With Stilbiades handling the other end, they bore the stretcher down from the deck and lowered it gently to the wharf. The Nigh-Dwellers’ eyes followed every movement, their curiosity beginning to outweigh their hostility. Xeuthes faced them.
“Tell your masters that we declare, by the gods, that we did this man no harm.”
He held up the splinter-a stake, really-that Epitadas had used to cut himself. It was dyed now with the purplish blue of congealed blood, with strings of skin and muscle still embedded in it. Xeuthes placed it on the blanket as he would the sword of a gallant warrior beside his corpse. Then he turned to Stilbiades, whispering, “We should go while they’re preoccupied.”
As the crowd closed around the stretcher, Patronices the beam man, gazed out at the town. “It’s the port of Sparta, boys! Take a good look now-we’ll never see it again.”
“Speak for yourself, defeatist!” countered Dicaearchus.
“Suit yourself… while you’re busy here your mother will be playing my flute.”
“I’m just happy to get that carcass off the ship,” said Oreus from the deck. “The way that Spartan went-that kind of thing can spoil everything.”
On that none would disagree. That evening, after grounding the ship on a sandy beach at Cythera, the crew performed the ablutions that would purify it, scrubbing the decks with sand and seawater just like a family cleansing their house after a relative had died. The griffin figurehead was likewise washed, and the very bodies of the crewmen, all of whom were every bit as polluted by Epitadas’ act.
Lastly, the Spartan prisoners were tossed rags with which to clean themselves. Frog and the others complied, but Antalcidas did nothing, having yet to banish the stupefying image that had met his eyes when he woke that morning. He ignored Stilbiades’ order to wash, and Xeuthes’ as well, until the captain ordered a gang of oarsmen to bathe him forcibly. They set upon him while his arms were shackled, scouring his skin with dry sand until he bled. He then sat in the hold, covered with a cement of sand and dried blood, for the rest of the trip to the Piraeus.
It was some time before the first Spartiate arrived to take charge in Gytheion-a junior officer who had been hunting in the hills above the town. Looking down at the mass that had once been Epitadas, Rehash commanded, “Get away from him, you dogs!” He then re-covered the body, which had been exposed by the curious onlookers, with a tenderness worthy of a true hero-for anyone who had gone through the Rearing could recognize at once a death befitting the legend of Cleomenes.
Patronices was not entirely correct. A decade later, some of the men of the Terror would look out from their seats and glimpse the Spartan port again, albeit at a great distance. They would see it as part of a force of forty thousand men and two hundred ships, on their way west for Alcibiades’ great, doomed expedition against the city of Syracuse.
2.
A deputation of Spartiates came to Kynosoura to inform Damatria of the death of her son. It was the moment a noblewoman prepared for all her life-the culmination of her son’s education, in a sense, and the apogee of her personal honor. The fact that he appeared to take his own life gave her pause, to be sure, but like the other Spartiates she understood and accepted the special circumstances of Epitadas’ case. The death of a man who preferred self-mutilation to confinement, who would make a spectacle of himself before the Athenians could do it for him, was a model for the generations.
The mother of the heroic dead was expected to reflect the magnitude of her good fortune. She displayed the remains of her son, anointed with imported oil, dressed in a linen chiton of purest white, on a flowered bier in the men’s quarters of her house. For two days Damatria sat next to him in a condition of carefully arranged dishevelment: fingers stripped of all but one fine gold ring, ashes demurely scattered in her finely combed hair, a single picturesque scratch scoring her alabaster cheek. The male relatives of Dorcis came to her in cheerful procession, bearing congratulations. Their wives and daughters came in somewhat smaller numbers, but with plates of honey cake, making the customary pleas for the bereaved to eat, to sustain herself. At the proper intervals, and with conspicuous preliminaries (for she loved this part), Damatria would let loose a piteous shriek. The guests would stand around her, admiring the perfection of her mourning, looking as if they might burst into applause. On the last day even Dorcis was carted into public view for the first time in years-fatter, as helpless as ever, but beaming in the reflected glory of his son-in-law’s honor.
Two hours before dawn of the third day, they carried Epitadas out the door, feet first. The cortege lined up behind the wagon carrying the bier, with the relatives walking behind Damatria and the helot mourners and flute players going last. The streets were more than typically full at that hour: it was well known in the city that the only hero of Sphacteria would be honored that morning. As the retinue passed and the pipers played, soldiers stood and saluted; from the road around the base of the Acropolis, Damatria saw the caretakers dim the lamps of the Brazen House.
The pyre flared to its full magnificence just as the sun rose over Parnes. Curiously, it was at that point, as the body neared consumption and the flames began to wane, that Damatria felt her first stab of genuine grief. For the burial ground was one of the places where she had met her son in secret, during his first years in the Rearing, to deliver him extra food. She would see him in the twilight, stepping out of the forest and wearing nothing but grime and a ravenous look on his face; he would make no greeting as he snatched the bread from her hands, his hunger as elementary as a newborn baby’s. The tracks of real tears creased her soot-caked cheeks as they wrapped his bones in his chiton, and the last libation was poured on the ground. They buried the remains under a handsome marble stone she had commissioned in his honor. Unlike most of the other stelae around it, his grave bore a personal inscription:????????.
By consensus it was the finest funeral seen in Laconia for some years. Though there was some concern that Damatria’s ostentatious ways would spoil the event, her taste this time was impeccable, her conduct beyond reproach. She gave all the requisite feasts on the third and thirteenth days after the ceremony. Best of all, she did not embarrass the Spartans by breathing the name of her other son.
Epitadas was held exempt from the general decree that stripped the capitulators of Sphacteria of their status as Spartiates. The prisoners in Athens, who were now publicly known as “tremblers,” were denounced in absentia by their dining clubs. If they ever returned from their captivity they would find their legal rights to land and helots curtailed. Those they left behind in the city, such as wives and daughters, were no longer welcome to participate in the festival choruses, or become betrothed to boys of respectable families. The trembler and his family were required to give way to other pedestrians in the streets, and forbidden to wear bright or conspicuous clothes. That a trembler or his wife would smile or otherwise show good humor in public was inconceivable, for such a miserable fate could leave them nothing to be happy about.
With the prisoners on their way to captivity, little came back to Sparta about the circumstances of the disaster. At some point Cleon and Demosthenes would testify before the Assembly, of whose deliberations the Peloponnesians received regular reports from their paid informants. Until then, gossips spoke of an uncoded message sent to Antalcidas from Zeuxippos, regarding the existence of an unborn son. Zeuxippos’ rivals among the Spit Companions brought the story up at the mess, hinting that the message might explain the surrender of his former protege.
The old man rose from his bench, and with an expression more sad than indignant, said, “Gentlemen, if you wish to suggest that I would do anything to make the boy behave disgracefully, I believe you already have my answer. The message was sent out of compassion for the wife, who wished to reassure her husband that his line would live on, regardless of what Fortune had in store for him.