The End of Sparta: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

back across the plain in the Thespian camp high across the creek bed, Mêlon and his slave Chiôn were almost finished digging their armor from the wagon, cursing at the frayed straps and patched clasps since they had not put the full bronze of Malgis on in more than seven summers—since the last spear crossing near Tegyra beneath Mt. Ptôon. Finally at late dusk the two began to make their way slowly toward Epaminondas. His tent was in the gully below.
    Gorgos was left back alone with the ox. The helot slave was sitting on the ground against a wagon wheel, happy enough to be alive with Chiôn gone. In vain, he once more strained for even more Doric sounds from his godly poet Tyrtaios, as those sweet melodies wafted in from the Spartan campfires across the gully. The music of old brought dreams of his son Nabis, the beardless boy he had left as an orphan long ago in smoky Lakonia, when Malgis had captured him up here in pig land.
    Gorgos had been more than a helot in the south. He had risen to leader of the helots in Messenia, renamed by his masters Kuniskos, or so he claimed to the slaves on Mêlon’s farm. In his youth he was freed by the house of Lichas for his battle courage and had once become known even as Lord Kuniskos—Lichas’s fixer, the eyes and ears of the Spartan ephor and hero. Gorgos now dreamed that after the victory of Lichas at Leuktra perhaps he would return to Lakonia and be known this time as Kuniskos the Terrible—no longer Gorgos the snake man. Once the two, side-by-side, had spear-charged the Thebans at the great battle at the Nemea River—only to have Gorgos fall stunned, brought down and dragged out by Malgis the Thespian, bound with a rope on his way to servitude on Helikon, land of the pigs. Gone forever from his beloved master Lichas. Now he was old and had ended up as no more than Gorgos the dung spreader, who for twenty and three winters had emptied the slop jars in the vineyard of Malgis.
    With Chiôn gone, Gorgos was soon napping at the wagon amid the flies of Aias. As he dozed, he chuckled out loud, as he went deeply back into the old dreams of his highland hideout, on his beloved mountain of Spartan Taygetos, far to the south in the Peloponnesos, where he was once more Kuniskos meting out justice for his lost son Nabis. Now he was cooking in his own hut, and laughing in his slumber that Nêto, and Chiôn, and Mêlon had just walked into his house, his own house, where his dinner, quite a meal, was ready for them all. There on Taygetos, the slaves were masters, and masters were slaves—though not in the way that his fellow dreamer Mêlon had thought.

CHAPTER 3
    General Epaminondas
    Mêlon was trying to pick up the soft sounds from the playing of Kopaic reeds as he and Chiôn neared the main tents of the Theban generals of Leuktra. The two were let inside by a few leather-clad sentries with felt caps, stoking the evening fires of Epaminondas.
    At last here was the great Epaminondas. Their general, who would lead all the Boiotians tomorrow, did not look like much. Was this short fellow really the god who claimed he could chase a myriad of Spartans back home and turn Hellas into a single polis?
    Epaminondas seemed to Mêlon dark and wiry, with shoulders almost too broad for his small frame. His beard was flecked with gray. Most of the head was without hair. But it was hard to tell since his scalp was leathery and dark from the wind and sun. Eyes, nose, mouth—they were all dark too, and blended in with beard and crusty face. He was neither old nor young, neither fair nor entirely foul—just burned and wrinkled. He was covered in something that looked more like hide or bark than real skin. No wonder, Mêlon thought, folk like this talk of freedom, and deathless souls and all the other code of the wild Pythagoras. Most ugly sorts on the wrong side of four decades usually do babble of god and the good they will do as their end nears—like the great rationalist Perikles himself, who wore