The End of Sparta by Victor Davis Hanson

fields on the rich black soil, the wine vines higher up to catch the cooler breezes, olives on the poor rocky soils atop, each crop suited for each step higher up the mountain, no soil idle, no change in temperature or wind wasted. The harvests were serial, as the clan moved through the year from grain to vines to olives—the Malgidai busy always, slack in their labor never. No ice storm could kill their triad, as the harvests of the diverse crops and their leaf-break dates were never the same. A spring frost hurt the grapes, but not the barley—in the way a fall rain cracked open the grapes, but did nothing to the unripe olives. And the farm was the goddess Amalthea’s horn of plenty, as Malgis called it: olive oil for the light in the clan’s lamps and for cooking on the stoves, or even to lubricate the wagon’s axle; grapes for raisins all winter, for fresh fruit in summer, for wine all year round; barley and wheat for their bread and gruel. Who needed anything more? Only war could stop the farm—by sending in Spartans to burn their wheat or trample their vines, or, worse yet, letting the foul Kêres harvest the farm’s harvesters.
    Walk into the orchards and vineyards anywhere on the slope, and the symmetry brought forth the voice of Pythagoras. On the farms of others, chaos reigned as three vines encircled a crooked row of four olives, or goat pens were plopped down amid apples. No order in the farms of others—and no reminders of the perfect world that we all must strive to glimpse and at some point enter. Malgis, the creator, told his son that in matters of great things, such as this carving out of an entire estate from the flank of Helikon, men tend to look only at the finish. The envious never remember the hard beginning or even the worse middle of doubt and remorse. Instead, without shame onlookers come to covet what they used to mock. “I can see them below from here, and that’s close enough for me. Soon the Spartans will turn on them, and they will climb up here looking for our spear arms.” Malgis taught the household to distrust the superstitious majority and to join it only when it acted in according to the precepts of Pythagoras—in other words, rarely at all. Even though the son Mêlon doubted that creed, he kept to his father’s admonitions to shun the crowd and keep it away—and earned both the advantages from the ensuing tranquility of solitude and the dark moods that resulted from thoughts and suppositions untested and unquestioned that grow unchecked by others.
    Freedom—Malgis added in his daily sermons to his son Mêlon—wars with equality. Always. The fathers of the polis had once marked out the grid of bottomland farms. Originally they were all equally sized and portioned out to the hoplite farmer citizens of equal wealth. Within a generation those belonging to the luckier, or better, farmers were larger, while some of the poorer or unfortunate farmers lost their portions altogether. Mêlon still dreamed on this early morning before Leuktra that his father had warned him of those who demand equal slots in both the end and the beginning: Beware of the phalanx, the agrarian grid, and the assembly hall, where all are declared to be equal who in fact are not. So beware of those in the phalanx who look equal but do not protect their position as do others. They can kill you.
    The farm craft of Malgis gave the vines’ canes, high up and long in the air, the full sun for the entire day. That was why his grapes made the sweetest wine on Helikon. Malgis got the idea of the arbors from a farmer outside Syracuse he met who read and wrote block letters on long scrolls. “The sun makes the grapes, and the grapes the wine,” this Sikilian Lysis told Malgis. He showed him charts and graphs, and when he returned home to Thespiai, Malgis translated all those lines and letters into plethra of arbors and pergolas, roofed with grape canes twenty feet long and more. But then Lysis also had lectured on