At last they rested beneath the shiny Phaidriades cliffs, not far from the ravine at the spring of Kastalia, happy to spend their last night together in the nearby tavern beneath the upper sanctuary of Apollo. In the morning the four headed down the Boiotian road with an escort of Phokians who were eager to hear of the victories in the south as the wage of their escort-and who pressed them for news of booty and more to be had. Rumors had already reached them that the army of Epaminondas would come up from the Isthmos in a new moon with wagons of Spartan plunder and gold from the Messenians. Ephoros and Alkidamas were to go on to Athens. Ainias would accompany the two as far as the shadows of Kithairon and take the fork off to Plataia and the farm of Proxenos. So Melon would be the first to part in the evening at Helikon, whose looming silhouette brooded on their right. Finally at dusk the four came to the crossroad that led on to Askra and Thespiai. The wheat of the upper fields was about milk ripe, not quite in full ear-just as Epaminondas had promised the previous winter when he assured the men they would be home from Ithome for high harvest in Boiotia. The other three said little at their parting, for Ainias wished to see Arete of the yellow hair, the widow of Proxenos, by nightfall. He had at last bathed as promised in the icy Mornos above Naupaktos, and then shaved at the inn below Parnassos. Each in Boiotia and beyond would now talk up the virtues of Epaminondas and ready the countryside for his return.
Ainias knew that he always would be a mere day’s walk from the farm of Malgis and that he and Melon were yoked as the twin oxen team who, for all their grunts, would still once more, side-by-side, willingly pull the hard plow of Epaminondas. Ephoros and Alkidamas were anxious as well to get to Thebes by dark. Ephoros had to meet two Athenian scribes and was ready to dictate from his dirty scrolls all that he could remember and all that Alkidamas could relate of the great march to the south. He was soiled with mud on his chiton and his cloak was thick with burrs. The writer wanted a long bath to wash and pleat his hair and get the road stink off before he took a carriage over Kithairon to his salon at Athens, the lone brave voice to take on Platon and his friends on behalf of Epaminondas. The great adventure that had begun so long ago with a marching into the spears of Kleombrotos at Leuktra ended quietly in the spring sunshine a few stadia away. Alkidamas told the Thespian, “I wish you would come to Athens to hear my speech on the liberation of the Messenians. I could use a strong arm since I have no friends at Athens and I hear a number of enemies would like this head off its shoulders. Their democracy is much more of a free-for-all than anything at our Thebes.”
“No, not Athens,” Melon laughed, “I would rather go back to Sparta than that. So good-bye to you three and farewell. I will see you at our trial. Don’t listen to the signs of your doom this year, Alkidama. I wager you will die in your sleep in your eighth decade.” Melon slowly made his way up the winding road to the flanks of Helikon. He was alone, just as he had begun on that cold day five months earlier when he had made the long detour to the monument of Epaminondas on his way to the great debate at Thebes. And Neto? He had left her somewhere at Ithome, lost in the forests above the schoolhouse of Erinna. He should have stayed, even if he had sensed that she could see him through the glens and glades and would not come out and not come home.
He recoiled at the thought of the disorder of the farm. Would it be worse than the mess that he left when he had loitered in town with Phryne? Of course, it must. After his half-year of neglect, there would be chaos-the weeds choking the fields, mud clogging the great drain. Perhaps the stones of Chion’s walls fallen to the ground. The worst of it? There would not be even a one-armed Chion to make right what would take other lesser men years to finish. The three boys of his dead Lophis had only the half-wit Myron to guide them. Damo was twice-widowed now with a young son. She would be locked in the tower as before, now with two husbands to mourn-and, with her young Chionikos, now four children to raise. The tower’s roof probably leaked and its whiteness had probably long since peeled off. In her frenzy, Damo would blurt out the cold voice of reason: Why die for helots far to the south? Still, Melon remembered that there was at least no more Dirke. No more Thrattos or Medios, or Hippias or maybe others like Hipponichos, who had coveted the farm of the Malgidai or even plotted it harm. The final rage from the outlaw Chion had settled those accounts. He had played Zeus on Olympos-as Melon had feared both Chion and Gorgos might have if they had been freed-meting out final justice to any of those he thought had lived far too long.
Melon felt how hard the great ideas of Epaminondas, noble as they were, had fallen on the household of Malgis. He wondered what he would do as he aged, with the bad leg and without the arms of Chion, or even the bitter obedience of Gorgos-and with the pipe-playing of his Neto a distant memory. A wretched farmer without son or a wife finally grows decrepit by the tiny fire and alone ends in hunger on the floor, without the energy to fetch even a light twig for the last flame. Melon half-expected to meet around the next turn of the road the Spartan Antikrates in his armor and tall crest to take a life for the life of Lichas. Or maybe Dirke’s satyrs and centaurs had come down from the high slopes of Helikon and overrun his vineyard, as it went back to the wild savagery of the strawberry trees in his absence, as in the days before Malgis had cut it out from Helikon. Or would the ghost of the hag herself float up with tears and rents on her chest and arms, howling at the night for the knife work of Chion? Nothing is worse for a wayfaring farmer than that last day before home when the mind conjures up thoughts of ruin and mayhem of the long absence.
But none of this proved so. One hundred fifty days and more had it been since the army had left Sparta to march into Ithome. On each, it was Myron, freed at Leuktra, who had stomped about with manure between his toes, and earned the scars and cuts from the slapping canes as he tied the pruned vines back onto the trellises and lifted the stones back onto the walls after the hard rains. In the evenings as soon as the winter freezes ceased, Myron had begun whitewashing the tower, perched on a long ladder, but bending his neck often backward, always toward the south and east to catch at least a glimpse of the homeward trek of the Boiotians. So in the last months the farm, it turned out, had improved with the absence of Melon. That so often happens when those of the land, the petty tyrants of our ground, think they are irreplaceable and learn on return that the truth is even far worse than that for them. Things often prove better with their departure, as liberated dependents learn to fend for themselves without the overbearing hand of the worried overseer. Or perhaps it was the work of Pythagoras all along that made the farm thrive as it did-as its symmetry entranced all who worked in it, and for their toil gave them calm in return. Myron at last found that farm work suited him, and that he was not as dull as his long arms and stooped back made him appear.