Victor Hanson - The End of Sparta

The Malgidai themselves produced the bounty, not just prayers to Dionysos or cries of the Bakkhai that the ignorant shout who are without the reason of Pythagoras. When a man fails in body or soul or wisdom, he always prays to the Olympians. Or so as Melon kept dreaming before battle he remembered all that Malgis once had said. For fifty and more harvests before Leuktra, the Malgidai rarely came off Helikon except to fight for the Boiotians. They had enough coins and enough grapes, wheat, and oil to need none of those below-and no more desire to die in the phalanx of the Boiotians on the doomed left wing in the battles against the Spartans. So they were a confident bunch, and came to forget that the wages of hubris are nemesis .

Finally in the year before Leuktra, Melon had opened his ears a little to Pythagoras. For he tired of meat, and found his left arm as strong as his right, and no longer felt himself better by birth than his slaves, all in the manner of Pythagoras. He wanted to believe that he had an eternal soul that would be judged in the hereafter by its brief entrapment and struggle within an all too human body; or so he also told the believer Chion, who was determined not to return as a sparrow or snake, but to free his soul forever with deeds he deemed good. And yet Melon had hesitated until now, worried by the rumors that Epaminondas might make the worse better and so replace the tyranny of Sparta with the chaos of freedmen.

For all their farming expertise, the Malgidai’s strongboxes were heavy with coins that had not come entirely from the soil. No one ever quite makes a living on farming alone, although all always insist that they do. Instead the money had come from Malgis’s campaigning when he once sailed for fifteen days to Sikily to join a Spartan attack on Athens. He came back a rich man with the loot of the dead at the Assinaros River. His new strongbox, with the lumps of gold beneath the coins, proved so heavy that he finally sent young Melon for a chain at the town forge to haul it up out of the well. No mere hemp rope would bear all the weight of his profits. War, it turned out, was a good way to make or lose money. But profit depended on what side of a war you ended up on. Always it was the wiser choice to fight on the side of the Spartans-even if that meant halfway across the ocean in Sikily or Asia. The Spartans would enrich Malgis for most of his life. At his end, they would kill him when he broke his own rule.

Melon remembered how Malgis, in the days after Athens had lost its great war with Sparta, liked to talk deep into the night with the big men from Thebes. Years before Melon came of age, the Theban friends used to walk on his farm’s paths, talking of spurning earth’s pleasures. Most of these city-folk were like Alkidamas, all self-acclaimed peripatetics who thought they were the true children and stewards of Pythagoras keeping the master’s teaching alive in the backwaters of Boiotia, as they lectured amid trees and shrubs.

The dream of Helikon continued as the sleeping Melon tried to make sense of this night at Leuktra. Like all who renounce wealth and the tawdry pursuit of it, the philosophers who trudged up to the farm often came to enjoy its fruits all the more. Affluence adds a veneer of authority to knowledge-if it can be displayed without the ugly scars of its acquisition. Melon knew that as well, and how someone else’s money had allowed him to think he could keep himself away from the mob below. He was at Leuktra this morning for yet one more reason as well: not just because of the prophecy of the apple, or to keep Spartans off his ground, or to replay the battle of Koroneia with a different ending, but also to prove, as he had at Nemea and Koroneia, that money gave him no exemption from the ordeal of the phalanx, and that he at last did believe men, even his Boiotians, could in a season or two set right the wrongs of ages.

The hoplite had thought that his senses, which had saved him so many times in the melee, had been dulled by age. They had not. Smell, hearing, even touch were all heightened this summer before Leuktra as never before. The light off Helikon had been much clearer, the hot wind of late afternoon through the shiny leaves of the olives stronger. Ever since word of Epaminondas and the failed peace at Sparta had spread and war had neared, everything had turned crisp. Nothing was as before. War was in the air. In this lull before the spearing, his touch, nose, ears, and eyes were burning and told him he alone was standing still as the world moved beneath his feet.

What was this mystery of Epaminondas, Melon asked in his dream? Whence came his zeal to face down the king of Sparta and then march south, down one thousand stadia into the heart of the Peloponnesos to build new cities of freedom for others finer than their own? These Pythagoreans, with no doubt, no second ideas, thought they had ushered in the new age of Hellas. All the city-states would become one state, one community of equals. All would worship the god Logos, and would teach that there are no masters, no slaves, no right hand better than left. No man would be better than woman-but all with free will to play the fool or the good man-and suffer the consequences at the blink of death. That was the power of Epaminondas to save the souls of the would-be saviors of others for the judgment to come. So these Pythagoreans had become the godfathers of Epaminondas, well before Leuktra. When Melon came down to fight in the year of Leuktra, he knew well enough where the fight of these men would finally lead.

This was also the arrogance of the Pythagoreans, Melon saw in these pre-battle visions. They thought they alone knew the good and alone could implement it among the Hellenes. They taught that everything we do-eat, sleep, crap, talk-must be in measure, according to meson , the golden mean. Once a man knew the rhythm of living-and he could not without the help of Pythagoras-then work was not work. Money was only for independence from the mob, never to be used for indulgence. Women and slaves were to be as free men; and dumb animals, who had inside them the souls of the departed, were to be untouched. Maybe even the olives and grapes were the stopping stations of the souls seeking to reform this time around.

For most who improve their grandfather’s house or ancestral vineyard, this temptation is never distant-to destroy and start over from the beginning rather than to correct the wrongs and burdens of the long dead. Malgis the killer was given a great gift not to farm the plot of his father Antander, but to start on the wild Helikon anew. This was the creed of creation of the Pythagoreans. The restlessness was also the danger residing in an impatient Epaminondas-to tear down all the ancient good along with the old bad and start over afresh. Sparta was a tired city of crooked streets and cobbled-together plots. But Messene, the capital of free Messenia to come? This dream of Epaminondas’s new city would be a grid. All new streets and blocks as perfect as the new vines and trees to be planted around it, their city to practice on with the newly freed helots-like the famous farm of the Malgidai, but for thousands.

After his father Malgis had terraced the hillsides, fashioned the big courtyard with a view of Boiotia below, planted the vines and trees, leveled and smoothed the wheat fields, built the pens and threshing floor, got the big press working, lined the farm’s paths with flat stones, and worshiped his god of Pythagoras-after all that, three things that no seer imagined had followed. First, he ended up not with a man’s refuge, but with the finest-looking farm in Boiotia. The orchard and vineyards proved better even than those on Sikily that he had copied so well. Malgis the founder became not just an idiotes -not just a recluse-but a wealthy one at that, whose wine and oil brought in gawkers and buyers alike. Then he buried his young wife, Kephesia. She died ten springs after the battle of Delion, from the stiff-jaw right after giving him a single son up in their new house on the mountain. Last of all, at sixty years still hale, Malgis himself fell.