The rest of the helots had taken the other path down after their nighttime patrolling. The rival Doreios yelled to them, “Join me-not this anvil-head Nikon. His name spells defeat-not victory.” All this meant nothing to the mumbling Nikon, who this night kept up his helot shouts at the moon. “I watched my daughters with horse tails, clipped to their butts, forced to neigh, poked by Spartans at the symposia. Or made to bellow like cows, mounted from the backside, to the strains of their bastard poet Tyrtaios. Or my son Aristomenes, flogged and kicked as he howled like a dog to the laughter of the Spartans, hit with their black olives and mushy apples and then dragged like a side of beef from his pony.”
Nikon, in desperate appeal, thought he could plead to the female voice in his head from north in Boiotia. “Is there anything worse than for a man to pick his grapes, stomp them, filter the juice, store the amphora, and age the wine-only then to cart it over to the Spartan acropolis? To give them as apophorai-to be whipped for the service as the idle red-cape soldiers gulp down a year’s work, most of it ending up as piss and vomit on the floor?” Now Nikon went on to the black night above, “Don’t forget the cleft of Kaiadas, the black abyss on Taygetos. Where we are thrown and then broken at the bottom, waiting at night for the wolves to eat our dying flesh as our tortured souls fly out from our ruined bodies.” Soon his dwindling band split off on the paths between the wild figs. They laughed at the wages of wine, for now they saw that their captain Nikon, silhouetted on a rocky outcropping across the vale, was taken with one of his periodic manias, as he talked with voices that wafted in the air.
He was drunk. Dionysus had sneaked into his head. Or worse, he had chewed some of the wild weed with the bitter white flowers that made the horses and cattle bellow and fall over. Alone of all the leaders of the helots, Nikon could see that an army would come, and that some men in Greece were for justice and not just plunder and their own pride when they marched to battle. He looked more to the gods above, as the late-night fog lifted, and he saw the yellow moon of the coming Dog Days, smiling at the very thought of the liberation to come.
“I am Nikon. A Messenian. No helot. A free man. Born here in Messenia. Citizen of its Messene to be. Messeeeniiiaaa. On free Ithooomeee.” Like the gray night wolf he yelled. He wanted his howl to reach the Spartans in their drink below and in dance behind their walls.
“Quiet, Nikon.” From a distance across the ravine the rival helots of Doreios on their way to the villages called back. “Shut up, drunken fool. No more wine boasting-unless you want to bring back Lichas from the north and his helot henchmen to string us up. Hush, mad dog. Siga. Go home. Helos! Hit him, Helos, won’t you? Some leader-this fool who wobbles down a tiny path. Chew your bone alone, far off this holy mountain. Dry your gut out.” The helots sang and laughed, far away, at the fading cries of their would-be leader.
Let the others talk of revolt while only Nikon’s men freed helots. Now Nikon bayed at the moon all into the night. He clung to the ledge that pointed north to far-away Boiotia-as if in his sudden fit his godly Boiotians could hear him a thousand stadia away. “Eimi Nikon. Eleutherios gignomai.” I am Nikon … I am born free.
Yet for all the prophecies of Neto and the drunken calls of Nikon on his ledge, Epaminondas did no more marching this summer after Leuktra. Nor the next spring did he call out the Boiotians to descend on Sparta and free Nikon’s helots. Most Boiotians instead thought that the great, the seemingly final victory at Leuktra had proved war to be the parenthesis and peace the natural, more common order of things. So in the hamlets around Thebes the yeomen hoplites went right on after the victory into their cycles of the farming year. The timeless soil cared little what its temporary human tenants thought or did. The ground mute beneath the farmers just endured and went on whether Leuktra was won or lost. War or no war, for free men or slaves, the tasks of the season-sow, weed, reap, cut, and thresh-continued day in, day out. For most of the other vineyard men on Helikon, the battle was no more to be remembered than the severed tail of the stone lizard who proudly wags his growing stub without a thought of the old one, rotting in the dirt.
After finishing the later vintages of summer, the three boys got to work on the autumn harvest of the olive trees. For all the visual splendor of the estate, there was a well-thought-out economy to it as well, as in its irrigation ditches from the pond above that meant less carrying of the water with the donkeys. The three threshing floors spaced near the grain and barley fields made the harvests far easier. The eighty plethra could produce twice the food of the neighbor Dirke’s similarly sized place with about half her labor and expense. That gift-only vaguely appreciated in the past-was sensed by all in these days of loss. Melon had tried to let Myron go. But the awkward slave stayed on. Soon he followed Chion on the farm and even into the woods, like and not like him-both enormous, but Chion’s maimed arm impairing his stride far less than did Myron’s natural clumsiness. Myron had been freed by his presence at Leuktra according to the decree of the Thespians, and now earned his wages from the Malgidai.
Myron’s skill in the collection and spreading of dung hardly meant he knew pruning and tilling. But he met rebuke for his poorly cut spurs and his crooked furrows with a shrug. Like the Korinthian mirror glass in town, he turned the harshness back on his master. Chion was freed, but as a one-arm he was more unfree than he had been as a slave of two hands. He saw that a man’s body is his only master after all. Thoughts are nothing without the leg and arm, which alone turn word into deed. Yet he bore the hale newcomer Myron no grudge, praising his new henchman as he climbed high into the olives with his tree saw. “Myron is my left arm I lost at Leuktra,” Chion laughed to Melon. “This freed slave is not so bad, once his dung stink wore off and he picked up rocks in the field and quit collecting the mess of the public toilets. I wager no master ever will pry him off Helikon.”
“Yes, he’s our Sturax and Porpax come back alive,” Melon offered, “the new watchdog of the farm. Our lost tail has grown back longer, and the farm is as good now as can be without our Lophis.” Myron winked or twitched at that, since he knew them better than they knew themselves. So he let praise roll off his back, and looked down as they lauded him to the skies. Myron was working for different, better sorts now, and on a wage, no less-and so he no longer bore pots of dung from the city stalls to his master’s vineyard, in fear of the lash of his owner Hippias, who each summer morning galloped on his pony down the rows of the vines, hitting the backs of his slaves with his mule-tail whip. This Hippias often came by Helikon on his black horse to take back or sell off his Myron. But Melon’s spear and the dark look of Chion shooed him off, and reminded the mounted grandee that the assembly of the Thespians had freed all the slaves who had flocked to Leuktra to fight-a fact known to Hippias, who now wanted to keep the silver buyout from the polis and yet get his slave back for a double profit. No concern. Soon Hippias was no longer seen near Helikon-nor seen at all.
On a late summer morning, a year after Leuktra, it was Myron who found the rotting Medios, the Thrakian slave of Dirke, the neighbor, hung up by his heels on a short pine tree far above the farm on Helikon-dead half a month or longer. Dirke, Melon, and Chion soon followed Medios’s trail-he had been cutting oak for plowshares above the farm of the Malgidai, so Dirke said-but uncovered no others tracks of his killer. Now in fear of a demon-like man-bear on Helikon, Dirke for a while came less to the farm of the Malgidai. She certainly said no more about Medios. Dirke told no magistrate, and wanted no talk of where Medios had been-or how he’d been hung up and sliced, and how there was a man-beast killer loose on Helikon. Otherwise, despite the warnings of endless war against the Spartans by Epaminondas, the long months after Leuktra proved among the most peaceful in recent memory in Thespiai. Soon no one missed Medios.