Free The End of Sparta: A Novel by Victor Davis Hanson Page B

Lichas there, could touch my son. And I wish I had never heard the name Leuktra.”
    Chiôn said nothing. He assumed that he would kill enough Spartans on their right wing himself to keep both his masters safe, even if Lophis were mounted and in front of the phalanx. As Lophis disappeared, the two lay down beneath a mountain oak and soon were asleep for the few hours left before the sunrise draw-up of the phalanx. Chiôn and Mêlon, as if by consent, were alike dreaming of the farm back on Helikon. Both were pruning and talking in these dreams before battle—as if they would soon have no more chance to meet again in this life.
    Where was this high farm of Mêlon and Chiôn that drew them home in their last sleep before battle? Mêlon’s ground was not far from Leuktra, high up the eastern side of the massif of Mt. Helikon, two stadia above the floor of the valley. The farm was right below the hard frost line, at an elevation at which olives can thrive. It was a good, safe place to grow things, to keep away from the Thespians and all the other Boiotian villagers below—mostly hidden as it was from the invaders from the north or south, and too hard a hike up for the raiders on the coast. The slopes of Helikon itself were a divine place, the center of Hellas—a place where the Muses could speak directly to a man. Helikon was south and to the east a little of snowy Mt. Parnassos. Along these mountains the clouds piled up to hide Apollo when he visited his oracle Pythia beneath at Delphi, navel of the world.
    For his part this night at Leuktra, Chiôn could see the land almost as if he were floating above it, like Ikaros with waxen wings. From the farm it was an easy gaze at the mountain passes of Parnon to Attika and Athens. To the south were the high woody crests of ill-omened Mt. Kithairon, on whose backside the Spartans this morning, if they lost, were going to sneak away along the cliffs above the sea. Farther in the distance rose peaks of Pentelikos and Akonthion, the ridges that kept out of Boiotia the bad Athenians, the false democrats whom the Boiotians hated more than any of the Hellenes. Chiôn for his part could see craggy Ptôon and the green island of Euboia lying far off into the west. The farm of Mêlon was right above the great plain of Boiotia—“cow-land,” those arrogant Athenians called it. Few went up to Helikon. Even fewer on Helikon wished to go down.
    Over fifty crops before this morning’s battle, the founder Malgis, father of Mêlon, had staked out his plot on Helikon. He cleared virgin ground from the mountain. Hyacinth, amaryllis, and wild Attic orchids followed. Once the sun hit the land shorn of thousands of strawberry trees, dense beech, and poplar copses, tulips sprouted. “I did it,” the hoplite Malgis used to yell to the skies. When he patched broken tiles on the farm’s high tower roof, he could take in the view of his thirty years’ worth of work. “All this—it came off of my back, with help from the prophets of the One God, all led by Pythagoras who set me right on my course.” Farming, Malgis the founder said, was a lot like war. It needed the same order and discipline if you were to survive it. He came to worship Pythagoras, the god of order and reason, rather than the overgrown child-gods on Olympos. All they wanted were libations and burnt offerings, just like babies in diapers who cry when the teat slips out of their mouth.
    Mêlon had been told all this by Malgis, his father, and how the old man had once planned their farm on the number principles of his god, who explained how the perfect world beyond is revealed to us through the eternal laws of the arithmoi . On a rocky expanse of about a hundred plethra , the farm’s 720 olive trees and 5,040 vines spread across the terraced ground in a careful grid. He had dug in all the cuttings and rootings himself. The holes of the pattern he marked out with chalked rope. The farm spread all the way up the slope—terraced grain