School of Athens

by Archer McCormick

PARTA

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  On a normal day Lysander is an imposing physical creature—a twenty year old man with taut muscles incapable of being contained by most tunics—but as he circles his friend Gyllipus in the wrestling ring he looks malnourished, brittle and destined for imminent defeat. “C’mon!” he shouts at Gyllipus through the corner of his mouth. “What are you waiting for? Just be done with it!”

  Gyllipus does not respond. He’s much taller than Lysander, much heavier, much faster and much, much stronger. Gyllipus stands in the center of the ring waiting for Lysander to make his move. Lysander reaches for a grip around Gyllipus’ legs, but the giant merely swats his hands away like overgrown flies. Lysander attempts another hold, this time around his opponent’s waist, only to be pushed face first into the dusty ground at the edge of the ring. The crowd laughs and hollers as Lysander quickly springs back into an attack stance.

  Overseeing the bout is Agis, son of King Archidamus, a leaner man who somehow manages to keep a regal bearing even as he pushes the encroaching crowd back to give the combatants room to maneuver. Lysander keeps his distance, side-stepping around the perimeter of the ring until he bumps into Agis, knocking him away with a stiff shove from a single arm without concerning himself with whom he is pushing. The poor prince falls and sits on the ground for a moment, his legs fully extended as he tosses his hands behind his head. “He’s on his own, now!” Agis says, abdicating his official position and sending a ripple of laughter through the crowd.

  Gyllipus, still holding the center of the ring, lowers his guard when he sees an attractive girl named Timaea walk through the surrounding mob. Not even sixteen years old yet, she’s the daughter of a former ephor and a member of one of the most prominent families in the city, one that claims a lineage that extends all the way back to Helen of Troy herself. Timaea’s all the proof that claim ever needs.

  She quickly swallowed by crowd. Instinctually, Gyllipus leaves his position in the center and take a few steps toward the edge of the ring, blissfully ignoring his opponent. Lysander immediately notices the distraction and dives for Gyllipus, wrapping one arm around his waist and punching the back of his right knee with the other, sending him to the ground and rolling him on his back. Still seated at the edge of the ring Agis scrambles to center ready to end the match in the event of injury. The crowd gasps at the sudden change in fortunes, certain that a victory is in Lysander’s clutches.

  Yet all Lysander accomplishes is winning the undivided attention of the much stronger Gyllipus. With the force of pack mule, Gyllipus kicks Lysander off and sends him tripping backwards into the crowd. With a taunting roar the audience spits him back into the ring, right into Gyllipus’ waiting arms. Gyllipus picks Lysander up with a bear hug only to fall to a knee and roll him over until Lysander lays immobile on his back, Gyllipus’ enormous arm pushing down against his chest and slowly squeezing the air from his lungs.

  “Nikeh!” Agis yells, waving his arms over his head and signaling the end of the match. The two wrestlers slowly break away from each other. Gyllipus pats Lysander on the back, a gesture of support for his defeated friend. He rises to his feet and takes in the audience’s cheers before the crowd scatters around the hippodrome in search of other matches to watch.

  Gyllipus hopes to catch another glimpse of Timaea, but before he can he feels Lysander’s arm fall around his neck; only his friend isn’t congratulating him: Lysander is leaning on him for support. “I don’t know if I should hate you for beating me or thank you for letting me last as long as you did,” he says. “Humor me while I rest for a while.”

  Lysander pushes Gyllipus with what little strength he can muster to a wooden bench adjacent to a well where the two take seats and began cupping handfuls of water from an idle bucket. Lysander is exhausted. Gyllipus is well-known among his fellow wrestlers for slowly wearing his opponents out while he methodically conserves his own energy, waiting to seize the perfect moment to catch the other wrestler off guard. Gyllipus ignores the water and continues to scan the crowd in search of Timaea.

  “How many matches have you wrestled today?” Lysander asks. “Five? Six? How is it possible you can’t be thirsty?” Gyllipus doesn’t reply. “Gyllipus?” Lysander asks after another drink. “Gyllipus!” he yells again, this time snapping his fingers in front of his friend’s face.

  Gyllipus shakes his head involuntarily. “I’m sorry, you were saying something?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean!” Lysander says, tossing his hands in the air. “You had no focus until the very end of the match. A herd of elephants could have stampeded through the agora and you wouldn’t have noticed until you stepped in mammoth shit.”

  “My apologies,” Gyllipus offers, “my mind has been elsewhere.”

  Lysander shakes his head, disgusted with the ease by which he was dispatched, when a drunken farmer walks by carrying a skin of wine. “You there,” Lysander bellows. The man turns to Lysander and points at his own chest. “Yes, you: come, and bring that wine here with you.” The man does as he’s told, his punch-drunk grin slowly inverting as he hands over the skin to Lysander. “Now off you go,” Lysander says, dismissing the peasant with a wave of his hand.

  Gyllipus glares at his friend.

  “What?” Lysander says defensively. “Look at the poor bastard! He’s had more than his fill tonight!”

  “Leave him to his reward,” Gyllipus advises. “It’s all he has.”

  “Well, it’s all I have now!” Lysander snickers as he puts the skin to his lips for another drink. Yet just as anticipates feeling the wine hit his lips, an arm reaches from behind him and grabs the flagon. “Hey!” Lysander yells, wine dribbling from the corners of his mouth. He rises from the bench and turns to investigate, ready to inflict a harsh justice on the thief, only to discover Agis guzzling the rest of the wine.

  “You should be kinder to the helots, Lysander,” the prince scolds, taking a seat on the end of the bench. “After all, they know where you sleep.”

  “I’m no more worried of their drunken retribution than Gyllipus is of losing to me in wrestling,” Lysander replies.

  “Then you both sleep well, I’m sure!” Agis laughs. The prince slaps Gyllipus on the shoulder. “Congratulations, old friend: You will do Sparta proud at the next Olympiad.”

  Gyllipus and Lysander exchange befuddled glances. “But only true Spartans can participate in the games, Agis,” Gyllipus notes.

  “And that’s what I’ve come to talk to you about,” Agis says, taking one last swig before throwing the empty skin over his shoulder. The prince examines the hippodrome conspiratorially. “But we can’t speak here. Come: join me in the alley.”

  Agis stands up and walks through a crowd of dancing revelers, making his way to an alley adjacent to the far end of the hippodrome and disappears into its shadows. Lysander and Gyllipus shrug their shoulders and follow, carefully negotiating their way through the maze of wrestling matches, bonfires and drunken peasants until they too slip into the alley.

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  The scene at the agora across town is much more solemn as the helots make the final preparations for the Festival of the Naked Youth. The Gymnopadeia, as it is known locally, is a festival unique to Sparta, one that does not honor a specific god’s cult, but celebrates an ancient military defeat at the hands of the city of Argos through the spectacle a war dancing.

  Each year the oldest students in the agoge, the compulsory military school every Spartan boy enters when he is seven years old, performs an elaborate choreographed routine that to demonstrate the virtues of Sparta: strength, organization, precision, and sacrifice. It’s a notably martial affair, held under torch-light to the primal rhythm of drums, flickering shadows moving with a graceful agility that obscures the suggestion of murder on a mass scale. There is chest-pounding and stutter-stepping, balletic pirouettes that erupt into violent flailing of arms in every possible direction, charges into spectral enemy lines only seen vividly in the memor
ies and imaginations of a perfectly silent audience of aging warriors.

  By ancient custom, only married men are allowed to attend the festival and in Sparta no man can marry before he is thirty years old. Since the performers were still training in the agoge, which included almost all boys under the age of eighteen, the Gymnopadeia left hundreds of young Spartan men with little to occupy their attention for several days each year and over the years an unsanctioned wresting tournament organized by young Spartan men evolved as an alternative to the festival.

  The city elders tolerated the tournament under several tacit conditions. The first was that only Spartans could compete. Helots and the perioikoi, free occupants of Spartan territory who did not enjoy the legal privileges or responsibilities of full Spartan citizens, were allowed to attend, but not to participate. The second condition was that the tournament never be named, nor trophies given to the champions, nor records kept of the winners. Lastly, the competition was in no way to interfere with the Gymnopadeia.

  The Tournament Without a Name was an event that Gyllipus had always found curious. Nearly every aspect of its existence was an exception to the rule of Spartan law. Women are segregated from men during the typical course of any Spartan’s day, but during the Tournament both sexes mingle freely; consuming alcohol is condoned and the strictly observed caste system of the city disappears in the revelry. Even the terms by which the elders permitted the event contained exceptions, as only the third condition was considered obligatory.

  These were just several of many contradictions of Spartan society that frequently troubled Gyllipus. His ethical logic was very clear on the matter: Exceptions to rules lead to contradictions. Contradictions create hypocrisies. Hypocrisies are a weakness, and weakness leads to defeat. Yet at the same time, the Tournament seemed to bring out the very best in the city, almost as if the Sparta of myth and legend in a foreign land had sprang from the ground in a single afternoon. At no other time of the year did the city embrace youth, strength, equality and moderation so exemplary.

  It was too much for Gyllipus to wrap his head around, especially after a long day of wrestling. Some of his contemporaries were quick to judge him to be as mentally weak as he was physically strong, but those who knew him best understood better. Gyllipus took his time contemplating ideas because he wanted to understand them on a deeper level than others, and he was about to be given a great deal to think about as he followed Agis’ lead into the grim alley adjacent to the hippodrome.

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  “I’ve spoken to the Ephori and they’ve agreed to allow you both to participate in the Crypteia,” Agis says once his friends join him.

  “How can that be?” Lysander asks.

  “But we’re not—” Gyllipus begins.

  “Shhh!” Agis interrupts. “Save your breath! It no longer matters that you’re a bastard, Lysander; or, Gyllipus, that your father disgraced his position in the king’s court. Now you will both have a chance to reclaim your families’ names.”

  “When do we begin?” Lysander asks anxiously.

  “Patience, my friend!” Agis urges. “The Ephori are set to declare war on the helots shortly after the Gymnopadeia and when they do you will each have one week to kill a helot and bring back his ears.”

  “Agis,” Gyllipus starts, “I don’t understand: the law says that we’re too old for the Crypteia.”

  “And there can always be exceptions made to the law,” Agis replies, “even in Sparta.”

  “Thank you, Agis!” Lysander says, hugging the prince. “I never doubted you!”

  “Of course, you did, you miserable bastard!” Agis says through a knowing grin as he returns the embrace. “I must attend to the rest of the tournament. Go! The both of you celebrate your victories tonight! The gods be with you!” the prince says, just before he scurries from the alley.

  “And with you as well!” Lysander echoes.

  The friendship shared between the three young men would have only been possible in Sparta, where all men were famously equal in the eyes of the law. They had entered the agoge fifteen years earlier marked by stigmas in the eyes of the other boys: Lysander was a mothrax, a bastard born of a Spartan father and helot mother. Gyllipus’ father, Cleandridas, had been an advisor to the King, but exiled from Sparta for accepting a bribe from Pericles on the very day Gyllipus began his training. Agis was seen as receiving special treatment from the instructors by virtue of being the prince, so his peers took it upon themselves to mete out harsh treatment of their own. Over time, those stigmas vanished, but their early alliance persisted.

  Lysander could not be more thrilled at the news. It’s the moment he’s waited for his entire life, the moment when he finally receives the acceptance into Spartan society he craves. “He actually did it, Gyllipus! Agis actually got us positions in the Crypteia!” Lysander says, embracing Gyllipus.

  “He is the heir to the throne, Lysander,” Gyllipus replies, patting his friend on the back with a stoic measure of reserve. “Such a position carries great influence.”

  “But he’s been promising us the Crypteia since we were children,” Lysander notes jubilantly.

  “I must confess: my doubts were as frequent as they appear to be unjustified,” Gyllipus says.

  The two men start walking back to the hippodrome just as the sun starts its passage through the horizon, illuminating the wrestling matches and igniting Lysander’s blue eyes the way sunlight reflects off the surface of calm waters. “Do you know what this means? No more hungry nights! No more stealing food! We will finally be able to leave the barracks and take up in a real home. We may never have to set foot in another filthy brothel ever again!”

  Gyllipus stops walking and looks at his friend from the tops of his eyes. “And you know whores who make house calls?”

  “Not yet!” Lysander quips. Gyllipus smiles at the joke and continues walking morosely through the alley. “What’s the matter, Gyllipus? Why are you so glum? I thought you would welcome the news?”

  Indeed, Gyllipus expected as much from himself, as well; but the moment Agis told him the news, Gyllipus suddenly felt empty. His journey is different from Lysander’s: he is not climbing Sparta’s social strata, but seeking to return to what he believes was his rightful place among the elite. His friendship with Agis and Lysander may have sustained him during the most trying portions of the agoge, but it’s the resentment and bitterness he feels for being punished for the sins of his father that motivates him.

  Such introspection is rare among Spartans, who regard it as selfishness. It’s a quality Gyllipus exposes to others selectively, refusing to reveal it to even Agis or Lysander. “You would happily exchange the life of a helot for the comfort of a traveling whore?” Gyllipus asks, hoping to change the subject.

  Lysander scoffs. “Is that what this is all about? The precious lives of the helots? It’s been this way for 200 years, Gyllipus. The law is the law.” Gyllipus remains silent. “They’re little more than slaves, Gyllipus! Serfs, really. They’re lucky we don’t dash them against the rocks like we do feeble and weak newborns.”

  “They?” Gyllipus stresses for his friend. “Haven’t you always been one yourself? Don’t you still call many of them friends? And you would still kill one for personal gain?”

  “Not for personal gain,” Lysander says, “but because the law requires it. The law is what makes us Spartans, Gyllipus. Without it, we’re just Greeks. Besides, you will be doing the helot you kill a favor.”

  “And how is that?” Gyllipus begs.

  “By sparing him the monotony of toiling in the fields day after day until his hands are only good for counting,” Lysander answers.

  Lysander’s animosity for his origins is nothing new. He has never made any secret of his loathing for the helots, even at a very young age. Years ago, most who knew him believed these expressions were merely his way of compensating for his low birth, a way of demonstrating to others that he belonged in the upper echelons, but as he grew older his
opinions only hardened and left no doubt to any one ins Sparta that Lysander genuinely despised the helots.

  Gyllipus shakes his head at his friend’s answer as the two men reach the end of the alley and the hippodrome sprawls out before them. He scans through the crowd and once more finds Timaea ignoring a near-by wrestling match to dance with her helot servant, a beautiful girl just a few years older named Ismene. Gyllipus can almost hear her laughter as she spins around, the folds of her chiton whirling above her thighs.

  Lysander unwittingly enjoys the same sight, concentrating his steely leer on Ismene as her body moves along side Timaea’s. She is, without question, a beautiful woman in her own right. In Lysander’s eyes she stands taller than the other helot women. Her muscles are leaner and tauter, as if she were the descendent of a fugitive Amazon.

  “Besides,” Lysander continues, his gaze still fixed on Ismene, “the Crypteia also has its unmentioned benefits, old friend.”

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