The End of Sparta

by Victor Davis Hanson

  A wave of silence struck the crowd, as if the apoplexy of the sight of the lame Mêlon had not been enough. How could a man with a scarred face and stubble talk like he was a sage of hand-to-hand spearing, the eloquent master of hoplomachia? Officers far better than Backwash pushed and squirmed for a better view of his crazed battle plan in the sand at their feet. The Theban elite was now to be on the bad-omened left side? The dirty side. Spear-to-spear, shield-to-shield set against King Kleombrotos. Mêlon scanned the tent. The provincials in the past always used to face directly the enemy king and his guard, while their own city grandees of Thebes stationed far to their right were untouched—slaughtering the allies of the Peloponnesos and calling it their victory.

  Since the time of Kreon, the nobodies of Hellas in the battles between the city-states had been the fodder to die on the ill-fated left wing. Mêlon was always told by the Boiotarchs not to lose the battle before their good men could win it over on the easy right. Malgis his father used to joke, “A funny sort of war it is, when the weak fall to the strong—on both sides of the battlefield.” Then Ainias called out some more. He would either convince the Thebans or enjoy bashing the heads of the shouters. “Yes, on the left. It’s been done before in the south and maybe elsewhere as well. Do you hear me, the left—the good-omened Left Hand, the divine Left of Pythagoras, where our strong hits their strong. There it will be for most of us in this council tomorrow. I and this Mêlon and Epaminondas and Pelopidas over there.”

  Ainias went on. “But that is not all the Spartans will see at noon.” The raspy voice of the torn ear had three cups of wine behind it, so he was louder even than before. “We will not stack sixteen men deep. Not like your fathers did at Nemea. We will not crowd even up to twenty-five shields—as your grandfathers fought at Delion. No, no, no. Epaminondas will lead a column of fifty deep. To push over the king from our left. Fifty shields deep, I say.”

  Fifty? Fifty shields on the left. How? Why? Now at more of these crazy taktika, the throng began pushing to see this map of Ainias in the sand, to find out whether he was mad or drunk or both. In the midst of the crowd’s chattering, a tough Boiotarch of wide shoulders from Tanagra came forward, with cratered face, a burn scar down his chin, and a smashed nose. He was no trembler like the whiny wide-butt Backwash or lord of pomegranates, Ladôn. No, this veteran scowled and he forced his way to the fore in a well-earned swagger. Hoplites parted since they had seen him cut a similar wide swath in the mess of battle. Ainias himself was not sure whether to hit this man—or, better yet, pull his sword out. For now the Stymphalian kept his blade in his scabbard on his shoulder.

  “Enough of this sophistry. Philliadas, I claim to be. Son of Philostratos. You all know me,” he yelled as he turned back to the crowd. The coarse farmer had cleared his barley ground near the battlefield of Tanagra. He was covered with ugly welts and healed-over rips, from both spears and goat horns. Grime and splinters were under his nails. Worse was on his hob-nailed sandals. This Philliadas also knew his numbers. In the past he had earned an Athenian drachma a day settling fights as a surveyor on the borders at Panakton near Attika. Philliadas could measure boundaries in his head—and box any who questioned his number reckoning. He would have done the judging free, just for the chance to kill a man without the charge of blood guilt.

  He stared down Ainias. “I wouldn’t try to slap me, sophist. Keep that shield still, or we’ll settle it here.” He stuck his finger almost into the chest of Ainias. “But listen, Arkadian, all you big fellows over there on the left will be only sixty men wide in your square—if even three thousand of you show up tomorrow and I can square my numbers. I figure Kleombrotos and his Spartans on the right wing will add up to twenty-five hundred, if not three thousand—at least as much as the men of Thebes. They may be eight shields to the rear. Or they may be twelve deep at most. Either way, with your sixty shields wide in the front row, you men on the left will be facing two or three hundred of them. I say you will be swallowed up in an eye blink one against four or maybe five. You Pythagoreans talk big about numbers and the good left hand. But these you don’t have a clue about.”

  This Philliadas had the crowd’s attention, even though most could not add or subtract, much less multiply his numbers. But they grasped well enough his point: The king’s wing of the far bigger army would be broader and quickly outflank the narrow deep column of the outnumbered Epaminondas on the left. It was madness to put your small head into a wide Spartan noose. Philliadas was chewing on the stem of a dried fig as he growled. “With that wider bunch, the king’s Spartans will go around you in no time. They’ll be at your rear and in the baggage in eye blinks. Even if my boys of Tanagra are out of the storm, soon they will be left naked in the center. We’ll be cut and spliced from our backsides. You Thebans will spear nothing but shadows way over on the naked left.”

  Voices of agreement followed. This torn-nose Philliadas had seen his share of crashing shields. “Maybe this will happen,” Ainias nodded, “if our mass charges straight ahead or to our right, dear Philliadas, as you seem to think. But why in your Apollo’s name should we when fifty deep?” Ainias then threw out the rest of his wine on the dirt. “Instead Epaminondas and Pelopidas with the mass will veer left from the left. They lead their Thebans leftward to the king himself—at an angle, or loksên as you say. The rest of the line must follow them. The whole army will go out double-time at an angle leftward. Boiotians too can be crabs in their walk—although left-clawed crabs at that.”

  As he talked, Ainias clapped his hands to signal the collision of the armies, and then hit the dirt with his spear. Most in the crowd could not see his lines in the sand. But the hoplites felt that he seemed to know what he talked about to be able to draw and talk numbers at the same time—and not get a stab from Philliadas for his efforts. “No, our left mass will angle left for the king. It will kill him. Kill his flank guard, too. Our strong against their strong. We’ll hit them fifty shield deep from their open sides before they encircle us. The red-capes have not a clue of our ship’s ram that will smash them tomorrow with full oars.” Ainias finished, “If the Thebans do as we say, the Spartans will carry off their dead king in defeat packed in honey, back to the River Eurotas before Sparta itself—and the rest will flee.”

  Philliadas was left mumbling something about himself and his men filling in gaps when the left wing went on its slanted march. Then he headed back to the rear of the crowd, which hooted in approbation that one of their own had at least stood up to the Arkadian high talker.

  Epaminondas had quietly translated Ainias’s talk into even more crude lines and arrows in the sand. Then he paused to add a few twists of his own. To the hipparchs, about ten or so of the cavalry commanders of Thebes, he pointed. “You ride better than the Spartans. They scoff at horse battle. Why not move away from the flanks and ride out at our front? Why not begin the killing at the fore, as the better men you are—shielding with your dust our new moves from the king?” When he saw the light in the cavalry commanders’ eyes, Epaminondas went on. “Kleombrotos will not expect our horsemen in his face. Even he will not think that fifty shields are coming his way behind our cavalry. Their king will see something different at Leuktra—something that no Hellenic general has ever witnessed. I plan to hit him right after his midmorning meal. Then his men are full of food and wine—slow on their feet, and dizzy in their ranks.”

  Epaminondas paused again. Too much battle talk, and now he could see the eyes of his hoplites wander. But he pressed a bit more. “Allies on the right—give us a little time tomorrow to hold fast. Do not move against the spears of the Peloponnesos. Don’t cross the battle line. Watch us first kill their idle Spartan overlords. Stay put. Hold. These allied farmers of Sparta need not die. Our business is only with the braid-hairs and smooth-lips. We have no killing lust for the allied yeomen of the Peloponnesos. They plow their own ground. Do not kill today who will be a friend tomorrow.”

  He finished with a warning. “Today we talk about killing Sp
artans on our ground, but that I fear will not be the end of it. Better to ask how we let Kleombrotos in here in the first place. Or why he comes with praise from the Athenians and most others who do not so much hate us as fear and worship him. But there will come a day soon that Hellas, as we know it, ends—and ends, I hope, for the better. There shall be no more unfree in Messenia—and beyond that no slaveholders anywhere even among us, the liberators who free serfs. This is a war not just to free us from Sparta, or even to free the helots from Sparta, but to free us all in Hellas from what makes some masters and others slaves. We fight to free ourselves from ourselves.”

  Mêlon murmured to Chiôn, “This man is either crazy or himself a god, and I suppose we will find out by daybreak. He seems as worried about keeping us alive as he is about killing Spartans. Does he know that most Boiotians here are scared, so scared that they would bolt at the sight of a Lichas or Sphodrias, even with all the war lore of Ainias and Epaminondas?”

  The slave answered only, “That is why we are here, master—to make sure none runs.” But the assembly was not quite over. On some sort of cue, Proxenos, the Plataian aristocrat, strutted to the center like the oligarch that he was. It was fine and good to have new ideas like a deepened phalanx, a slanted march, and the left wing stacked to fifty shields deep. But most of the ignorant and superstitious could not follow the logic of the tactics. That is why Nêto and Proxenos, long ago on his estate above the Asopos, had figured a far better way to rally the Boiotians: to remind them that the gods, the Olympian gods of the ignorant and superstitious, had promised victory to them should the Thespian Mêlon join the ranks.

  Now Proxenos began to walk and point. He wore a white cloak and heavy gold around his neck and on his fingers. He trampled over the sand without a care, as he did his polished marble halls at home over the Asopos—and the chart of Ainias disappeared beneath his boots. His newfound protector and friend Ainias did nothing. If the ragged Epaminondas was willing to crash into the red-capes for ideas and helots and freedom, well, then, it was likely because he was poor, and old and without wife or child. But why so, the hoplites wondered, was this rich man, with a deep-breasted wife and sons, and plow land above the Asopos? Why would a Plataian with a big gold ring fight for Thebes or, worse still, for things beyond Thebes? He knew well enough the answer if others did not. He had come to leave the idle rich estate owners of his Plataia, to build entire new cities rather than hang a city-gate in a backwater polis of Boiotia.

  Nêto, the slave girl of Mêlon, had drifted into the council this evening, and said she had joined the circle of Epaminondas to free her kindred helots. But she told herself that she was here to free her master Mêlon as well, and bring him down the mountain to fulfill the prophecy of the apple—and turn his mind from the mountain back to the world of the polis below, where men marry women if they proved to be their equals. Nêto trusted that her master cared not for any women except for herself, a lowly slave from Messenia. When off Helikon, she rarely saw any need to talk of him to others, to stand near him, to worry even that slaves are more often beaten than yoked by their masters. So she would do her part for him: She would be freed by the Thespians for joining the Boiotians at Leuktra when most of the craven of the small towns would not, and the two could then be one on Helikon. Because of all that, Nêto also reasoned that there was not much need even to talk to Mêlon, given they were as fated to be one as the Pleiades to rise or the magnet stone to find iron. After all, he was Mêlon, she Nêto, and that was all that the two or any others needed to know. It was just that simple.

  Proxenos was an architect, a wall builder, known in Thebes for his good sense and for his devotion to the logic of walls and gates. There was none more believable to deliver the oracles and signs of the gods. His father had taught him about Pythagoras, but then his father had also died seeking gold with Xenophon and the Ten Thousand in Asia. The Pythagoras of the son Proxenos taught the Hellenes that their souls were not one with their bodies, but can live on after death, in the next world where they suffer or prosper on the records that they compile here. Fail, Proxenos lectured his new friend Ainias, mar the soul with the lust for gold, women, or power, and the need to find yet another body—of an eel or snail, perhaps—to house an errant soul becomes endless.

  The meeting was about over, when even this man of Pythagoras reported the wild things he had just seen that morning. If the sober Proxenos saw omens, surely most had as well. “Boiotarchs and you other leaders of the files: Listen. Today the doors of the temple of Herakles in Thebes flew open. The statue of Herakles himself stands without his armor. It has vanished. The god himself is in the field. He is calling us to follow him against his impious kin from the Peloponnesos. The virgin daughters of Skedasos are to be avenged. Yes—those who were raped long ago on the rolling hills of Leuktra by men from the south. Listen to the wails of their ghostly spirits. They will fly out to help us kill Spartans.”

  Proxenos left the center and walked amid the crowd, to and fro, patting the heads and backs of the Boiotian commanders. “The spirits of these maids of Boiotia, once molested here at Leuktra by men from Sparta ten generations ago, have guided us here for revenge against their attackers from the Peloponnesos. Their ghosts hover over us tonight. Their shades shriek for our vengeance against the Spartans. Smoke of the offerings drifts in black patterns into the wind. The seers tell us the livers of their victims lack their full lobes as the gods demand vengeance. The insides of the animals are night-black with a foul stench. A few goats are without any organs at all. Some lungs stink and shrivel in the air when touched by flames.”

  Proxenos raised his hands to the top of the tent, and went on. “That is only the beginning; ribbons blow off our officers’ spears and then land on the tombs of the dead to warn of more to come. The snake god at Trophonios warns the Spartans of their death. The stone statue of Athena bent over and picked up the shield sculpted at her feet.” The crowd was rapt at the rich man’s words that offered far better promises of victory than all the complex sand drawings of Ainias and big talk of Epaminondas put together.

  This Proxenos was as handsome as the foreigner Ainias was ugly—and one of their own Boiotian aristocrats for relish. Who cared for the logos of Epaminondas? Who needed Ainias’s technê? Listen to the prophecy of their own Mêlon, a Boiotian. There were gods on Olympos. They listened not to the numbers of Pythagoras—but spoke through the omens that Proxenos, another man of Boiotia, related. “Hear me out. All the prophets sing of our Mêlon the Thespian. This man the oracle of Pasiphai from far-off Thalamai warned. He is the lame one—come here tonight from his high farm on Helikon. He is the one the king was warned about. This I can prove. I have talked to the priestess of Apollo on Ptôon. She too has heard the gods’ voices: “Should Mêlon live till tomorrow and see the face of a Spartan king, then the sons of Leônidas, they will be no more.”

  Proxenos grew even quieter in speech. “Some of you have heard the rumors about the Thespian Nêto, near Askra. She’s the virgin helot, the slave on Mêlon’s farm. She has sworn that the priestess of Trophonios, the snake-goddess of Lebadeia, promised us victory—if only the son of Malgis would fight. Ah, she is here with us now.”

  Then on cue a blood-curdling shriek filled the tent. “Alalalê. Alalalalalêêê …” The war cry of Helikon. Tall and thin, Nêto stood on a chair above the hoplites. She had sneaked off from the farm, once Mêlon had left with Chiôn and Gorgos, and had spent yet another day at Thebes with Proxenos studying the omens. Now with her hair in waves and her eyes rolling, she posed like those wild gorgons in stone, carved high on the big temples, with mouth and teeth wide open. Back on Mêlon’s farm, Nêto had learned to sound her war cry in Boiotian, when guiding the oak plow that Chiôn drew—always in fear that the snorting, sweating slave would break her plowshare on the half-hidden boulders ahead. She had been born a helot but had been bought here in the north by Mêlon. He claimed her seller had told him that the little girl was daughter of a disgraced priestess of Pas
iphai to the south. Now she was the oracle of the Thespians in the woods of Helikon. She acted no more like Mêlon’s slave than did Gorgos or Chiôn.

  Then this wild Kalypso went on again, louder in man speech, winking at her master as she began. “Here is Mêlon. Among you Mêlon, son of Malgis. Don’t you see? Mêlon. Listen to our one God. Mêlon of Thespiai is chosen. Yes, yes he is the one they fear to the south. Mêlon will kill a Spartan king. Why? Why? He is the mêlon of course, the “apple” the seers say will end the Spartans.”

  Now she was quite out of her steamy breath. Shaking, swaying, almost tipping off the chair, near collapse, she offered gibberish all mixed up in clumsy hexameters. One hand went up and flailed the air. The other was stabbing the breeze with her reed pipe. The hoplites had never seen anything quite like this. The sudden shouts, followed by her eerie calm voice, kept them still. All this ranting in cadence came from what looked like a slave and a woman. In Boiotian with some Messenian strains—delivered with a high pitch that cut the ears. She appeared as odd as her verse. Nêto was as tall as most men, cloaked in the rough wool of a man. Her nose was a bit long. Her lips were too wide. Her ears were big enough that her long hair could never quite cover them. Yet she was pretty, perhaps even goddess-like—or so she seemed to the eyes of her master Mêlon, who let her roam all over Boiotia.

  They could see all that right now, so at least she was humankind. Nêto’s face balanced out well enough, as if its parts could not do without each other. Her legs were long. She often ran up to the dam above the farm of Mêlon, with the fawns and does. “Deer Legs,” Chiôn called her. Yes, Nêto of the fast legs that outpaced the stags on Helikon. Some of the Thebans murmured that she was a wood nymph or worse than a naiad. But who could get her off that high chair? She must have jumped up with those panther thighs to get there. Without much prompting, Nêto threw off her cloak and hood. As if possessed by the Pythia’s vapors, she slowly sang out a few more phrases as she pointed to Mêlon. “Him. Him. The Spartans must kill or lose tomorrow morn. Keep him safe. Do that and the king will die. The Thebans are mightier in war.”