The End of Sparta

horsemen parted ways and yelled to them to finish their own against the jumble of Spartan riders and hoplites. More summer dirt blew into Melon’s face. Staphis-or was it the pressure itself pushing Staphis?-crowded him and knocked him off balance into Chion. 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 Melon’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 Melon 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. Melon could not even hear Epaminondas in the ranks a few feet away. His ears were instead full of Neto’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 dromo. 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 Melon 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 Ker, 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 Melon’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.

Melon 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 Chion 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. Chion, my Chion, 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 euonumon.”

Still, few heard a word. There was too much iron and wood-and, for most of the terrified, the shrieks of the circling black Keres above. Melon’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 othismos 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-Melon 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.

Chion 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 Melon 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 Chion yell, “Forget your hobble. No Cholopous now, master. Let them at our backs do the work. Jab our spears into their faces.”

The Spartans were upon them all. Melon 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. Melon’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 symbole, 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 Melon’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, Melon 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 breaking 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. Melon 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 Chion’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