I will add, from my own observation, that Dienekes' gift and vocation, more so even than warrior and officer, was that of teacher.

As all born teachers, he was primarily a student.

He studied fear, and its opposite.

But to pursue such an excursus at this time would lead us astray from the narrative. To resume at Antirhion:

On the return passage to Lakedaemon, as punishment for accompanying Alexandras in following the army, I was removed from that youth's company and forced to march in the dust at the rear of the train, with the sacrificial herd and my half-helot friend Dekton. This Dekton had acquired at Antirhion a new nickname-Rooster-from the event that, immediately following the battle, he had delivered the thank-offering cock to Leonidas half-strangled in his own fists, so frenzied was he with excitement from the battle and his own frustrated desire to have participated in it. The name stuck. Dekton was a rooster, bursting with barnyard belligerence and ready to scrap with anything, his own size or three times bigger. This new tag was picked up by the whole army, who began to regard the boy as something of a good-luck talisman, a mascot of victory.

This of course galled Dekton's pride beyond even its accustomed bellicose state. In his eyes the name embodied condescension, yet another reason to hate his masters and to despise his own position in their service. He declared me a blockhead for following the army.

You should've flown, he hissed sidelong as we trudged in the choking flyblown wake of the train. You deserve every lash you get, not for what they blame you for, but for not drowning that hymn-singer Alexandras when you had the chance – and churning your shanks straight to the temple of Poseidon. He meant that sanctuary in Tainaron to which runaways could flee and be granted asylum.

My loyalty to the Spartans was rebuked with scorn and ridicule by Dekton. I had been placed in this boy's power shortly after fate had brought me to Lakedaemon, two years earlier, when both he and I were twelve. His family worked the estate of Olympieus, Alexandras' father, who was related to Dienekes via his wife, Arete. Dekton himself was a half-breed helot, illegitimately sired, so rumor had it, by a Peer whose gravestone, Idotychides in war at Mantinea lay along the Amyklaian Way, opposite the line of syssitia, the common messes.

This half-Spartiate lineage did nothing to advance Dekton's status. He was a helot and that was it.

If anything, the youths his age, and the Peers even more so, regarded him with extra suspicion, reinforced by the fact of Dekton's exceptional strength and athletic skill. At fourteen he was built like a grown man and nearly as strong.

He would have to be dealt with someday, and he knew it.

I myself had been in Lakedaemon half a year then, a wild boy just down from the hills and consigned, since it was safer than risking ritual pollution by killing me, to the meanest of farm labor. I proved such an infuriating failure at this that my helot masters took their complaints directly to their lord, Olympieus. This gentleman took pity on me, perhaps for my free birth, perhaps because I had come into the city's possession not as a captive, but of my own uncoerced will.

I was reassigned to the goat and kid detail.

I would be a herd boy for the sacrificial animals, minding the train of beasts that serviced the morning and evening ceremonies and followed the army into the field for training exercises.

The head boy was Dekton. He hated me from the first. He saved his most blistering scorn for my tale, imprudently confessed, of receiving counsel directly from Apollo Far Striker. Dekton thought this hilarious. Did I think, did I dream, did I imagine, that an Olympian god, scion of Zeus Thunderer, protector of Sparta and Amyklai, guardian of Delphi and Delos and who knows how many other poleis, would piss away his valuable time swooping down to chat in the snow with a cityless heliokekaumenos like me? In Dekton's eyes I was the dumbest mountain-mad yokel he had ever seen.

He appointed me the herd's Chief Ass Wiper. You think I'm going to get my back striped for handing the king a shit-caked goat? Get in there, make that puckerhole spotless!

Dekton never missed an occasion to humiliate me. I'm educating you, Bung Boy. These assholes are your academy. Today's lesson is the same as yesterday's: in what does the life of a slave consist? It is in being debased and degraded and having no option but to endure it. Tell me, my freeborn friend. How do you like it?

I would make no response, but simply obey. He scorned me the more for that.

You hate me, don't you? You'd like nothing better than to chop me down. What's stopping you?

Give it a try! He stood before me one afternoon when we and the other boys were grazing the animals in the king's pasture. You've lain awake planning it, Dekton taunted me. You know just how you'd do it. With that Thessalian bow of yours, if your masters would let you near it. Or with that dagger you keep hidden between the boards in the barn. But you won't kill me. No matter how much disgrace I heap on your head, no matter how miserably I degrade you.

He picked up a rock and threw it at me, point-blank, striking me so hard in the chest it almost knocked me over. The other helot boys clustered to watch. If it was fear that stopped you, I could respect that. It would at least show sense. Dekton slung another stone that struck me in the neck, drawing blood. But your reason is more senseless than that. You won't harm me for the same reason you won't hurt one of these miserable, stinking beasts. With that, he kicked a goat furiously in the gut, bowling it over and sending it bawling. Because it will offend them. He gestured with bitter contempt across the plain to the gymnastic fields, where three platoons of Spartiates were going through spear drill in the sun. You won't touch me because I'm their property, just like these shit-eating goats. I'm right, aren't I?

My expression answered for me.

He glared at me with contempt. What are they to you, moron? Your city was sacked, they say.

You hate the Argives and think these sons of Herakles – he indicated the drilling Peers, spitting the final phrase with sarcastic loathing – are their enemies. Wake up! What do you think they would have done had they sacked your city? The same and worse! As they did to my country, to Messenia and to me. Look at my face. Look at your own. You've fled slavery only to become lower than a slave yourself.

Dekton was the first person I had ever met, man or boy, who had absolutely no fear of the gods.

He didn't hate them as some do, or mock their antics as I had heard the impious freethinkers did in Athens and Corinth. Dekton didn't grant their existence at all. There were no gods, it was as simple as that. This struck me with a kind of awe. I kept watch, waiting for him to be felled by some hideous blow of heaven.

Now, on the road home from Antirhion, Dekton (I should say Rooster) continued the harangue I had heard from him so many times before. That the Spartans had gulled me like they gull everyone; that they exploit their chattel by permitting them the crumbs off their table, elevating one slave a fraction above another and turning each individual's miserable hunger for station into the invisible bonds which held them in chains and in thrall.

If you hate your masters so much, I asked him, why were you hopping like a flea during the battle, so frantic to get into the fight yourself?

Another factor, I knew, added to Rooster's frustration. He had just got his barnfriend (as the helot boys called their illicit wenches) pregnant. Soon he would be a father. How could he flee then?

He would not abandon a child, nor could he make his getaway lugging a girl and a babe.

He stomped along, cursing one of the other herd boys who had let two goats stray, chasing the urchin back after these stragglers behind the herd. Look at me, he growled as he fell again into step beside me. I can run as fast as any of these Spartan dick-strokers. I'm fourteen but I'll fight any twenty-year-old man-to-man and bring him down. Yet here I trudge, in this fool's nightshirt, holding the leash on a goat.