The Scroll of Pythagoras

Chapter 6

Rhys was glad the Hellenic family moved out to their farm in the country. He had enjoyed wandering through Athens with Lysander and Becky, but he still worried what might happen if their secret trip over the garden wall was discovered. Lysander had been telling him awful stories about how boys in Sparta were punished. If Lysander could be believed, boys in Sparta were deliberately not given enough food, forcing them to steal so they didn't go hungry. This was so they would learn to steal and be secret scouts in enemy territory when they went to war (which seemed to be all the Spartans did). The boys never got punished for stealing like this, unless they got caught! And then they got whipped pretty badly.

Lysander seemed proud of this way of doing things. He scoffed at Athenians, calling them "soft," and complaining that they didn't suffer the same kind of discipline. But Rhys didn't want to find out if he was right or not.

The trip to the farm took about an hour because the women and a few chests from the house all traveled in a wagon, pulled slowly by mules on the dusty, rutted road. Several male servants (and Rhys and Lysander) walked beside the wagon. They walked through the agora on their way, where Hybrias left them to spend the day with his friends. They passed the Akropolis and soon came to a big gate opening in the southeast part of the city walls. Shortly after passing through the gate they encountered a dry riverbed, where the water seemed to have dried up from the heat of the season. Both the riverbed and its banks were covered in beautiful green, with groves of trees here and there along the way. To their right as they followed the river, a short range of low mountains rose up, with green patches on their sides where little farms and temples were set. The travelers kept the city walls and distant Akropolis on their left, and finally came into more open country.

Now they really felt the sun, even this early in the morning. They passed several farms and even, to Rhys' surprise, a network of irrigation ditches. It was all very interesting, but Rhys was tired from all his walking yesterday, so the wagon driver finally let him sit beside him. Lysander's leg was on the mend, and he kept walking longer than Rhys, but the limp was getting worse.

Finally the driver, whose name was Prodicus, said, "It makes no sense for a soldier to force himself to keep going if there's no need. You'll heal faster if you don't push yourself too hard. You gave that leg enough of a workout yesterday, so why not ride the rest of the way?"

Lysander looked sharply at him, and then at Rhys. So their adventure yesterday had been noticed. The wagon slowed down and Lysander climbed onto the seat beside Rhys. "Do you plan to tell Hybrias about us?" the Spartan boy asked quietly.

"No," said the servant. "I don't think any harm was done. But it's why I suggested the Master move his family to the farm today. Energetic boys - and girls," he added with a knowing smile, "need a place to spend their energy. Especially when everyone's so tense about the war."

"Good idea," said Rhys. "But was it really your idea to go to the farm? I didn't think guys like Hybrias paid attention to servants."

"That depends on the servant," Prodicus smiled. "I've been Hybrias' pedagoge for many years, so he trusts me when it comes to the young people."

"What's a ped - ped - " Rhys stuttered.

"A pedagoge goes with young boys to their schools," said Prodicus. "He makes sure they have their school things, helps them with lessons, and keeps them out of trouble. He also gives whippings if they're necessary," he added with another knowing smile. "I was pedagoge to Hybrias' three sons as they grew up. And now I'm pedagoge to you."

"I don't need one," Lysander said stiffly. "I've had good enough teachers at the agoge at home."

"I'm sure you have," Prodicus nodded. "But neither you nor Rhys know our customs well enough to be left on your own. I'm here to answer questions and, as I said, to keep you out of trouble."

"And that's what you're doing, taking us to the farm," Rhys laughed. "Keeping us out of trouble."

"That's right," Prodicus nodded with a grin. "And if you like, I can teach you some lessons too."

"Like what?" Rhys wondered.

"Well. For a beginning, tell me what color is the piece of wood we're sitting on."

This was a lesson? The answer was so simple it wasn't even important.

"That's easy," Rhys said. "It's brown."

"Is it?" Prodicus said without taking his eyes off the road. "Look more closely. Is it just that one color, brown?"

Rhys peered at the board. "Okay," he said. "I see what you mean. It's lots of different shades of brown. They run in streaks."

"Just brown?" Prodicus repeated.

"This is pointless," Lysander grumbled. But he, too, was looking curiously at the board beside his leg.

"Let's see…," Rhys said thoughtfully. "There's dark brown…and there's a darker brown…and this one is so light, it's almost gold… Oh!" he said suddenly. "There's some black."

"Black, gold, and different shades of brown," said Prodicus. "Three colors. What does that tell you?" Rhys thought for a minute, but couldn't imagine what the man was getting at. Prodicus said, "It tells you that things are sometimes different from what you think they are at first sight."

"That's obvious," Lysander snickered.

"Maybe," Prodicus nodded. "But I ask again. What color is this brown board, really?"

"All sorts of colors," Rhys said. "We missed them before."

"Yes," said Prodicus. "And when you look at other things in the world, the same thing happens. Here's a harder problem. What color is the Akropolis?"

"White," said Lysander confidently.

But Rhys already had a clue about this one. "Yes, it's white…," he said slowly. "But sometimes it looks almost orange."

"When the sun is setting," Prodicus nodded.

"And sometimes it even looks pink," Rhys finished.

"Exactly," the driver agreed. "It's not quite like the board; it changes with the light. So when we look at the Akropolis, are we seeing what color it really is? Or are we just seeing something about the light that's shining on it? And if we're only seeing the light - do we have any idea what color it is? Really?"

Rhys laughed. "Maybe not," he said.

"Maybe not," Prodicus nodded. "Maybe our eyes never see the thing as it really is. Maybe we only see the effects it creates in the world."

"This is fun," Rhys said. "I like thinking about things like this."

"It's pointless," Lysander protested again. "What possible use is it, to think like this?"

"No use at all," said the servant. "Unless the same problems exist when you look at other things. Enemy soldiers, for example. Enemy fortresses. That sort of thing."

Now even Lysander had to stop and think when Prodicus mentioned those things. Rhys laughed again, to himself this time. The ped - the whatever he was called - was very clever. Rhys was going to have to tell Becky about the things they talked about, to see what she thought of it all.

That wasn't so easy, though, once they got to the farm and were settled in. The girls had a lot more freedom here, and got to wander in and out of the house as they pleased, as long as there weren't any men visiting. But getting Becky to slow down long enough to talk was quite a job. There was so much to see on this farm: there were big barns surrounding courtyards full of manure for fertilizer; there were buildings where grain was stored; there were stables for mules and horses, and fenced-in fields for sheep; and there was a building were olives were pressed to make olive oil. (There were a lot of olive trees around Athens, Rhys noticed.) All the different buildings had been whitewashed some time ago, but had darkened to a sort of grayish white with the passing of time.

Becky spent a lot of time talking to the shepherds and stable-hands (they even let her onto the horses once in a while). But a lot of the time, she practised her "javelin-throwing," using some old tool-handles she found in an old shed. It was hard to talk about colors and things not really being the way they seemed, when you had to keep backing away so you wouldn't get hit by a "javelin."

So Rhys mostly hung around with Prodicus, who seemed to be an odd-job man when he came out to the farm. And the lessons continued.

Melissa had peeked through the wagon curtains once in a while as they were leaving the city, but Penelope and Kassandra preferred that she wait till they were away from Athens, so she missed a lot of the beautiful scenery along the river. She was already getting sick of having to hide all the time, just because she was a girl. She had secretly envied Becky for going sight-seeing yesterday. What was the good of visiting a wonderful foreign place when you weren't even allowed to walk around and see it? She decided she couldn't wait till they got to the farm and she had a little more freedom.

In fact, there was more freedom than she ever imagined. Even the male servants had been with the family for so long that they didn't seem to count as "strange men," so Kassandra, Melissa, and Becky got to be outside as much as Rhys and Lysander, even when the farm hands were around. At first she was worried at how Becky wandered around on her own, but then she realized that Prodicus was keeping an eye on all the young people. He never let any of them out of his sight for long before he checked on them. So Melissa stopped worrying, and simply enjoyed herself.

Penelope and Kassandra did a lot of spinning, just like they had in the city, but they brought the wool outside onto a patio in front of the house, or sometimes by the garden in the back. Some of the servants showed Melissa how to prune the vegetables in the garden, almost ready for harvesting in a few weeks. It surprised her to find out that farms and gardens grew two crops every year instead of one. There was a winter planting and spring harvest, and then a summer planting and autumn harvest. They were in the summer growing period now, being past the middle of August.

On their second morning on the farm, Melissa went for a walk. She heard a dull, scraping noise coming from a building near the house, and went in curiously to find out what was going on. Two servant boys were using a large wooden handle to turn a huge, thick, flat stone round and round on top of another stone. A servant girl leaned over the top stone and slowly poured grain into a hole in the center of it.

After a moment she realized that the two huge stones were grinding the grain into flour. Melissa had often heard the word "millstone," but this was the first time she had ever seen one.

"They are making flour for the day's baking," said a voice beside her, and she turned in surprise to find Lysander there, leaning on his cane.

"I've never seen this sort of thing before," Melissa said, "but I guessed that's what they were doing."

"I haven't seen grinding stones for a long time," Lysander answered, "but when I lived with my mother, she took me to our estate once, when she went out for an inspection."

"You've only been to your estate once?" Melissa asked in surprise. "Where do you and your mother live, then?"

"She still lives in the house in town," said the boy. "But I haven't lived with her for several years now. Boys live in the agoge with other boys, and men have quarters with all the other soldiers."

"So you never get to see your mother?" Melissa tried to get her head around this, but she couldn't imagine it.

"My father and I visit sometimes, on sacred occasions and other times. Often my father is away fighting, and of course I'm usually learning at the agoge. My two sisters live with our mother, though."

Melissa turned from the millstones and went back outside, followed by Lysander. After a good night's rest, his limp had gotten less again. She said thoughtfully, "It's very weird, seeing the different ways you live, in Sparta and here at Athens."

"What is 'we - weird'?" Lysander repeated awkwardly.

"Sorry. It means strange. Things are so different where we come from."

"In Kanada?" he said.

"You remembered," Melissa said.

"We're trained to remember small details," he explained.

"Well…I wouldn't say the name of a whole country is a 'small detail,'" she commented.

He ignored this, and asked, "What's so different where you live?" They began to walk, slowly, past the mill house and toward one of the barns.

"Well, the way girls are treated for one thing. They don't get to go to school here, and they don't get to decide what they're going to do with their own lives."

"Girls are educated in Sparta, even if they aren't in Athens," Lysander said smugly. "They are taught some gymnastics as well as their household duties."

"But they still don't learn the same things the boys do."

"Of course not," the boy scoffed. "Why would you teach girls to fight battles?"

"But we don't even teach boys to fight. Boys and girls learn all the same things in school, and battles have nothing to do with them."

"How do you defend your country, then, if your men don't know how to fight?" Lysander asked, astonished.

"We have an army, but you only join if you want to. And for your information," Melissa had to add, feeling smug herself, "we do have women in our armies."

Lysander stared at her, trying to digest this. Melissa decided she might as well keep adding to his confusion. "And you know, we don't have servants or slaves either, in Canada. People get paid for the work they do, and they can decide to quit their job and go to another job if they want to."

At last he burst out, "You really are barbarians!"

"What's barbaric about that? People get to decide about their own lives. Nobody decides for them. Doesn't that sound like a good idea to you?"

Lysander looked away. "You're talking like an Athenian. If we allowed people to live like that, the whole Spartan way of life would be destroyed. The helots - "

"The what?"

"The helots. The serfs - the slaves, I guess you'd call them. They're the ones who do all the work in Sparta. They work the estates, they do all the manual labor. If we were to free them, we'd starve."

"You mean they do the work and you get the rewards? That doesn't sound fair."

"But the society works extremely well. It's more efficient than any other society. And without doing manual work, Spartan citizens are free to study warfare and become experts. We are," Lysander boasted, "the best army in the world."

Melissa knew she had read something about that, a few months ago when she and the other kids were studying ancient Greece. She wished she could remember more. But Lysander was already continuing.

"And because we are the best army in the world," he said, "Athens had to make an alliance with us, to go up against the Persians in battle. A small Spartan army is even now traveling north to stop the Persians in the Pass of Thermopylae. My father is with them. And once the Karneia festival is over in a couple of days, the rest of our army will go north to join them. If not for us, Athens and all the rest of Attica would have no chance of defeating them. That's the benefit of making the helots do all the manual labor, Melissa."

"It's still not very fair for the helots, is it?" She saw the expression on his face and said quickly, "I don't think we're going to agree about that, so maybe we shouldn't talk about it. Why don't you tell me what happened to your leg instead?"

"It's simple. I snuck into the army going north."

"Really?" Melissa was impressed. "I thought you were too young. Did they catch you somehow?"

"I don't know if they would have, if I hadn't fallen when I was off by myself, practising with my sword."

"You had to practise alone? Is it hard to practise the sword when you don't have a partner?"

"You don't stay as sharp," Lysander admitted. "It would have been better if I had a partner, but I had to stay secret. It was hard enough keeping anyone from noticing me when we made camp and everyone was walking around without helmets. I had to slink around the edges of the firelight then, so no one would get a good look at me."

"So how far did you get before they figured out you were there?"

"Not very far. We were coming east from Corinth and had camped a few miles northwest of Athens, ready to turn north and go through Beotia. I was practising by myself again, behind a rocky outcrop, but some of the rocks above me fell suddenly, and landed on my leg. I didn't have any choice but to call for help."

"Were they really angry to see you there?" "No," he smiled proudly. "They were impressed that I stayed with them so long without being noticed. My father wanted to scold me, but King Leonidas himself said I might have a good future as a scout if I keep learning how to be un-noticed like that."

"Do you think he would have let you stay with the army if your leg hadn't been hurt?"

Lysander considered this thoughtfully. "I don't think so," he said finally. "Leonidas only took soldiers who had living sons, and the sons were left behind in Sparta. I'm not sure why. So no, he wouldn't have let me stay." He frowned. "But he took that seer with him, Megistias, and I know Megistias' son was with them. I don't know why he let that son stay, but wouldn't let me…"

Later in the day, when Penelope had arranged for a meal to be brought outside onto the front patio, Melissa and the others learned a little more about the battle plan in the north. Prodicus the pedagoge was allowed to eat with the young people, and he had a lot to say about it. First he listened to Melissa filling in Rhys and Becky on what she had learned.

Then he commented, "That's a good summary of the land battle plans. But our young Spartan friend forgot to tell you about the sea battle plans."

"A battle with ships?" Becky said. "Do the Spartans have a lot of ships?" Prodicus raised an eyebrow at Lysander, who shrugged.

The pedagoge answered, "No, they hardly have any. But the Persians have many ships, which is why Sparta made the alliance with Athens, because Athens has a very powerful navy. Even if the Spartans could defeat Persia on land, the Persian ships could go south past Athens and land another army right on Spartan territory, and invade them that way. So Athens didn't just make this alliance because they needed Spartan help. Sparta made this alliance because they needed Athenian help too."

Rhys said, "So everybody's in this together."

"Exactly right." "Well," Melissa said, "it does make sense. You're all Hellenes."

"Maybe," Lysander said stiffly. "But we're very different from each other."

"That means everybody can learn something from everybody else," said Rhys.

"That's a good way of looking at it," Prodicus answered.

"Okay," Rhys said. "Tell us more about the two parts of this battle up north."

"Well, the Spartan army will hold the Persians at the pass of Thermopylae. At the same time, Admiral Themistokles and the Athenian navy will take on the Persian navy a few miles east of the pass. That way, the navy won't be able to bring help to the Persian army, or the other way around. And if they can be held off long enough, and take enough casualties, the Persians might realize that Hellas will be too hard to conquer, and turn back."

"They won't just be 'held off'," Lysander boasted. "They'll be defeated - at least by the land forces."

Kassandra commented, "They'll be defeated by the navy too. Our sea warriors are very intelligent and brave."

Lysander laughed a little. "And what do you know about the navy? I thought girls didn't know about things like that in Athens."

"My betrothed is serving on a ship right now," Kassandra said. "I try to find out about the navy when I can, so I'll know about his life when we're married."

"That's pretty cool," Becky said. "Your fiance's a sailor. Does he write you letters when he's at sea?"

"No," Kassandra admitted. "Mother finds things out and tells me."

"Does he talk about sailing when you see each other?" Melissa wondered.

Kassandra answered, surprised, "No. We haven't met each other yet."

Becky's mouth fell open and Melissa exclaimed, "If you haven't even met him, how can he be your fiance?"

"What do you mean? Our parents arranged the betrothal," Kassandra said. "It was all perfectly legal."

Rhys said, "But you can't marry someone you don't even know. And what do your parents have to do with it?"

Lysander laughed again. "Oh, I suppose you choose your own marriage partners in Kanada?" It sounded like he thought he was making a joke.

"Of course we do," said Becky.

"That's barbaric," said Kassandra and Lysander at the same time. They looked at each other for a second; it wasn't often that the two of them agreed on anything.

Then Kassandra said, "Do you mean the man chooses the woman on his own?"

"No," said Melissa. "The man and the woman get to know each other, and go places together, and then one of them proposes marriage - it's still usually the man -- and the woman says yes if she wants to, or no if she doesn't. It's nice if the parents like the guy you pick, but they aren't the ones who decide if you'll get married. You have to decide for yourself if you love the guy, and if you think you could live with him and be happy."

"That's simply absurd," Kassandra said firmly. "I know I wouldn't be able to decide anything like that. I need someone wiser to make such important decisions for me."

Lysander opened his mouth, probably to say something insulting to her, but Melissa glared at him till he shut it again.

They talked about other things after that as they finished their meal. But just before he got up to leave, Lysander said, "Well, whatever happens, you can be sure that the Spartan army - and the Athenian navy," he added with a little smirk toward Prodicus and Kassandra, "will keep the rest of the Hellenes safe. The Persians can't possibly defeat us." Then he stood up and motioned to Rhys. "Let's go see what's going on in the stables." The two boys walked away, Rhys going slowly enough that Lysander's limp wasn't a problem.

"He said something strange before," said Melissa, watching them go. "He said King Leonidas only took men with him who had living sons, but the sons had to stay behind in Sparta. Lysander didn't know why he would do that."

"Oh, I think Lysander knew perfectly well," said Prodicus. "King Leonidas did it so that if his army is completely destroyed, there won't be any families in Sparta without a son to carry on the family name. Leonidas didn't want any Spartan family to come to a permanent end at Thermopylae."

Melissa stared at him, her heart suddenly pounding. "But Lysander is sure the army will win the battle. He's really sure."

"He needs to believe that, Melissa," Prodicus said gently. "You can guess why."

"You mean," she faltered, "because his own father is - "

"Yes," he nodded. "Because Lysander's father is with that army. So it's a very good thing the boy's leg was injured, and he's here. Isn't it?"

Melissa watched the Spartan boy across the yard, limping toward the stables with her cousin. He had a lot more on his mind than she had realized. Maybe he had an excuse for being a bit grouchy sometimes. She just hoped very much that he turned out to be right after all, and the Spartan army did win its battle at the pass. She couldn't bear to think of any other possibility. It was funny, as she watched him walk away with the afternoon sunlight shining down on him. In the bright light, from this angle, his hair almost looked dark red.