Authors: Victor Davis Hanson
Despite the crusty surface, Gastêr had painted over the faded colors its new name, meaning “Sacred Mission,” on its bow in a fancy block script. Now he and Ephoros sat onboard while the crew foraged, waiting until their bodyguard Chiôn appeared from Plataia with Mêlon’s money for Nêto and some bonus coins for Gastêr. Finally before sunrise, the porters brought in bread and water. Gastêr barked out orders. The crew lined up and began counting off. He sent the bottom rowers, thalamians, to the lower benches first. Maybe forty or so climbed in. Then another forty of the zygians. These were the middle rowers squeezed in on top of the lower set. Much later the elite thranites sat up on top, thirty at most who had some oaring in their past, or who had paid Gastêr the most coin. Ten hoplites, swearing in their Messenian Doric, carried on their gear and were sitting flat on the outrigging, arms out to roll with the swells that came in, even at dock. Most below were soon pushing each other. They fell on the slippery planks and fought over their rowing pads, blaming each other for the farting and smell.
Gastêr yelled as he balanced on the top deck. “Alkidama, it’s a small ship, not a fleet trireme. With you fatties up here and these heavy breastplate boys, we’ll have a slow go out against the wind this morning. Can’t any of you slobber-mouths row, or is it to be talk all the way out the gulf? Cold, are you? I’m sweating and need a breeze.” Alkidamas had never been on a trireme, and only once on a rolling ferry boat to Aegina. When he and Ephoros lumbered on top with the
epibatai
, the entire boat nearly keeled over.
“Careful, clumsy fools.” Gastêr came up and slapped them down. “Sit with your knees crossed and don’t move. Do you want to beach us before we leave the dock? A ship’s not a dance floor. Hoa. Look over there at who’s coming. He’s late. If that’s your big man, O Alkidama. We have to put that slave—or is he a freedman now?—somewhere. I was hoping we’d swish out before he came.”
No one had heard the bellowing of the approaching stranger. Now Chiôn was upon them, at the beach waving a torch with his good right hand, and then running up the plank out of breath. He seemed clumsy without two good arms, more so than Gastêr, and he stumbled as he approached, but he had a huge iron sword strapped to his back and a travel sack hanging from the leather belt. Finally he coughed out his story on deck—and more than his usual word or two. “I came, Alkidama. On the third day as promised from last we met at Thespiai. I made my Marathon, running the whole way. All the way, from the army camp on Kithairon, all the way and with Mêlon’s money. But Nêto—she’s been taken from the helots in the south, or so that Nikôn says. Into the hands of the Spartans, into the jail of Kuniskos with a ransom on her head. For Nêto, I ran. I saw Mêlon, outside Plataia. He let me take his money I pulled out of his well. Here, take it.” Chiôn threw down the sack of silver and collapsed on the deck, his cloak wet and his breathing heavy. “Oar. Where’s an oar? Give me a butt pad. I’ll row. Where’s the captain? I will watch him as promised.”
“Right here, one arm, right here. So you decided to come after all.” Gastêr laughed at the idea of a clumsy crippled freedman pulling, and instead turned to his drummer and pointed to the sea. “Hey you,
Keleuste
, hit your drum. A beat, one not too fast. I’ll take us right up the middle of the gulf and then out westward.” Then Gastêr broke off a half-loaf and handed it to Chiôn. “How do you like your one arm, brand face?”
“Like this.” Chiôn jumped up, grabbed Gastêr’s chin beard, and pulled the enormous man down to the deck. He would have torn off his scraggly whiskers had not Alkidamas waved him off. Chiôn had already tired of Gastēr’s brag and let him up slowly with a warning, “I came to watch you, fat man. Trick us, or talk like tricking us, and I’ll throw your head overboard. I would rather run to Messenia, so if I have to bleed you, it’s better for me anyway.”
Gastêr gave Chiôn ten feet of room for the rest of the voyage and turned his back to him when he yelled. And with that, the
Theôris
at last went out into the black gulf to the sound of beating and fell heavy into the surf, bound due west out of the great gulf of Korinthos toward the sea of Sikily five hundred stadia away. For all the weight of the hoplites and the short crew and the leaky hull, this
Sacred Mission
made good headway over the black waves as the rowers began to chant and sing, happy returnees now on their last leg to Holy Messenia. Like the wings of some old bird of the sea that limbers up when it leaves the shore, the oars of the
Theôris
dipped and swung outward as the boat picked up speed through the gulf.
Gastêr was calling out over the sea’s roar to Alkidamas. “I like this ship, Alkidama, like it a lot. Built with good seasoned fir from Makedon. Better than what they slap together these days. It has Phormio’s smell all over it. Let’s sell it in Koronê and split the coins. Or don’t you want to give me a little extra for getting it here in one piece?”
Alkidamas ignored him, deep in thinking how best to find Nêto and deal with Gorgos, if Nikôn were right that he was the kidnapper.
All the oars were the same length, but only half the helots hit the waves in unison—even though they pulled from different banks. Too many of these beginners fouled their wood. The oars echoed as they hit each other. “So we row, Chiôn,” Alkidamas patted the freedman as the two sat up. Then he went himself to a top bench below the outrigging and began to pull in front of the slave. “You came as promised, as you always do, Chiôn. As for this new report, don’t worry, we will save our Nêto yet—if as you think your Nikôn is true in his messages, and Nêto still lives and if she can be bartered for in the house of our Kuniskos at Ithômê, wherever that is. A helot like Nikôn does not run a thousand stadia into Boiotia for nothing.”
Chiôn nodded. He had not told Mêlon at the camp the prior night that he had met Alkidamas in Thespiai on the day Mêlon left for Thebes, and had been promised passage on his ship. That this Nikôn showed up on Helikon just before Chiôn’s planned meet-up with Alkidamas made it even easier to go south. Indeed, Damô had told him to rescue Nêto and to hurry with money to Aigosthena, and to draw on the wisdom of Alkidamas. Chiôn fell into his new pulling. He had given the horse to Myron, and covered a hundred stadia on foot over the mountain from Plataia to the shore, all that late day and night, and reached the ship well before dawn as promised. But he could not sleep. Not yet, not with the chance that Nikôn spoke truly, and that Nêto was caught in the hands of Gorgos. So he was still yanking on the oar with his good right arm until the sun came out, when all could see Helikon on their right and off in the distance Parnassos and the waters not far from Kirrha, as the
Theôris
continued westward out of the gulf. He pulled for Nêto.
This rowing was far easier than pressing the lever of the olive-crushing stone on Helikon. These waves gave way to his strength in a way the stone smasher never did. Even with the sunrise, the hoplites were asleep on the outrigging, but just one or two were waking to the gentle surge of the ship. Chiôn could see tall forests close by on the northern shore of the gulf—good places for a man to live in the wild over there, with plenty to kill to eat. Soon the winter morning sun finally came out full, cold and bright. The sea calmed. Gastêr turned into the light wind a little more and in caution began to hug the coast of Boiotia. “A good night and a calmer morning, and already halfway out. We soon make a sharp turn out of the gulf at the mouth and catch the tail wind to Messenia.”
Then something on the horizon caught his eye, and he turned to his tiller. “Hard to the coast! Turn full into Boreas. Take in the wind at our faces. Head right to Boiotia. Look at them, damned Korinthians. Six at least. Not pirates. But warships, faster than ours—and in Spartan pay. They’re pulling our way from all sides. Look, look at them, all good long ships with full crews. Right, right, we go right. Head for the north shore. Cut into the wind. Outrun them. To holy Delphi. Pray to Apollo. Row to the peaks of Parnassos. Ten hecatombs to Poseidon for our safety.”
The
Theôris
made a hard turn and had a lead of twenty lengths, and maybe five more. Ephoros in his trance about the great march kept on writing on the outrigging. But despite a sudden haze on the water and the morning glare, Chiôn already could see on the shore Phokians watching their race. The six triremes behind were closing the distance. Would they catch the
Theôris
before shore? Gastêr went up and down the top deck, grabbed the backs of the necks of the hoplites, and pushed them onto the top benches right below. He took their breastplates and shields and began tossing them over the side.
“Row, fools. You down there, hand them up spare oars. All of you row. Row you boy-butt Ephoros and white-head Alkidamas. Row
proktoi
or you won’t have any scrolls left to write on. Give me an oar and I’ll balance out your slave. Between Chiôn and me, we one-arms will have two arms still, a good left and right each.” The
epibatai
climbed down among the
thranitai
and pulled with the rest. Ever so slowly the
Theôris
surged toward land on the northern shore of the gulf. There was a mob already forming at Kirrha, the port of Delphi, all waving for the helot ship to speed up. About a hundred or so rushed into the surf. These were Phokians who hated the men of the Peloponnesos somewhat more than they hated the Thebans—and they had been paid to harbor Boiotian ships if they came to shore in need. Some bent on one knee with shields and spears, waiting for the Korinthians to beach. Bowmen took aim to pick off the Korinthians if they neared the
Theôris
. Suddenly the pursuers veered off, about three stadia from shore.
The crowd waved in the
Theôris
that slid onto the shore. The helots climbed out and dragged the boat out of the water. They stacked their oars against the keel. Gastêr had them carry their food up the path to the crowd that swarmed them, hawking dry cloaks and for a few drachmas offering them wood for campfires. “Look.
Ide, philoi mou, ide,
” Gastêr yelled as he turned back to the sea. Another four triremes were joining the six, even as the friendly shore crowd of gawkers swelled and more Phokians came up in arms. Ten enemy ships were circling well out of bowshot, crisscrossing the rising early-morning whitecaps to keep the
Theôris
beached and off the gulf, as they relayed in and out from the bay far away at Perachora.
Phrynê had sent Lichas the time and route of Alkidamas. And in turn Lichas had sent the Korinthians money. In return the Korinthian captains promised to keep ships from the northern shore from leaving the gulf. When the wind died, those on the shore could hear the taunts of the enemy rowers over the morning surf. “Cowards. Wide-butts, come out to fight. We’ll kill you for sport. We kill you still.” Gastêr laughed and yelled back to the trireme that darted parallel to the coast. “Whoa. Maybe so. But we’re dry and on ground. You Korinthians. You can stay out there until you freeze. Drink your bilge.”
Then he turned to Alkidamas. “Well, man, we made it halfway, almost. Though I bet we could have hiked as fast on land as we made by the oars. This may be the end of our voyage, if these damned Korinthians decide to patrol in turn, five or so at sea, five or so replaced by fresh ships from over there to the south on the Peloponnesos. For now, we stay put here. We eat—until our Poseidon gives us a winter storm that sinks them. Remember I get paid whether you walk or ride the waves the rest of the way.”
Alkidamas tried to reply over the roar of the surf. “Yes, safe for now—but trapped and still far from Ithômê.”
CHAPTER 24
The two women had better sense than to board a winter trireme when Alkidamas had talked grandly of one day taking a boatload of free helots into Messenia to craft a constitution. Instead, months earlier, when Gastêr was still mending the
Theôris
, Erinna and Nêto had crossed the Isthmos as easily as the philosopher and the historian had later not even made it out of the gulf.
But once inside Spartan-held Messenia, Nêto saw that she should have listened to her hide-clad Erinna, who had known the woods and the mind of those like Kuniskos. For all Nêto’s talk of helots and Messenia and the visions of Nikôn, it turned out she understood very little about life in the south, or indeed life outside the protection of the farm of the Malgidai—and nothing about how to live in the wilds of Ithômê. The priestesses of Artemis had offered their precinct to Nêto; but she too often was forced to sleep in the light rains and snow of the forests, given the constant Spartan patrols that crisscrossed Messenia on orders of Lord Kuniskos. It seemed odd to Nêto that the Athenian Erinna, with no trace of Messenian in her speech, might have turned out to be the better friend to the revolt. Or not so odd, since the poetess had lived up on the mountains of Parnes and Hymettos and knew more of the wilds, how to live on the red berries, skin the rabbit, and drink the cleaner brook water, than did even the helots themselves—and how to put an arrow in a mountain thief and yet be five stadia away in the brush by the time his gang found the dying corpse.
When Nikôn’s party finally had climbed over the summit of Taygetos and crossed the borders in the late summer, Erinna went straight up to the highlands along the long spine of Ithômê. Her new spot was not far from the holy ground of wild Artemis Laphria and its priestesses of the sanctuary in their hunting garb. Erinna sang out to Nêto that the two were finally in holy Messenia and at last insurgents in the war against the Spartans that they so long had advocated from a distance. “Stay here where you are safe, Nêto. We are not like foolish men. They blindly walk by the food that can feed us—greens and herbs and berries under their noses. They stalk the bear and deer and are blind as bats to the rabbits and birds that fall into my snares. Up here learn to eat meat again. Pythagoras will forgive the eating of meat for the greater good of Messenia. Take in the peaks around Ithômê. Relearn your Doric tongue. Then, and only then, go down to raid the Spartans below. We cannot yet meet their hoplites in battle, and must kill them at night or through ambushes in the woods—where a stealthy woman can fare better than these loud helot men.”
But Nêto was driven and would have none of it. “I walked a thousand stadia to fight, Erinna. Not paw the backsides and fondle the
titthoi
of your girls. There’s not a
krypt
that can outrun me. Ask Nikôn who knows these helot-killing Spartan patrols. We will go in packs and swarm the Spartans, even on the daylight roads if need be.”
“But Spartan hoplites, Nêto, still control the lowlands, far better men than your friend’s ragtag tribe of insurgents. Better to organize up here until all the Messenians have armor and a good general to storm the fort of Kuniskos—otherwise you will end up either tossed into the Kaiadas or nailed up on one of Kuniskos’s poles.” With that Erinna turned and headed to the far side of Ithômê with Nikôn, while Nêto descended to the sanctuary of Artemis below to meet the priestesses.
At the small hamlet of Aitos, there in the woods Erinna set to organizing her school—to teach the orphaned helot girls the rhetoric of Isokrates and the way of Pythagoras, and for relish the poetry of her dear Sappho and the Boiotian Korinna, and as a treat Pindar as well. She would take her rhapsodists up to Olympia and then down to Pylos and thereby learn the news of Antikrates and his new henchman Kuniskos. If Alkidamas were to bring in his Athenian-raised helots to teach the liberated Messenians of good government, she would do better still and ensure that they had tragedy and lyric and epic poetry as well. Erinna’s new Messenê would not merely be Proxenos’s walled citadel forever safe from Sparta, but a polis of the Muses as well—a new Athens that would ascend in the Peloponnesos as the old one in Attika faded away.
On a rocky face on the backside of the ridges behind Ithômê above a deep gorge, she pitched at first an oiled leather tent. Then word got out that the strange Athenian had silver owls. Soon the rustics were on their way up to sell her pans and shovels and anything bronze or iron they could steal from the Spartans. After Nikôn had left her to return to camp on the saddle of Ithômê, Erinna had set about with ten or so women, mixing clays and drying them into bricks in the late-summer sun. Then with a donkey and cart they carried in stones for the floor and built the school as a fortified compound. At night they were taught by Erinna to sing and memorize the words of the lyric and melic poets—before going on to Homer, in reverse fashion of the way the rhapsodists did it at Athens. By the end of the fourth month, their baked tiles were on the roof, held up by stout mud-brick walls whitewashed inside and out, with a good stone floor within. The girls were singing the new war song of Epaminondas on wooden benches in her schoolhouse—still more worship of the man she had seen only once. Erinna had put targets—old Spartan helmets that the helots brought her for barter—on rock outcroppings outside the courtyard, so that her helot girls could learn the bow, and how to put an arrow in an eye-slit at fifty paces. She had them wrestling and lifting small stones, so that their arms were as hard as Erinna’s. Most wore small daggers in scabbards that were cinched over their breasts, and their teacher showed them how to seduce a Spartan as they put a blade in his backside. Erinna gave them all felt
piloi
, cone-shaped hats, with long red feathers tucked at the sides.
These were to be her
peripoloi
, her own rangers in brown felt and green cloaks who chanted their songs and yet could still kill as they sang. Her rangers would come down to lead the Messenians both to victory and to the Muses. No one got within ten stadia of her outpost without the entire school up in the trees and amid the rocks with their bows. But soon this upland sanctuary of Erinna—there was a spring here as well as terraced fields of barley and grain—was doubling as a camp, housing helots of the highlands on their way to Nêto and the sacred precinct of the other lowland Artemis below. Some nights a hundred and more helots came in through the thickets for the water and food and shelter in winter. Poor Nêto. Erinna knew more of her danger up here through these spies than Nêto herself knew down below.
She wrote just that and often in letters like this.
Erinna to Nêto. Listen. You learn from me.
They know you, Nêto. Spartans do. Antikrates and Kuniskos himself. They follow you. You and the priestesses at the low temple in the marshes are easy game. Targets for that helot traitor. His packs of Spartan killers hunt you. He knows the paths of your helots. So come up here for a spell, out of sight. Here you will be in school, safe with my girls. The Spartans fear to come up our slopes, fear the wild and the wolves. Be in good spirits. Erinna of Ithômê.
From this new mud-brick school Erinna sent down agents to Nêto, who returned each evening from her to the safety of the sanctuary. Always Erinna’s helots went back up to her with stories of the revolt, of Spartan killing, and of a countryside in rebellion—waiting for news of the great army of Epaminondas and the Boiotians’ promised turn to the west, as had been ordained for the first month of the year, Theban Boukatios. The helots sang that this Boiotian first month would see the Thebans finally on Ithômê and their Spartan taskmasters gone. Meanwhile in the days of waiting from the first of the year, they kept killing Spartans in ambushes. They hid their wine and grain from the food collectors of Sparta and in threes and fours left the farms to hide in the highlands.
These helot marauders—maybe five thousand were loose, a thousand or more with Nêto and Nikôn—were fed and kept safe by the temple priestesses, in the shrines and sanctuaries from Pylos up to the falls of the Alpheios. Each night the holy women sheltered the helot Spartan hunters, ever hot after Antikrates and his killer henchman known as Puppy Dog. Meanwhile Erinna far above had taught the girls at her school that the prophecy was nearly fulfilled—the apple would fall again, and seven myriads of hoplites would sweep down from the mountains of Taygetos, all led by her Epaminondas, and Mêlon, and the blood-crazed Chiôn, all taught by Alkidamas and the deadly Ainias and the great-hearted Proxenos. Soon these names were in songs and chanted by the girls as they went back down to the markets of the Messenians.
Below, Nêto was seeing visions almost nightly of Epaminondas on the pass in Sparta. There he was addressing his men, staring down at Lakonia with seventy thousand soldiers at his back. Eight or ten days after the winter solstice, runaways from Lakonia came over Taygetos with more stories like Nêto’s dream warning that a tide of grasshoppers would some winter day sweep over the passes north of Sparta, stripping everything in its path, and on the way south growing larger still. So Nêto, convinced that Mêlon and the army would be in Messenia within the month, took more risks, attacking with Nikôn’s men the Spartans in broad day, and closer always to the Spartan base at the foot of Ithômê.
Finally as the days neared to the middle of Theban Boukatios more rumors spread over Taygetos with the high shepherds that the Thebans had already left Boiotia, determined to reach Lakonia before the new year. They might even have reached Mantineia. There they would join Lykomedes to burn all the farms and towers of the Spartans, turning their whitewashed homes black with soot. Soon Spartans, either in fear of the Boiotians to come or answering the call of King Agesilaos to hurry home to defend the city from Epaminondas, began leaving Messenia, swarming the short high road atop Taygetos. A few Spartans left behind in Messenia stayed in their compound under orders from Antikrates; otherwise they would be ambushed by the growing mob of helot fighters who fought at night and from thickets, and with missiles and arrows, rather than lining up in the phalanx. The Spartan rearguard under Antikrates had built a final redoubt, a log stockade on the spur of Eva on a lower hill beside Ithômê. It had a timber wall, two men high, with half a thousand Spartan hoplites trapped inside who could not stomach the notion that helots had driven them out of their Messenia.
Their captain was the renegade Kuniskos. Even in the twilight of Spartan power, he sallied out at night with two hundred horsemen to burn and level the helot hamlets on the northern borders, before riding in at dawn to hunker down at his compound. Finally even Antikrates had fled back to Sparta to join his king. He had left Messenia to his helot Kuniskos because the black soil, he knew, was lost, and his Spartans were to be better used defending their women in Lakonia in the battle to come. “Leave Antikrates,” Kuniskos told him, “leave and let the real lord of Messenia at last be the better Spartan that he always was. For you, Messenia has fallen and so is better abandoned; but for me it is rising—at last in the hands of a child of its soil, a man better than both the whipped helots and the Spartans who lashed them.”
Then Erinna heard no more about Nêto and her band of raiders. Had she disappeared? Even Nikôn had lost her. The temple of Artemis of the lowlands was razed and the priestesses scattered or killed—or sent to the gorge on Taygetos. Nêto might be dead or worse. Kuniskos had warned the helots that he would never flee like Antikrates had. Not he, the last good helot, who would kill all on sight who were not in the fields weeding the barley and wheat—would kill and kill before his stockade was overwhelmed. Even on Ithômê, Erinna heard reports of these final boasts from the last of the helots, all the bolder as his last band shrank and his enemies increased.
A
phoinix,
that was what Kuniskos proclaimed he would be, the war bird that would rise up on the ashes of Sparta to rule over Messenia himself, with his die-hard last
lochos
of Spartans, as lord of the Helots. If his compound were stormed, Kuniskos boasted, he would flee, but not to Sparta. No, if he must leave for a time, Kuniskos would go up to high Taygetos. “I, Lord Kuniskos,” he would rail in his drunken fits to his retainers, “I will ride back down in triumph once these Messenians one day beg me to rule them again. Who else would put an end to this looting and raping—this mad idea that unlettered serfs could ever be democrats?”
It was Nikôn who brought word that Nêto was now five days a captive with Kuniskos—with an offer of a ransom. “No surprise that these Spartan gold-lovers wish to be bought off. He knows there is silver on Helikon, so he won’t kill her just yet. He wants ransom and perhaps more. Klôpis his henchman left a scroll at the first column of the ruined Artemision, and my Hêlos read it and told me the threat of Kuniskos:
“You robbers of Messenia—listen! The rebel Nêto, she remains inside the fort of Lord Kuniskos, first man of Spartan Messenia. He says to the rebels and to the Malgidai in the north to fetch her with their silver. A talent wins her freedom, but only before the northerners come over Taygetos. If no silver, no Nêto and she dines in the Kaiadas.”
Nikôn was desperate now, trying to get Erinna to bring her girls down the hill. “Get all these holdouts under Ithômê to collect silver to keep her alive. But better still, tell me, woman—how goes the road to Helikon in the far north? Which way? How many days away is this farm of Mêlon, the home of our Nêtikê? Those she left behind have money. So I run, Erinna, to the north and to this Helikon across the gulf. Maybe in ten days I am on this Helikon and then back on Ithômê with money for Nêto—if she lives, if she lives. Ten days, no more. I run hundred stadia, maybe more, each day. Maybe I’ll know the way, at least from the dreams that come at night.”