two quick strokes at the base of the animal's skulls. From the rear came the shouted order: 'Fifth and sixth ranks, three paces to the rear —march! Third and forth ranks, rise!'
The phalanx was itself again, ready to meet the next charge of the Essedarii.
Two chariots were coming in abreast now. Surely they intended to hit the phalanx full on, sacrificing themselves so the following chariots could plow through the broken line. The Hoplites braced themselves for the shock. At the last instant the chariots split, turning to left and right. The lariat man in the left-hand chariot threw his noose with the quick, underhand toss, aiming for a man in the rear rank. An officer cut the rope through with a single slash while it still hung poised in mid-air. He had served in the Near East and his sword was of Damascus steel. The other lariat man took advantage of the distraction. He had been playing his rope, doing a spin now known as the Ocean Wave, in an attempt to hold the Hoplites' attention and distract them from his friend. When he saw that his comrade's throw had been foiled, he instantly flung his own rope, leaning far over the side of the chariot and putting the whole force of his body into the motion, using his arm mainly to guide the rope. He caught a man in the fifth rank, jerked him off his feet, and began towing him through the other lines.
Among the Hoplites, homosexuality was regarded not only as natural but as an idealized and noble relationship between an older and a younger man. In the phalanx, the young man in the front ranks each had a lover among the older men in the rear ranks. This situation was believed to increase the efficiency of the regiment for no man would run away and forsake his lover in a crisis. But the relationship also posed difficulties. As the Essedarius dragged his captive through the ranks, the man's boy-lover dropped his spear and threw himself on his friend's body to save him. The two men together cut a wide swathe through the ranks. An officer passed his sword through the boy's throat and the cry of 'Dress ranks! Dress ranks!' went up from the officers and the non-coms alike. But the damage had been done. The phalanx was broken, and the yelling Essedarii were charging in from all directions.
The commanding officer saw that the solid phalanx could not be saved, but there was one desperate expedient left. He gave the order, 'Squads right and left! Open lanes and hold!'
The phalanx was divided into squads and each man knew his position in the squad as well as in the phalanx. The men on the right of the squads took two steps to the right and those on the left, two steps to the left. Lanes appeared through the phalanx through which the chariots raced. Before the Essedarii could recover, the commanding officer had snapped another order and the phalanx had begun to close again.
The commander of the Essedarii was a tough old experienced Briton, his red hair twisted into pigtails and his face and arms blue with tattooing. He had fought the Romans under the great warrior Queen Boadicea and knew something about charging disciplined troops with chariots. He realized that if the phalanx was once allowed to reform it might never be broken again. Shouting his war cry, he urged his shaggy little ponies into one of the lanes and then, springing from the chariot, started laying about him with his battleaxe. Other Essedarii followed his example and within seconds the phalanx was broken up into little groups of desperate men fighting back to back against the charging chariots.
'Reform! Reform!' shouted the officers, but the phalanx could not reform. The men flinched from the plunging horses and were forced back into each other so that there was no room to wield their spears. The long spears of what had been the rear rank men were now useless and only the short spears of the front rank men could be employed. Attacked on all sides, no man dared to look over his shoulder for fear of being brained from in front with an axe or of finding one of the fatal lassos settling around his neck, but from behind him came screams and groans as his companions were cut down and at any instant he might feel a stab in the back as the Essedarii pressed in on the remnants of the phalanx.
The Hoplite commanding officer stood within a circle of his men who had turned at bay before the wild rush. Around them the rest of the Greeks were being massacred by the blood-splashed Essedarii. The savages' yells, their crouching figures, the delight with which they dispatched the wounded men, made them seem like Furies released from the pit. The fight was over, and in the stands the members of the crowd who had bet on the Essedarii were already yelling for the bookies to pay off.
The Hoplite general raised his voice in a last order. 'Form the Leuctrain wedge and forward!' he shouted.
The disciplined group around him broke their ring and with the general taking his position at the point of the wedge, moved forward behind their spears. It was a formation much like the old 'flying wedge' in football—a triangle of men moving forward with increasing speed. Their spears were shortened and held close to their sides in the same direction as the point of the triangle. The wedge plowed through the Essedarii, picking up more of the Hoplites as it progressed until it became a formidable body of men against which nothing could stand. The Essedarii refused to face it and ran for their chariots but the horses had stampeded. Dismounted, the Essedarii were helpless before the steady advance of the spearmen. The wedge swept around thearena,crushing all resistance and hamstringing the horses still attached to the chariots. When the Hoplite general saw that all real opposition was over, he gave another order.
'Break ranks. Deploy and kill at will!'
With the first shout that they had given throughout the battle, the Hoplites broke their rigid formation and scattered over the arena. They paid no attention to thumbs-up or thumbs-down decisions and, indeed, the crowd was too awestruck by what they had seen to make any motion. One after another, the Essedarii were hunted down and speared. Then the Hoplites re-formed and marched across the arena towards the gate, heads back, chests out, the non-coms calling the step. They would leave Rome the next day to fight in the arena at Pompeii and from thence proceed to Africa to take part in subduing a Nubian chief who had revolted against Rome.
The Hoplites' victory was not popular with the mob. They despised Greeks as effeminate, and no one likes to have his illusions shattered. Besides, the Essedarii had won the favour of the crowd because of their picturesqueness and their unusual skill with their lassos. The Hoplites with their rigid discipline and haughty airs antagonised the rabble. Taunting cries of 'Dog's-head, Dog's-head!' were raised to remind the arrogant Hoplites of the great battle of Cynoscephalae (Greek for Dog's-head) in which the forces of Greece went down in defeat before the Roman legions. The Hoplites paid no attention to the jeers. Only once did a Hoplite deign to reply to the taunts. A half-drunken man shouted, 'Why don't you relax, Greek? The war's over!'
A young Hoplite officer glanced up at him. 'Which one?' he inquired contemptuously. Then the Hoplites marched out through the Gate of Death still holding their faultless formation.
As a climax, a fight was staged with war elephants supported by two companies of the heavily armed Samnites. Thirty elephants took part in the battle, fifteen on each side, all carrying castles on their backs full of armed men. One group was composed of Indian elephants and the other of African. To the patricians and generals in the podium, this battle was of particular interest because it would prove, once and for all, whether the Indian or African elephant was superior for warfare.
The elephants were all males and had tusks. The females were useless for warfare as they would instinctively run from a tusked bull. Curiously, the African elephants were generally smaller than their Indian cousins although a full-grown African elephant is much bigger than an Indian one. This discrepancy was because the Indian mahouts were much more skilled at capturing and keeping elephants than were the Numidian mahouts. The Numidian animals were young bulls and many of them in poor condition.
All the elephants were heavily padded for protection. Most of them came from the government herd in Laurentum near Rome. The Romans occasionally found them useful for warfare, especially against a savage foe who would panic at the sight of the great creatures. It was the policy to spare the elephants as much as possible, both for reasons of economy and because the crowd disliked seeing them killed. When Pompey first exhibited an elephant hunt in the Circus Maximus, a wounded elephant had raised his trunk toward the crowd in the same appealing gesture that a fallen gladiator used when asking for mercy. The sight was so pitiful that even the brutalized mob rioted and the hunt had to be called off. (This gesture is apparently instinctive with elephants. J. A. Hunter, the famous Kenya professional hunter, told me that he had seen mortally injured elephants make the same motion when he moved in to finish them off. His native trackers refused to allow him to shoot, saying, 'The elephant is asking to be allowed to die in peace.')
However, although it was the men rather than the elephants who were to die in this engagement, the elephants like every other living thing that entered the arena had to take their chances. The crowd watched, tense with excitement, as the two groups approached each other, the elephants trumpeting as they saw what was ahead of them and curling up their delicate trunks to keep them out of harm's way.
