The End of Sparta: A Novel by Victor Davis Hanson Page B

Mêlon, had drifted into the council this evening, and said she had joined the circle of Epaminondas to free her kindred helots. But she told herself that she was here to free her master Mêlon as well, and bring him down the mountain to fulfill the prophecy of the apple—and turn his mind from the mountain back to the world of the polis below, where men marry women if they proved to be their equals. Nêto trusted that her master cared not for any women except for herself, a lowly slave from Messenia. When off Helikon, she rarely saw any need to talk of him to others, to stand near him, to worry even that slaves are more often beaten than yoked by their masters. So she would do her part for him: She would be freed by the Thespians for joining the Boiotians at Leuktra when most of the craven of the small towns would not, and the two could then be one on Helikon. Because of all that, Nêto also reasoned that there was not much need even to talk to Mêlon, given they were as fated to be one as the Pleiades to rise or the magnet stone to find iron. After all, he was Mêlon, she Nêto, and that was all that the two or any others needed to know. It was just that simple.
    Proxenos was an architect, a wall builder, known in Thebes for his good sense and for his devotion to the logic of walls and gates. There was none more believable to deliver the oracles and signs of the gods. His father had taught him about Pythagoras, but then his father had also died seeking gold with Xenophon and the Ten Thousand in Asia. The Pythagoras of the son Proxenos taught the Hellenes that their souls were not one with their bodies, but can live on after death, in the next world where they suffer or prosper on the records that they compile here. Fail, Proxenos lectured his new friend Ainias, mar the soul with the lust for gold, women, or power, and the need to find yet another body—of an eel or snail, perhaps—to house an errant soul becomes endless.
    The meeting was about over, when even this man of Pythagoras reported the wild things he had just seen that morning. If the sober Proxenos saw omens, surely most had as well. “Boiotarchs and you other leaders of the files: Listen. Today the doors of the temple of Herakles in Thebes flew open. The statue of Herakles himself stands without his armor. It has vanished. The god himself is in the field. He is calling us to follow him against his impious kin from the Peloponnesos. The virgin daughters of Skedasos are to be avenged. Yes—those who were raped long ago on the rolling hills of Leuktra by men from the south. Listen to the wails of their ghostly spirits. They will fly out to help us kill Spartans.”
    Proxenos left the center and walked amid the crowd, to and fro, patting the heads and backs of the Boiotian commanders. “The spirits of these maids of Boiotia, once molested here at Leuktra by men from Sparta ten generations ago, have guided us here for revenge against their attackers from the Peloponnesos. Their ghosts hover over us tonight. Their shades shriek for our vengeance against the Spartans. Smoke of the offerings drifts in black patterns into the wind. The seers tell us the livers of their victims lack their full lobes as the gods demand vengeance. The insides of the animals are night-black with a foul stench. A few goats are without any organs at all. Some lungs stink and shrivel in the air when touched by flames.”
    Proxenos raised his hands to the top of the tent, and went on. “That is only the beginning; ribbons blow off our officers’ spears and then land on the tombs of the dead to warn of more to come. The snake god at Trophonios warns the Spartans of their death. The stone statue of Athena bent over and picked up the shield sculpted at her feet.” The crowd was rapt at the rich man’s words that offered far better promises of victory than all the complex sand drawings of Ainias and big talk of Epaminondas put together.
    This Proxenos was as handsome as the foreigner Ainias