The fox, p.27
The Fox, page 27
“Leotychides, if a warrior points out a cavalryman who is not all he should be, he gets his horse as well as his place in the cavalry.”
“A cavalryman had ought to have a spare.” A blossom fell from a wild cherry tree. “Kallias says there is a man in his company who cannot control his mount in a charge...You are a fine rider...”
“My regiment suits me well enough.”
“Kallias says that there are always men who are good for nothing but pointing out the failings of others, but do not better themselves. I could replace one of these men when I am twenty. Kallias tells me that a weak cavalry can cost a battle.”
“Leotychides, is this all concern for the cavalry? Or do you simply like the feel of a horse under you?”
A breeze moved the branches of the olive trees that line the roadsides; not cruel Zephyros who killed Hyakinthos, but a gentle god who carries the scent of flowers through the Vale.
“It doesn’t matter. A hoplite regiment will do as well. And the armour is more splendid.”
He halted and looked me in the eye. “Then why have you been practising vaulting on horses with your spear, cavalry-fashion, since you were sixteen?”
“You saw me?”
“It would have been harder not to.”
“I’m sorry. I was not straight-spoken.”
“Nor was I.” He smiled. “I, too, have talked to Kallias.”
The sun struck the bronze of an old statue, almost hidden between the olive trees.
The first time I saw the statue of the boy with the fox, I had been disappointed. It was smaller than I anticipated. Now I saw it was a very fine work. Perhaps watching Apelleas sharpened my eye. Or was it life that honed the perceptions of the spirit?
A few of the old sculptors had known what they wanted from bronze and marble, and tried for it, although they lacked the skill. Yet their work had an intensity of feeling that penetrated its shortcomings. Once in the south, I saw a grave-marker of a youth, mourning a dead friend, which had almost brought tears to my eyes. The boy with the fox was the same sort of work. One felt his concealed pain, as he sank to the ground dying.
“Wait, Doreius. I didn’t see it properly before.”
“The boy with the fox? That always takes time.”
Chapter 10
Sikyon is a busy trading city. Like all foreigners, Sikyonians prize objects of Lakedaimonian making. We men of the Spartan garrison bartered pitchers, oil flasks, and such things for coins: to buy sweet plums, or a cup of fine Sikyonian wine in a wine shop; or a place in the upper part of the theatre, where it is carved out of the rock. Once glancing down, we saw Euagoras between two senior officers, in one of the best seats.
Army logic sent Euagoras on garrison duty, and left natural soldiers like Hekataios and Aristokrates in Lakedaimon. Yet, sometimes army logic has a rhythm of its own, and Euagoras was useful at devising games and music competitions, to keep the men occupied. Tedium was the only enemy that seriously threatened us.
I had set out with dreams of adventure and glory. I was a warrior. The day I left Sparta, my mother turned out to see our company set off. Her beautiful face was set and grave, as she told me to come back with my shield, or on it. It earned her a cheer. She had a way with crowds. After a year on garrison duty, I felt I was more likely to fall in the field of boredom, and be carried back on a discus.
All over the compound, men threw the discus or played knucklebones. I had just come off duty, and been to see Dancer (so I called the black horse). My groom was a serf from my kleiros. I did not know the fellow
– unlike my batman, who was the son of the old man who had kept vigil with me at my father’s dying bed. I wandered down to the infantry section to pass the time of day with Pityas and Apollodoros. Then I saw Praxitas, the garrison commander, drilling hoplites. Some Sikyonian troops stood idly and watched.
The garrison consisted of two regiments of heavy-armed infantry – one Spartan, one Sikyonian – and a company of Spartan cavalry. We had, as well, about one hundred and fifty Corinthian exiles; young men who opposed the union with Argos, and had come in with their weapons, asking for a place in our army. They elected a fellow of about thirty as their general.
I had no wish for my own company, having been in charge of a punishment detail. We were only fifty horse, and the talk would be of nothing else in the cavalry section this day. Pelles, the man who had been flogged, was a friend. We had danced for Apollo the same day, been enrolled in the list of warriors, and taken our horses at much the same time. He fell foul of Pasemachos, the cavalry commander, shortly after we were posted to Sikyon.
The first month, his groom let his horse lame. Pasemachos boomed at him, demanding to know why he was in a cavalry regiment at all. Poor Pelles stammered that he was here to die for Sparta.
“By the Twin Gods, you are here to make the enemy die!” Pasemachos thundered, like Zeus in Olympia.
Pelles gave his mount careful attention after that, but when he became enamoured of a hetaira in Sikyon, he began to be heedless and inattentive. Once he misunderstood an order, and earned himself a full night standing guard with his shield for disobedience.
This is humiliating; I know from experience...but that is another story. Pelles took advantage of the darkness to slip away to his mistress, and was punished by a flogging. I had rather another than I had ordered the army serfs to bind him and wield the lash.
I turned, and started back to the stables, to tell the groom that I would exercise Dancer myself, when a black-haired Corinthian stepped into my path. Ask me how I could tell him from a Sikyonian before he spoke, and I can only say that Corinthians wear their cloaks with a certain air.
Some of the exiles had arrived with only what they had on their backs, and no servant to look after them, but even the men whose cloaks were becoming shabby still sported those elegant folds. This one looked at me as though I should know him.
“Leotychides, the son of Agis.” He looked amused at my bewilderment. “You do not remember me, do you.”
As he spoke, I did. It was that he was the last man I thought to see amongst the exiles.
“I know you, Aristeas. Where is Nikomedes?”
Anger sparked his eyes. “In Corinth, with the traitors.” He linked his arm through mine, as though we had been old friends in Olympia, rather than enemies. “How long have you been there?” Most of the exiles had come in when the boundary-stones separating Corinthia from the Argolid were removed. “Since the bastards changed our feast-days to Argive feast-days. Timolaos betrayed us. It is conquest, not union. Corinthian citizenship is abolished. Well, by Zeus, I will die a Corinthian before I live an Argive!”
“So you are in accord with Alkimenes.”
“Alkimenes wastes his time with Pasimelos and his peace party.” He lowered his voice. “There has been a massacre. On the feast of Artemis. Half the peace party are slain.”
“No man would shed blood on a holy day.”
He laughed bitterly. “There is nothing our rulers would not do, if their Argive masters ordered it. I told my father – We quarrelled when I left Corinth – Being a good peace-party man, he disbelieved me.” Exiles always exaggerate, I thought. He kicked a stone. “The Argives are organizing the Isthmian Games. The Isthmia has always been Corinthian. Those Games of yours in Sparta – you don’t even let foreigners watch them...”
“The Leonidian Games.”
“What would you do if foreigners arranged them?”
“It could not happen.”
“Because you would kill them. Or die yourselves. Peace party!” He spat the words. “The only way to free Corinth is with the spear.”
“Aristeas does not use a knife when a sword will do,” Doreius said, as we walked towards the infantry section. He retained his rank of platoon leader when he took his cavalry horse. In a short time, our platoon was the best in the company.
Some hoplites threw the discus in the fading light of the sun. In front of another garrison hut, a man sang and played his lyre. It was a song of Alkman’s about the simple pleasure of making soup on the wooded slopes of Taygetos.
A number of Corinthians were also singing as we approached their section of the compound. The exiles had songs of their own making: bitter, stirring songs about their city’s rulers; defiant, stirring songs about the victory to come. News of the massacre in Corinth had spread like wildfire, and new words were being put to old melodies. One rumour had it that the survivors were on their way to Sikyon. Another had no survivors living.
A small group of Corinthians huddled together on the ground, talking in their soft, sibilant Doric. Amongst them, I recognised the black curls of Aristeas. When he saw Doreius, he leapt to his feet, and embraced him as though they were reunited brothers. I recalled how they had sat in hostile silence as Nikomedes gave me his warning in Olympia.
Aristeas motioned with his head towards his companions, who sat in front of the hut. “They have just come in. Those five.” Five! Was that the army they expected? “They were there when it happened. Come...”
It was not a pretty tale the new arrivals had to tell. The peace party had been swelling in numbers with each Argive affront. Pasimelos received frequent warnings that his life was at risk. The Feast of Artemis neared. The warnings became threats.
“Pasimelos told us to meet him outside the city walls at Kraneion, in the gymnasium, on the morning of the festival,” one of the Corinthians, a soft-spoken man in his thirties, explained. “The young men came, but our fathers and grandfathers could not credit that anyone would commit so great an impiety as to shed blood on the goddess’s festival.”
“They will be punished,” Doreius spoke with certainty.
“My friend,” the Corinthian said. “The gods move in their own time, and we must move in ours.”
Another man spoke. “We heard the screams. Outside the city walls, we heard the screams still...”
“Some men were standing in small groups, talking with friends, when they were slain.” The youngest newcomer spoke. He was no more than eighteen. “I stayed in the city with my father, you see. He holds with neither peace nor war party. We were in the theatre. My father was talking to a friend, a peace-party man. When he slumped over, my father thought it a seizure. It was I who saw the blood seeping through the back of his cloak.”
“Theatres are sacred to Dionysos,” I spoke stupidly as Pronax. “He will send them mad.”
“Can mad beasts be maddened further?” he went on. “I saw the killer running. I saw him take a dagger he had concealed in his cloak, and stab a man. Or perhaps it was another. They all had daggers hidden in their cloaks.”
“That is why they chose the festival day,” the eldest explained. “They knew we would be without weapons.”
“The theatre was all confusion. Women screaming. People scrambling over seats to get away. Slipping in blood and falling. One of the judges stood, and called out, “Stop this. You will bring a curse on Corinth.” He had a white beard. A killer plunged a blade into his throat. All the peace-party judges died. We fled from the theatre. I saw the old judge lying where he fell. His beard was soaked red. I don’t know why, but that seemed the worst of it.”
“Men were stabbed in the shrines and sanctuaries as they made their offerings,” another man said. “That is how most of the old died.”
I no longer disbelieved in the massacre. These sober men of the peace party were not hot-heads like Aristeas and Kallipides, could not have acted the depths of their quiet outrage.
The eldest man spoke again. “The men of middle years were speared, as they fled into the side-streets.”
Aristeas looked up. His hands clenched. His cheeks were wet. I doubt he knew he wept. The other exiles hid their tears in their cloaks. He forced his voice through his throat, but when he spoke it was firm. “Does my father live?”
“He came to us in the gymnasium, Aristeas. All the men who escaped the massacre came to us. We knew we would no longer be safe there, so we made a run for the Acrocorinth.” That small mountain of a citadel. “Argive troops attacked us on the way.”
“My father...” Aristeas repeated.
“He was wounded.”
“What is the name of the man who shed his blood?”
“It was an Argive, Aristeas. His wound is not grave.”
“Then where is he?” Aristeas demanded. “Where are the others?”
“We crossed into Sikyonia, before we stopped to rest for the night. In the morning, our mothers and sisters arrived. Timolaos sent them, to persuade us to come back.”
I wondered at the stupidity of these women. Doreius told me later that foreign women are kept close and know nothing.
“I should think Timolaos would be glad to see you gone,” Doreius said.
“The best men of the city were with us. They would have made it known, in every corner of Hellas, that Corinth wants no union with Argos.”
“And not before time.” The fire was back in Aristeas’s eyes.
“Timolaos and his underlings swore solemn oaths that Corinth’s constitution will be restored. Pasimelos put it to a vote. They voted to return to Corinth. But we have little trust in the vows of men who desecrate a day sacred to a god. We think it a trap baited.”
I glanced at Aristeas, and thought of a day when I stood in the barracks quarter of Sparta, searching faces. Surely there was a question in his mind that pride and anger forbade him to ask. If Doreius – but in Sparta, such things did not happen to come between friend and friend, father and son, brother and brother. It was simpler to be Spartan than Corinthian. I put the unvoiced question for Aristeas. I asked about the safety of my friend Nikomedes.
“Nikomedes the boxer?” someone passed the wineskin again. “He is training for the Games.”
Aristeas was alert. “What Games?”
This time there was a false note in the reply, but the evasion was kindly intended. “The Pythian Games. The next Olympiade. Who knows? Nikomedes is always training.”
Doreius stood on the high fortifications, looking down into the compound, a strong autumn wind whipping his hair about his face. I climbed up to join him. In the infantry section, Praxitas looked on while both hoplite regiments drilled.
He kept the Sikyonians turned away from the Spartan regiment, as it practised that movement that allows men to fight and regroup simultaneously. Something that foreigners are not intended to study.
The Sikyonians responded smartly to the commands of their officer. Directly below us were the ragged columns of the exiles. They were, for the most part, well-born young men like Aristeas, who knew nothing of hoplite drill. In foreign cities, where citizens are divided into men of good family and those of common origin, the well-born are cavalrymen. They had come to Sikyon with cavalry armour, soft leather cavalry boots, and cavalry weapons.
“Will those Corinthians never learn to keep in step?” Doreius watched them. “With allies like that, it is a wonder we won the Athenian war.”
“They show enthusiasm.”
A sudden cloudburst sent the Sikyonians scurrying to their huts. The Corinthians, like the Spartans, continued exercising.
“Discipline would serve them better.” Something in the distance caught his attention.
A sentry halted two figures. Doreius eased.
“Are you on duty, Doreius, or hiding from Pasemachos?”
A man stood guard with his shield. “I am to see that he doesn’t move a muscle.”
“Is it the fellow in Maro’s platoon, whose horse shied on parade?”
“It is Maro,” he replied.
We stayed in the battlements until the sun had sunk, releasing Maro, who walked off with stiffened gait. Then we started down and collided with Euagoras, who was on his way up. He held a letter in his hand. The scroll meant news of Sparta; each commonplace like a piece of red-brown Lakonian earth.
“Old Chairon...” The wind carried the rest of his words away.
“Has paid his unmarried man’s fine for the twentieth year.” Doreius finished for him.
Euagoras caught his breath. “Better than that. He has become enamoured of a maiden.”
“Then he’d best marry her quickly, before he’s fined for marrying too old,” Doreius said.
“She refuses to have him. She says if it is unlawful for a man to marry for wealth, it is dishonourable for a woman to do the same.”
Doreius approved her sentiments. Euagoras ran on. “And Konon is rebuilding the Long Walls of Athens, with the gold Pharnabazos gave him.”
Doreius stared at him in disbelief.
“That being, in your estimation, of less importance than Chairon’s troubles.”
“Perhaps in Chairon’s, too, Leotychides. Oh, I nearly forgot. Praxitas wants to see you. Immediately. It was an order.”
The polemarch was an iron-faced man in his middle years. He bore a resemblance to Pasemachos that was in no way physical. Pasemachos was lean. The cavalry commander had a full head of greying brown hair. Praxitas was pale red and thinning. Yet they were men of a stamp.
Both had risen, slowly and steadily, by merit. If Pasemachos was still but a pentatarchos, a commander of fifty, it was because the cavalry is a very small part of the Spartan army, and there were far more good men than promotions.
Praxitas was seated at a table in his hut. Two oil lamps flared in their standards. Senior officers were with him; a strategos and a lochagos. And two Corinthians. Their accents named them. Damp soaked the elegant folds from their cloaks. The autumn rains had started, but there were none today.
They were telling very much the same story that I heard from Aristeas’s companions. I started forward to report to the polemarch. A lochagos halted me in the shadows. Army servants brought wine and dry cloaks for the Corinthians. They stood to change. One was Alkimenes. The lochagos silenced me. When I heard the other man addressed as Pasimelos, I studied him carefully.
