Fell? Hardly. Malgis was gutted by the Spartans-knocked down by no less than Lord Lichas himself, at the spear clash at Koroneia, ten seasons after the great war with the Athenians-caught in the final mad Theban crash against the king Agesilaos. There the Boiotians in folly threw away the fight they had earlier almost won, losing thirty years after they and Malgis’s Thespians had won at Delion. But, of course, they were now fighting Spartans, not Athenians any longer. This last muster at his age was Malgis’s death sentence. But still at Koroneia, Malgis did all that the Theban generals wanted, as a lochagos leading his son Melon and six hundred Thespians head-on against the Spartan king Agesilaos in the battle’s bitter finale-on the Boiotians’ weak left against the choice Spartan royals on the enemy right wing. At first he was blocked from nearing the king, but he soon found a way over them, as the men from Thespiai behind pushed their front files through. These images came more quickly now to the dreaming Melon as sunlight neared and with it the approach of battle.
Malgis had hit the royal guard under Lichas, who stabbed better with the spear than any on either side of the battlefield. Malgis had first wounded Sphodrias. Then he took on Deinon as well, and got close to King Agesilaos, almost through the last circle of the king’s guard under Lichas. Finally, with the king’s crest in sight, Malgis in desperation had thrown his thrusting spear-and it had hit the royal thigh itself. The wound would cripple Agesilaos, but not kill him. Malgis could not withstand the fury of a stunned Lichas. No man could. The Spartan caught Malgis without his spear and stabbed him right under the chin, above his breastplate. Then Lichas called in vain for his henchmen to strip the Thespian and take the gleaming armor that had once belonged to the Spartan general Lysander.
Melon saw his father collapse in the dust. Now he battled his way forward to keep the murderous Spartans from desecrating the body of Malgis; somehow he carried the body away from the fray. Lichas stabbed him above the knee and almost took him down, too, but the royal guard fell back and circled Agesilaos. They carried their king out rather than go after the Theban vanguard under Melon. The next day Gorgos, the captured helot, packed dead Malgis back to the farm, and he wrapped the leg of Melon as he drove the cart to Helikon with his dead and wounded masters. The Thebans set up a small black stone hidden away on a corner of the Kadmeia in the center of town, reading just as the Boiotarchs promised: Tode mnema Malgidi, Antandros huio, to Thespiao, hon Spartiai eidon kalon en Koroneia. Eis Hadas elthe makairpistos ton Helikonidon hina Boiotia pasa e eleuthera. (This memorial is for Malgis, son of Antander, the Thespian, whom the Spartans knew well at Koroneia. He went down to Hades, most blessed of those Helikon way, so that all of Boiotia might be free.)
The Spartan iron had bored in a palm’s width above the back of Melon’s knee. To the bone and deeper Lichas had driven his spear tip to roll up his tendon. If he were to meet Lichas this coming day at Leuktra, then the reckoning had been yet another reason to follow Neto’s prophecy and come down at last from Helikon. But Lophis had filled him with talk of Epaminondas, and freedom from Sparta, and something greater still. The result was that he thought himself not so old and crippled as much as wise and experienced-and needing to settle with Lichas. But even before that for twenty years and more, he picked up his spear Bora, put on his panoply every other evening behind the shed-bronze breast- and backplate, concave round willow shield, banged-up greaves, slashing sword, and heavy helmet-and then did his ten or so jabs and set moves. Right foot forward with the spear thrust; right back to bring the enemy in off balance; the shield bash with the left foot leading; the underhand stab to the groin; the overhand thrust down into the enemy’s neck; the wild right hand cross slash with the cleaver; the sword chop down on the helmet; the crouch to one knee behind the shield; the right-wing drift; the steady walk ahead; the double-time trot. These were all the moves, the hoplomachia, that his Theban drill masters had once taught him before the battles at the Nemea and at Koroneia, and that he had repeated three thousand times and more these years so that perhaps one day he would come down his mountain and kill Spartans without end.
At fifty Melon was on the downhill course without a rock or stump in his way, with a better farm for his boy Lophis than what Malgis had given him-and with a better son in Lophis than he himself had been. Lophis riled Melon with new talk of helots and Epaminondas and grand marches and Lichas and how he must come down to fight the Spartans if he were to claim he was a citizen and a man of the polis. But shortly after making his decision to fight, Melon had begun to see black visions sent from the gods-the dream changing on alternating sleeps. He always saw two cities to the south, far beyond the Isthmos, and now at Leuktra those old dreams came back and turned his mind from Helikon.
The first one was a rising city of tall stones, with ladders of men at work, and black cut rock stacked everywhere amid the growing ramparts. Two big levers with pulleys and hooks lifted squared blocks on a temple wall. A theater was half-finished. Workers swarmed on the embrasures, singing with the oxen-team drivers in a thick Doric. An agora was crowded. Farmers in peace flocked in to sell their wares. Squabbles were settled in a large dikasterion by swift-mouthed rhetors and voting jurors. Women brought their men apples in baskets. They sang to them as they hauled stones. On a bema, a tall orator lectured to his listeners, who jeered and clapped-but then voted in peace and praised their freedom as their walls always rose higher. Calm and order reigned.
On the other gloomier nights when there was no moon, Melon saw these same towers and walls, but unfinished, with many more black blocks ready to be stacked. This other vision of the city was longer, darker and louder. There were rotting Hellenes hanging in nooses from the gates. Dogs and birds fought over even more corpses in ditches and refuse piles, pulling on their putrid ankles. There were more bodies half-eaten outside the towers, clubbed and knifed, with their purses and packs stolen. Men were killing and raping at will, and packs of cutthroats in the chaos of the city’s license roamed over the unfinished city that was full of trash and worse, as slaves dumped their slop jars into open pits. Always upon waking Melon asked himself how could this same city be two different cities, and which dream was the real, which the false. Somehow he put himself in the answer: His presence in the south could ensure the good city of this Epaminondas, holy Messene to come-while his absence would mean its failure and descent into chaos. But, he asked himself, would Gorgos, would Chion stay or go with him, and if they went, who would keep the farm and the family of his son Lophis safe?
A spear’s length away, Chion on this hard-baked ground this night now saw these same images, but he had more of his own dreams and memories before Leuktra that would not easily give way. Malgis, he knew, had roped the slow-moving pursuing helot Gorgos in the free-for-all after the Theban phalanx had broken at the Nemea and the battle lines had been crossed. The prisoner Gorgos had squirmed on the ground and whimpered that he was the prized shield carrier of a Spartan noble. Maybe the manservant to the big ephor, to Lichas himself he was. Now the Messenian slave was somewhere around six tens, maybe more, or so he claimed, though his arms seemed too hard for a man that old. On feast nights for the two meat-eaters, Chion saw Gorgos crush a piglet’s head like he did a squash. Gorgos said he was nearly blind-though the helot saw more than others the bad spots and crooks of the farm. Most days he shuffled about and was just worth the food to keep him going, although Gorgos talked as if he owned the estate itself. Chion’s dreams now stayed on Helikon.