Sparta'a conquest and control of Messenia was both as source of wealth
and an Achilles' heel. In this excerpt from "A Peerless Peer" the young
(22 year old) Leonidas makes his first trip to Messenia in the company
of his Messenian attendant.
When it became completely dark, they
had no choice but to find a relatively sheltered fold in the mountains and
settle in for the night. They tethered and fed the horses, and then dug
themselves into the leaves to set up a tent. They cooked a meal over a fire
they built at the entrance to the tent, then crawled inside and lay down with
Beggar between them.
After a moment Leonidas asked, “Is this
safe?”
“The fire will keep away the wild
beasts,” Mantiklos assured him.
“I was thinking of your countrymen,”
Leonidas answered, remembering with unwanted vividness all the childhood
stories of Messenians slitting the throats of unsuspecting Spartans. It even
occurred to him that Mantiklos, up to now kept in check by the fact that they
had
been with the Spartan army where
Leonidas was surrounded by his comrades, might have been awaiting this
opportunity.
“You are well armed and well trained.
It is unlikely that the kind of men who live in the wilderness could kill you.
And there is Beggar, too.”
The bitch lifted her head at the sound
of her name, looked over at Mantiklos, then yawned and flopped her head back
down, obviously intent on sleep after the long, hard journey.
“Do you regret your decision [to seek
employment with me]?” Leonidas asked abruptly, the cold keeping him from sleep.
“No. But sometimes I wish I were not so
alone.”
“Alone?” Leonidas turned on his side and
propped himself on one elbow to look at his attendant. They were never alone.
They lived in barracks, drilled in units, went to the baths and gymnasia in
groups, and sang in chorus. The rarest thing in the life of a young Spartiate
and his attendant was solitude.
“The others, the attendants, they’re
all Laconian. They look on me with as much suspicion as you do. Not to mention
your comrades! Sometimes I get very tired of all that suspicion and hostility.”
“It’s hard to forget two hundred years
of warfare.”
“Especially when you declare war on us
every year!” Mantiklos snapped back.
“That does not seem to bother the
Laconian helots,” Leonidas pointed out. “And we only declare war on you because
you are so hostile. We live in peace with the perioikoi, and Tegea, and all the
cities of the League, which were our enemies once,” Leonidas pointed out.
“But not with Argos!” Mantiklos
reminded him. “You only make peace with people who submit to you. Like hounds,
the others have to lie down and offer you their jugular. Then you accept them
as long as they run in your pack. But if men are as proud as you, then you
cannot abide them, and you fight until one or the other of you is destroyed.”
“Then all Messenia needs do to have
peace is to submit—truly submit—to us.”
“But that doesn’t make sense! You
admire courage above all else. You should respect us more for not being
submissive! You should admire our spirit.”
“But you would never be satisfied with
our admiration. You want control of your country back. You want independence
for Messenia.”
“Of course we do!”
“But we can’t afford to give it to you.
We can’t support the Spartan army—not in today’s world where other armies are
so well equipped—without the riches of Messenia.”
“Then you will always live in fear of
us.”
They were silent for a few moments,
each following his own thoughts. After a while Leonidas asked in a low, earnest
voice, “Why did you want to serve me?”
“I wanted to learn what the Spartan
army was really like, from the inside. I wanted to understand what made it so
good, so I would know how to fight it.”
Leonidas held his breath for a moment,
registering that this was more dangerous than the murder he had feared. He
should have thought of this earlier. “And now you will stay here and start
training rebels?”
Mantiklos laughed. “If only it were
that easy!”
“What do you mean?”
The other shrugged, then sat up to
readjust the sheepskins he had spread over himself to help keep warm before
asking, “Do you think there are many Messenians like me?”
“I have no idea.”
“You will see. Most of my countrymen
are craven. They want their freedom only if others are
willing to fight and die for it. They want independence only if it does not cost
them anything. The bulk of my countrymen are whiners—always
complaining and moaning about their fate, but unwilling to take any risks to
change it.” With these words, Mantiklos lay down again and turned his back to
Leonidas.
The following day they kept to the
coastal road following the shore of the Gulf, and at last Mantiklos seemed to
lose his inhibitions and began to talk. He started hesitantly, but when he
realized that Leonidas was interested, he talked more and more expansively. He told
Leonidas about the battles that had taken place in the surrounding countryside
during the First and Second Messenian Wars.
Of course, Leonidas had already heard
about these battles. They were an essential component of agoge curriculum. But
he pretended otherwise, responding rather with wonder and pressing Mantiklos
for details, because Mantiklos’ version of what had happened was very different
from what was taught in the agoge.
Mantiklos stressed again and again that
his forefathers had been heroic freedom fighters, while Leonidas’ forefathers
represented brutal and corrupt power. Mantiklos’ ancestors had been crushed by
greater numbers, greater wealth, superior weapons—never by the cleverness or
courage of their adversaries. Yet when Leonidas looked around him, he saw that
Messenia was richer and more prosperous than Laconia. Messenia should have had
numbers and wealth on her
side. As for weapons, it does not take
long to imitate the weapons and tactics of one’s adversaries. They taught that
at the agoge, too: if the enemy has something that you find
hard to defeat, then learn what it is and how to counter it—fast.
So Leonidas did not discard what he had
learned in the agoge. He thought that the agoge version could not be so far
from the truth, or he would be Mantiklos’ attendant and Mantiklos the wealthy hoplite—not
the other way around. But he realized that the way one was told about the deeds
of one’s ancestors had a huge impact on one’s perception of oneself.
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