The End of Sparta

the Argives at Mantineia. The Spartan was splashed with blood, his helmet long since torn off. He cared little whether he wore any armor or none. Bald on top with a forked beard, he looked like a besotted Satyr, but with blood, not wine, his drink. This was Lichas. And he now stalked from the shadows to the fore. He had ranged across the battlefield to find twenty Spartan hoplites in isolated pockets, rallying them to march over to the last stand of the Spartans and save their king. Two braids of his side hair were swinging wildly in the air. As his mouth opened there was not more than a tooth or two in his ugly head. Melon thought he was not grimacing-but smiling. Yes, this was Lichas of legend, who had killed his father at Koroneia and ruined his own leg.

Wrinkled almost beyond recognition of being a Spartan hoplite, scarred, and bald, this monster stormed into the final killing, scoffed at the spears tips bobbing in his face, and tried to save his dying lord whom he had ridiculed the last nine years. His huge son Antikrates followed him, eager to outdo the father, and himself prepared to carry out both their corpses, if need be-father and king one on each shoulder. Lichas and his son were frantic. “Save the king! To the camp! All alive back to the camp! Eis to stratopedon. To me, rally to me!” Neither cared anything for the collapse of the Spartan ranks, much less the truth that the day of his parochial state was over. No, it was enough this day that they were Spartans-now in the joy of battle, with their grip on shield and spear, whether that be here in the north or far to the east. Lichas’s last son was with him. Good men lived-even if his other boy, Thorax, was gasping now for breath, after Chion’s spear had torn apart the sinews of his neck behind the ear.

Whether in the heyday of Spartan power or amid its twilight also counted for nothing. He was stalking proudly upright despite his age. If the Spartans were to lose, they would lose in the way of Leonidas and Lysander-and Lichas-killing as they protected their king with all blows to their front. The stabbing in this last battle grew fiercer still. But Lichas laughed as he heard the dying around him in vain begging the Keres to pass them by, the vultures of death back above Melon and Chion. The black deities kept their wide distance from Lichas-lest such a man strike even these deathless ones a fatal blow. No, Lichas laughed, even Nyx, queen of her dark brood, fears my smell.

Then, without missing a step, Lichas stepped toward the downed Chion’s chest and tried to spear his throat. The wounded slave rolled away as Theban spears covered him. Lichas moved on to finish off others less dangerous. But in that moment the slave stumbled somehow to his feet, bellowing, “Kill the king. Where is Kleombrotos?” Then he fell a third time to the ground, muttering as the battle raged past him.

Lichas whirled to meet a challenger: He slammed his freed spear shaft with an upward flat stroke against the helmet of the onrushing Epaminondas himself. Before Epaminondas could recover from the blow and with his men swarm this killer, Lichas stooped down. With one fluid motion, more a god than human, he picked up his limp king, slung him over his back, and used his body as a shield to batter himself a way out back through what was left of the guard. Antikrates backed away, face to the enemy, as his father headed to camp. He was trying to warn all those Spartans alive to follow his father’s path. “We and our king are the way out. We are the way back. To camp. To the ditch. Eis taphron, phugete pros taphron.” They were aiming at an escape, perhaps back through the shattered circle and on right through the Sacred Band to the open country-slashing as they went. “Turn, Spartans. Turn back. Draw back from these stinking pigs. Apostrepesthe ton suon. They will not have our Kleombrotos. No Spartan king for their slop. Not today-not ever.”

There were only two hundred Spartans alive in the circle who broke out with Lichas, as their bald hoplite god roared on, “Not today. Not ever. Not today, not ever-ou semera, oupote, ou semera, oupote.” They had been abandoned by their allies and were surrounded by the Boiotians. But the Spartan remnants were buoyed by the late appearance of their bloody Ares Lichas. He had always found a path out for them. Now his indomitable son Antikrates was his rearguard. The two would outdo each other for the laurels of battle. Both would clear a way for the rest to get out and home, or so the last of the Spartan hoplites thought.

With Lichas leading, the Spartans remembered their training of the agoge, and as if awakened from a trance they backpedaled in column. With Lichas, almost magically they wheeled around and plunged ahead through Pelopidas’s men to their rear-who had thought the battle long over. One man, a single god- like Lichas, was worth a lochos, or maybe more still than six hundred mere hoplites, and now he intended to save the best of those still alive for wars yet to come.

Many of the Theban Band in the rear had already begun stripping the bodies. Fools again. Ten or so of them, the best hoplites in Thebes, were impaled by Lichas’s charge. Their ashes would soon send the big houses of the city into mourning for the year to come. Where this foul apparition came from, no one afterward knew. Perhaps some fissure in the earth had spat him back out from Hades below? Survivors claimed he had been on all sides of the battlefield, on and off his horse. That his neck and forearms were a bloody mess made him yell in delight, “The pigs bite us like children. Like children. They sting like wasps, no more.”

Lichas stalked his way through the raining blows of the Thebans to the front of the retreating column. In disgust, with a quick overhand slam he sent his spear into the throat of Saugenes, the high officer of Pelopidas’s Sacred Band who stepped forward to block his passage. Like his dead father at Delion, Saugenes only earned himself another black marble grave stele on the road to Thebes for his trouble. Lichas, even under the weight of his king, was making headway with level Spartan spears at his front and side. Melon had bolted back up after ducking his blow, followed the retreating band, and picked up the fallen spear of the king. He tried to cast it in anger for the stabbing of Chion, but it was a heavy thing not meant for throwing. Melon was aiming at the body of the king, since he thought the limp Kleombrotos might have survived his head wound.

Lichas turned and saw something out of the corner of his eye. He bobbed his head a little. The iron point of Melon’s throw only cut through the ear of the Spartan’s bare head before hitting the thigh of the king draped over the shoulders. Lichas’s shredded ear on the side of his unhelmeted head spurted blood. He ignored the scratch. “To the hill, to the hill and form up. A thousand in camp await us there. A thousand others and more live. Across the ditch and on home,” he roared. Kleombrotos was dead, having breathed his last even before Melon had thrown his spear. Now it fell from the king’s limp thigh. The bodyguards pressed even closer to Lichas and their slain lord. In moments the Spartans were through the crowd of Thebans. Now they were marching across the bridge over the ditch under a hail of missiles. The Boiotian light-armed ran up to get in their blows, once they had a clear fleeing target.

Antikrates was last. With his massive shield, the son of Lichas brought up the rear. He was pushing the Spartans ahead. He waved his spear this way and that before throwing it at the Boiotians who had slowed in their pursuit. He took up a cleaver now. As his father rushed ahead into the camp, Antikrates turned about and paused, eager to kill one more Boiotian before he too was across the ditch-a sight to encourage his men who watched him cross.

Ismenias, son of Ismenias, the firebrand of the Theban demos, had ordered his men not to let them away. “At them. Follow me across.” But Chion was now wounded and down. Melon, Epaminondas, and Pelopidas were wobbly and stunned. So Ismenias found himself far out in front of the pursuers, riffraff who waited for archers and javelin throwers to come up to pelt the retreating Spartans. Antikrates didn’t wait for the fool Ismenias to reach the bridge over the gully. Now he charged back out to give his swing more power. With a clean cut, Antikrates sent the head of Ismenias flying off and up, his helmet strapped tight, a half yell already out of his mouth: “No escape! Ou phuge!” Antikrates turned once again in scorn and lumbered toward the camp. He crossed. Then the Spartan knocked away the two boards across the ditch and joined his father.

Lichas was already up on the rise of the Spartan camp where more than a thousand Spartan stragglers had found safety. They were forming up the phalanx to greet their rearguard. Lichas laid down his dead king carefully, strutting back and forth, smiling to the defeated Spartans. He was already making order among the mess and confusion of camp. It was better, he thought, that the king was dead, and now the better man, ephor Lichas, could take command and lead home what Kleombrotos had nearly ruined. Lichas commanded rank after rank of his survivors to kneel, shields down on the ground and spears resting on their knees. “Stay fast, my sons of Herakles. Stay fast. By our spear arms we get home. I bring you all home. There are no tresantes here. Not one. Not one of us is a trembler.”

The battle of Leuktra was over. It became legend for the widows at the looms in Thebes and the blind bards in the halls to work over. The larger war to end Sparta itself now began. Hundreds of Boiotian onlookers swarmed the battlefield and began to tear at the bodies of Kleonymos and the corpses of the royal guard. Then back on the killing field Melon himself stumbled to the ground, in exhaustion, right where he had toppled Kleombrotos, amid a