Melon didn’t even look at him as he answered back, as the sun began to warm his face. “I’ll be blunter stilclass="underline" One side wins, the other loses. Only that way does the reason the troublemaker fights vanish, and do his big ideas get smaller. Talk never stopped any war for good; talk only passes it on to grandchildren not born.” Melon grimaced, thinking that all the spearing of Malgis at Nemea and Koroneia had only left it to Lophis to fall at Leuktra. Leuktra? The battle to end at last the war with Sparta? Hardly. As long as the Spartans had the serfs of Messenia feeding them, they would keep marching up here. He went on. “As for the truces of the Hellenes, they are not worth the stone they are cut on. The more some of the Hellenes swear to others before the gods that they will both have the same friends and enemies for fifty years, the more likely such a peace will not last for one.”
The two talked and were interrupted often by the Sacred Band, especially the younger of the three hundred. But they tired of the chatter and wanted to know only when they would arrive in Lakonia. Surely it must be over the next mountain as they looked down at the great plain of Megara before them and imagined they saw the Spartan Eurotas instead of a thousand stadia of walking ahead. Not a Boiotian in this army seemed to have been to the Peloponnesos. Melon ignored them all. “You see, we will change Sparta from what it was-take its claws away and cage it-if we can, that is. Do that, and it will never be able to make war north of the Isthmos. That is, I think, the plan of our general. So he preempts and starts this war to be the last.”
Pelopidas sighed. “I fear even with war in Lakonia, and even with the Messenians free, we will leave this war to our children unless we level Sparta and kill her kings. Our Epaminondas must make war so terrible that the Spartans can never fight us again.”
Melon slapped Pelopidas. “So this was a game all along, Pelopidas. You are no honest philosopher. No, you simply wished me to give back your own answers. I say that you are more the fire breather than iron-gut Epaminondas himself.”
“I suppose,” Pelopidas quietly offered, but then he stuck his head closer to Melon’s and in a softer voice went on. “But sometimes others can give voice to the dark truth we prefer ourselves not to utter or even hear, but wish to be aired all the same. Because you know war better even than I, and not so long ago no doubt had no appetite for this great march, Melon, you have taken a great worry off my heart.” Pelopidas stopped in the road to finish. “I know there is no other way. I am not just a war lover. There is really no other way to end this, but in the direction we are marching. Yes, we must cut off the head of the serpent and watch his slithering trunk die in pain.”
“No. No, there is no other way,” Melon answered.
“We will either end this war our way-or they will end it theirs.”
Now even Melissos echoed. “No other way, no other way-no other way than to head south and cut them all down-or have no war and no peace, as it is now.”
With that outburst, the talkers heard the trumpeters’ order to halt and pitch camp and to wait for the twenty thousand men at their backs. Melon could already see well the Megarid below. They figured that they had gone some one hundred twenty stadia while they had talked the first day’s march away. Still Melon thought on in silence. This new power of Thebes-would there come also in time the end of its own democracy? Of course it would. Sparta had once dethroned Athens. Now Thebes was doing the same to Sparta. He knew well an end-day would arrive in turn for these Boiotians. That was the nature of states. In their wealth and pride, they forgot the harder ways of earlier men who had given them plenty. Maybe the Boiotians would muster a year or even ten of such marches at his back. But even now as he looked around the front ranks of the column, he saw few such as Pelopidas and Epaminondas to lead such men again-and far too many men like Backwash to throw away what others had given them.
Victory, the wealth of peace, proves as deadly to states as does defeat. Is that man’s doom? That as we struggle to plane down the edges for the young, old men forget that their own blisters and cuts from these knots and burls made us the savvy carpenters we are? That smoothing the splintery grain for our own children only ends up smoothing them, so that they know nothing of the rough to come? That in our wish to be good we ruin those who we wish to help, because we cannot let them suffer as we did when we have the power or the wealth to stop it? That law of iron explains the fall of families and the poleis as well. Did their Pythagoras have any answers for all this, since-Melon knew-his vanishing Zeus did not?
Only Chion and Neto and Gorgos, even-the slaves born poor and with the coarse edge of life sharp in them still-showed the stuff of the older breed, and only for a while until they would become soft lords of an aging Ithome of soft citizens who forgot that they had been helots. That was Chion’s fear, Melon knew, and what made the freed slave stay feral and far from the appetites of the city. The key, he also saw, for polis man was to match word and deed, body and mind, the work of the hoe with the papyrus, avoid the lounge of Phryne as much as did the shaggy hill men of Aitolia. Without the mean, to meson, the laborer becomes a thug, the sophist an effete. No, Chion would stay in the wild where he could do more for the tame in the town by almost alone of men not being tame. For his part, Melon consoled himself that at least for now the new Messene to come, the city of the soon-to-be-freed helots, might yet remind Hellas, even in its dotage, of the original ways of the polis-once the low rough stones were placed on the polished top. Freeing the helots would end Sparta, Melon knew. But he guessed that Epaminondas thought their liberation would give Hellas itself a reprieve, both by the struggle needed to free them and the infusion of new blood into the city-states of Hellas.
CHAPTER 23
Meanwhile, halfway to the farm, Chion had stopped. He grabbed the wrist of Myron. He spoke slowly, and then Chion began to make the freedman repeat what he said, so that Myron could say it all to Damo when he got back to Helikon-just as Chion ordered. At the fork, Chion took from Myron’s pack the sack of silver that they had promised Nikon and sent Myron back to Helikon on the horse. He alone headed south and east over the spurs of Kithairon, running to the port at Aigosthena and the windy winter gulf. He prayed to the One God to forgive his lie to Melon that he would stay on Helikon; in truth, he had already promised Alkidamas that he would meet him at the dock. If Chion went all the way back to the farm, he would surely miss the ship of Alkidamas and his promise to Alkidamas to go southward with him and keep him safe. He had promised the old man to be on the shore by midnight and to come armed to guard them should the captain-and their money-need watching. Perhaps if he brought news of Neto, Melon would grant him a pardon when they met again. Swinging the silver across his shoulder, Chion continued across the hills. The day gave way to dusk, then to black night, as Chion’s shadow moved among the trees, like a night-hunting creature in the forest, whose byways he had long ago mastered on his solitary hikes.
Down at the shore, the dockers on the quays at the port of Aigosthena were calling out at the lights that were visible on the waves-Thauma! Lampades, ide lampadas. Lampades en thallasse-A wonder! Lights, look, lights. Lights on the sea. Soon even the eyes of Alkidamas saw them, the twinkling flames over the water. Well after midnight at last the torches bobbed over the swells, without a sound of the approach. The clouds parted, and in the cold moonlight they could see the far peaks of Arkadia across the gulf, but nothing else. Then, late but safe, the long-expected ship quietly swished into port, oars up.