Now Proxenos began to walk and point. He wore a white cloak and heavy gold around his neck and on his fingers. He trampled over the sand without a care, as he did his polished marble halls at home over the Asopos-and the chart of Ainias disappeared beneath his boots. His newfound protector and friend Ainias did nothing. If the ragged Epaminondas was willing to crash into the red-capes for ideas and helots and freedom, well, then, it was likely because he was poor, and old and without wife or child. But why so, the hoplites wondered, was this rich man, with a deep-breasted wife and sons, and plow land above the Asopos? Why would a Plataian with a big gold ring fight for Thebes or, worse still, for things beyond Thebes? He knew well enough the answer if others did not. He had come to leave the idle rich estate owners of his Plataia, to build entire new cities rather than hang a city-gate in a backwater polis of Boiotia.
Neto, the slave girl of Melon, had drifted into the council this evening, and said she had joined the circle of Epaminondas to free her kindred helots. But she told herself that she was here to free her master Melon as well, and bring him down the mountain to fulfill the prophecy of the apple-and turn his mind from the mountain back to the world of the polis below, where men marry women if they proved to be their equals. Neto trusted that her master cared not for any women except for herself, a lowly slave from Messenia. When off Helikon, she rarely saw any need to talk of him to others, to stand near him, to worry even that slaves are more often beaten than yoked by their masters. So she would do her part for him: She would be freed by the Thespians for joining the Boiotians at Leuktra when most of the craven of the small towns would not, and the two could then be one on Helikon. Because of all that, Neto also reasoned that there was not much need even to talk to Melon, given they were as fated to be one as the Pleiades to rise or the magnet stone to find iron. After all, he was Melon, she Neto, and that was all that the two or any others needed to know. It was just that simple.
Proxenos was an architect, a wall builder, known in Thebes for his good sense and for his devotion to the logic of walls and gates. There was none more believable to deliver the oracles and signs of the gods. His father had taught him about Pythagoras, but then his father had also died seeking gold with Xenophon and the Ten Thousand in Asia. The Pythagoras of the son Proxenos taught the Hellenes that their souls were not one with their bodies, but can live on after death, in the next world where they suffer or prosper on the records that they compile here. Fail, Proxenos lectured his new friend Ainias, mar the soul with the lust for gold, women, or power, and the need to find yet another body-of an eel or snail, perhaps-to house an errant soul becomes endless.
The meeting was about over, when even this man of Pythagoras reported the wild things he had just seen that morning. If the sober Proxenos saw omens, surely most had as well. “Boiotarchs and you other leaders of the files: Listen. Today the doors of the temple of Herakles in Thebes flew open. The statue of Herakles himself stands without his armor. It has vanished. The god himself is in the field. He is calling us to follow him against his impious kin from the Peloponnesos. The virgin daughters of Skedasos are to be avenged. Yes-those who were raped long ago on the rolling hills of Leuktra by men from the south. Listen to the wails of their ghostly spirits. They will fly out to help us kill Spartans.”
Proxenos left the center and walked amid the crowd, to and fro, patting the heads and backs of the Boiotian commanders. “The spirits of these maids of Boiotia, once molested here at Leuktra by men from Sparta ten generations ago, have guided us here for revenge against their attackers from the Peloponnesos. Their ghosts hover over us tonight. Their shades shriek for our vengeance against the Spartans. Smoke of the offerings drifts in black patterns into the wind. The seers tell us the livers of their victims lack their full lobes as the gods demand vengeance. The insides of the animals are night-black with a foul stench. A few goats are without any organs at all. Some lungs stink and shrivel in the air when touched by flames.”
Proxenos raised his hands to the top of the tent, and went on. “That is only the beginning; ribbons blow off our officers’ spears and then land on the tombs of the dead to warn of more to come. The snake god at Trophonios warns the Spartans of their death. The stone statue of Athena bent over and picked up the shield sculpted at her feet.” The crowd was rapt at the rich man’s words that offered far better promises of victory than all the complex sand drawings of Ainias and big talk of Epaminondas put together.
This Proxenos was as handsome as the foreigner Ainias was ugly-and one of their own Boiotian aristocrats for relish. Who cared for the logos of Epaminondas? Who needed Ainias’s techne? Listen to the prophecy of their own Melon, a Boiotian. There were gods on Olympos. They listened not to the numbers of Pythagoras-but spoke through the omens that Proxenos, another man of Boiotia, related. “Hear me out. All the prophets sing of our Melon the Thespian. This man the oracle of Pasiphai from far-off Thalamai warned. He is the lame one-come here tonight from his high farm on Helikon. He is the one the king was warned about. This I can prove. I have talked to the priestess of Apollo on Ptoon. She too has heard the gods’ voices: “Should Melon live till tomorrow and see the face of a Spartan king, then the sons of Leonidas, they will be no more.”
Proxenos grew even quieter in speech. “Some of you have heard the rumors about the Thespian Neto, near Askra. She’s the virgin helot, the slave on Melon’s farm. She has sworn that the priestess of Trophonios, the snake-goddess of Lebadeia, promised us victory-if only the son of Malgis would fight. Ah, she is here with us now.”
Then on cue a blood-curdling shriek filled the tent. “Alalale. Alalalalaleee …” The war cry of Helikon. Tall and thin, Neto stood on a chair above the hoplites. She had sneaked off from the farm, once Melon had left with Chion and Gorgos, and had spent yet another day at Thebes with Proxenos studying the omens. Now with her hair in waves and her eyes rolling, she posed like those wild gorgons in stone, carved high on the big temples, with mouth and teeth wide open. Back on Melon’s farm, Neto had learned to sound her war cry in Boiotian, when guiding the oak plow that Chion drew-always in fear that the snorting, sweating slave would break her plowshare on the half-hidden boulders ahead. She had been born a helot but had been bought here in the north by Melon. He claimed her seller had told him that the little girl was daughter of a disgraced priestess of Pasiphai to the south. Now she was the oracle of the Thespians in the woods of Helikon. She acted no more like Melon’s slave than did Gorgos or Chion.
Then this wild Kalypso went on again, louder in man speech, winking at her master as she began. “Here is Melon. Among you Melon, son of Malgis. Don’t you see? Melon. Listen to our one God. Melon of Thespiai is chosen. Yes, yes he is the one they fear to the south. Melon will kill a Spartan king. Why? Why? He is the melon of course, the “apple” the seers say will end the Spartans.”
Now she was quite out of her steamy breath. Shaking, swaying, almost tipping off the chair, near collapse, she offered gibberish all mixed up in clumsy hexameters. One hand went up and flailed the air. The other was stabbing the breeze with her reed pipe. The hoplites had never seen anything quite like this. The sudden shouts, followed by her eerie calm voice, kept them still. All this ranting in cadence came from what looked like a slave and a woman. In Boiotian with some Messenian strains-delivered with a high pitch that cut the ears. She appeared as odd as her verse. Neto was as tall as most men, cloaked in the rough wool of a man. Her nose was a bit long. Her lips were too wide. Her ears were big enough that her long hair could never quite cover them. Yet she was pretty, perhaps even goddess-like-or so she seemed to the eyes of her master Melon, who let her roam all over Boiotia.