“My, my, even face-to-face with my beauty, you still miss your helot girl, Melon, I can see that well enough.” And with that, the Toad left Thespiai-at least until the town’s zeal for the Pythagoreans and democracy for helots might pass.
CHAPTER 37
Then before the summer came on, all gossip stopped. At last the grand army of the tired Boiotians trudged in from the south-a thousand stadia and more of tramping from Ithome to the hike down Kithairon, a month and more after Melon himself had reached Thespiai. Tired and dirty, the Boiotians had pushed their way through the Athenians at the Isthmos and marched proudly over the Megarid on the heels of Iphikrates as he scampered in fright back with his army to Attika.
Epaminondas had smashed Iphikrates at the Isthmos, like a farmer’s boot flattens the dung beetle. So the army came into Boiotia dirty and ragged, but with another triumph still and in perfect order. The long snake wound through the pass just as it had left nearly half a year earlier, but with Pelopidas and Epaminondas singing Erinna’s songs at the head and worrying little about what their war had been for. The Boiotians came down over the crest of Kithairon at precisely the time the rhetores in Thebes were swearing their sons had been lost in the land of Pelops and the harvests would rot in the fields for want of men. Menekleidas of Aulis, in the middle of his peroration to confiscate the property of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, ran from the bema. All the Athenian silver and gold of Kallistratos did him no good. Backwash was unsure whether the rumors were true that the veterans were about to storm the ekklesia and hang the seers of doom like himself from the plane trees in the central courtyard. So he fled over to Euboia, always in fear the island was too close to Epaminondas.
In the plain below the Kadmeia, smoke arose off to the east above Plataia as the army broke up and spilled over the plain. The Thebans in the agora cheered as they saw the morning campfires of the horde that was already nearing and filling the roads of Boiotia in the thousands. A long line of creaking wagons came down the pass, full of pots and tools, and Peloponnesian herds behind to enrich the villages of the flatlands. Immediately upon his formal report of the army’s return to the Boiotarchs, Epaminondas was ordered by the council of the Boiotians to be tried within thirty days. First, the stay-at-home Boiotarchs had in their fear immediately ordered his army to disband, to scatter to their harvests and homes. Perhaps they could try him in the night, and stone him at the Kadmos Gate, before the thousands who followed him even knew he was in the jail on the order of the rhetores.
On these first days of the army’s return, Melon figured that Epaminondas had no retainers to bar his arrest. Bluster and boast had not yet filtered through the countryside about the size and beauty of the not finished new cities of Mantineia, Megalopolis, and Messene. No one knew of the terrified Agesilaos trapped on his acropolis, with Lichas and the others of Sparta’s worst all dead, with twenty-five myriads of helots free and full of hatred for Lakonia. Yet, Melon guessed, once the truth of free Messenia was out, and the extent of the plunder from Lakonia seen, tempers would soften. The truth would spread that thousands of Boiotian hoplites were wealthy, with good pay from the Peloponnesians and plenty of plunder in their sacks and gifts from the Messenians. Yet in these initial days after the arrival of the army, few had any love for the generals who had marched their men south to help others when their own fields needed tending.
So it is with all wars, that both supporters and critics weave and warp until the final story is known-and alike then go back with their plumb strings to line up their past principles with the final verdict of the last battlefield. This Epaminondas knew and shrugged off as the price of leading rather than watching events go by. While he feared he had not yet ruined Sparta as he wanted, he also accepted that his men thought he had, and so would always follow a leader who gave them victory, and whose own sense of achieving less than he hoped was more than they had dared imagine. At last, the day of the trial of Epaminondas came. He was standing in the dock alone; if he were found guilty, the other generals would follow. If he were freed, the others would never need to come before the popular courts. Six hundred jurymen chosen by lot and eager for the drachma daily wage poured into the jury hall. Melon was determined to ride the lame Xiphos over from Helikon to Thebes to speak out at this twisting of justice. On the Kadmeia, he was to meet Alkidamas and Ainias, who swore that they would not have the Boiotians do to Pelopidas and Epaminondas what the Spartans had not been able to do.
Then all Boiotia was on fire with word that thousands of hoplites would march into the dikasterion. The armed would file in who had known the Spartan on the Eurotas and had lifted stone for the Messenians. Few of them had been lost despite the ordeal. Most were rich from their victories in the south, but, like all good soldiers, were already bored with the luxury of peace in their hamlets. Had Epaminondas nodded, these hoplites in their torn cloaks and battered shields would have gladly crossed the pass into Attika for him and taken down the Athenian temples of Perikles if only for sport and to fulfill his boast. So for now, fickle war had proven sweet to all the Boiotians, even for those who had stayed home-as they counted all the plunder and noted that their fathers and sons came back with eyes that blinked and arms that had all five fingers. Even marching in dead winter at Boukatios had proved wise, since all came home just in time to cut their barley and scythe the wheat.
The courtroom of Thebes was an armed camp pitted against the slackers and men left behind. On this day of the trial Melon had gotten off his tired and lame Xiphos about halfway to Thebes. The once sleek warhorse’s hooves were cracked, and Melon was leading him the rest of the way, worried that he would miss the opening indictment. Then, just as he passed the fork to Leuktra, a hooded horseman, with a cloak of green frayed wool that the old men of Thebes wore, galloped his way. “Melon, son of Malgis, one of the renegades, aren’t you?” the covered traveler yelled out. “You are late-and you soon to be a defendant as well.”
Melon halted and led the pony to the orchard on the side of the road. “Why, I guess I am. Say your thing. Be careful what your tongue may earn, stranger. I know my way around iron.”
Then the horseman, as if Melon were no stranger, started right in, “So I hear you do. Your master has been freed. No trial, man-for him or you. Hear the story.” The hooded rider had his pony’s nose at Melon’s chest. “Epaminondas walks up to the jurymen, all six hundred, Epaminondas does. A thousand hoplites roar to his rear. He pleads guilty. Yes, guilty to the charge of holding his command beyond the new year. He says to the jurymen of Boiotia to punish him as they please. As his dog, little Eurotas, barked a second for him, they voted to pardon this Epaminondas and all the stalwarts who went with him to the south. You too. How? All the accused did was to recite a poem of sorts. The funny song was in the poet’s six-foot and said to be the work of the fallen Amazon Erinna, whose ashes they scattered amid the winds below Ithome.