A Heroic King

by Helena P. Schrader

  Agiatis was too fixated on her race to notice his tone of voice and insisted, “I mean on horseback. You can ride Red!” she decided. “He’s fast enough to keep up and―”

  “I can’t ride Red in competition!” Pelops interrupted her. “I’m just a helot―”

  “Not in competition!” Agiatis corrected, annoyed by how dense he was being. “Just to cheer me on, in my race.”

  Pelops was starting to understand. “You mean, as if I were your sweetheart?”

  “Well, you are, in a way,” Agiatis rationalized. “I’m not old enough to have a sweetheart, and you’re my best friend.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m one of your Dad’s helots!” Pelops told her bitterly. Agiatis just stared at him, baffled. For her, nothing had changed. Pelops was compelled to add cruelly, “I’m not your friend. Helots and Spartiates can’t be friends.”

  “But we always have been!” Agiatis protested. “And what about your parents?”

  “They’re stupid! Stupid idiots!” Pelops shouted at her, all his anger and frustration exploding out of him.

  One of Pelops’ cousins, a son of Melissa and Polychares, looked over the edge of the loft where he was stacking hay and rebuked Pelops sharply. “Don’t talk like that!”

  “Why not?” Pelops called back furiously. “It’s a lot nicer than what your Mom calls mine!”

  “What the hell’s got into you?” his cousin asked, and Pelops threw the curry comb down and stormed out of the stables.

  Agiatis went to her mother. “Mom? Why is Pelops so angry at me?”

  Gorgo was preparing to watch the afternoon events, and she was surprised to see Agiatis in the house rather than down in the stables getting her pony ready. “Agiatis! Is your pony ready? And the cart?”

  Agiatis frowned. “I don’t care about them or the race! Why is Pelops so angry?”

  Gorgo took a deep breath. Although used to Agiatis’ sudden shifts of mood, she was annoyed by her lack of constancy. Then, on second thought, Pelops was more important than a race, and she had to applaud her daughter’s instinctive priorities. She let out her breath and said slowly, “Pelops got in trouble with his father yesterday for telling a story about the Messenian rebel Aristomenes as if he admired him. I expect that is what has upset him.”

  “But what does that have to do with us?” Agiatis wanted to know. “Why can’t we be friends anymore, just because he told a stupid story?”

  “It’s not about a story, Agiatis. Aristomenes is the national hero of the Messenians. By identifying with them, he was declaring himself an enemy of Sparta,” Gorgo tried to explain.

  “But that’s silly. How can he be an enemy of Sparta when he is Spartan?”

  “But he’s not. That is, he’s not Spartiate. He’s a helot.”

  “But what’s wrong with being a helot?”

  “A helot isn’t free, Agiatis. A helot belongs to the Lacedaemonian state.”

  “I thought we all did,” Agiatis countered.

  Gorgo had to stifle the desire to laugh as she heard her husband speaking through her daughter. “We all serve Lacedaemon,” she corrected, “but we are free and the helots are state slaves.”

  “So what?”

  “Well, they have to work, and aren’t allowed to leave Lacedaemon except when accompanying a Spartiate. They cannot be soldiers or priests or hold office or―”

  “Gorgo!” It was Leonidas. He was standing at the door. “What’s taking you so long? Agiatis, what are you doing here? Are your pony and cart ready?”

  “I’m not going to race,” Agiatis told her father, frowning.

  “Why not?” he asked, astonished. She had been talking about this race for weeks, practicing each day with a dogged determination that bordered on fanaticism.

  “Because Pelops says he won’t cheer me because we can’t be friends anymore because he’s a helot and I’m Spartiate.” Agiatis sounded indignant.

  Leonidas glanced at his wife and their eyes met. He forgot his hurry and went down on his heels before his daughter. “That is a very hard lesson, I know, sweetheart.” Agiatis looked infinitely beautiful to him in that moment. She had the soft, unblemished skin of a child. Her golden eyes were bright and wide-set. Her hair was fine and silky, her red lips soft and moist.

  “But why can’t we be friends?” Agiatis wanted to know.

  “Only equals can be friends,” Leonidas answered simply.

  Agiatis frowned at him. “But that’s not fair! We’ve been friends up to now. What’s changed?”

  “Pelops has learned his place in the world―and he doesn’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he is bright and strong and thinks he could be more than he will be allowed to be.”

  “Why can’t he be what he wants to be?”

  Leonidas drew a deep breath and glanced again at his wife. She could only lift her hands in helplessness. “Agiatis, it is just like you and your mother not being able to become king. You are women and can’t be soldiers and kings, and Pelops is a helot and can’t become a soldier either. Are you really sure you don’t want to compete? If I come help you with your pony, would you change your mind?”

  Leonidas had said the right thing. “Oh! Would you? Let’s hurry!” Agiatis was off before Leonidas could even get to his feet again. He looked at his wife and she just shook her head, then reached for her himation to wrap around her head and shoulders.

  Out in the stables, Agiatis had already taken her pony out of his stall and tied him up in the middle of the aisle so she could pick out his feet. She worked with sudden, frantic urgency, and Leonidas wordlessly helped her, but he was wrong if he thought she had forgotten Pelops. As soon as she finished with the hooves and was brushing straw from the pony’s tail, she started again. “The kings aren’t equals with anyone, either. Does that mean you can have no friends?”

  “In a way, yes. The kings have to uphold the law. So, you see, even though I like Temenos very much, and Chryse and their boys, because he broke the law by not marrying before the age of thirty, I had to let him get punished.”

  “Isn’t Uncle Alkander a friend?”

  Leonidas drew a deep breath. “We have been friends ever since we were little boys. Before I was king. But if he broke the law, then I would have to treat him like any other criminal, no matter how much it hurt me inside.”

  Agiatis burst out angrily, “I would rather not be king than have to betray my friends!”

  The choral performance that evening struck a chord with the audience in a rare way. Somehow Euryleon had put together a program that acknowledged and honored the dead, but at the same time focused on new life. The story of Kastor was well suited to that, of course, and yet not every choral master could have pulled it off. The audience was given a chance to mourn, and Leonidas heard more than one person sobbing in the darkness behind him. Even Gorgo clutched his hand more tightly and dabbed at her eyes with her other. But then the maiden chorus came down the aisles of the amphitheater, singing lyrics about Helen guided home from Troy by the stars of her brothers in the night sky. Each girl was carrying an oil lamp and when they met in the center, they joined their lamps together to light a larger fire. They formed a circle and started to dance around it, soon joined by young men. The song was joyous, and the dancers, followed by the audience, started to clap in time. At the end, the audience broke out into thunderous applause.

  Gorgo leaned to her husband to shout in his ear over the cheering, “Do you really think they have anything in Athens that can beat this?”

  “It would be interesting to see, wouldn’t it?” Leonidas answered, clapping vigorously and getting to his feet, taking the rest of the audience (obligatorily) with him.

  Eventually, after Euryleon had taken many extra bows, the applause died away and the audience started to disperse for home. Leonidas and Gorgo lingered, waiting for a chance to talk to Euryleon, who was still surrounded by other well-wishers. They took no note of a minor commotion at the edge of the amphith
eater.

  Several men were moving the wrong way, pushing against the crowd toward the theater. Because of the darkness, people didn’t always recognize them, but then someone exclaimed in a loud voice, “Bulis? Is that you?” Followed by: “Sperchias! The ambassadors! The ambassadors are back alive!”

  Leonidas snapped his head around and saw Sperchias and Bulis break free of the stunned crowd, which had stopped dispersing to stare at the apparitions of two men they had thought dead. Had they been resurrected like Kastor himself?

  Sperchias reached Leonidas first, and the words freed themselves of his lips as he sank down on his knees before his friend. “We failed!”

  Leonidas stared at his friend in horror. Sperchias looked ten years older. His hair had gone white and had receded farther from his forehead. Beside him, Bulis looked powerful and young. Leonidas’ gaze fell on the younger man with the unspoken question.

  “He’s right. We failed.”

  Around them the people who had been dispersing started whispering among themselves. Oliantus worked his way through the crowd to stand at Leonidas’ elbow, conscientiously putting himself in a position to take any orders Leonidas gave. Dienekes approached from the other side with a handful of guardsmen, as if Sperchias and Bulis were foreigners and threats.

  “What happened?” Leonidas demanded. “Didn’t you reach Xerxes?”

  “We reached him! That’s the worst of it. We reached him, but he refused to accept our sacrifice!” Sperchias explained.

  “He said he would not commit the same crime!” Bulis added bitterly. “And he sent us back to tell you that the crime has not been atoned for.”

  “But the fever has burned itself out!” someone in the surrounding crowd protested.

  “Yes, the fever is gone!” another agreed nervously.

  But fear was hovering tangibly in the air again.

  Sperchias was gazing up at Leonidas with burning eyes. “We failed,” he repeated.

  Leonidas felt compelled to say, “You did not fail!” He reached down to pull Sperchias back to his feet, adding, “What does Xerxes know of the will of our Gods? Apollo was appeased by the gesture alone. He did not require your lives! He values you precisely because you were willing to die for our sakes. How else explain that the fever is gone?”

  Sperchias let Leonidas lift him off his sore knees, but he shook his head. “It’s not that simple,” he exclaimed. “Remember the thousands of stars that fell from the sky? I’m convinced that the epidemic was only one of many calamities we will face.”

  “You’re exhausted from a long trip,” Leonidas countered. “Come back with me and tell me about everything.”

  “Teti,” Sperchias drew attention to the patient Egyptian, “has kept a record of all we saw and heard, but I was also given these.” As he spoke he dropped his leather satchel from his shoulder, reached inside, and removed a wooden writing tablet folded together. “From Demaratus,” he declared, provoking a rustle of exclamations.

  “You talked to a traitor?” Lysimachos asked indignantly, echoed by others.

  Leonidas simply took the tablet and opened it warily. The face of the tablet was blank. “There’s no message,” he exclaimed, perplexed, holding it up for all to see.

  Sperchias took a deep breath and explained, “I know. I don’t understand. But that’s what he gave me.” He glanced at Bulis and Teti for support, and both nodded confirmation, while Bulis added gratuitously, “Ass-licking bastard!”

  Teti spoke up at last to explain: “The former king brought the tablet to us personally just as we were preparing to depart. One of the Immortals tried to stop him from passing it to us, but seeing it was blank, he allowed it.”

  “Ah.” The exclamation came from Gorgo.

  Leonidas turned to look at her.

  “I think,” she ventured, “that if you scrape the wax off the tablet, you will find a message scratched into the wood underneath.”

  Leonidas hesitated only a second and then, drawing his knife, started scratching the wax away from the surface of the tablet. Oliantus, Bulis, and Sperchias looked over his shoulder as he worked. Bulis grunted first and Oliantus exclaimed more articulately, “The queen is right! There is a message underneath!”

  Leonidas scraped at the wax more urgently, yet taking care not to scratch the message underneath. He frowned as he worked, and then held up the tablet toward the nearest torch, irritated by the poor lighting.

  “What is it? What does he say?” the voices came from the back of the crowd―yet Gorgo, too, seemed to be holding her breath. Sperchias and Bulis stared at Leonidas’ face, watching for the first indication of what he’d found.

  “A warning,” Leonidas finally announced. “A very blunt warning of Persian intentions.” He snapped the tablet shut. “We will have to discuss this in Council and with the ephors―not here in the middle of the night or during the Dioskouria. Come!” He held the tablet firmly in his left hand, and with his right he took Gorgo’s elbow. “Sperchias, Bulis, Teti, you are all welcome to join us.” With his eyes he included Oliantus and Dienekes.

  As he moved forward, the crowd fell back before him. Only Gorgo could feel his tension. She looked up at him, worried. Whatever had been in that warning, it had not been good.

  Throughout the last day of the Dioskouria, Leonidas maintained a façade of cheerfulness and confidence. He went out of his way to honor and shower praise on Sperchias and Bulis, telling everyone that they had achieved their mission simply by their willingness to die. Apollo had been appeased, he insisted, and no one contradicted him. He was a descendant of Herakles. He was a priest to Zeus. Besides, everyone wanted to believe him. They wanted to believe that that the epidemic was over, never to return, that the Gods had forgiven them, that life could return to normal. Only Gorgo knew that Leonidas had not slept.

  He had, of course, let her read the message Demaratus had scratched on the back of the tablet with his own hand. It was a promise of cataclysm―of destruction without hope of survival. Demaratus warned that the full might of Persia―not a single army under a Mede commander as at Marathon, not even an army under Xerxes himself, but a horde of armies (or should that be a pride of armies?), was collecting and preparing to descend upon Greece. Xerxes planned, Demaratus warned, not to punish but to obliterate, not to conquer but to enslave―just as Teti, too, had warned.

  Gorgo had spent much of the night trying to convince herself that Demaratus was intentionally exaggerating. After all, he had every reason to hate the Spartans. Yet if things were as bad as he said, why should he warn them? Surely he would have been more interested in disguising the true state of affairs and gloating from the sidelines as Sparta was crushed.

  But Gorgo could not convince herself of that. She had not known Demaratus well, but her grandmother had. Chilonis called him vain and overly proud, had deplored his temper and his inability to compromise, but had refused to believe he was a traitor. Meanwhile, Leonidas had considered it dishonorable for a Spartiate, let alone a former king, to sulk at the Persian court. But sulking was not the same thing as wanting to see Lacedaemon defeated, occupied, and enslaved. In short, Demaratus had many weaknesses, but he loved Lacedaemon and Sparta.

  And that left only one interpretation of his message: that Demaratus sincerely believed the threat was as bad as he painted it, and he wanted to warn Sparta.

  Maybe he thought if he warned Sparta, the Spartans would ask him back. Maybe he hoped the Spartans would offer him back his throne on the assumption he knew how to deal with the Persians.

  If that had been his intention, he had miscalculated. They would not ask him back, Gorgo was sure of that. They would not ask him back, but they would ask Delphi what to do. Leonidas had already told Sperchias he must rest and prepare for the trip to Delphi. “There’s no rush,” he’d told the exhausted ambassador, “but we will have to see what Delphi says about this message before too long.”

  Sperchias nodded wearily, that look of already knowing that worse was to come settling o
n his prematurely aged face.

  Now the crowd was gathering for the traditional end of the Dioskouria, when the kings jointly offered a final sacrifice of a pure white bull to the Divine Twins. There were various theories on what the white bull symbolized, the most popular being that it represented the Minotaur, a sacrifice by Theseus of his greatest trophy to the Dioskouroi to placate their anger over his abduction of their sister Helen. Earlier in the day, wrestling matches had been held and the victors crowned by maidens dressed to represent Helen. These, too, commemorated the brothers’ rescue of Helen from the rapacious Athenian king.

  In ceremonies where Leotychidas had to make a joint appearance with Leonidas, the Eurypontid was always in a hurry to get things over with. Leonidas had learned to let him take the lead rather than fight him for primacy. Usually, Leotychidas sprinkled water on the bull’s face and all but tossed the entrails on the flames, while Leonidas stood back and let him perform the rites in careless haste. Then, when he was done, Leonidas calmly and carefully performed his own rites, reassuring the populace by his composure and dignity.

  On this occasion, too, Leotychidas flung the water at the bull so recklessly that the bull shied, rearing up his head and then shaking it so obviously that the crowd gasped. Leonidas waited for the helots to calm the bull, and then gently let water from the sacred spring at Delphi drip on to the thick white hair of the bull’s brow as he made soothing sounds under his breath. The bull relaxed, then nodded his head in obvious consent. Leonidas was handed a knife, and he opened the jugular so rapidly that the bull hardly had a moment to even look surprised.

  The experts stepped in to remove the heart and lungs of the powerful beast, and Leonidas and Leotychidas offered these to the Dioskouroi with prayers and an ode sung by the collected citizens. No sooner had the last notes of the ode died on the air than Leotychidas disappeared as usual, but Leonidas lingered by the altar as the crowd started to disperse.