The End of Sparta

by Victor Davis Hanson

  “ ‘Master’ is it still? Small talk for such a big man—Chiôn the new lord of Hellas, hero of Thespiai.” Dirkê sneered at him and went on, since she knew it was futile to get a pass from a man like that, and she might as well play out the hand to the end. “A conniver, your quiet cripple Chiôn is. He gets the farm without a silver owl or a Boiotian gold shield upfront? Dirkê works hard to buy it—but he stumbles into it? But I’d say instead maybe that tall tower of Mêlon’s, and Damô’s big melons along with it, is what he’s got his eye on. So here we have a branded slave from Chios, with the scar on his poxy forehead. He ends up as lord and master of the estate of Malgis, swimming in the billows of a dead man’s wife. You won’t help your Dirkîkon a bit by hiring my Thrattos?” With that she hustled off down the trail in fear of a stone or kick for her venom. Being old and ugly and bent over is a better guard than a breastplate and shield.

  “She is an Hekuba all right, Chiôn,” Mêlon grumbled as his slave approached, “But the hag sorts out the chaos nonetheless.” He stopped and put his lame leg on a stone and parted a few strands left back over his bald spot. They were outside the shed, around a smoky fire of green olive prunings. “Look, Chiôn, she believes in nothing, nothing at all—no love, no hate, no future, no past. Her memory is washed always by the waters of Lethe. She gets up each morning fresh without baggage or learning. She is guided only by that long nose for money and the bitterness that comes from feeling she is of lesser stock. Envy and spite, these are the twin oxen that pull men and women like her along. The logos of profit alone pilots her thoughts. I listen to her far more than I do to your Pythagoras.”

  How strange, Mêlon went on to lecture his Chiôn, that the odious among us can teach us the most—if we only can endure their cuts and jibes and then learn from their very mouths how not to view the world about us, and yet how with just a slight shove we might become as they are. Then he paused and thought to himself that had he not inherited the paradeisos from Malgis, had the gods not blessed him with Lophis, had he not been the mêlon of prophecy, perhaps he too might have become a Dirkê—or even a Lichas had he been raised in the agôgê of the Spartans.

  Nevertheless, after Leuktra, Mêlon explored all these forbidden ideas further, and he now started up again to Chiôn. “Dirkê was as bad and yet right as much as our Lophis was so good and so wrong—about how the oligarchs at Sparta would come even to accept Pythagoras. But thank the gods for these Dirkai. She is the voice of all the dark thoughts in the world. Chiôn, Dirkê has been a great gift to me these years, sounding out and exposing the bad that is in me. She gives me a chance to hear my dark thoughts spoken, hear it all said by another, not me. Then I redeem myself by sneering at it, and claim the high ground from it, when she turns everything so foul and has no shame to voice the evil in us that we too feel.”

  Chiôn ignored his high talking and started to return to the olives—until Mêlon grabbed his rough wool cloak. “But Chiôn, she has reminded me that you were the better man at Leuktra, and one freed by the town fathers of Thespiai. So you marry Damô. Raise my son’s boys to take this farm. More if you carve out another slice of the mountain with your one arm. Damô is still not three tens. She has three or four boys more in her yet. I can’t pay you to stay on the farm. But stay you will. All that Malgis gave me will be your own to care for—at least until the boys of Lophis and your own to come are of age.”

  Chiôn and Eudoros, with Neander, Lophis’s second born, were a small phalanx now. Chiôn was right. There was no need to hire slaves of others. Not when Chiôn and the boys had handled this olive crop, late but well enough in the absence of Lophis, and crippled as Chiôn was. Myron in his dung boots was strong and loyal, so he might work out as well. The wheel of luck would turn yet again for the farm. The upswing would be as good as before. The battle was over. Calm had arrived. Even the gossips of Thespiai would say little about the marriage. Chiôn was becoming the big talk of the forge loungers, jawed to the skies to the sound of hammer and anvil. They would all say the union of Damô and Chiôn was good farming—to keep the land safe and the free slave on the farm without paying wages, and the widow Damô from begging coins in the agora.

  “Chiôn,” Mêlon spoke slowly as the two made their way up to the high vineyard again. “You are my son now. The father of my son’s sons. I claim my right as her legal guardian to pick who Damô marries. Those in Askra, and Koroneia and even Thespiai, too, will live with it—if for no other reason than all of Boiotia fears our two right arms.” Chiôn said little. But his master was pushing him hard, to make him lord of the estate, father and husband and free man, citizen of the high property qualification, a rich hippeus should he wish to fight from a horse—all the honors Mêlon himself was tiring of as he waited for the call to go south. If Mêlon wanted a yoking on this farm, why not then he and the freedwoman Nêto? Were not they the better pair to stay home and guard the vineyards and pass the farm on to the boys of Lophis?

  Yet Chiôn said to himself that he would try all this, at least for a while. Who would not wish the pleasures of Damô? Still, the wild, the high land of Helikon called, the better place—or maybe the strange piney, wilder mountain to the south, the slopes of gloomy Taygetos, where his mind went in his sleep to a highland hot on its slopes. He would try this plan of Mêlon, for they were all still in peace, and his master was the killer of Kleombrotos and so to be obeyed, even if Chiôn was no longer a slave. He would try. But he had his doubts. He and his master after Leuktra were each trying to make the other the custodian of the farm. Yet neither of them any more wanted to stay the man rooted to the soil, not with the scent of the south in their noses. “It is as you say master, as you say, at least for now.”

  Mêlon was coming off his mountain every other day, far more even than Damô. No longer was he the misanthrôpos and erêmos of old. The famous king-killer walked proudly on the narrow winding streets of Thespiai. He nodded to the admiring looks of the town folk from their balconies, those who had all voted to stay put, to keep themselves safe rebuilding their walls. He had been cured by Epaminondas and his fame of Leuktra from the disease of solitude, but the medicine had done far more than end the malady. His visits, he said, were meant to keep gossip about Damô and Chiôn within reason, and to learn what Dirkê was up to. Mêlon wanted to shame any he heard talking the dark stories about the heroes of Helikon. Or so he said of his time in town. But to Chiôn and Nêto, this new busybody was not their Mêlon, and they feared he was falling into something worse even than his years as the recluse before Leuktra.

  As Mêlon strolled into town, sometimes he stopped at the potters’ quarters to teach the idlers about Chiôn. They must know of the prostatês of the phalanx who had yelled “For Thespiai, for Helikon,” as he slew Deinon, and Sphodrias, and cut down terrible Kleonymos in his proud youth. Chiôn, Mêlon lectured the craftsmen, gave his arm for these here, for the idea that they could idle in town. Mêlon went on and slapped the faces of the pot turners and kicked the kiln feeders. “It was your Chiôn, Chiôn of Thespiai. He killed the kings’ best, when my Bora was shattered. He took on Kleonymos. He took that blow from Lichas so that I could spear Kleombrotos.” Praise in town for his own clan—and for himself—was now as dear to him as the Thespian’s disdain had once been to him out on the farm before he had heard the name Epaminondas.

  A year and more after Leuktra, Damô and Chiôn were yoked. As a pair they had often driven Aias down from the farm, with Eudoros riding on Xiphos and the other two boys in the wagon, always just as the sun came up over the spurs of Kithairon to the east. They drove through the rubble walls into Thespiai to buy a litter of Lakonian hounds that the new henchman of Eurybiades had hauled over from Kithairon. Murmex was his name. He bought and sold dogs, blacks and spotted browns, with clipped tails and upright flat-topped ears—Lakonians not as large as the lost Molossians, Sturax and Porpax.

  When the small caravan of the Malgidai made its way through the main gate and the roaring stone lions, and on by the thea
ter, those at the forge yelled out to Chiôn, “For Thespiai.” The hoplite stood up, turned, and roared back, “For Thespiai. Always for Thespiai.” The widows at the looms shook their heads wondering how it had happened that Chiôn—the islander branded at birth by the Spartan hoplites of Lysander and sold to Malgis for two obols—had become his son and keeper of the name of the Malgidai. For all her three boys, the townsmen remarked that Damô was the real Aphrodite of Boiotia—and that Mêlon’s rich soil grew goddesses as well as heroes.

  CHAPTER 14

  The House of the Goddess

  In these autumn months, between Pamboiôtios and Boukatios, well after the first celebration of the Leuktra with its hekatombs and feasts, and the union of Damô and Chiôn, Mêlon found he could still not keep away from town, and he praised those on his farm as much as he sought to avoid them. The Spartans were defeated—and yet not quite defeated, given that thousands had escaped under Lichas. No doubt the surviving king, lame Agesilaos, was raising an army to stop the democracy madness, which like the black spills from the ink bottle was staining the entire Peloponnesos.

  In the great uncertainty over quitting while ahead, or marching southward, some daimôn had turned Mêlon’s thoughts back and forth, to solitude and then company, to being alone and to following the tug of the mob, and all in a blink. From relief that he had survived Leuktra to restlessness that something else was promised, something far bigger in the south that remained a rumor. So in his mix-up Mêlon began seeing Phrynê, the newly arrived courtesan from Athens—though she claimed she had been born at Thespiai and worked hard to sound Boiotian. For his part, Mêlon claimed he only needed news in his calm after the battle, though, as Chiôn worried, his master liked too much the back pats of town when it would have been better to join his former slave on his treks across the mountaintops of Helikon or Parnassos. Nonetheless, Phrynê knew the whispers of thousands—knew them and whipped them up or put them down depending on whether or not they favored Epaminondas, whom she hated more than any man north of the Isthmos. She did not quite know why she hated him, and she gave differing accounts to her friends about the wifeless, childless Epaminondas and his reluctance to visit her salon. To her clients, she cooed about the Theban at first, praised the general for his philosophy, and then only slowly showed her doubts about democracy, helots, new cities to the south, and all the dreams of Epaminondas.

  Mêlon heard Phrynê’s stories from both the peddlers of fruit and her own clients. Famous she was at Athens for having posed for the stone-artist Praxiteles himself. At ten and six years she had killed another prostitute, Lalagê, who claimed the tighter flesh. Phrynê had slashed her with nails and teeth, before finishing her off with a sharp mirror handle. Once when the young rhêtôr Hyperides, her lover, could not win an acquittal from the Athenian court for her profaning of the mysteries, she tore off her cloak in the dikastêrion and showed the Athenians her divine chest. She won the not-guilty verdict with her mastoi that the green orator could not. Then her titthoi pointed always upward. Her backside was hard as marble, curved, wide and full. Her tiny waist went in like the yellow-wasp’s middle, and then out again. “Crescent moon,” Hyperides had called her, for the bulge of her backside.

  The Athenian sculptor Praxiteles was known to visit Thespiai to call on her girls to sit for all his stone goddesses—though he rarely asked Phrynê any more to model. In this great year of Epaminondas he saw the little pockets and rolls on her thighs, and the flesh that hung too much from the back of her upper arms. As she sagged—and she did so only a little, but still enough for the sculptor’s falcon eye to notice—she bore him no ill will. Instead she turned her hate of aging to men in general, and men with power in particular. Phrynê fought the cruel law of her lord Erôs. The belly and bald head of an old man—just like the Satyrs’ on the pots from Athens—did not mean he could not taste young flesh if his money and his vineyards grew with his years.

  But for women? When the flesh spotted and its glow faded, when the hair thinned and the breasts drooped, then so did Erôs, the cruel god who saw only the wrinkled skin of the raisin, never the sweetness inside. To bear a child after lovemaking—and Phrynê had borne more than one—was a different sort of thing than a man’s single poke. If she would no longer be seen in stone, and tired of men, Phrynê turned her head to counting coins, and what it cost and what it brought in to please the citizens of Thespiai. She grew rich from her shop of love in a house built into the corner wall, and added tall talk and Theban pipers to her business of pleasure, piling up more silver than she ever had as a poser and seller of love. For dessert she sold the Spartan agents secret plans, ideas, and agendas, and all the things the powerful blurted out as she mastered their passions.

  Better than Naïs, the courtesan of legend, she wanted to be. With her money, she would find a man of action to whisper to, to taunt, to flatter, to play an Aspasia to a Perikles, and through him to defeat age and the laws of the Hellenes that say women alone must be trapped in their cages of aging flesh while stupider men were not. So Phrynê charged the estate owner ten silver Boiotian shields, but the philosopher or general sometimes nothing. Perhaps this bias came out of love of wisdom, but more likely she was careful to win high friends—all except Epaminondas—who could keep her exempt from both the fickle mob in the assembly and the angry wives of Thespiai.

  She had come to Thespiai to stop the town from fighting the Spartans; it was said that she had a box of Agesilaos’s gold. But, again, why did she hate Epaminondas more than did any Spartan? Perhaps she had lost business to the war, when the Boiotians invested in bandages and canes and not myrrh and frankincense. She worshiped at the altar of order and oligarchy; she knew clients by wealth, land, training, birth, accent, and parentage. Give this great leveler Epaminondas a cubit and soon he would take a stade and turn Hellas into a mixed-up rabble, where Phrynê would have to peddle her refined wares like the cheap harlots that lurked in the cemetery or the pottery kilns and took on all customers. Only hoi aristoi had the refinement to enjoy her houses of pleasure. In the world of Epaminondas to come, her slaves would be masters, her house frequented by smelly tanners and stained butchers who would choose always the younger flesh, never the smarter and more seasoned.

  Phrynê claimed that she was not near thirty seasons (in truth, it was more). She had twenty strongboxes of coin to Mêlon’s two. The farmer’s visits to her house had all started when one of her girls had sent a message for “the hero of Leuktra” to visit the new symposia—a world away from Helikon’s vineyards suffering under Seirios, the Dog Star’s heat. Phrynê thought having the hero of Leuktra in her halls would be good business, as she reviewed the ways to praise the coming invasion of the south in a manner that might stop it.

  Not happy just with the foreigners’ money, Phrynê had refurbished the Thespians’ temple to Erôs off the town square with a new fluted column and a hundred fresh roof-tiles. She even had paid for a new statue of Aphrodite near the south gate. Then she repainted the roaring marble lion at the city gate, added blue crystals for his eyes. “We get travelers from the islands, and from Thessaly way. They all hear of my house of Phrynê, and my statues. If I live another season, I will hire more potters from Athens. They’ll paint what my girls do on clay, and we will last forever.” With her silver, Phrynê stocked the back rooms with four looms and hired the widows in black to weave rugs and to sell to all her men what they could. That way the fools could go back home to their wives with gifts, and not just the scent of younger women on their cloaks. Always she sent them off with a word to stay home and forget the mad plans of Epaminondas. Phrynê still had beauty for most, and she knew it trumped all the philosophers’ pretensions and the dour reserve of the generals. Phrynê had reduced both to no more than street-corner beggars, eager to touch her hair, even a toe or finger—at least for a year or two more before her beauty faded altogether.

  The woman’s given name was Mnesaretê. The Thespians had dubbed her Phrynê, “Toad,” on rumors that at Athe
ns she had hopped on the couches from one prone lover to another with her long thighs. Despite her beauty, the foul name stuck. In any case she was tall for a woman—maybe as tall as Nêto and half a head higher than some men. Mêlon at first liked her because alone of the ripe women in Thespiai she had no eyes on his farm—nor on him, or so he thought. “I am the scarlet grape at harvest,” this Phrynê laughed to Mêlon, “plump and sweet. Yes, full of juice in the shade of my tendrils here in Thespiai. Why go up to thrashing the wheat stalks as Helios dries you out? I live for our god Love. Not for a man’s ox or even always for a coin or two. Better for you to come down here. I can teach you the ways of the polis. Perhaps with my teaching, within the year you will be Boiotarch or stratêgos. Think of it—General Mêlon, lord of the federation. Yes, side-by-side with our noble Epaminondas. That’s what wars are for—to winnow out the smart and brave and give them the fame to make them rich or powerful.”

  In these months after Leuktra, the town’s timê erotos, its reputation for lovemaking, was as powerful as it had once been for war in the long-past age of its grandfathers. “No Spartans, no Thebans to worry about anymore, just love. We can turn our noses to what matters—and what we know too little about.” Soon Phrynê was a philosopher of war as well, and lectured her customers that Herakleitos and that young Platôn from Athens were all wrong. There really was an end to war for all time. This was the age of the end of war, to telos polemou. The previous year had been the season of Epaminondas’s war, and this year was to be the season of Phrynê’s peace.

  Better men of this new age ate well, and they read and wrote on papyrus, and they made machines to keep time, and track the heavens, and lift stone, the polla ta deina of Sophokles. They were no longer like the savage warmaking Thrakians or Makedonians—bushy-haired primitive folk in hides who believed in killing for killing’s sake. Polis man, the new sophist Phrynê proclaimed, well, he was simply not as he had been in the past, and so no longer need a hoplite be. Lovemaking was stronger than the urge of pride, and honor, and fear and self-interest. Phrynê told anyone who listened, “It takes two phalanxes to fight. When we won’t, there won’t be war. I will rebuild the walls of Thespiai some day taller than those of Thebes, taller even than the new cities of Proxenos to the south, and then we will have no more need of spears. Why not have an erôpolis here in Thespiai? At my temple, here where our men can at last enjoy their own spear work? You stiff-legged Mêlon, don’t you know that song of your love-poet Mimnermos—“The crippled man pokes best of all”?