by P. K. Lentz
So arrayed, Demosthenes waited atop eager Balios for word on the progress of the enemy army. Brasidas had marched his force through the night over rugged terrain from the pro-Spartan city of Stagiros on the belief that the key bridge over the Strymon would be turned over to him by traitors in Amphipolis. In this, one might say he was half-right: roughly half of his army would be allowed across the river before the trap was sprung.
Where Brasidas expected the sun to rise on an Amphipolis besieged, daybreak would find instead a battle already well under way.
Sparse, tiny flakes of snow began to swirl gently in the pre-dawn darkness, vanishing as they touched the cold ground or the skin of a horse. After a seeming eternity, the Thracian youth serving as runner at last appeared at the top of the city wall, rappelled down on a waiting rope and raced over to Demosthenes to deliver a message in heavily accented Greek.
"Five minutes and they'll be in range!"
Were secrecy not a requirement, Demosthenes would have used those five minutes to wheel his horse to face his men and exhort them to battle, telling them, rightly, that a victory today would deliver a crushing blow not just to one Spartan army but to Sparta herself. He might remind them that Brasidas's host had just completed a forced nighttime march and was not expecting a fight straightaway, whereas the Athenians and their allies were well rested and looking forward to battle. But this was an ambush, and so he said nothing, but just stared straight ahead at the starlit Horseman's Gate and counted down in silence.
When but a few seconds remained, he whispered a quick prayer to a goddess whose existence he doubted and raised his left hand skyward. The hand then descended to point at the trumpeter standing not far off, who in response raised his horn and blew a low, clear note which soared into the night sky and settled there for a moment, alone, before falling into a sea of blood-curdling war cries. The pegs were pulled, the sandbags descended, the Horseman's Gate flew wide, and two hundred Athenian chargers bearing two hundred riders wrapped in bronze and leather thundered out five-by-five onto the plain south of Amphipolis in search of an enemy to kill.
They galloped into a land of shades, of deep blues and flitting black shadows, of swirling snowflakes and glints of silver moonlight on the distant enemy's spear blades and helmets. As expected, Brasidas had marched his heavy troops, his hoplites, over the bridge first. Once there, they began forming up into a phalanx six deep facing the city on the possibility of just such a sally as that which Amphipolis's defenders were mounting.
The enemy hoplites furthest east, those who had crossed over first and assumed the place of honor on the army's right wing, were Demosthenes' targets of choice. The blazons on their round shields were not visible yet through the inky darkness, but there was little doubt of what the light would show. According to informers on the route of Brasidas's march, the core of Brasdidas's three thousand spearmen and lighter troops was a band of seven hundred Helots offered their freedom in exchange for service on the battlefield. Maybe they were not true Spartan Equals, but here on this plain, to the men obliged to face down their gleaming spear blades, they were Spartans all the same.
An enemy trumpeter sounded a note of alarm, and Brasidas's troops raised a shout of their own that drowned out the cries of the far fewer horsemen charging them. The defending hoplites locked their round shields, dug spear-butts into the cold earth and lowered the points to receive the charge.
Were this how the battle were to unfold, with cavalry charging formed-up hoplites on open ground, the horsemen would have been doomed, for when faced with ranks of bristling spears, horses would ever turn aside at the last moment, even throwing their riders in their refusal to consign themselves to certain death. But that would not happen. Death remained a possibility today, as on any day of battle, but Demosthenes had no intention of throwing away the life of Balios or those of the two hundred citizens, among the wealthiest in Athens, following in formation behind him.
The thing which was to avert doom this day passed noiselessly overhead in the night sky, insubstantial black wisps which became real only when they hammered the enemy line, sending men's shades screaming into the kingdom of the eldest god. The one hundred wielders of the gastraphetes had released their first volley before even the Horseman's Gate had swung open, and now they fired a second over the heads of the charging Athenian cavalry. To give the bowmen time for at least a third round and perhaps a fourth, Demosthenes led his column not straight at Brasidas's line but in an undulating arc which had the secondary effect of making the enemy wonder where the blow eventually would land. An arrow slashed harmlessly to the earth just inside Demosthenes' vision, showing that Brasidas, despite his people's hatred of arrows, had not turned down a contribution of archers from some ally or another. But the hail of missiles was sparse compared even to the sprinkling snow, and it accomplished about as much.
The same could not be said of the mighty black bolts which plunged two-by-two into Brasidas's line. The shooters atop the walls of Amphipolis, all archers skilled with normal bows before their half-season of training with the new weapon, concentrated their fire on the enemy right, where the play of winter moonlight at last illuminated a solid wall of lambdas.
Even more than most fighters, a Spartan trusted none but a countryman to stand at his right and share his shield, but today the massive arrows of the gastraphetes refused to treat the shield of a Lakedaemonian differently than any other. Great holes were punched in the crimson lambdas and in the leather curiasses behind them. The spears of dying men scythed groundward, forcing the living to break ranks to avoid the loss of life or limb. In the darkness it was impossible to know how many fell, but four volleys of two hundred arrows each meant that by the time the clash of arms began, nearly a thousand merciless iron-tipped bolts had already ripped into a segment of the enemy line where stood just a few hundred men.
It was just after that fourth volley struck that Demosthenes drove the Athenian cavalry into the very same spot. It had been a great risk to rely on an unproven weapon to buckle a wall of shields held by the most fearsome fighters in all of Greece, if not the world, but the risk had paid off. Thanks to the belly-bows, instead of plunging headlong into certain death, the citizen cavalry of Athens ploughed the field of Lakedaemonians, whose ash spear shafts parted as stalks of wheat before the hippeis going to work with their lances. They jabbed down into necks and collarbones while their hoplite victims struggled to bring shields and unwieldy spears into position in time to give something back. Some threw down their spears and drew short swords, which made up for their lack of reach with swiftness of stroke, and from behind shields riven with fist-sized holes they stabbed upward at horses' necks and riders' thighs.
Their efforts were in vain. So weakened by missiles was the Spartan line that the Athenian charge lost almost no momentum in colliding with it. Each rider raced through the widening gap in the broken Spartan ranks and remained within the phalanx only long enough to thrust lances into one picked target each, skewering men like goats for roasting. By the time the Athenian cavalrymen had swords in hand to replace lost lances, they had ridden through the body of enemy troops entirely and burst out through the rear.
Demosthenes led the column far enough that all the ranks behind him could pass clean through the body of enemy troops without slowing. Then he brought Balios around and doubled back in time to see, over the helmets of the Spartan ranks, a thousand more shadowy defenders of Amphipolis pouring out from the Horseman's Gate to form up opposite Brasidas's army, which now suffered a wide gap in its right. No sooner had the defenders drawn up than they advanced at a run against a reeling and confused enemy.
Strewn with the corpses on the ground in his path, Demosthenes made out the dark, still hulks of three horses. The loss of their citizen riders was plenty of cause for mourning, but in the cold calculus of war it was as nothing, for no fewer than two hundred enemy now lay dead or dying. The Spartan contingent of Brasidas's army, its heart, had been effectively cut out. Brasidas himself, p
erhaps, was dead, for his helmet crest, assuming he wore one, was nowhere visible. Absent, too, were any long Spartan locks beneath the toppled pilos-style helmets of the Spartan corpses, lending credence to the reports that they were Helots.
Now, with the Spartan contingent broken, would be a proper time to pause and offer terms to the allies who had marched with Sparta, but Brasidas's army should be not just stopped here, but smashed–or so spoke a certain star-born prophetess whose current whereabouts were unknown. Instead of losing Amphipolis without a fight, Athens would keep the rich gold deposits of Mount Pangaion and vast forests of shipworthy Thracian timber. Best of all, a half-dozen other subject cities of the Athenian Empire would not be prompted out of fear to throw open their gates to Brasidas.
Thalassia had given him reason enough not to halt the battle and offer terms, but he had another reason. The battle delirium had taken root in him, much as he tried to stave it off. Madness was not useful in battle except to those barbarians who fought with no cohesion or order but relied instead on the feats of frenzied individuals bent on winning personal glory, but who were likelier by far to win themselves a grave. But today a civilized Athenian yielded himself, at least a little, to possession by the war god and ordered no pause. Instead he raised his long sword high and kicked his horse to a gallop. Seeing the bright white horsehair plume of their hipparch's helmet streaming through the dark in the direction of the enemy rear, the rest of the citizen cavalry followed.
Brasidas' force was now beset on two sides, front and back, and many of its rearmost ranks turned to face the returning Athenian horse, setting their spears.
Many of them turned–but not all–for in the darkness, confusion reigned. Demosthenes aimed his charge at those who seemed the least prepared, and the column of heavy horse thundered with little resistance through the ranks of the center-left, Chalkideans by the appearance of their arms, scattering most of those who were not cut down by slashing Athenian steel. But this time, instead of leading the column straight through, he caused it to linger within the mass of enemy spearmen, deadly though they could be to man or mount, to inflict as much havoc as their long blades could wreak in the short time that remained before the two armies collided.
When that time did come, Demosthenes withdrew, along with his comrades, behind the enemy's shattered right wing to watch and wait. The two armies met, filling the brightening sky with a sound like the clap of a Titan. The othismos, the pushing match, was joined. Bellowing war cries faded into groans of exertion and, for the unlucky, into screams of pain as the two masses of men packed themselves flesh upon flesh, bronze upon bronze with life-saving shields interlocked, dug their feet into the snow-covered plain of Thrace and pushed with all the strength in their hearts and limbs. Such contests could and often did last for hours. This one did not. Having been cut in two and deployed in a makeshift fashion to begin with, Brasidas' force was almost immediately enveloped on both wings. First the Chalkideans on the left, and next the center, began to break and run south. Some men, the last to have crossed the bridge just before the attack, even shed their armor and cast themselves into the Strymon to be carried by the freezing current to what they hoped would be safety downstream.
Heart soaring, Demosthenes rejoined the battle. He could not know how many men's blood he spilled that day with long, sweeping strokes of his sword from the back of Balios. No fewer than ten, certainly, but he did not keep count. He had kept his feet the whole time in Thalassia's dangling saddle-loops, and they likely saved him more than once from being thrown. They lengthened his sword stroke, too, and increased the force behind each blow. Well before the battle had ended, that portion of his mind which remained rational had concluded that all of Athens' cavalry must be so equipped, regardless of its natural resistance to change.
By the time pink fingers stretched across the sky, the battle east of the Strymon had turned to a rout. Demosthenes worked his way toward the river's bank, cutting down a group of fleeing Argileans on the way. At first opportunity, he looked across the river in search of some sign of how the fighting had gone in the western hills, where Alkibiades had waited overnight in a wooded depression with a thousand light infantry. Half of those under his command were Thracian swordsmen who had come down from Rhodope for nothing more than glory and the opportunity to strip the arms of those they killed; Demosthenes caught sight of a band of those men now, unmistakable with the fox-tail tassels of their soft caps flapping in time with their steps. They were running hard in pursuit of some enemy infantry who had slung their shields on their backs and fled north, toward where plains gave way to marshland. Perhaps the routed enemy did not know that they soon would find themselves trudging through knee-deep water and suctioning mud, or perhaps they did, and wrongly hoped the fox-tailed Thracians, who knew the land well, would be discouraged from following.
***
By full sunrise, the Athenian victory on both banks was complete. Five or six hundred of Brasidas's light troops were on the run through the northern marshes ahead of their tireless Thracian pursuers, but nearer and more pressingly, a band of about two hundred enemy hoplites had managed to withdraw to the bridge and hold it against sustained infantry assault from the eastern bank. Demosthenes had not ordered such an assault. No one had–it had simply developed in the frenzy of battle, as was often the case–but when he arrived on the scene and saw the Athenian corpses piling up, he called its halt.
As the Athenians withdrew, he saw who led the band of holdouts on the bridge. He had met him once before, briefly, having stood almost face to face with him during the failed Spartan naval assault on the beaches of Pylos, where the Equal had been the first trierarch to run his ship aground. The honor it had won him had helped make him a general.
Brasidas.
III. AMPHIPOLIS 5. Brasidas
He stood unhelmed, flowing dark Spartiate locks clinging to his high forehead and angular, bloodied cheekbones. His right hand rested defiantly on the hilt of his sheathed sword, and on his left arm hung a battered lambda-blazoned hoplon.
That Brasidas was not among the dead would disappoint Thalassia—wherever she was. (Why did he sense she was somewhere near, watching the battle with her overkeen eyes?) Let her call his survival a failure if she would. By any reasonable human measure, a great victory had been won this day.
And the day was not yet over. There was still time yet for Brasidas to join the ranks of the dead.
The bridge was packed from bank to bank, rail to rail with soldiers. They spilled onto the land, too, forming walls of shields facing east and west. Half the Spartans and allies were bloody and battered while the rest were fresh, as though they had been caught between the two battles on the east bank and west, participating in neither. All of the holdouts were hoplites, and the gentle, chaotic motion of their tall, closely packed spears made the bridge seem almost a living thing.
At the head of the pack, on the side facing Amphipolis, Brasidas stood. Around him and comprising the front two ranks were perhaps thirty more survivors of his army's core of freed Helots. At the Spartans' feet stood a tangled heap of corpses of Athenians and Amphipolitans, a makeshift palisade of flesh bound to interfere with any further attempt to dislodge them.
Of course, the standoff had an obvious solution, and it did not escape Demosthenes. After the end of the battle's first phase, Straton had brought his troop of gastraphetes-wielders down from the walls of Amphipolis; but consulting with the huntsman now, Demosthenes learned that the belly-bows could not be put to further use until a stock of used bolts could be harvested from the frosty earth and from the bowels of enemies already slain.
There was nothing to lose by talking, then, and something to gain, if not the holdouts' surrender: time for ammunition to be collected.
"You men!" Demosthenes called down over the bridge from his lines a safe distance away. "Spartans and their allies! You have nothing to be ashamed of this day! There is no dishonor in suffering an honest defeat, and so I offer you the chance to leav
e this place with your honor intact. Surrender only your arms and your general, and you may keep your lives and your freedom!"
Brasidas, long hair matted with blood and cheek bearing a deep gash, did not give his men time to consider deserting him. He shouted back, "That is ever the way with you Athenians, is it? Willing to fight so long as the going is easy, but when the real work begins you start throwing about something even cheaper than your arrows: words! Come finish us if you've got the balls, hippopornoi!"
The term was new to Demosthenes. Horse-whores. Perhaps Brasidas had invented it, or perhaps it was a part of the vocabulary of the Spartans, who so despised horsemen—ranking them second only to archers in cowardice—that the unit Sparta called its 'cavalry' marched and fought on foot.
Whatever the insult meant, Demosthenes brushed it off along with the fat snowflakes which had settled on his cloak, and replied, "I think my offer is a magnanimous one. Refuse it and find yourselves spitted like sheep by arrows that treat bronze like the silks your wives wear now while they seduce your slaves. The archers are on their way, and you make good targets packed shoulder-to-shoulder on that bridge. Those of you who would use reason and think for yourselves, be not afraid of one man, this general who has led you to defeat! Be afraid of the skewer that bears your name, for we have plenty to go around!"
By the time Demosthenes finished, he was forced to shout over a war-chant, some words of blood and honor by Tyrtaios or other martial poet of Lakonia. Brasidas was the first to raise his voice, but soon was joined by the whole of the thirty-strong Spartan contingent. These uplifted Helots, it seemed, were as willing as any Equal to die at the word of their highborn commander.