If Agesilaos won’t come out, and we can’t get in, then we will make the Spartans feel in just a few days what it is to be a helot forever.” With that warning of destruction, a defiant Epaminondas led the armies into the Lakonian plain to ravage even what they had gone over once before. Yet not all in the huge army wished any more to follow his lead, given the failure at the Eurotas and the death of Proxenos-and beyond that, the growing cold and the end of their tenure in Boiotia that made them all outlaws. Still, Ainias, Pelopidas, and Melon roused the troops, and for the next seven days the Boiotians, alongside the men of Argos, the Eleans, and the wild Arkadians, tore and burned their way through all the remaining houses and sheds of Lakonia.
It rained, and fog hugged the ground, with evening snow near the foothills. The ravagers found fuel from the fences and the woodwork of the windows and doors. Fires continued all over the farms in every direction to the mountain ranges east and west. Despite the cold, the men of Epaminondas sang and chanted as they kept at it, piling on the roof-beams and torching all the Spartan farms they had once passed over in cold mists and fogs, cutting down the smaller trees and hacking the limbs of the larger. To destroy centuries of what was once Sparta was no easy thing. The carnage spread from the Spartan port at Gytheion back up to the mountains near Sellasia where the ravagers had entered in the north, and then across the plain from the slopes of Parnon to Taygetos. Three hundred stadia east to west, and another three hundred from the north to south, the ravagers scoured the countryside.
It was not Boiotia, but Lakonia that was the new treeless and barren sheep walk of the Hellenes. That was what Epaminondas promised when he told his Boiotarchs that in a Lakonia denuded of its trees the grasshoppers of Sparta would soon all sing from the ground. If there were any alive next spring, they surely would. For the funeral of Proxenos, the Thebans piled carts and any wood they could find on the banks of the Eurotas-a pile ten times as tall as any tall man, with the dead builder of walls at the very top, looking out over the houses of Sparta across the river. Then Epaminondas lit it. “O king Agesilaos. Look at the campfires of your enemies. Look right before your faces. Not a Spartan man among you can stop it.”
All during the night Ainias stalked around the fire, adding logs as the Spartans looked back out from across the river at the coals of the pyre of Proxenos. Still, King Agesilaos would not come out to fight. The Boiotians had learned the enemy had horded months of food stores across the Eurotas and more than five thousand goats and sheep. The Thebans tried to incite the red-capes. Yet Agesilaos kept his men on the hills of the city, despite the shrieks of his women who saw their fathers’ orchards shamed. Elektra in her wild tresses ran berserk along the opposite bank, begging her grandfather to cross the river and with her husband Lichas drive Epaminondas out of their farms. She was met by a backhand from the king, “Go inside, mad woman, before you kill off what was left of us after Leuktra.”
Melon saw that the Boiotians could neither draw the Spartan across the Eurotas nor themselves wade through the river to torch the town-or stay much longer in the plundered countryside in the mid of winter. “There is a reason why he is king, that Agesilaos. He’s no Kleombrotos. We’re like the bloody-headed ram butting the shed walls when the she-goat won’t come out.” Melon finally warned Pelopidas about the ravaging of once-ravaged ground. “Put a stop to this madness of Epaminondas or soon we will destroy the land that must feed us. We either move on or go hungry or cross the river and take their food. But Epaminondas must do one of these and now, before the snows and the ice get worse.”
Ainias gave Pelopidas a cold stare of approval of Melon’s advice. “Yes, my general, leave this infernal place. Either head home or west over Taygetos. I will take the ashes of Proxenos either to new Messene-or back home to Plataia.” When the invaders at last were done with fire and ax, the wagons and most of the herds of Sparta were stolen or burned. A few thousands of the stranded helots of Lakonia were run off or fettered by the Mantineians, against the orders of Epaminondas, who wanted them freed outright instead and sent to the new Messene to come.
Lykomedes now boasted that his Mantineians alone had the glutton’s share of the loot, some four hundred wagons of oil and grain, and most of the windowsills and doors torn from the houses of Lakonia. His new city of Mantineia could be finished out with the ornaments of the Spartans. Ten more carts were loaded with iron ingots and chests of hidden gold that his men had pulled out of the wells of the Spartan peers who supposedly owned no gold. After unleashing his helot captives, Lykomedes bristled even more when Pelopidas and the Sacred Band confiscated half of his booty to pay for their march west over the pass into Messenia. So yes, Lykomedes thought, let us talk of war with Lord Epaminondas.
At first dark around the big campfires south of the city, the allied council met about the next march. The choice was either to head back with a half victory to their homes or west to Messenia. The weather was even colder and damper. The green olive limbs that were thrown into the fire sent smoke into the eyes of everyone and wrapped the speakers in a cloud of haze. Men coughed and sneezed and swore at each other over the allotment of booty. Some had the chest rattles and the leg aches, others the winter nose runs. Their leaders grumbled that too many slept on the winter ground. It was long past time to sit by the hearth in victory, not camp out in the fields and court defeat. Didn’t the Spartans have it right to stay warm in their houses across the Eurotas, fed and rubbed by their women?
Lykomedes stood surrounded by his archons of Mantineia. As arranged, he spoke first, and wished only to play up to his hoplite kinsmen who were eager to report back all he said to the assembly of the Mantineians. “After our twenty days of hard work we have gone past the new year. Then all our tenures expire as the assemblies demand. That is the custom in our democratic cities here in the south.” Then Lykomedes walked toward Epaminondas to shout at him directly in front of the camp crowd and for all to hear. “We have won. The war is over. No reason to stay. We are on their land, they are hiding with their women. Their Messenia is lost. Time to leave as victors before we get sick and piss it away.” Little Ariston was at the side of Lykomedes, clapping as his master’s voice rose. “We have eaten ourselves out of our new winter home despite the generosity of the Spartans. But it is the time of the sick cold that grows much worse after the winter solstice, at the time you know of as Boiotian Boukatios. We Mantineians are leaving at sunrise back home to Arkadia, so that we won’t find ourselves the besieged when you northerners leave us exposed and are safe far away. We wish you Boiotians well. It’s your throw of the knucklebones-whether you take our good advice to go home, or as fools venture farther to the west to start yet another war in the dead of winter. Either way, tomorrow you will no longer see your friends here from Mantineia.”
More than half the men who had descended into Lakonia earlier were to leave, maybe three or even four myriads packing for home-all the hoplites from Mantineia, Elis, the cities of Arkadia, and the northern tribes other than the Boiotians. They had sacks of bronze pots and tools. The flatlanders of Mantineia even had Spartan roof-tiles stacked high in their pilfered carts. It mattered little that it was Epaminondas and his Thebans who had sent architects-and that their Proxenos had fallen-to plan their cities Mantineia and Megalopolis. Or that the ingrates of the new Mantineia could be safe to finish such high stone walls only because Thebans had come south to keep the Spartans at bay or even that a free and fortified Messene would keep the Spartans worried and away from the Arkadians.
Lykomedes finished. “So to stay friends we will part. Many of us supported this war against Sparta to end her rule over others. That is now over and won. But we are not so sure that we need press on in the snow to Messenia for this winter madness.” In his cockiness he walked and stared at Pelopidas and Epaminondas and he tossed his head up and down, like the morning chicken free of the dog, who struts about the courtyard. Now he laughed in the generals’ faces. “Yes, we can kill all the Spartans. But what, pray tell, would we do with thousands of their helots over the mountain in Messenia, all free? Who by Zeus would govern them? Who is to feed and house them all? Who wants to own fragile pots that will surely break and then become the burden of the owner to mend them, ugly though they will always thereby be.” Lykomedes was speaking to hard hoplites in arms, not back home to Mantineians on the three-obol dole or with the young boys of the palestrai, so he was careful to blame only the Messenian helots and not Epaminondas and his generals. There were twenty thousand tough Boiotians and worse-looking Argives, with long spears upright in their gloved right hands and the club of Thebes painted on their shields. And this Argive general Epiteles? Why, he looked more a Thrakian cutthroat than a man of the polis.