Read Online The End of Sparta: A Novel by Victor Davis Hanson - Free Book Online Page B

Ainias who can oversee your walls to the south. There are no black clouds above that man, either, and yet he cannot keep you safe. I see only corpses of enemies at his feet, never his own. He will die with a white beard and a walking stick at his own choosing.”
    Proxenos the architect laughed, this time even louder. He was young and tanned more than he needed to be from his days fixing the walls of Plataia. Birth and money, and his white teeth and black beard, gave him a certain arrogance that comes when a man feels bigger and stronger and richer than those around him. He had been born into wealth and bred to think less of slower wits. Women, he knew, he could always persuade. Nêto would be no different: No doubt she was entranced by his vigor, looks, and silver, and now worried that she might lose the chance to enjoy them all the more when the war ended.
    Proxenos had met this Nêto the previous year at the shrine of Eurynomê on the Asopos River below his red grape vineyards. A chance occurrence, he had thought, to see a naiad alone in the wilds of Boiotia. But now he was not so sure of that long-ago accident, as Nêto had come often for most of the past spring. She had taught him of Pythagoras, and soon no longer was he the bored aristocrat lamenting that the capitals of his atrium were Doric rather than new Ionic. Instead the new Proxenos became a devotee of her Pythagoras when she told him that his genius could raise walls of new cities to the south taller than those of Troy—his work for thousands rather than for a few aristocrats who wanted a new portico on their mansions. He could draw the plans in the north, and let others follow them to the south.
    Now, in reply to her warning, Proxenos’s soft words flew out as pained concession, or more condescension from lord to master. “Nêto, Nêto, my Nêto. We go to all the trouble to consult these fat priests. If that is not enough, we give heavy silver to the virgins of the temple to tell us of their signs and visions. And now you tell me to go home to the Asopos? Some day, if the One God wills, we will march into shadowy Messenia and at last live up to our divine logos that says no one is born a slave—and just as we start, you tell me all that reason, that faith in numbers is but a lie?”
    Nêto grabbed the arm of Proxenos. “But my Proxenos, reason or not, don’t press too hard the dying gods who like to give short lives to those too certain of themselves. Run from Nemesis.” She was almost ranting again. “Because we ignore some of the omens does not mean we are smarter than the old gods—or the duller mortals who believe in them, much less that they no longer exist and cannot hear us right now. They grew old, yes, but they were here before the wisdom of Pythagoras dethroned them. That is why the reason of our god Pythagoras may explain what exactly saves our souls and what not, maybe nine tenths of what we do each day, but not always the last tenth part of our lives. Only faith and belief do that. The other voices tell me. I warn you, if you cross the Isthmos this year or next, it will go badly for you, Proxenos—as badly here as it will be square and good for your soul with the One God later on. The others, they can or cannot come back. Their fates are their own. But not so Proxenos, son of Proxenos, of youth, and riches and bottomland on the Asopos, who has the most to lose of us all. Epaminondas can win here and in the south without you. You were to build the ramparts, and you have drawn up such plans, but you were not to cross spears—or so said Pasiphai to me.”
    Proxenos felt a sharp pain across his flank. It burned right below his navel on the lower left, as if cut by iron. She had the powers of a witch. But the aristocrat and the rationalist forced a second laugh. “Why ruin tonight with words of gloom and darkness? If you believe in our One God, if you really do, then you know nothing bad ever happens to the good man who lives his life