The End of Sparta by Victor Davis Hanson Page A

the right dirt, the perfect elevation, the type of water, and so Malgis thought it wasn’t just the arbors that made his vintage. Good wine needed sparse soil. Grapes liked just a little water. Crisp mornings were good for color. A cold nip at night gave taste, as did the hot sun on the leaves of the vine. Vineyards would be planted above the wheat and below the olives.
    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 Mêlon 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, Mêlon 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 Chiôn, who was determined not to return as a sparrow or snake, but to free his soul forever with deeds he deemed good. And yet Mêlon 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 Mêlon 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.
    Mêlon 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 Mêlon 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 Mêlon 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. Mêlon 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