aborted by Agis a stone's toss before contact. The Spartans had withdrawn south to Tegea. No one knew what they were up to. Attempting to flood the plain, the allies heard. The month was Boedromion; there wasn't a course strong as an old man's piss in either river. A day passed; then another. The allies took fright that Agis would pull something truly harebrained.
They came down off Mount Alesion, an impregnable position, into the throat of the plain, just north of the Pelagos wood. Word came that the Spartans were advancing from the south with every spit and jigger they could carry. That was when I arrived. The allies had formed up, two miles across, barring the plain.
Now a fresh rumor started: the Spartans had turned back. There would be no battle; our side would haul out too. The regiment above which my brother and I perched had marshaled beneath pear trees, the only crop left untorched by the Spartans because they were not ripe, and the troops from boredom had begun gnawing the stony culls. These made men crap like geese. By twos and threes troops fell from formation, ostensibly to heed nature's call but in truth to get a jump on packing for decampment.
Suddenly one saw dust.
Wisps ascended from the Pelagos wood a mile away. This appeared at first as the brush-burning in fall, when the olive grovers rake their piles beneath the canopy and light them off.
Now tendrils grew to vapors, and vapors to clouds. All stir ceased within our formation. The front of dust broadened; isolated risers conjoined. The tread of thirty thousand could not raise such a storm; the enemy must be twice that. Yet one saw neither a flash off a shield nor even a scout rider cantering in the fore. Just dust, ascending in thunderheads from the canopy of oak until the wood seemed to smoke from end to end.
Lion reined beside me; we must make to the commanders to receive orders. He began directing me to the swiftest track.
Suddenly, inexplicably, our troops began to advance.
You have witnessed such movements in hosts of men. Soldiers in massed formation often cannot hear even a legitimate signal, owing to various clamors of the field. The individual finds himself stepping off in response to the motion of others, knowing no more why he follows than a sheep or a goose. At any event the corps began to move. “Get to the fore.” My brother motioned me toward the plain. “Find out what the hell's going on!”
I have said I am no equestrian. More, the mare was rank; as I sought to heel her through the milling troops she began to caper and buck. The formation was among orchards, as I said, with branches abounding to crack one's skull, not to say a forest of elevated spearpoints as my mount plunged past, while my knees and ankles clamped her in a death grip and both fists clawed into her mane. Beast and rider broke into the clear.
From Pelagos the first columns of the foe now emerged. We learned later that the Spartans had been startled nearly witless, issuing from the wood, by the sudden apparition of the allied army drawn up before them. Such was the brilliance of their discipline, however, and the order with which they deployed from column of march to line of battle, that it was we and not they who nearly buckled with terror.
I turned back to our side, the estate of Euctemon, whoever he was, who owned the land upon which the allied armies had marshaled. Here they came, left and right but no middle. Two corps advanced, with half a mile of daylight between. By the gods, what a mess!
Enemy regiments continued unpeeling from the wood. One discovered in aftermath the extent of the Spartan mobilization. So grave was the perceived threat engineered by Alcibiades that the foe had called up seven of eight age-classes, eight thousand Spartiates under both kings, Agis and Pleistoanax, with the full Corps of Knights and four of five ephors present as serving officers.
In addition they had activated the forces of the seventy Lacedaemonian towns, twenty thousand heavy infantry, constrained to “follow the Spartans whithersoever they shall lead,” with the whole army of Tegea defending native soil, the Arcadian allies of Heraea and Maenalia, plus the freed helots, the brasidioi, and the “new citizens,” the neodamodeis. With the Argives, Mantineans, and allies arrayed in opposition, this was the mightiest massing of Greek against Greek in history.
Now I saw Alcibiades. Even at a distance one knew him by the dash with which he rode. The allied center at last emerged, with him and other officers galloping to join the commanders in the fore.
The full body of the foe had emerged from the wood, fifteen hundred yards off. On the flat between the armies one could see materializing, as preceding all battles, boys afoot and on ponies, and even girls come to lark and goggle. Some, caught up in the moment, would dash onto the field and lose their lives; others would prove heroes, recovering the fallen; while yet more would linger to loot the corpses of the slain. One heard the cries of dogs.
The wild packs can smell a battle, and even tame hounds, whipped to a pitch by that keening heard only by their race, may be driven from the field by naught but their own extinction. I galloped toward the commanders. One could see them unnerved by the foe's impeccable advance. “Let it be now!” Alcibiades called above the approaching din. “Let it be now!”
The foe's skirmishers led, an eighth mile off. Lion hauled in beside me. The first sling bullets started chewing divots at our feet; in moments stones began clattering like hail. I could not reach the commanders, scattering to their units. We must fight as cavalry now, my brother shouted. Here came our own darters and lancers, packs of them on the scamper, and to the rear the mass of the heavy infantry, Argives, Mantineans and Athenians, Orneaeans and Cleonaeans, and the mercenary Arcadians. The plain trembled beneath their tread. They had commenced the paean, the same Hymn to Castor their Doric kinsmen, the Spartans, would take up in moments.
At the right of the field twined a dry course and the wreckage of a vineyard torched earlier by the foe. Over these razed walls advanced the Spartan Sciritae, eighty shields across and eight deep, whose place of honor is ever on the left. Adjacent pressed another sixteen hundred scarlet cloaks, the regiments who had fought in Thrace under Brasidas; they and the new citizens, two hundred shields more bearing the lambda of Lacedaemon.
On their right came the Corps of Peers. There was no mistaking the precision of their order and the brilliance of their kit. Every other nation of Greece advances to battle beneath the trumpet; only Spartans employ the pipes. These now skirled that cadenced wail which is part music and part curdling of the blood. Agis the king marched at the center, flanked by the Three Hundred, the agema of Knights. The entire force, all seven regiments, strode in scarlet with their shields at march port and spears, unsheathed nine-footers, at the upright.
Across the air came “Advance to Battle.” The beat picked up and the corps as one lifted its voice in the Hymn to Nike. The formation, shields straked solid, rolled out onto the flat of the plain.
I clutched my mare's mane and kicked her like hell.
On came the line of lambdas. The Mantineans who must clash with them had worked themselves into a state of frenzy. Fear drove them to shout and beat their shields; out front their officers sought in vain to check the discomposure. Four hundred yards now separated the armored infantry. The allied line kept edging right, as armies will, as each individual seeks the shelter of the shield of the man at his shoulder, so that our wing overlapped the Spartans by an eighth of a mile. An order pealed down their line; the pipers picked it up; the Sciritae went to echelon left, fanning to conform to the oncoming Mantineans. A gap opened between them and the adjacent companies. Something had got cockeyed.
No reserves advanced to fill the break. The Sciritae commanders, perceiving their vulnerability, piped back to the right. Too late. A hundred yards remained. Spears lowered to the attack. With a cry the Mantineans closed ranks and fell upon the Spartan left.
Of all moments of concentrated fury in this long and bitter war, few surpassed this, as the corps of Mantinea, fighting for home and country against that race which had lorded it over them for centuries, descended upon this blood foe, while the isolated left of Sciritae and brasidioi set shoulder by shoulder and dug in to endure the scrum of the othismos.
My brother and I were on the extreme right, with the cavalry and the overlapped heavy infantry of Mantinea. The Spartan left had been cut off on both sides, to their right by the void between themselves and the Corps of Peers, to the left by the lapped wing of the Mantineans. Here is the posture a fighting force fears most- envelopment.
Slingers and javelineers of both sides, who had been passed over by the heavy troops in the advance, now flooded into the gaps, assaulting each other and the compacted infantry. They were so close to the fight, the darters, that they flung their shafts over the shoulders of their comrades, into the faces of the foe, while across, the same dish was being served hot to them. Clouds of missiles arced and ascended, plunging and vanishing within battlements of dust. The Mantinean heavy infantry swept past Lion and me, as triremes on the sea in that
