Our campfires spread for miles up the road by night. We bivouacked without sentries, without order, and without care. There were rumors that a man named Stratocles was in charge. He was a strategical genius, they said, and he had a plan to rout the Macedonians, who were much due for a humbling. A drink to victory! And another to Stratocles! And more after that, until the fires were superfluous, and we danced away whatever energy the march had left to us.
The joy division reached Thebes, and streamed around her walls, thinking the Theban army would come out to embrace their new allies. But the gates stayed shut, and the guards in the towers looked down on us warily. On the far side of the city we saw a neat square of armored men waiting on the road. It was not the whole Theban army, but the best part of it: we had the Theban Sacred Band on our side, three hundred strong. Since the action at Delium, 86 years before, this Band had never lost a battle. They fought as couples, each man consecrated to his lover in the ranks. It was a coup for Demosthenes, to have convinced the Thebans to plight this, their most cherished unit, in our cause. What need, then, of strategy, tactics, security? On to victory! And then on the Macedon, to smash the half-barbarian upstarts who presumed to enslave true Greeks! The only sour note was struck by the Thebans: though undefeated in more than a generation, they marched diffidently, without joy or confidence on their faces. Some thought they felt dishonored to share the road with us. We might have suspected that they had a better idea of the quality of the opposition.
Our scouts sighted the enemy in a narrow valley in the north of Boeotia. From that moment the events of the day became a blur to me. Stratocles, it turned out, had no strategy in mind. Officers from different units came scurrying up to organize us into phalanxes eight shields deep, then sixteen, then back to eight. First we stood here, then we stood there. An order went out to march forward onto the plain-but the command went to only half the army, leaving big gaps in our lines. The mood passed from happiness to frenzy, as everyone wanted something done, but no one was clearly in charge, and the gaps infuriated the officers, who yelled at the gallant but frustrated boys and old men. With these annoyances we became aware that we were footsore and, though we had feasted on patriotism, hungry. The good times on the road gave way to squabbling as men were crushed against each other. The only cool heads were on the shoulders of the Thebans, who marched in precise order to our right flank and settled there, resting their peculiar crimped shields on the ground against their legs.
The Macedonians, meanwhile, were collected in their neat ranks, watching us struggle to form our lines. Of the Companion cavalry and Philip and Alexander, there was yet no sign. Somebody in the vanguard observed that the enemy had just tiny shields hanging from the shoulders, and that they wore only leather armor. A rumor was passed back through the ranks that the Macedonians had no protection at all, and for a moment all discomfort was forgotten, for the enemy had left their shields at Pella, and it would be an easy day of killing for the Greeks!
At last they had us all organized and pointed the right direction. I was on the right, adjacent to the Sacred Band, in the sixth row of a phalanx eight shields deep. I recall it was already late in the day to begin a battle; the sun beat down so mercilessly on my helmet that I could smell the liner cooking within it. To keep their hands dry on their spears, men up and down the line were wiping their sweaty palms on their breastplates, or struggling to bend over for some dirt.
At the sounding of the pipes, we marched forward in more or less good order. We were a loud army, clanking with every step, raising the paean; the Macedonians, on the other hand, moved over the battlefield in almost complete silence. The mood became very tense as the armies closed on each other. From many yards away we could see that the Macedonian pikes, their sarissas, were at least twice as long as the ones we carried. The whooping and hollering on the Greek side subsided; our lines contracted as each soldier pressed against his comrade to the right, trying to nestle behind his shield. This forced each shield bearer to move to his right, until our whole line began to drift north, angling obliquely toward the enemy. Lacking true shields, our enemies could not hunker behind their fellows, but marched straight and true. Watching them between the shoulders of my comrades, I could see their faces: the Macedonians were serene, even bored.
The enemy halted their advance as our first three ranks leveled their spears. Our boys kept on coming, giving throat to the cry that terrified the Persians at Marathon and Plataea-eleleu eleleu! With that, the Macedonians all turned around and withdrew on the double. There didn’t seem to be any signal given for them to do this. They just did it, as calmly as if they were drilling on the parade ground.
Unlike at Marathon, our front ranks were not taken up by our toughest hoplites, but by our most enthusiastic. The Macedonian withdrawal confirmed what they had long imagined-that the barbarians had no stomach for fighting the free citizens of a civilized city! Our ranks dissolved as they pursued the retreating enemy; weighted down with their ancient panoplies, the Greeks exhausted themselves running after the lightly-clad Macedonians. Our officers were screaming at their men, trying to organize an orderly advance. Yet our glorious commander Stratocles, who was very probably drunk, was off celebrating the rout, riding with sword aloft, crying “We’ve got ‘em on the run, boys! Now on to Pella!”
With the sole exception of our Theban allies, who anchored our right with no trace of emotion, all semblance of organization among the Greeks was gone. Our army opened up like a boiled onion, the ranks peeling away from the phalanx one by one. Some of the hoplites, half-blind with sweat under ill-fitting helmets, tripped on rocks and clumps of soil; as they struggled to rise, they were trampled in the dust by their jubilant comrades. This was in chilling contrast to the Macedonians, who wheeled around in their thousands without a single man going down. Not a single one!
You know what happened next. At the sounding of a trumpet, the enemy retreat suddenly seemed to halt. What had really happened, of course, was that the Macedonians didn’t run away at all, but had only countermarched behind a new line formed by their best men. Having fooled many of the Greeks with this sham, they grasped their pikes underhand and lowered the tips. The Macedonian pike is long enough for men four and five shields deep in their phalanx to reach the enemy. Many of the Athenians were propelled by pure momentum into this swarm of spear points. Hemmed in by their comrades around them, hundreds were struck full in the face, noses or jawbones split. This was when I learned that the entrance of a metal point into the unprotected face of a man makes a peculiar noise-a certain combination of a crunch and a thud. I had much opportunity to hear it as the survivors tried to come about, colliding with the oncoming ranks, until we were all a helpless jumble of exhausted, blind men and boys, so terrified that we defecated ourselves with fear, or cried for our mothers.
It was at this point that the enemy broke their silence. They let loose an inimitable cry-made in that strange dialect of theirs-that rose over the ongoing din of shields and armor, freezing the blood of every Greek on the field. The Macedonians then started forward again, walking right over the Greek casualties, finishing off the fallen with downward thrusts of the iron points on the butts of their pikes. I remember seeing a face I recognized among the wounded: he was the teacher who taught me my letters, decades before. I had not seen him since, and never did again, but only in that instant. He lay uncomplaining at the feet of the Macedonians, the contents of his testicles spilled on his groin flaps, his gray head anointed with the dust of sacrifice.
There was at that point still some distance between the enemy and what remained of the Athenian line. To the eternal credit of my fellow citizens, most of them stood firm as the enemy approached. Others, foreseeing only their imminent death, and finding themselves hemmed in on all sides by the phalanx, gave themselves over to panic. Just a few of these cowards, flailing to free themselves, was enough to disrupt huge swaths of our formation. And all the while the Macedonians were coming on, those damnable cocksure smiles on their faces-smiles like those right there!
Machon leveled a finger at the Macedonian observers in the courtroom, who were indeed grinning as they listened to one of the storied moments in their nation’s history. Their smiles withered as five hundred pairs of resentful eyes bore down on them.
You may be thinking that I paint too dark a picture of the events that day. To those who were not there, it should be pointed out that the battle seemed far from over to us. There was still the opportunity for the Greeks to turn the tables on the enemy: to settle in, dig the butts of our spears into the earth, and impale the dogs as they charged.
We were confident we could do this, and prepared for it, for we all understood exactly what was at stake. We had already learned, after all, that there was no defensive strategy against the likes of Philip-no resort to Long Walls and hope for bad weather. Can you remember when our grandfathers told us of the war with Sparta, when those half-hick stiffs would come every year at the same time, shake their fists at our Long Walls, burn a few haystacks, and go home? Remember how formidable those Lacedaemonians sounded to us, as children? Yet we all knew we were in for much worse if Philip’s hordes poured into Attica. To Philip, walled cities were just unshucked oysters, and the war never stopped for harvest, weather or any other reason under heaven. His troops were neither
