Mêlon was not quite free yet from that vision of neighing Pan—and so once again he grasped Chiôn’s arm and finally, in these last moments before the charge, he spoke to him as the equal Chiôn had always really been. “It matters nothing whether we are eight or fifty deep. We care little about how long Kleombrotos’s line over there ends up. Men alone count on the battle line.” Then he turned to his slave. “If it is the will of Zeus that every Boiotian die this morning, still you and I at least will not fall beneath the spears of Kleombrotos. Never. There is not a hoplite nor a god yet born that will break us, Chiôn. Not this day. Not on this plain of Leuktra.”
But Chiôn was already eyeing the king across the way. He pulled his helmet down and heard not a word. Then a Thespian trotted up to the front out of breath. “Son of Malgis. I came late with the slaves.” Staphis? It was the farmer the Thespians all knew as Dried Grape. Here was the lowly vine owner from Helikon who ran up from the back of the phalanx. Too old, with bad armor, thin arms, and knock knees and his empty head with no notion of the spears to come, only that he wanted to do some great thing on the front line before he fell to the earth beside his ox in aged weariness—the sort of idea that so often gets the best of us killed.
Staphis had marched from Helikon along with Nêto the evening before. Then Staphis had spent the early morning looking for the tent of Epaminondas to learn where were the files of Mêlon and Chiôn of Thespiai. Staphis had little skill with the spear. But he would prove the braver man if genuine courage is, as the philosophers said, not the raging of the desperate, but the risking of all when all in life is most dear and most to be hoarded. For this Staphis, his tiny vineyard on the rises below Helikon was his Elysion, paradise on earth for many seasons to come and a rather valuable thing not to be thrown rashly away in a morning in the muck at Leuktra, when the presence of a vine grower would not change the verdict of the battle either way.
Being ungainly and aged can suit a good man, when a spirit looms larger than what it is trapped in—and a certain rare beauty follows from the very contrast. On this morning facing the old guard of Sparta, the ugliest farmer from Helikon was not ugly at all. So Mêlon saw for the first time on the front line of the army of the Boiotians. Staphis was, in fact, the most beautiful of the Hellenes in Thespiai. He was at Mêlon’s side ignoring a death sentence in hopes to fight head-on against the king of Sparta and his guard. The tiny teeth of the field mouse would have had a better chance against a green field viper. “Staphis,” Mêlon called, “fight here. Head with us into death. Right through the swinging doors to the other side.”
The line was set and about ready to charge out. The tanner Antitheos, on the other side of Staphis, kept his gaze fixed ahead. He held his shield too high, to show all the power of his strong left arm. Now he was raging out of the side of his mouth to Mêlon. “If you limp to the king first, Mêlon Chôlopous, all is forgotten. But I think we Thebans over here on your left, we will be the ones to cut off Kleombrotos’s beard.” Every man in the phalanx was boasting something like that. But not more than one or two in their immediate midst could hear a thing. Staphis muttered to himself, “Here we go into the storm. Pray Herakles and any gods who roam Helikon that I prove worthy of these better ones at my side.” Staphis had cut the throat of a young goat the night before. He had offered it up to Zeus Eleutheros who frees those on the eve of battle shackled in fear. But the blood had not flowed. The victim had a half-liver. The spongy lungs had put the sacrificial flame out as well. Now the vine man wasn’t sure that even if the god listened, and gave them victory, he would shield Staphis of Helikon. Then the grape grower stepped out even as he trembled. Mêlon felt his shaking and so he moved his shield a few more palms to cover more of the farmer’s right flank. “Don’t worry, my neighbor. We will laugh at all this, at harvest next, in the victory halls of Malgis on Helikon, my Staphis. These are the days that will bring us joy to recall back on Helikon.”
On the other side, Antikrates frowned as he focused on the Boiotians across the field under the banner of Epaminondas—just out of bow shot, no more now than three hundred paces away. Like his father Lichas, he saw for the first time the Boiotian weight: too many spears there facing the royal right. The young Spartan thought, “Here is trouble right at the beginning, right in our path.” His boys had drunk too much of their red wine as rumors swept the camp that the Boiotians would run and there would be only women across the way, and no need for a fight after all. His father, Lichas, had been circling on his pony, too far out in front of the phalanx, eager to charge the Boiotians and be the first to kill on either side, before he dismounted and joined the king’s guard. “Still, our best may die, but if so, they are not our best. We follow no rules, no nomima of the Hellenes for us. We know no heralds. We pull back no spears from the wounded. No shaking of hands when we beat them. We ask for no quarter. Nothing but death now, death to them. We pray to no gods but Thanatos.” With such pride, Antikrates lowered his gray spear Haima. He aimed its tip at a big hoplite opposite, with the tallest crest on the line. He had spotted a big one from Thespiai, not far, not far across the way.
The Boiotian hoplites across from Antikrates jostled to keep rank. Then Epaminondas stepped out without his own shield or helmet. Seven thousand spears were shaking. The general trotted down the front line of the Thebans beneath their raised spears. He was hitting the wooden shafts lightly with a large cleaver, an iron klôpis of the type the Spartans favored. “For Thebes, for Boiotia, and for Hellas!” he repeated as he made his way across the front rank to the clattering of struck wood. A few enemy arrows from the strong bows landed harmlessly ten paces from his feet.
Then he stopped in the middle of the Boiotian front line. Here Epaminondas yelled out a final time, “We are better men than the Spartans, better in peace and far better men in war. I swear a great oath to every man here: We will kill their king today. It is fated. I will not live after today if we lose. I will not breathe the air of Boiotia in shame and laughed at by all. We shall not lose this Holy Leuktra. Follow me into their spears. Follow Herakles who roams above us. Avenge the daughters of Skedasos. Follow me into song and story. Give me one more step forward still. The Thebans are mightier in war.”
The army behind him shook their spears and clapped them against their shields. They let out a thunderous roar with their own paean to death, “Death, death, death—thanatos, thanatos, thanatos—the Thebans are mightier in war. The Boiotians are better than Spartans.” They were immediately cut short by the ping of metal against wood and flesh as a thousand Spartan horsemen galloped out and hit the Theban cavalrymen head-on. Lichas led them, with a spear in his right hand and a cleaver in his left, reins in his mouth, his own men behind likewise chanting “Thanatonde, thanatonde—deathward, to death.” To no avail. His horsemen were outnumbered, and they soon proved to be mere boys compared to the skilled riders of the plains around Kopais. The Boiotians had hit them in a massive rhomboid and then sliced through the thin line of Spartan horse, forcing them all back into their own ranks. Then the Boiotians threw javelins at the confused jumble of foot and horse, as they split off and rode back to the wings—even as the Boiotian phalanx now bore down on the men of Sparta. Dust engulfed the wine-soaked Spartans, and the oncoming hoplites of Boiotia could see only the raised spear of Lichas, as he shouted in vain, “Rally to me, my riders, rally to me!”
Pray God that Lophis my son was ready for that hippomachia, thought Mêlon. But then without warning almost everything in the ranks began to move, as the pushing from behind started up. Dust rose again. A cloud of it was already hanging in front. The phalanx of the Boiotians was on the move as the horsemen parted ways and yelled to them to finish their own against the jumble of Spartan riders and hoplites. More summer dirt blew into Mêlon’s face. Staphis—or was it the pressure itself pushing Staphis?—crowded him and knocked him off balance into Chiôn. The men at his side were all moving at a double-step, with their spears held underhand. He could feel that much. The butt of M�
�lon’s Bora caught on something to the rear. The men behind were that close, their shields battering the back of his own shoulders. Even though the hoplites of the Peloponnesos were a few cubits distant across the rolling field, an enemy horseman broke through on his right. He was a Spartan hippeus and he had got turned around after the cavalry collision. The fool, with his flying braids, had galloped back into the wrong army. The Spartan rider was quickly stabbed on all sides—but not before taking a few hoplites down with him as his horse crashed over onto the men of Tanagra.
Next Mêlon heard an even worse sound than the neighing horses, worse even than the straps and shields bustling, and wood hitting iron as spears and shields bounced together: the sickly sweet music of Dorian flutes. Or was it women’s shrieks in the air above them? No, it was enemy flutes, as the Spartan infantry were upon them and at last slanting into the leftward march of the Theban massed wing, each side now desperate to outflank the other. Mêlon could not even hear Epaminondas in the ranks a few feet away. His ears were instead full of Nêto’s Thisbean flute, as if she were playing it inside his head to drown the death music of the enemy. He chanted to himself to blot out the enemy tune. His general was pleading with the men at his immediate side. “The sound of the Spartan dirge. Ignore it. The music is coming for them. Not for us. You hear the pipes of a dead city. A dead people. The enemy is lost. They are fleeing. Their flutes are sweet music to our ears.”
Epaminondas might as well have been on Olympos. His men were charging ahead. They were already running in the dromô. Their heads were encased in bronze, tucked behind their shields, ready for the crash.
CHAPTER 6
The Breaking Point
Like some tawny hedgehog that is riled by the hunter’s dog out of his deep field hole with spines erect, the Boiotian phalanx had shuddered and then, at last, had lumbered out to face the red Spartan line—this, the best army of men Boiotia had ever fielded in the memory of the elders, better even than the men at Delion who beat back the Athenians over fifty summers before. Never had Mêlon marched leftward. He squinted out the eye-holes of his Korinthian helmet. But he could see no helper god Herakles yet at his side. He thought he saw a glimpse of some deity in the sky, but it was a harsh one—in black with white incisors, and a pale female one at that. She flapped her long wings of ugly skin and feather, the length of two, maybe three hoplites. Ugly pale breasts with black braids bounced about on this thing, this monster, the Kêr, scavenger of the dead, the courier woman of Hades. Where were the virgins of Leuktra, who were promised to fly up and bat away the smelly daughters of night?
Then Mêlon’s trance ended as the two armies kept on course for the crash. Spartans ahead. A long spear line of them. Now not more than twenty paces away. Their death music louder. He could hear that much. They would come on, shield touching shield—not like the farmers of Boiotia running with underhanded spears hoping to crash in and break through the slow-moving wall.
Lichas had already led the Spartan cavalry against the Theban horse and saw his mounted men beaten back and mostly killed. Now he leaped down and headed to the king’s guard on foot, his side braids flapping out of his helmet, his retainer taking his mount behind the phalanx. Lichas was laughing in joy to be spearing as a hoplite, even as he yelled to the flutists, “Play them louder still, my pipers. It makes the pigs mad with the god Pan. We will eat them by noon. Look how they herd up. All good and ready to be slaughtered. All in a neat bunch. Follow me to the kill. Keep in step, not a gap in the ranks. Don’t let them get to our sides! Shields chest high. Forward into the spears—eis dorata. Slow, steady in our walk of death. Spear, bleed these pigs. I rout their horsemen as play. Hear our Tyrtaios, hear him—‘Let you never relax from war.’ Where are you now, my Antikrates, where is my boy killer?” He screamed on without worry that not a one of his helmeted Spartans heard him and that the mass of Thebans was heading right for him.
Mêlon across the way knew that none could hear him either, given the clatter of gear and their bronze helmets, and the war cry of the Spartans. But the same advice came out nonetheless to Chiôn on his right and the quivering Staphis on the left. “Run. Keep moving. Shields out. High and out. Bunch together. No gaps. No gaps. No stops—all eyes ahead. Look at the men you kill. Steady, men, steady. Spears level. All at once. All at once, aim for their throats. Hit them as one, all together. Chiôn, my Chiôn, here they are, the eyes of these Spartan snakes. Endure it, men. Endure it, my Staphi. Staphi, Staphi stay left. Left. Left, left—drift to the good side. Always to the good side move. Hit them on their right, from the flank on their naked right. We go left. Pros t’aristeron. Eis euônumon.”
Still, few heard a word. There was too much iron and wood—and, for most of the terrified, the shrieks of the circling black Kêres above. Mêlon’s helmet was down. Dust was in his mouth and ears. He was dizzy and wondered why he was running. No more trot now, he was running with the bad leg—faster even to the hated left, faster than he remembered from the old battles. The rear ranks are pushing me ahead, he thought. They’re knocking me over, my own men, the fifty aspides from the rear. My elbows are free as we run. Good sign, good sign in these early moments. Yes, the big shove, the ôthismos that knocks us ahead. Do these doomed reds, these blurs up ahead, do they have any notion of these fifty shields at our backs? Poseidon’s wave is about to knock them over. Yet they walk, walk into our charge?
What would the others, these young ones—Mêlon kept thinking—these who had never stood down the Spartan, what would they do with this wave, this push of their friends’ shields breaking on their backs? They might panic. Or be knocked over before they hit the wall of the red-capes. He could hear the Boiotian paean, the war cry—eleleleu, eleleleu, eleleleu.
Chiôn alone was quiet and a step ahead, worried that his master’s slow leg meant they could not be four or five paces closer to the oncoming Spartans. The Boiotian front lines hit the enemy at a run, shuddered, recoiled, bunched back up, and then began to push, stab, and pour into any gaps where Spartans had gone down. In a few moments, it was all Mêlon could do to keep his feet, even as he was struggling to move to the left with the others on the front line and get to the flank of the Spartan right wing. His left arm was battered and stung. The hard rims of the friendly shields from the rear kept pushing on his back shoulder to force him forward. He could not hear his Chiôn yell, “Forget your hobble. No Chôlopous now, master. Let them at our backs do the work. Jab our spears into their faces.”
The Spartans were upon them all. Mêlon revived from a brief moment of darkness after the crash of the armies. Spartans everywhere—horsehair, braids, and plate bronze in a sea of red tunics and wooden shields, the lambdas on their shields eyeing him. His own to the rear kept blindly pushing him through these crimson lines. Shafts hitting at all angles, the battle now a maze of wood, round shields, and tall spears that not even the god of war could sort out. Mêlon’s long Bora struck something and shuddered, first before most others. Why not—his tip was four palm’s widths longer than most of the first line. He at least knew where they were—at the symbolê, at the first hit between the two armies. Then came the terrible counter-blows from Spartan spears. At first only a few spent jabs glanced off Mêlon’s breastplate. But soon his shield shuddered and cracked from hard spear thrusts. In these first moments none of the stabbers of the enemy line had hit his throat. His groin was untouched. Not so with the enemy. Thebans here on the left had struck the enemy royals at an angle, hit an entire line on their unshielded right sides as they had tried in vain to move to their right and behind the mass of Boiotians—who had won the race to the flank.
The noise reminded him of a hard spring hail on Helikon, when he worked on the olive press in the cold shed, under the din of Zeus’s storm. It was like clattering ice on the roof tiles above. Amid the clanging, Mêlon was stabbing and bashing with his shield as the Spartan resistance stiffened. Soon he was nearly crushed between the pressure of spear points ahead and his own shields behind—before breaki
ng deeper into the Spartan mass ahead. Then as the line plowed on, Spartans inside on his flanks grabbed at him amid their ranks. “Just keep on your feet, fool,” he muttered to himself. Mêlon tried to steady himself, as the shields behind continued to send him forward, as he sought to keep his own shield high on his left to give Staphis cover, as he took safety in Chiôn’s wooden shield on his right, as he stabbed over the shield rims of the enemy, as shafts from the rear grazed his helmet, as he went ahead in unison with his own, as he stepped over spears and shields—and men—on the ground. The best hoplite was not the strongest right arm, Mêlon knew, but he who could cover his neighbor, stab, advance, keep his balance amid the flotsam at his feet, and hide in the shield cover from his right—all at once.
At Mêlon’s side, a husky Spartan broke through a small gap that just for an instant had opened between himself and Staphis. The long-haired killer—he was known in the south as Kobôn of the large hands—had plunged too deep into the Theban lines with not a Spartan shield in sight for his cover, and then fell to the stabs from the butt-ends of a half-dozen spears to his rear. “Lizard-killers”—saurôtêres—hoplites called these bronze squared spikes. Those with their spears still upright shredded anything that moved on the ground at their feet. This gnarly-hide Kobôn, even in the bronze of his grandfather Artemôn, was hammered apart by the feet and spikes of six men. “Keep rank, fools, keep rank, stay together,” Mêlon yelled, more to himself than down the line. He knew that if just two or three more of these red-shirts like Kobôn had made it through, the Boiotian front line would have split asunder. A phalanx was like water: It flowed through the easiest hole. A current soon became a deluge if there were quick-witted officers (and in the Spartan army there always were) to cry out, “Push”—ôtheite, ôtheite—when they found a channel to widen.
The End of Sparta Page 9