John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

“Lykourgos was missed, during his time away from Sparta. There had been for a long time an absolute abyss between the rulers and the common people, and each watched the other with hostility. The Spartans, you know, are descendants of old-time mountaineers — tough, rugged, stubborn men, Dorians and various breeds of Northmen, a black- and red-headed mixed rabble of cattle raiders by nature impatient of reasonable law or of complexity in any form.” I get up from the table and hobble around on my crutch as I speak, to keep my mind off women. Occasionally I pause behind his chair. He broke my jug.

“To make myself clear,” I say, “I must stoop to fact.”

He sighs, but I am a tempest. I tell him how it was.

When the Mykenaians were weak from the last of their booty hunts — the invasion of Troy — the Dorians and newer waves of Northmen, who’d been watching all along, perched in the mountains like starlings on a clothesline, swooped down to attack them. By animal courage and stupidity and luck they wiped out the majestic old civilization (only cultural islands survived, refuges for the disposessed, such as Athens), and they occupied — along with the Helots, who seem to have been there since time began, everybody’s slaves — what was left of the ancient cities. They lived as squatters in the burnt-out palaces, like goats nibbling at the cracks in old altars, and they made no effort to rebuild. Record-keeping vanished, the art of writing disappeared, handicrafts decayed, old gods became confused with new ones. Finely wrought weapons of bronze gave way to clumsy iron. Burial in magnificent tombs gave way to quick cremation. “All things were Chaos,” Anaxagoras says, “when Mind arose and made Order.” He might have added, All things were Mind when the Dorians came down and made Chaos. (But I veer from my matter.)

Even so, a Dorian aristocracy developed, a thing impossible back in the mountains, and it modeled itself, as well as it knew how, on the one it had overthrown. The process took a long time, but old ways hang on, especially among Northmen. The commoners scorned this froufrou new class, bringing the state close to anarchy; and the ruling class scorned the commoners as insolent. Both the commoners and the two kings of the diarchy sent again and again for Lykourgos, but he wouldn’t return until Kharilaus had engendered an heir. Lykourgos was in Athens when word came that finally it was done. He started for home the same day, set himself up in the two kings’ palace like a statue of its original owner, and began his fierce reforms.

His aim was total reconstruction. He compared himself to the wise physician who brings all the humors to the brink of exhaustion and then, by surgery, diet, and exercise, rebuilds the sick man’s constitution from scratch. He went first to the oracle at Delphi to collect his set of laws from the god himself. (This was always a favorite trick of his, a thing not to be inquired into too narrowly.) When he returned to Sparta he broke his plans — or some of them — to his closest friends and then, little by little, to others. He organized a police force on the Egyptian model, one which could operate swiftly, secretly, and without any bothersome scrutiny by the courts. His opposition soon became more flexible of disposition, and the kings, Kharilaus and Arkhelaus, came to his side. He established a senate of twenty-eight men — all hard-line old military leaders — and denied the people any right but ratification or temporary rejection of what they might decide. Then he began his more daring innovations.

He outlawed wealth. First, he redistributed the land, splitting all Lakonia into thirty thousand equal shares and Sparta itself into nine thousand, with a provision for yearly review and redistribution. Of those who fought him, some stood trial for treason, some merely vanished. Nevertheless, men still had money, and Lykourgos knew from his travels in Asia, especially Sardis, that treasure hoards, like land, mean inequality. Finding that it would be dangerous to go about seizing men’s gold openly, Lykourgos took another course and defeated greed by a stratagem: he commanded that all gold and silver coin should be called in to be reminted and standardized. When the money came in — you remember the story — he returned it not in gold or silver but in iron bars, the coin of the ancients, before the Asian influence. A great weight and quantity of the stuff was of very little worth: to lay up, say, three thousand dollars’ worth required at least a large shed. Thus he closed out several vices at once. Who would rob a man of such coin? Who would even accept as a bribe a thing by no means easy to hide, a thing not a great credit to possess or of any worth cut in pieces? Moreover, it was ugly. When it was red hot they quenched it in vinegar and spoiled it: it couldn’t be worked.

The trick had further implications. It ended trade. Foreign nations—“inferior breeds,” Lykourgos called them — scorned the coin of the Spartans and would not sell to Lakonia. No more fat merchants came with shiploads of trinkets or finely carved furniture or spices. No more rhetoric masters, fortune-tellers, whores, engravers, or jewelers cast their wide, comfortable shadows on Spartan soil. As for local arts, all but the useful were outlawed. Spartans made bedsteads, chairs, tables, golden cups. In time, for reasons I could never make clear to Lykourgos, they made nothing but cups — neurotically elegant — and left all other work to the Helots — in effect, though not technically, their slaves. An incredible thing, when you muse on it. The Spartans stood over the land like gods, grandly posing with their round shields and swords, while a more populous race which they judged inferior — a civilization as separate from theirs as the woodbine is from the elm tree — provided the bulk of Lakonia’s blacksmiths, shipwrights, masons, bakers, cooks, woodcutters, messengers, longshoremen, saddlers, shepherds, dry cleaners, doctors, foresters, carpenters, bowmakers, weavers, unguent boilers, ditch diggers, even wine inspectors! Any fool should have guessed what trouble it would lead to! But the Spartans were clever, intuitively. They developed an almost unconscious theory that the one thing Helots were incapable of was fighting, even to prevent, say, the rape of their wives or the murder of their children. And the Helots, who’d been losing for centuries, believed it I don’t credit Lykourgos himself with inventing this ingenious weapon, but no doubt he knew how to wield it.

Then came the masterstroke that almost killed him. He destroyed the last refuge of gentility — fine manners. He ordered, backed by a Rhetra from the god, that all Spartan men should eat in common, of the same bread and meat and of kinds officially specified, and should not spend their fives at home, lying on costly couches at splendid tables, delivering themselves into the hands of their tradesmen and cooks, fattening themselves in corners like hogs, destroying both their bodies and their minds. No man henceforth could indulge in the Sardinian luxury of daintiness or effeminacy. The princeling who could not stand the chomping and slobbering of honest warriors must sicken on it and die.

When the law was announced, all who opposed Lykourgos gathered in the central square of the city to wait for him. (The sun beat straight down. The three- story stone buildings of the government, with those wide sterile columns and tier on tier of marble steps, trapped the heat inside the square like oven walls. Hawks circled in the sky overhead as if riding the crests of the heat waves. At the crowd’s edges, Helots watched, loaded like animals, and hobbled donkeys waited with their eyes shut.) When Lykourgos appeared, dark and morose as a volcano, as always, they met him with no overt sign of hostility, drawing him into their snare. He came toward them, and when he had approached too near for retreat they rushed him, hurling the stones and sticks they’d hidden until then behind their backs. It was holy, and I was there, I witnessed it! He stood his ground for a moment, like a man undecided as to whether saving his life was worth the trouble, and splashes of blood appeared on his forehead, his bare shoulders, his legs. Then he laughed, a single irate snort, as if he had glimpsed for an instant the full senselessness of life, and he turned, stretching his arms out before him, and ran. His mouth gaped, his black hair flew out behind him, his feet slapped down on the pavement as if he were clowning. But he outran them — or outran all but one, a young man named Alkander. He was right on Lykourgos’s heels, and when Lykourgos turned to see who was so close, the boy swung his stick and popped Lykourgos’s left eye like a grape. Lykourgos stumbled. When he got up he was holding both hands over the eye, and blackish blood came bubbling like oil through the cracks between his fingers. Alkander stood still, terrified, no doubt, and the crowd behind him stopped too. With the one eye he had left, Lykourgos looked at the boy. Then he said, “Come with me.”