The End of Sparta

red-capes unawares. The Spartans had wine in their mouths from the late breakfast, and a few were unsteady from too much. The ranks were not as tight as usual, and already enemy horsemen were charging from across the way. Too much drink, too much hubris this time. How could these pigs be more ready to charge than his own taskmasters of war? No, this was not the Spartan way, Lichas knew-and with a coward like Kleombrotos at the head of his army and drunken Dionysos, not Ares, their god this morning. Nonetheless, his hoplites raised their shields high and hit their spear shafts against the bronze shield blazons. The clash bellowed across the vale of Leuktra.

Melon across the field could smell the stench, as if in reply to the Spartan spectacle too many Thebans in the line had soiled their legs in terror. He noticed piss too in the dirt. Even some of the older ones emptied their bladders in the ranks. Their ground was becoming a sewer. Melon hit Chion on his broad shoulder as they found their slots on the left wing. “Our time, islander. You and I, we will stand firm-always the lead geese who break the wind for the weaker flyers behind.” He was talking as if he were Epaminondas.

Chion paid his master no mind-even though he heard well with his helmet up on his forehead. He tapped his spear on Melon’s shield. He was full of the good spirits, the daimones of courage and audacity. The slave was entheos, a god was inside him. As for Spartans over there preening to the mounted Lichas, he would kill plenty and rout the rest-happy to teach the Hellenes that there were men at Thespiai still. If he were killed? Well, nothing-he knew that well enough-nothing bad, no kakon. Neto had promised him that: nothing bad would come to the souls of the good. He would return in his own fashion, fly back out of the whirl to his haunt on Helikon in a shape and with a voice he could hardly imagine-a free soul as an ant or leaf with no memories of who or what it had been as the slave Chion of Helikon.

Melon was not quite free yet from that vision of neighing Pan-and so once again he grasped Chion’s arm and finally, in these last moments before the charge, he spoke to him as the equal Chion 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, Chion. Not this day. Not on this plain of Leuktra.”

But Chion 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 Neto the evening before. Then Staphis had spent the early morning looking for the tent of Epaminondas to learn where were the files of Melon and Chion 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 Melon 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 Melon’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,” Melon 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 Melon. “If you limp to the king first, Melon Cholopous, 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. Melon 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 klopis 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 Melon. 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