Demosthenes raised the signal pennant. As planned, his order was relayed around the south end of Sphacteria and around to the Ionian squadron. The troop carriers off the east and west shores of the island drove ashore and disgorged their contents: crack platoons of the Athenian hoplites in full panoply, assigned to set up a defensive perimeter around the landing places. After them would come the regular oarsmen equipped with spears and wickerwork shields, and finally the archers, who would form up in ranks to cover the push inland. If the whole operation went as planned, the Athenians would outnumber the Lacedaemonians on the island by a ratio of ten to one.
Resplendent as the dawn in his new armor and exhilarated by the spectacle, Cleon wore a proud, militant pout. Though he had contributed nothing to the attack but its timing, he clearly had the most to gain or lose from its outcome. The high personal stakes gave him a sense of ownership over the forces unleashed that morning; men were marching to war, he sensed, in the service of his destiny. So it was this, he thought, that made Nicias so enamored of the military life! Such had never figured in his plans, this kind of glory. But as the brave little bronze figures splashed ashore, and serried to his purpose, Cleon was thrilled by a world of possibilities. He could not help but wonder now, “Why not me?”
Demosthenes turned around. “Did you say something?”
“Nothing,” he replied, still intrigued by the question. Why not, indeed?
From the water they could see only the east prong of the attack, but that seemed to be progressing well. The hoplites met no resistance at the beachhead, and as they pushed further up the broken ground, probing shadowed crevices with the points of their spears, it appeared as if the enemy had deserted the island. Time seemed to slow as Demosthenes awaited the key deployment; he envisioned his forces, before they organized and dispersed, suddenly swept onto the hardscrabble shore as if by some invisible force. For the first time in months he feared to unlock his knees, lest Cleon see his legs snap, and learn he was not a man but a two-stemmed figurine of clay and dirt. What business had his kind on the pitching deck of a ship? Was there any doubt that, when he failed, they would toss him over the side, like drunken merchants disposing of a spent wine jar at sea?
Less than a mile west, Xeuthes waited his turn to scramble through a jag on the island’s seaward rampart. The point was narrow, a mere crenellation in the island’s natural defense, and the Athenians found themselves bunched up along the gangway and back onto the deck.
“Keep moving, you women!” Leochares hissed from the shore, waving his hands like a chorus master exhorting his troupe. “This is no time to worry about soiling your skirts! I’ve seen girls file through a springhouse faster!”
“He’s been in and done with a whore faster, too,” cracked Timon, who waited in line a few places behind Xeuthes. Cleinias found the wind to laugh along, though his terror at the Lacedaemonians had left him without a trace of spit in his mouth. Under the circumstances, embarking through the passage in that dreary half light, it was as if they each awaited their turn at the gates of Hades.
When the men of the Terror reached the plateau they joined a force of four thousand others massing there. Space was still limited, and with most of the Athenians wearing old closed helmets with a limited field of vision and no earholes, many of them could neither see nor hear. Disgusted by the jostling, Leochares combed through the mass in a silent frenzy, sorting peltasts from archers, hauling the latter out by their leather corselets and into position. Time was running short: though the sun had still not showed itself from behind the mountain, the halo around its summit promised it would soon. With that, the possibility of surprise would be lost.
The first wave of light-armed troops charged inland. True to their reputation, the party included a disproportionate number of Acharnians. Scaling the spine of the island, Xeuthes, Timon, and Cleinias were slowed by boulders, hidden kettle holes, and the blackened skeletons of trees looming in the darkness. A man beside Xeuthes suddenly fell behind, clutching the back of his calf; Timon, his heart pounding, felt a tearing pain in his right big toe but ran on. Only later, when his excitement ebbed, would he realize that the toe was cut nearly in two as he stumbled over a sharp rock.
Xeuthes willed his old legs onward a few more steps. He was among the oldest in the attack, but felt his gaunt form renewed by it. To grasp the spear, to embody the will of his city with every stride, was a thrill rarely available to him anymore. As the first sun-beam broke over Mathion he felt a trickle of sweat course through the bristles at the back of his neck. There was a square of fabric lying on the ground before him—a faded cloak with traces of crimson at the edges.
With Timon and Cleinias at his side, Xeuthes watched as something rustled under the cloak. A lump appeared, and a dirt-caked finger along the hem. When a fold of the cloak was suddenly flipped up, the Acharnians looked down on the face of a young Spartan.
Lips cracked with thirst, locks disheveled like a nest of snakes, Namertes squinted at the newcomers. He was still struggling to make out what he saw when Cleinias, in a sudden panic, lifted his spear and sank it through the cloak. Timon followed before Xeuthes could stop him. Six others converged, taking their chance to jab a vaunted Lacedaemonian. As he was attacked, the victim made only a single sound: a kind of startled grunt, like a man stubbing his toe.
“Stand down, you men!” shouted Xeuthes. “Cleon wants prisoners.”
The Athenians laughed at this. Not that their captain had said it with much conviction—who ever heard of such a thing as a Spartan captive? Didn’t the longhairs take pride in never raising a hand in surrender? Well, if someone was going to give himself up today, it wouldn’t be this fellow!
The hold men perforated the corpse until they were exhausted. Xeuthes cast a reproving eye on them.
“Satisfied?”
Timon extracted the point from Namertes’ backbone with a twisting motion. “No,” he replied. “It seems they die just like other men.”
7.
It was not long before Antalcidas understood the magnitude of their blunder. They had seen the fleet ring the island the night before, as usual. What no one among the Lacedaemonians had thought to do, though, was to count the number of vessels the Athenians had used in the blockade. If they had, they would have known that ten extra ships—together carrying as many as two thousand men—had taken up position around the south end of Sphacteria. There was now no doubt about their purpose.
Epitadas could spare no time on regrets. When the alarm went up, his first thought was to control the helots. Spartiates barked at their squires to fetch their shields and spears; the servants were then herded to one spot and two platoons of troops placed around them. It was the most he could spare in the face of the enemy attack. He assumed the latter would be driven off soon enough, but he feared what the helots might attempt in the interim. Defeat and death at the hands of the Athenians would be disappointing but creditable in the eyes of their elders. To be slaughtered from behind by unsecured helots, on the other hand, would be remembered as a true humiliation.
Epitadas summoned the captain of the guard and said—with no particular effort to conceal the threat—“If they so much as twitch, kill them.”
The rest of the Spartiates and under-thirties assembled around the well at the center of the island. There were enough of them to form a phalanx forty files wide and eight shields deep. The platoon leaders were in the front rank, and the most experienced hands in the back to bar retreat. But when Epitadas inspected his men, he saw the impossibility of cowardice. Every spear was held straight and true, the blades aflame with 320 tiny, reflected dawns. The new-style helmets left their faces exposed, burning eyes fueled by steady rage, lordly jaws square with confidence. After all the weeks of privation, of impotent waiting, the Lacedaemonian machine, leveler of the proud, stood assembled. He stepped before them.
“This looks like the day we’ve seen coming, so I won’t detain you with fancy talk. In Laconia we don’t need rousing speeches to
fight, but only our love of country, and the sense to follow our training. You all know we’ve met the Athenians before, and whipped them. We’ll whip them here too, provided you each keep the line. They might try to use bows against us. I expect the under-thirties to do their duty in that case. . . .”
Frog, who was standing in the file next to Antalcidas’, leaned toward him. “Might try to use archers? Doesn’t he see the bowmen down there?”
“Tell him, not me, fool!” growled Antalcidas. “This is your last chance.”
“We are three hundred today,” Epitadas went on. “I probably don’t need to remind you of the significance of that number. When our grandfathers stood against the barbarian at Thermopylae, he faced an army unglimpsed before or since in the history of men. It is said that they were so numerous that when they crossed into Greece, their host covered the plains of Thessaly, and the dust from their feet blocked the sun for three days. But despite such odds, despite the incompetence and betrayal of those they trusted, Leonidas and his three hundred were not diminished by their defeat. Instead, they gained everlasting fame.
“Today it is not Xerxes’ thousand thousand before us. Instead, we face Athenians, in numbers just two or three times our own. In these last months, in the time I have been privileged to lead you, we have contended with hunger, thirst, and fire. There have been injuries, storms, plagues of birds. The enemy thinks we are weak. He may even believe he has an advantage! But we know he is still overmatched when he faces us. For we fight now not for some distant mountain pass, but for soil vouchsafed by our ancestors, who long ago crossed high Taygetus to humble the Messenians. With their conquest it became our birthright—it became our life. I say to you, then, that I don’t expect we face Leonidas’ fate here.
“Yet I also say that if it comes to that choice, to consecrate another three hundred to eternity, I will not shrink! Nor will you, if my experience in these last months is any guide. For that is the way for men bred like us, for war. If we do our duty, if we fight as if the shades of our fathers back us in the phalanx, we must be victorious, either on the field this very day, or with our willing deaths, in the hearts of our children. And that, my companions, is all I have to say.”
No one cheered. The Spartans, who understood the importance of hearing orders above the roar of battle, were fastidious in their silence. Instead, the men simply raised their spears, checked the fit on their helmets on their heads, and tightened up their ranks. Epitadas, satisfied, turned to look down the hill at the enemy’s disposition.
What he saw encouraged him. The Athenians were pouring onto the island and collecting in the center, in the level area below the slope. His advance post, held by thirty of the younger men, already appeared to be overrun. Yet it seemed that the Athenians had landed only a company-sized force of hoplites. Did they think so few of their heavy troops, who were inferior to the Lacedaemonians under the best of circumstances, would carry the field? There were others flitting about—peltasts taking up positions on the hill, archers beyond them—but Epitadas knew from experience to focus on the real threats—the hoplites—and ignore the auxiliaries.
He was startled by a voice beside him, saying, “Look how they occupy the high positions with their bowmen. They hope to catch us between fires.”
Antalcidas was standing there, leaning into him as if to keep his counsel discreet. The presumption was galling.
“What are you doing here? Get back in line!” roared Epitadas.
The other hung his lower jaw for a moment before replying, “I just thought I would help.”
“Don’t presume upon my patience, Brother. And I’ll thank you to leave the thinking to me!”
8.
It was testimony to Lacedaemonian discipline that they could march on Sphacteria at all. They had no pipers that day to govern their pace, and the irregularity of the ground made it impossible for them to keep their ranks straight as they descended the hill. The Athenians, to Epitadas’ contempt, did not even try: Demosthenes had instructed them not to advance, but to stand still and let the archers and peltasts do the killing.
The Spartans came within bow shot. At first, their upturned spears knocked down a few of the arrows, until the archers found their range and the missiles began to drop vertically down on them. Antalcidas watched from the back as noble Spartiates were stuck with arrows straight through the crowns of their helmets. He could see a few of their faces as they twisted and fell—some dropped in their tracks like men struck by lightning; others stood for a long time with faces aghast, disbelieving, as if they had suffered a personal insult.
Peltasts pressed close on the left with their slings. Epitadas barked an order, sending two platoons of under-thirties out of the phalanx and after the peltasts. Antalcidas had seen this maneuver done better and faster elsewhere. The young men moved sluggishly, as if underwater; a good many ran as if bothered by wounds to their feet. The Athenians pulled up short, turned, and ran; being more lightly armed, most got away to slightly higher ground where the archers stood. Retreating, the under-thirties were then exposed to missiles both ahead and behind, from the bowmen shooting from the other side of the island. Half of the Lacedaemonians were wounded as they clambered back to the phalanx. A good many never made it back.
That was all Antalcidas needed to see. The enemy had demonstrated the principle behind his tactics—all that was left now was to let it succeed. With the Athenian hoplites unwilling to engage and their archers free to hit the phalanx from either flank, Epitadas could not grapple with the enemy anywhere. Nor could the Lacedaemonians survive in the open with their inadequate headgear.
Peltasts attacked from the right. Two fresh platoons bolted out to meet them. Same mistake, same result: the peltasts ran away, and the Spartans were plied with arrows. Antalcidas looked to Frog who, to his credit, seemed discomfited to be proven correct.
The stomping of thousands of feet stirred up the freshly burned ground, sending up a curtain of fine, black dust. The Spartans could no longer see where the arrows were coming from. The slingers and peltasts, meanwhile, were growing bolder, appearing out of the gloom no more than a few yards away. On impulse, Antalcidas darted out at one of the attackers, approaching him from the blind side as he turned to use his sling: Antalcidas speared him with such force that the tip passed through the man’s body and pierced his leather corselet from the inside. Stone tried in vain to extract his weapon intact as the enemy peltasts swarmed around him. “Use the cover!” he shouted to his brother as he planted his foot in the dead man’s back and, pulling the spear right and left as blood arched from some torn vessel, snapped the ashwood shaft. “Use the dust to cover a withdrawal . . . !” Someone came at him through the gloom, swinging a sword. Antalcidas blocked a blow by driving forward with his shield. The assailant fell back, but there was no time to finish him. Antalcidas dropped the broken shaft and retreated back to the phalanx.
The dust had become a noxious cloud, coating their throats and stinging their eyes. The Lacedaemonians kept their silence, but the Athenian hoplites were hooting and shouting, and the peltasts screwing up their courage with wild cries as they pressed the attack. All the while the arrows kept dropping from above, the tumult muffling the snap of the bowstrings, the gloom hiding the volleys until they struck. Under the circumstances, even the Spartans, who credited themselves for their calm in the face of battlefield chaos, turned with worried eyes to Epitadas.
And still he did not concede. Instead, the phalanx was ordered forward at a half march, inching along like a man groping for something in the dark. The enemy hoplites were somewhere ahead—certainly as encumbered as the Lacedaemonians were, perhaps equally as contemptuous of men who fought at a distance. Perhaps they might meet in the center, and give each other someone to kill in the time-honored way. There was still a chance a battle might break out in the middle of the massacre.
But they never saw the Athenians. Though they marched for an eternity, the hoplites seemed to recede from them, as if Demosthenes h
ad somehow compelled the island to serve his purpose by stretching longer. Antalcidas was now stepping on or over his comrades, the finest troops in the world, now reduced to gray lumps on the gray earth. As losses mounted and the men closed ranks, and the phalanx seemed to contract on itself, Antalcidas felt he could no longer keep silent. “Epitadas!” he shouted, packing the magnitude of his despair into the one, desperate word.
Through the haze he saw the shadow of a horsehair crest—the badge of his brother’s office—turn toward him. Somewhere far beneath the unceasing clang of Attic vowels, he felt a Laconian marching command that he did not hear as much as feel in his bones. The order, relayed by the platoon leaders to all the men, reached him just as he saw the forward ranks pivot.
There was no time for fancy countermarches now, no stepping in place to wait for the officers to lead the way back. Everyone just spun on their heels and retreated up the hill. The reversal of direction was missed by the Athenian bowmen, who went on pouring arrows through the cloud to where the Spartans would have been. When the phalanx was spotted it was halfway up the slope and barely in range; as bad as the advance had been, Antalcidas saw no one fall during the retreat.
9.
The Lacedaemonians were safely inside the old fort when the sun was at its highest. With nostrils caked by dust and ashes, lungs burning, and wounds begging for care, they were desperate for water. The island’s main well was, alas, now in Athenian hands. The new one by the fort, beyond the bones of the old cyclops, had so far produced little more than a trickle. Epitadas allowed the men to take turns crawling down to wet their lips.
The Athenians made another series of landings, swelling their contingent on the island. Xeuthes, Timon, and the rest of the crew from the Terror were on the left, having advanced as close to the Spartan lines as Demosthenes dared. The heat tortured them too, as months of confinement on ships and crowded beaches had ruined them for marching, and their commanders had not yet organized distribution of water to troops that far up the slope. They had hoped, after all, that the longhairs would be crushed on the flats, in the first hours of the battle. That the enemy had escaped to the high ground was the first thing to wipe the smile off Cleon’s face that morning.
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