaks of Arkadia across the water, the four finally took leave of their hostage Melissos. As arranged, the youth would go back on board the Messenian ship—Eleutheria—to sail out of the gulf. It would row up the coast on the west side of Hellas to Epiros. The crew, after dropping their marble at Kirrha, had planned to continue north past Akarnania to fetch more Messenians who were eager to reach their liberated homeland. None of these Messenian seamen seemed to mind taking the boy along for ballast, especially as Mêlon flipped them four silver owls for their trouble.
At the docks, Alkidamas first saw a fat man grab the silver from his steward—and with his one hand, no less—even as he called back from across the boarding plank. “Old man. I thought you’d be dead now, you, my partner, and your Spartan-killers.” It was Gastêr. Gastêr who never aged, and never worried, and cared not a whit whether you were Athenian or spoke Doric, won or sat out the great war, if only you had four-piece silver owls from Athens in your palm. Yes, Gastêr was here, the anti-Epaminondas. “I’m afraid I sold our Theôris to the Messenians, Alkidamas. Or at least sort of. Why, that cutthroat Nikôn and his council, they gave me this merchant boat instead. I got marble and ferrying business with it to boot. Not a bad trade. Some shiny coins came with the ship swap. Those helots of yours learned to row and stayed with me on this boat too, better sailors than they proved wise men. So we meet again. I took the risk. You don’t want a cut out of my Eleutheria, though the rhêtôrs might argue it came from your money to begin with. I have proof of sale. Here, take it.”
Alkidamas took the rumpled tiny papyrus and gave it to Mêlon without thinking to throw it away. “Fine, fat man. No need of proof. You beat those Korinthians out to the gulf, and we all got to Messenê as bargained for. As for your trade for the Theôris—well, there’s money to be made even in Messenia, it seems. Take it as the spoils of war.”
“I already have,” announced Gastêr as he waved for their passenger to board his deck. Alkidamas then escorted the Makedonian to the quay and laughed. “You remind me of clever Kuniskos, Melissos, if you don’t mind me saying. Now that you’re both gone, as it were. Like him, you were not like you seemed—with your rickety thin bones and bad eyes. Or maybe you’re a Gastêr, as smart as you are ugly, who can tiptoe on a rolling deck with one arm and a pot belly. Yet I think you see better than the rest of us who don’t squint so. Tell the kings of Makedon that Alkidamas took good care of you, as you did him.”
The four gave their ward a final good-bye. Melissos walked on board, just as Ainias called out across the gangway. He had thought he disliked this half-Hellene and had not believed in his eye blurs or even his stutter, but instead had studied his airs and darting eyes. Now he was not so sure, and he wanted others to see the boy’s true insides here at the end, since they were more good than bad. Indeed, Ainias would not slit the Makedonian’s gullet, even if the voices in his head warned him that thousands of Hellenes not born would live if only this buzzing bee from the north were swatted right here before he ever began.
Ainias grabbed his sword. “Not so fast up on your hind legs, our little Makedonian upstart. One last order. It won’t require you to carry our shields any longer. Just tell me a final thing, down-beard northerner. What exactly did you learn from your year with our Alkidamas, and with us as well?” A wind came up, so Ainias yelled out even louder to the departing ship. “So hostage boy, give me something that I can tell our general on his return. You claim to be half-blind, but like no-eyes Oidipous you see more than the seeing can.”
Melissos sensed that Ainias meant him more good than bad. On the final walk along the gulf he had been going over just such questions and how to answer them when his father King Amyntas at home pressed him for wisdom—and for the walls and passes and armies of the Hellenes they would soon conquer in the south. He was safe, and even Ainias would not kill him now. The boy thought that he wanted to say that they were all second-thoughters like Mêlon, who would hesitate to strike the first, or maybe even the second, blow—dreamers who thought we had souls and so died for something other than loot and fame; makers of grand walls and bronze armor, but without the sense to put them to proper use. But that was not at all what came out from the departing Melissos, not at all.
Melissos turned to Ainias and spoke no longer in the role of hostage servant of Alkidamas and Mêlon, but as the future king of a warrior tribe who was coming of age. Melissos stared at the Arkadian. “I figured out many things, Taktikos, as you will soon fancy yourself as you write down your exploits for the rest of us. Of your democracy, it is not so silly as I thought—even if the dirtiest and loudest like Backwash shout down their betters. There are, I learned, lords like poor Nikôn and Nêto and cowards like well-born Antikrates. How would we know that if birth trumped merit? Any of those who whined in the hall of the Thebans we would have strung up, and yet they fight for something far better than my father’s wage, though he would have kicked them into the barns for their braying.”
They laughed at that boy’s high talk. Then even Ainias stopped, for he saw that this new Melissos was no fool, and was no longer what he had been before the great march. He went on with the airs of the Makedonian prince that he was again: “Was there some gold or a secret shipment of slaves in the bargain for you? I think not, though I was once convinced that there must be cartloads. Instead, I think here of Proxenos and your Chiôn and lame-footed Nêto and all the wild men like Nikôn and the rest who rot, who taught me, their slave, that I was as good as they with no idea that I was supposed to have been born far better than them all. I too in Lakonia and in the hut on Taygetos would have died for the dream of all them, and for crippled Nêto and my crippled master Mêlon, who taught me that I was the real cripple, after all.”
The four were struck dumb as Melissos went on. “I will also tell my father that we too will fight deep in the phalanx like you smarter Thebans. Very soon we will carry spears longer even than yours, sarissas we know them as. We will kill from five ranks in, not your three. We are tough, foul folk as you know, who worry only about killing in the north—not dying. Yes, I fear my Makedonians will be far better killers than you in your phalanxes. All that is written as the sun will set tonight in the west.”
Now Melissos was shouting as the wind came up. Then, as the Eleutheria left the pier and floated out from its mooring, Melissos ended. “A last warning, my friends: I fear you have no more Chiôns that I can see. No more giants of the soil to come, men like Mêlon and Ainias. When I come back down here as king, as I must, I will honor you all even as I must end you all.”
Then even as his voice was carried off by the wind, the youth yelled to the clouds a last time. “Oh, and you will know me next time I come back, but not I fear by your dear Melissos the Honeybee. For you see, I was and am Philippos, the lover of horses of the royal House of Pella. Yes, I am the son of Amyntas and the royal Eurydikê, the future King Philippos of all of Makedon and all of Hellas to come and Persia perhaps as well—I who carried your baggage and would do it if I could ten times and more again.”