The End of Sparta

Peloponnesian allies were beginning to throw down their gear and flee to the hills beneath Kithairon. Their dust trail wafted hundreds of feet up into sky. Perhaps Lophis had risen to his feet after all. He might have made his way through the advancing hoplites to find a new mount.

From this lookout, Neto saw the Boiotian allied right wing stop its pursuit of the panicked Peloponnesians- also just as Epaminondas had ordered. Then these allied Boiotians below turned to their left, to help the advancing Thebans under Epaminondas surround and annihilate the final Spartan stand. The few alive of the vaunted Spartan royal wing were surrounded and trapped. No farmer, she sensed, wished to miss out on the bloodletting of a Spartan king. She didn’t either. “Oh, One God of us all, look.” Neto turned to the dumb ox at her side. “They are broken. So ends Sparta. Here, right here, is the end of Sparta.” Now on the road downward Neto climbed into the wagon, hitting Aias with a switch. She would drive the creaky wagon around the gentle slope of the hillside to find Lophis below and perhaps reach Melon and Chion as well. But as Neto reached the trail that led to the camp of Epaminondas, a stream of rustics swarmed ahead of her, all unhinged in their bloodlust. Hundreds of Boiotians- wives, men, archers, horsemen, armed or not-were calling out in unison, “On to Sparta, on to Sparta.” Then a new chorus rose of “O Epaminondas. Crush the head of the snake.”

Another madness had taken hold as the mob of onlookers scrambled over the mess of the battlefield. Hundreds of the widows of Boiotia were on their knees, tearing off the jewelry of the dead Spartans, indeed fighting one another for their red tunics and clasps. Neto thought from the bench of the wagon that the battle was over and won. All that had once been ridiculed was now accepted as dogma: “Like wheat stalks these Spartans-and mowed down by the scythes of our Pythagoras.”

CHAPTER 9

The King of Sparta

Leuktra had ceased to be an othismos aspidon, a push of shield against shield, since most of the enemy who were not trapped here were either dead or running. The Boiotians were battering with their shields the few stumbling Spartans who were left. Some fell and were stabbed by oncoming ranks, a few tried to join the shrinking circle around Kleombrotos. “Their king is trapped. Drag them away,” rippled out through the Boiotian ranks. Always they were answered with a chorus from the mob rushing forward, “On to Sparta. On to the Peloponnesos.”

For a moment only, both sides of the battlefield paused at the sight of the surrounded Spartan king and his huge Kleonymos barring the way forward. The king’s man was swinging fiercely with spear and shield as he hit Thebans foolish enough to charge alone such a man. A skilled bowman from Phokis tried to bring him down from a distance. His missiles bounced off Kleonymos’s shield and hit more of his own than of Sparta.

Four or five Spartan guardsmen rushed in behind Kleonymos. All raised shields to block the way to the king. In some places Spartans in the ring were nearly back-to-back. A tiny but solid mass was moving backward and for now was unbreakable. Maybe three hundred, maybe four were alive and had not fled, still killing all the Thebans who bounced off their spears. But this last circle was tightening, ever smaller, as it was pounded on all sides. Where was their Lichas? Where his son Antikrates?

It mattered little. Neither of those two talkers, Kleonymos swore to himself, had ever deserved their honor, their time-not over himself, the best son of Sphodrias. Kleonymos turned and aimed his spear once more at Melon. He would spike this apple and finish off the faker for good if he dared to come on again. But a hoplite on his right blocked the Spartan’s lunge. In the blur of bodies, Melon, as he would recall in the months to come, was pushed aside by one of his own, and so was not hit again by his attacker Kleonymos. Instead the Spartan pressed forward past him, eager to spear this new bigger target. Only later would Melon learn that Kleonymos would have stabbed his thigh, had he not been struck down almost at once by Chion-his Chion along with at least three retainers of Epaminondas. All their spears hit Kleonymos in the neck and groin. This legend of Sparta had gone down three times already at Leuktra-but always had regained his feet. This time the blows were mortal. The son joined the father Sphodrias in the dirt at the feet of their king.

As Kleonymos tottered, the melee cleared for a bit. Melon stared directly at the face of King Kleombrotos. The tall king was not more than five cubits distant. For a blink, he was alone. The royal had the look of a young man-far younger than Melon had imagined-even in these glimpses through the nose guard and bronze on his faceplate. This Kleombrotos had not wanted to be king, though the honors and the big house on the acropolis were good enough. His brother Agesilaos had fallen sick at Olynthos. So by accident the lot of the Agiad royal house had fallen to him, the lesser sibling. He was no leader in battle. The partner Eurypontid king, crippled Agesilaos of the lesser line, had shunned him as womanly. Now in his ninth year of kingship, Kleombrotos right here at Leuktra would crush the Boiotians and restore the honor to his Agiads. Or so the reluctant king had thought.

Again, where was his Lichas, the king now fretted, where was young Antikrates to save him? Traitors. Nothing in Kleombrotos had warranted royal rank other than birth and the unlooked-for fall of his elder brother. He was hardly the caliber of Agesilaos, the other king now sitting at home, who was glad when spears came his way, and-so the priestesses of Artemis had promised him-who would live on in his dotage to block Epaminondas from the acropolis of Sparta itself.

The rheuma polemou, the surge of war, gave Melon strength for a final burst, strength he had not known even in his youth. His spear was gone, his sword now in his right hand. He aimed his blade right over the edge of the king’s shield with all the power of his good farming arm. His royal victim was frozen-in faith perhaps that his wood of Mt. Taygetos would save him for a bit longer, or that Kleonymos would rise up a fourth time to his defense. Or that Lichas was not dead, but would come down from the air to lift him away.

Fool. Nothing of the sort followed. Melon’s thrust just cleared the top curved edge of the shield above the rivets. The sword’s point found Kleombrotos’s mouth. The tip entered between the cheek guards and beneath the bronze bridge over the nose. Melon’s arm rammed the blade a good way into the Spartan king’s head, snapping it back. Instinctively he raised his shield to prepare for the swarm of spears from the onrushing guard to follow. It came with no delay. Four or five blows knocked him back into shields of the Thebans to his rear. Too late. Melon had killed their king.

“King down. The king is down-Basileus epesen, peptoken hameteros basileus,” the guard called out. “Rally to us, men of Sparta, rally to us!” But there were few men of Sparta now to rally to anyone. Most of the guard were dead or wounded. A few even of the boldest had backed away looking to flee. Now others were trying to draw out of the circle to re-form the army or to prepare some rearguard to save the body of Kleombrotos. Losing their dead king would be worse even than losing this battle. Spartan hoplites such as these could not see their wives or boys again, even if they returned alive to Lakonia, if they did not save the body of Kleombrotos. They would be forever forced to live as spat-upon beggars, the tresantes- the tremblers who had lost their courage and their war and their king and their state.

The dark goddess Mania took hold of Epaminondas, the father of the Spartans’ disaster, and goaded him on toward Kleombrotos. The Boiotian general was enthused with the divine as he now cut in on Melon’s left. Boiotians from every direction reached at an arm or a leg of Kleombrotos, who had fallen to one knee and was about to keel over. “To the Kadmeia with him. Drag this dog to Thebes,” they yelled. Chion was at the fore. He was dodging spear thrusts to his chest, trying to join his general and help drag Kleombrotos out. In the confusion, the patched armor of Ainias caught Melon’s eye. Proxenos also was with Epaminondas, as the best men of Boiotia swarmed the body.

But just then from the retreating Spartans a spear thrust flew right under Melon’s jaw. Swoosh. It slammed instead into Chion, squarely inside the left upper arm at the shoulder. The blow knocked him off his feet-Chion, who thought he had killed nine of the red-capes so far without receiving even a scrape. The slave shuddered and struggled to rise, for the hit had come from someone as strong as himself. For a moment those to his rear froze as the white flame that had blazed a path for them flickered and went out. Then their Chion got halfway up, tottered, and fell again, not far from the dead Kleombrotos.

Melon tried to make out the blurry figures in the jumbled mass of fighters. Here came a shadow out of the Spartan past, one of the breed left of the type that once had broken the Persian Mardonios at Plataia, and smashed