The End of Sparta

by Victor Davis Hanson

  As Mêlon, son of Malgis, neared the farm of Malgis, he felt the power of the symmetry of the grain fields, of the vines and of the orchards especially, the grid of files and rows of Pythagoras’s perfect numbers, and knew he was back where it had all begun as planned. Now he could sense also the indomitable strength of the triangle’s golden ratios, as strong in their order even as the streets and blocks were of the grids of Mantineia, Megalopolis, and Messenê. He looked this way and then up; not a vine, not a tree was out of line. He saw squares and triangles and more still in the layout of the farm.

  The whispers grew stronger in his head. They reminded him of the one way that had made the farm grow and sent them all south and would keep Mêlon safe until the end without fear. The voices with assurance told him that there were no shades in Elysion. There was no mythical Sisyphos, or Tantalos of children’s song in the rungs of Hades. No silly Hades even. No marble Zeus throned on snowy Olympos. Nothing like that at all. Instead those fables and bogeymen could do no harm to the good man on this earth or his soul on the next. His own choices and his faith in the One God, they alone determined the one life to come. Now one voice, everywhere at once, prophesied to him that there would be no peace for five or even ten years in Messenê as the ripples of three hundred and fifty years of servitude battered the helots still, and those of Lakonia who had done such evil would not quit with a trip or two. So confess it, you Mêlon. Epaminondas and his Thebans would have to go back to the south this very summer, and then twice more before the helot democracy was safe from others—and from itself. It seemed as stupid a thing to have marched south to liberate such wild childish folk as ten years hence it would seem wise to have done so. Men really are not, as Lichas boasted, born as slaves. The helotage of Sparta had to cease, if by the most unlikely tool of the farmers of Boiotia and their one-cloak childless general Epaminondas.

  As Mêlon made the last bend to the big house, he let lame Xiphos go with a slap to his flanks. The murmuring of his own friends and lost son in the air and in his head and in the trees and bushes about and the parables of Epaminondas in the wind at last ceased. Silence and quiet everywhere—but for a moment only.

  Now in their place, as if on some eerie cue, he heard sweeter music or something faint like the distant chords of a single aulos that always came to strengthen him when things to come seemed most forbidding. Mêlon shuddered at the familiar strains from Thisbê that so often went into his ear as healing sounds. He took a second glance back, half-thinking it was Epaminondas who had dismounted and followed him up with his reed—as before when the general had played the same tune of the Thisbeans in his wild talks about cutting the head off the Spartan snake. Or perhaps the melody was the sound of the ghost initiates, who, in the upper aithêr, were celebrating that Epaminondas had brought such fame to the way of Pythagoras and had saved the soul of Mêlon, son of Malgis, of the line of Antander on Helikon. Or was it the dirge of the dead?

  But the sound marked nothing at all like that. Epaminondas was even now far away. The general was racing out the narrows of Chaironeia, hoping to raise the countryside to free the serfs of Thessaly ahead—and so to offer the poor penestai of the north what he had bequeathed to the heilôtai of the south. Instead, the sound came from a faint figure below on the edge of the plain, though off in a different direction to his right. Mêlon turned to make out this solitary shape behind him, who was ascending with an unsteady gait the same southwest road up to his Helikon.

  Perhaps if the sound were real, the phantom—was it the shade of an avenging Dirkê?—would prove only some slow-moving woman playing a pipe to calm her goats. The shadow moved more slowly than he did, with a walking stick. Or was it more likely that after the voices, and the disguise of Pelopidas and the riders of Epaminondas, he was completely in the grip of a god, enthusiastikos—and so now he saw and heard divine things from Pythagoras that others did not?

  He wanted to awake from all this. Yet he already was awake in the sun and climbing and almost home. As he neared the courtyard gate of the lower fields and headed for the gravestones of Malgis and Lophis and the marker stone of the farm with the new high cenotaph of Chiôn, Mêlon could see into the big window of the tower with the shutters thrown wide open. No dream this. Damô and the children above were looking east beyond him, staring off with hands on their brows in the direction of the bright sun and the music, waving to that something well below him—not far to the south where Epaminondas and Pelopidas had raised the dust below as they had joined and galloped off together in the distance to hard battle with the horse-lords of Thessaly.

  Then all was lucid. Once again the Thisbean melody and the breeze kicked up. All those cobwebs of the past, the dusts of bitter memory of loss and regrets of choices not followed were blown away with the late spring wind on Helikon. With that, lame Mêlon, without needing to turn around, raised his right arm high and kept it there, opening all five fingers to catch the warm wind, slowing at last and entering the courtyard.

  As if on cue, a familiar keen-scented dog yelped in answer off in the distance, below and down the hill path. With that greeting, not far behind, Nêto of Messenia—now more beautiful even than before, as she would say too of the lame and bald Mêlon now made whole—took her fingers from the pipe, smiled, and then she too hobbled ahead as her Thisbean strain ceased. And with stiff Kerberos back as old Porpax at her heels, Nêto in her hood and shawl made it up to that final well-known turn, and onto the farm of the Malgidai.

  A Historical Postscript

  The historian Xenophon’s Hellenica, our primary historical source for events of earlier-fourth-century-B.C. Greece—in his apparent anger at the rise of a democratic and powerful Thebes—makes no mention of the presence of Epaminondas at Leuktra. He is silent also about his role in the first invasion of Sparta, or the Theban effort to free the helots of Messenia and to found the citadel of Messenê. Xenophon does, however, in his Anabasis (“The March Up-Country”), talk of a Boiotian Proxenos who had advised Xenophon to join the Ten Thousand, though he says nothing of our son of the same name. The loss of Plutarch’s “Life of Epaminondas,” together with Xenophon’s bias, explains in large part why today we do not fully appreciate the reasons why the classical Greeks and Romans considered Epaminondas the greatest man of the age.

  In contrast, the Roman-era Diodorus—based on the lost histories of an Ephoros, Xenophon’s contemporary—much more frequently mentions and praises Epaminondas and his invasions to the south. Thanks to Ephoros—I have no idea whether he had long yellow hair and lisped and was fond of the Boiotians—and the lost historians Theopompos and Kallisthenes, something about the achievement of Epaminondas survives in bits and pieces in the Roman-era traveler Pausanias and Plutarch’s Life of Pelopidas.

  Much of what we know about siege warfare of the age is found in “On the Defense of Fortified Positions,” written by one Ainias of Stymphalos, a shadowy general of the Arkadian federation. His larger corpus, “On Military Preparations,” is unfortunately lost and we otherwise know very little of the general and writer Ainias Taktikos, who may have played a considerable role in the politics of the Peloponnesos in the mid fourth century B.C.

  We don’t know exactly all the reasons why Plato (Platôn) so distrusted democracy and favored the Spartans, but it was more than just the democracy’s execution of Sokrates and his own exile.

  “The Oration on the Messenians” (Logos Messêniakos) by Alkidamas does not survive either, but a fragment of the great speech on the liberation of the helots, “No man is a slave by nature,” seems to be the only explicit condemnation of slavery that survives from classical Greek literature. Perhaps Aristotle had Alkidamas in mind when he later attacked those who taught that there was no such thing as a man suited to slavery at birth.

  We hear from Plutarch and others that an adolescent Philip of Makedon spent a year as a hostage with the Thebans. Though it is not recorded that he was known at Thebes as Melissos, the adult Philip bore no antipathy for the Messenians and wh
en, more than thirty years later, he invaded Boiotia, he spared the helot city to the south after his victory at Chaironeia. He did, however, finish the job of subjugating Greece by ending the Sacred Band at Chaironeia—but supposedly lamented the sight of their corpses that littered the battlefield. Scholars are still unsure why Philip erected a proud lion on the battlefield to honor the dead of the Sacred Band, but the monument sits there today guarding the old road to Thebes as it skirts the foothills of Mt. Parnassos.

  Pausanias says in his own days of the first century B.C. that there was an iron monument of Epaminondas at Messenia. Both Pausanias, and Plutarch in his life of Agesilaos, record that the offspring of Antikrates were forever known as the “swordsmen” for the thrust of their ancestor that killed the hated Epaminondas. They add that the great liberator was brought alive out of battle to die in 362 B.C. on the hilltop of Skopê, overlooking the battlefield of Mantineia, after Epaminondas’s fourth and last invasion of the Peloponnesos, more than nine years after the victory at Leuktra. They mention none who died with him, not even Mêlon, son of Malgis, farmer of Helikon.

  Black limestone steles of the heroes of Boiotia can be seen in the modern museum of Thebes, carved, we believe, by the sculptor Aristides. Archaeologists argue about the architecture of the great cities of Mantineia, Megalopolis, and Messenê, but by general consent the stones seem to reveal the work of now anonymous Boiotian architects whose work resembles the contemporary rebuilt walls of Plataia and Thespiai. Much of the massive Arkadian Gate at Messenê survives, though no one has yet found among the best-preserved city in Greece any fragments of the two stone lions with the likenesses of Chiôn and Proxenos—nor the iron statue of Epaminondas himself.

  Of the final end of Phrynê, little is known. Athenaeus in the thirteenth book of The Deipnosophists relates a tradition that she returned to Thespiai and offered her own great riches to rebuild the city walls after Alexander the Great had torn them down—if only they would inscribe her own name on the fortifications.

  I have hiked over much of Hesiod’s Mt. Helikon, but so far I have not discovered the highland farm of Mêlon, son of Malgis, father of the good Lophis—the master of godlike Chiôn and Nêto, hero of Leuktra, slayer of Kleombrotos, who in the following decade went south three more times after the founding of Messenê to fight the Spartans and, more than nine years after Leuktra, to die on Skopê above Mantineia at the side of his friend—and of his savior—Epaminondas, son of Polymnis, general of Thebes, first man of Greece.

  The Peoples and Places of Fourth-Century B.C. Greece*

  Attika: the territory surrounding the city of Athens, and, with the polis proper, comprising the city-state of the Athenians on the southern border of the Boiotians.

  Boiotia: a geographical region in central Greece whose capital city was Thebes. Its rich farmlands, cities, and hamlets were federated into a political union in the late sixth century B.C. and were made democratic in the fourth.

  Doric: the dialect of Greek that the Spartans and most in the southern and eastern Peloponnesos spoke—supposedly derived from the mythical Dorians who swept from the north into the Peloponnesos.

  Epaminondas: the Theban hero and victor at the battle of Leuktra (371 B.C.) who subsequently led Boiotian armies on four invasions of the Peloponnesos before dying at the second battle of Mantineia (362 B.C.).

  Ephoros: a fourth-century-B.C. student of Isokrates who wrote a universal history of the Greeks, from mythical times to the advent of Philip of Makedon. Now lost, many books of Ephoros’s history survive in part through the extant work of the Roman-era compiler Diodorus Siculus.

  Helikon: the prominent mountain of Boiotia, almost 6,000 feet in elevation, birthplace of the poet Hesiod and said to be the home of the Muses.

  Hellas: what the Greeks (or Hellenes) called their own country.

  helots: (heilôtai, “those taken”) indentured Greek serfs who were obligated to raise food for the Spartan state. Although there were thousands of helots in Lakonia surrounding Sparta, the great worry was instead the far more numerous thousands of Messenian helots who lived on the other side of Mt. Taygetos, and who for centuries revolted both frequently and unsuccessfully.

  hoplites: the class of Greek small farmers who, as middling citizens of the polis, fought as heavily armed infantry soldiers in the phalanx, with spear, body armor, and round shield.

  Lakonia: a geographical region in the southern Peloponnesos surrounding Sparta, and thus along with the city comprising the Spartan state, which in turn was also known as Lakedaimon.

  Lokrians: inhabitants of two regions in central Greece, to the west on the Korinthian Gulf north of Boiotia and to the east south of Thermopylai. They usually joined the Boiotian horse in battle.

  Messenia: large territory in the southwestern Peloponnesos, home to thousands of helots and controlled by Sparta—not to be confused with Messenê, the capital city of a free Messenia.

  Pelopidas: Theban general and political leader, partner with Epaminondas in spreading democratic fervor beyond the borders of Boiotia. He died in 364 B.C., two years before Epaminondas, while fighting in Thessaly.

  Peloponnesos: the southern and largely mountainous peninsula of Greece connected to the northern mainland by the Isthmos at Korinthos.

  Philip II: famous fourth-century B.C. king of Makedon who united its warring tribes and then moved south to end the freedom of the Greek city-states. His dream of leading a panhellenic army into Asia was to be completed by his son Alexander the Great.

  Phokians: inhabitants of Phokis in central Greece, near and to the north of Boiotia. They were often distrusted as robbers of the temples at Delphi and fickle neighbors.

  Phrynê: “Toad,” the nickname given to the famous courtesan Mnesaretê and model of the sculptor Praxiteles.

  Plataia: a Boiotian city at the southern frontier, nestled on the slopes of Mt. Kithairon, usually an ally of Athens and so often at war with the Thebans.

  Polis: the Greek city-state, of which at the time of Epaminondas there were some 1,000 to 1,500 on the Greek mainland and the islands in the Aegean and west to Sikily. The concept of a polis included both the urban center (astu) and the surrounding countryside (chôra).

  Pythagoras: the famous philosopher, mathematician, and mystic of the sixth century B.C. whose followers believed in one divinity, the reincarnation of souls, and a reality explicable by mathematics and music. Cult members were chastised for embracing vegetarianism, the nobility of the left hand, the equality of the sexes, voluntary poverty, and communalism.

  Sparta: both the city on the Eurotas River and the state that encompassed most of Lakonia, and, through alliance and conquest, controlled much of the southern Peloponnesos. Lakedaimon is probably the closest synonym.

  Taygetos: the large mountain wall between Lakonia and Messenia, ranging some 60 to 70 miles in extent and rising nearly 8,000 feet at its peak.

  Thebes: the largest city and capital of the federated region of Boiotia in central Greece. Not to be confused with Egyptian Thebes. On occasion Thebes and Boiotia were used, if inexactly, interchangeably.

  Thespiai: a city-state in Boiotia, in the foothills of Mt. Helikon, and nearly always at odds with the larger capital Thebes a few miles away. Thespians were residents of Thespiai but bore no relation to Thespis, the legendary sixth-century-B.C. founder of tragic drama, from whom derives the modern notion of “thespians” as actors.

  Xenophon: famous Greek historian of fourth-century-B.C. Greece and veteran of the retreat of the Ten Thousand from Asia, as well as author of treatises on topics as diverse as horsemanship and the economics of household management. He was exiled from Athens, lived in Triphylia as a friend of the Spartans, and was banished after the invasion of Epaminondas.

  * Ease of recognition and pronunciation, rather than absolute consistency, has guided the spellings of Greek names. Some less well known Greek names and places are transliterated rather than Latinized—for example, Korinthos for Corinth, Leuktra for Leuctra, and Thespia
i for Thespiae—while more common names like Epaminondas and Thebes seemed preferable to Epameinôndas and Thêbai. I use Hellas for Greece, which derives from Roman nomenclature for Hellas.

  Principal Characters

  Ainias: (“praiseworthy”) the Arkadian mercenary and tactician who came north to join Epaminondas

  Alkidamas: (“strength of the people”) the aged rhetorician and champion of the Messenians

  Chiôn: (“snowy” or the “Chian”) the huge slave from the island of Chios bought in infancy by Malgis from the Spartans, and raised on the farm on Mt. Helikon

  Damô: wife of Lophis and custodian of the farm

  Dirkê: aged neighbor of Mêlon on Mt. Helikon

  Epaminondas: Boiotarch and general of the Boiotian army and leader of the allied army

  Ephoros: historian and resident of Athens, at work on a general history of the Greeks

  Gastêr: (“belly”) captain of the Theôris and veteran sailor of the Korinthian Gulf

  Gorgos: (“dragon”) captured helot slave of Mêlon, veteran of the Spartan wars against Athens

  Lichas: ephor and warrior of Sparta

  Lophis: only son of Mêlon

  Malgidai: the descendants of Malgis who continued to work his farm on Mt. Helikon

  Malgis: the one-eyed Thespian veteran, father of Mêlon, who first carved out the farm on Mt. Helikon

  Melissos: (“bee”) the young boy hostage from Makedon, who spent a year with the Thebans as a guarantor of the northern peace