by Tobias Hill
VIII
Notes Towards a Thesis
What else is there but the past? What else is there to have faith in? It is not in us to believe in the future. We distrust it. We cannot be convinced. We believe only in what our eyes tell us. Seeing is believing, but the future can never be seen, and so it remains unbelievable. We are too short-sighted. Even in our darkest moments we never believe, in our hot hearts, that we will ever change. We go blindly on. We have faith only in Then and Now.
At least we have something, then. At least then we have faith in history.
The Spartans set great store by faith. Their multitudes of dire gods were like the old deities of Gilgamesh–which three thousand years before had Swarmed like flies over the sacrifice–but their way of life, too, required fidelity. The Spartans believed in Sparta as fervently as they believed in any god. Their state was an America, a dream of perfection. They lived out their lives in the shadows of their beliefs, and saw the fruits of doing so through generation after generation. Their city’s power was the proof that their faith was well placed. For half a millennium and more the Hollow Realm remained safe from the world, stronger than the world, the wall-less city inviolate, the red-cloaked phalanxes unmatched.
And then, inevitably, their time passed. The greatest soldiers in the world were beaten. The enemy trod them underfoot into the mire of their own meat. Lacedaemonia was lost. The meadows of the Eurotas burned. The strong women of Sparta ran screaming into the streets. It must have almost seemed to them as if the Taygetos had been torn down. The gods they loved had failed them. The Spartan dream had been destroyed. And what did they put their faith in, then?
The Hellenes called two places Thebes. One was a city of the Egyptians, who called it No-Amon, City of Amon, the god whose name means The Hidden, and whom the Greeks worshipped as Zeus. The other Thebes lay in the heart of Greece, north of Athens, with Mount Cithaeron at its back.
The Thebes of Egypt still exists. Karnak and Luxor are its names. Half a million people live among its endless monuments. But of the other Thebes almost nothing has survived. Like the Sparta it destroyed it has become a place of absence. It cannot be forgotten, but nor can it be known except through legend, myth and history. Like Sparta it was a city whose strengths lay in the practice of war, and it was through war that its fortunes rose and fell.
It was not much loved elsewhere in Greece. The Thebans were seen as a brutal, cloutish folk. After Xerxes breached Thermopylae, the Thebans were among the few to offer him subservience, and having done so they then fought relentlessly against the Greeks at the final battle of Plataea. After the Persian Wars, when Sparta and Athens battled between themselves, Thebes sided with the Lacedaemonians, yet it remained a thorn in the side of both powers, too eminent to be ignored, too close to Athens for comfort, too far from Sparta’s realm and reach to ever be wholly trusted.
Eight decades after Plataea Athens was conquered, its walls torn down. Sparta had won in war, again. Thebes saw its enemy beaten, but was not itself victorious. Its rivalry with Athens had dwindled as Athenian power had ebbed, to be replaced by other jealousies.
For generations, Theban men had fought under the Spartan kings. In doing so they had been changed. They had absorbed the Spartan ways. Years before Athens’s loss, Thebes had begun gathering its strength. Sparta was its new enemy, and the enmity was mutual. In the same summer that Athens fell, the Spartan phalanxes marched north, taking the Thebans unaware, conquering their old allies just as they had their enemies.
But Thebes would not accept defeat, and Sparta lacked the wherewithal to rule the world that it had won. After a century of war it was no longer the great force that it had been. Nor was it ever geared for peace. The meshed components of its state–hoplites, helots, fearful gods–these were streamlined for war. Victory did Sparta no good, though it still had faith in itself. Its ways had brought it victory. The elders saw no need for change.
Thebes changed. Having learned from Sparta, it surpassed its masters. It raised a standing army of its own, a force known as the Sacred Band. Like the royal guard of the Spartans, the Band comprised three hundred men. Its uniquity arose from love. The Sacred Band was anticipated by Plato, who in his Symposium has this:
And if there was only some way of contriving that a state or army should be made up of lovers and their loves…then they would overcome the world…for who would desert their lover, or fail him in his hour of danger?
Three decades after the fall of Athens, and for the first time in living memory, a Spartan hoplite army was defeated in the field, a phalanx of a thousand broken by the Sacred Band–a force composed of one hundred and fifty homosexual couples. Four years later Thebes drove out its puppet rulers, and Sparta readied for war again.
For all that the Thebans had learned, their army was still outmatched. Their great leader–Epaminondas, of the House of Aigeidai–possessed only six thousand men. King Cleombrotus of Sparta marched with ten thousand. In Thebes there were signs and portents, the temples of the city all opening of their own accord, as if the gods offered their strength; but the signs in Sparta’s favour were brutal in their simplicity. The triumph of the Sacred Band had been a minor oddity. Not for over four hundred years had anyone claimed victory against the full force of Sparta.
All began well for Sparta. Their army marched northwards unchecked, moving through the hills and capturing a Theban sea-fortress. With the taste of victory still fresh, Cleombrotus made for Thebes. By the road that led to Plataea–the place where they had once driven back an empire–the Spartans sighted their enemy. They camped near the village of Leuctra, and in the morning drew up their lines, the Thebans on the higher ground, the Spartans no fewer than eight shields deep, their cavalry edging ahead, their silent, red-cloaked phalanxes stretching for more than half a mile.
Not everything was as it seemed. Not every man in a red cloak–not even one man in a hundred–would have dared call himself Spartan. By the time battle was met at Leuctra, there were no more than fifteen hundred adult Spartans left alive. A hundred years of war, disease, earthquakes and Sparta’s rigid laws had left the city with almost no men left to call citizens. So precious had those last become that only seven hundred had been sent to fight at their king’s side. Those who swelled their ranks were the Edge-People of Lacedaemonia–the merchants, sailors and blacksmiths who were neither helots nor Spartans–with soldiers from Sparta’s allies, and mercenaries from beyond, and even helots offered freedom if they would fight for their lives. And the riders edging out ahead, their mounts stamping at the dust of the plains–those men were hardly men at all, Sparta having little respect for anything but the phalanx, so that the Spartan cavalry was manned by the last of its boys, By the least able-bodied of men.
Nor were the Thebans as they seemed. Epaminondas began the day by sending away any man who did not have the will to fight. Those left to him were the veterans, men who had fought alongside and against the Spartans. His cavalry were skilled horsemen, raised to ride on the plains. And while the Spartans queued to kill in the manner of their ancestors–eight shields deep along the line, twelve where the king stood on the right–the Thebans had altered their ways. Epaminondas did not place his strongest men on his own right, as hoplite generals had always done, but set them facing Sparta’s king, and ranked them not eight shields deep, or twelve, but fifty, with the Sacred Band at their cutting edge–the whole misshapen line withering along its length, all but the bulkhead holding back, as if most could not bear to fight, so that the Spartans did not face a phalanx like their own, but an army drifting away, its force all massed against one point, Cleombrotus, the Spartan king, Like a trireme, with its spur on its prow.
The Spartan horsemen rode out first, herding back onto the plains those men Epaminondas had sent away. It was then that the Theban riders attacked. The scattered Spartan cavalry was lost before their hoplites had begun to move, the orders from their king passing slowly along the thin red line. Their horsemen were thrown back into the
spears of the Spartan phalanx just as the Theban bulkhead charged.
Around the king stood Sparta’s greatest soldiers, its royal guard, its polemarchs and councillors; old men, trained all their lives for war. Against a force twelve shields deep they would have had no fears. Against fifty they had no chance. The Theban line broke them. Cleombrotus was dead before the army he had led had ever met its enemy. A thousand of his men were killed, and out of them, four hundred of the last living Spartan Equals.
Leuctra changed everything. To the traveller Pausanias it was The most decisive battle ever fought by Greeks against Greeks. But it was not Leuctra that destroyed Sparta for good. Epaminondas was not finished with Sparta yet. In the years after Leuctra he led his forces over the Parnon mountains, into the heart of Lacedaemonia. His armies had not come to fight. It was the helots they came for.
Epaminondas built them cities. In Arcadia his armies raised a capital where nothing had been. So massive were its features that the Greeks called it Megalopolis. The scattered peoples of Arcadia flocked to their new citadel. Epaminondas left them there, their love for him equalled only by their hatred for the Spartans who had ruled them for so long.
Westwards, beyond the Taygetos, lay the lost land of the Messenians, a people who had lived as captives for almost four hundred years. The Messene Epaminondas built them had walls thirty feet high and five miles in circuit, with towers all along its length, and an acropolis built into the fastness of the mountains. Nor did the invading army work alone. One by one, family by family, the captives of the Spartans came to rebuild for themselves a city that had not stood for thirteen generations. The face of Hellas was changed. The helots became Messenians again.
Sparta fought on for a few more years. Epaminondas fell on the battlefield, but Sparta was already dead. Perhaps it did not know it yet. The last of its Equals fought and fell. The enemy trod them underfoot into the mire of their own meat. The meadows of the Eurotas burned. The strong women of Sparta ran screaming into the streets. It must have almost seemed to them as if the Taygetos had been torn down. The gods they loved had failed them. The Spartan dream had been destroyed. And what did they put their faith in, then?
What was Sparta, without its helots? It was a weapon rendered obsolete. It was a creature perfectly designed for worlds forever lost to it. It was a thing evolved to hunt and feed on one species of bird or fruit that had itself become extinct.
And what did Thebes gain in victory? What happened to the Sacred Band, which defeated the greatest army in the world?
Thebes became no more than a footnote between the rise and fall of powers greater than it would ever be. The old cities of Hellas had fought themselves to a standstill, grinding themselves into the dust of the plains. The brilliance of the Thebans was emulated and surpassed. Thirty-three years after Leuctra, Thebes was routed by Macedonians from the north. Only the Sacred Band held firm. Most of them died where they stood. After the battle, coming to the place where they lay, the king of the Macedonians wept, saying to those who stood with him:
Perish any man who suspects that these men ever did or suffered anything that was base.
The lovers of the Sacred Band never overcame the world. The Macedonians buried them where they had fallen, raising a monument to them in the form of a lion. But the monument was soon forgotten. The history of the Band became doubtful, uncertain, mythical.
In 1818 the monument was discovered. In 1879 the grave was unearthed. Two hundred and fifty-four skeletons were found there, laid together, in seven perfect rows.
IX
Burials
Have you found someone else?
It’s not me. It’s you.
He still dreamed of her. More mornings than not there was a trace of her. Nothing exact, just the warm sense of her and, under the warmth, the cold intimation of what he had done. Guilt, always guilt, ethereal and malignant as a shadow on an X-ray. He would find himself thinking of her as they dug, the past silencing him, cutting him off from the others.
He recalled what he had loved about her: loved about her still. Nessie. Nessie as herself but also as the sum of their parts, as the best and worst of them both.
Other, lesser things. The way Emine loved washing lines. Once, on the train to London, he had asked her what it was she saw in them, and she had laughed and told him he wouldn’t understand. And then, as in other times and places with her, it was true that he had not understood, though he had tried. Maybe–he thought as he worked the earth–there had been something festive about them for her. The bright flags of skirts and festoons of underwear hung out in the sun. He could almost see that, though for him those domestic spectacles were embarrassing, exposed. Common, his mother would have said, peering down the neighbours’ yards, her own washing safely away on racks and radiators.
The way she liked the smell of petrol, rolling the window down at service stations surreptitiously, as if it were a guilty pleasure. The way she flirted with old men as if it were good manners. The way she liked standing under trees in the rain. The way she hated talk of sex or money, so that at first he had thought her shy, had worried that she would be wary of sex itself.
Her body. The hollows of her neck. The hollows of the backs of her knees. The skin there, each cavity as taut and hot as a fontanelle. Almost feverish, the heat of her there. He had kissed her there in his sleep once. Not her breasts or her sex, but the backs of her knees. A ridiculous thing to do, awake or asleep. He had known nothing about it until the next morning, when she had told him, her eyes shining, as if he were suddenly glamorous.
He remembered the week they had spent in Ireland, in County Antrim, before the child, before even the marriage. It had been the summer holidays and Oxford had become oppressive with heat and tourists. They had got the hotel for next to nothing online. The first morning there had been a hammering at the door, the kind of heavy-handed knocking a policeman might make, and when he went to open it–alarmed, cold with sweat, pink coverlet wrapped around his skinny flanks, abruptly conscious of the Catholic girl in the bed behind him–there was nothing there but a trolley loaded with breakfast: smoked salmon and eggs Benedict under the tureens, potato farls in nicked steel racks, kiss-curls of butter. Ironed newspapers and a spray of wild roses; and nobody in sight, the whole thing seeming like an elaborate trick played by children or benign goblins.
Propped between the teapot and the cafetière was a card from the hotel, almost lost amongst the other freight: Happy Honeymoon from all at The Hurdles! They had debated sending the trolley back for as long as it took to look under the tureens, then had devoured it all.
Afterwards, sated and idle, they had been flicking through the papers when a bunch of flyers had fallen into Emine’s lap. All were for local events–an outdoor evensong, a farmer’s market–but it was the summer fair they fell for, the picture showing old carousels, a helter-skelter, traction engines. It was to be held all that weekend in a small market town on the far side of a nearby lake, only a few miles away as the crow flew. There were maps at the hotel reception, and they went down and planned the walk. Plotting with their heads together. It was eight miles by foot, though, and by the time they reached the place they were tired, soaked through by quick showers of summer rain.
And the fair had been gone. That was the thing he remembered. They had come round the corner to the village green–the Linen Square, it had been called–and seen all the rides packed up to go. The carousels folded like gigantic umbrellas, the traction engines being loaded onto lorries backwards, like great four-square horses. Candyfloss trodden to mire on the worn-out grass.
They must have read the flyer wrong, they agreed, though their room had been cleaned by the time they got back, and they were never sure. Emine had cried on the way home, berating herself for doing so, insisting it hadn’t mattered at all. But it had, somehow. The way their hopes had risen and then been defeated. It had felt terrible and ominous, as if they had been too late for their own wedding.
He remembered being in
the house of his wife’s lover. People were still arriving–familiar faces, faculty and college, delayed by the rain–but the rooms were already crowded with unseasonable flowers. There were girls in uniform leaning by the kitchen door, hired for the afternoon and already tired with boredom, waiting to wait on uncaring guests.
–You like them? Foyt asked, and for a disconcerting moment Ben imagined he meant the waitresses.
What was it he said in reply? The proliferation of flowers reminded him of funerals, the way cut flowers always did, but he wouldn’t have told Foyt that. He was wishing he had come later or not at all. He was thinking that it had been a mistake, that seeing his wife and daughter wasn’t worth this.
Why had he come? He must have been mad. He had thought of killing this man, had stood under the trees outside this house, one night, cold-faced and hot-hearted, and imagined the ways he would do it. He was thinking that it was her place already, even if she was keeping the apartment. Already she had begun to put her mark on her lover’s home. She was there in her absence, in the disordered still-lifes of the flowers, the kitsch elegance of the new/old twentieth-century furniture.
He was thinking all this, and in reply would have said nothing worth remembering.
–Emine bought them. Not much from the garden, this time of year.
Foyt reached across him to a vase of peonies, lifting the already-dying blooms on the tips of his fingers. They were standing together by the French windows. It was warm in the long room, the radiators turned up high. The professor was so close that he caught the smell of him, like sweet vinegar.
–Emine arranges them herself. Not quite to my taste, but there we are. She has this striking dislike of formality, doesn’t she? Unusual in one of the Roman persuasion–
–Is she here? he asked, and Foyt looked up at him in apparent surprise.
