The End of Sparta by Victor Davis Hanson Page B

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, Mêlon 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 Mêlon 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, Mêlon 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 Messenê, 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