The End of Sparta

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Ainias the Stymphalian had enough of the noise and shoves and he shouted above the crowd with a mere point to Mêlon, “He’s here, here from Helikon.” Ainias was an Arkadian mercenary, born by the gloomy lake at Stymphalos, with rumors of slaughter and gore to his name from the south below the Isthmos. He had earlier left word for the command to watch for “the hoplite Mêlon of Thespiai, of prophecy fame.” It was he who had sent his newfound friend Proxenos out to the high ground to look for wagons from Helikon. At least some were relieved at Mêlon’s sudden appearance. Ainias paid heed to the seers who had promised victory should an “apple,” a mêlon, join the army, and he knew that was the only way to win back the ranks for war. Even the generals now quieted when they noted the arrival of two such killers from Thespiai for the front line, old as one seemed to be, and even though the other brute was a branded slave.

  Mêlon was pushed into the center of the crowd. Retainers stepped aside in deference to the son of Malgis. They knew he had fought at the Nemea, and the same year at Koroneia, and then later at Tegyra—and, in fact, in all the battles of the last thirty summers, after he went out with Malgis at his first battle at Haliartos and beat the Spartans back. In the three-sided open tent were another twenty officers of the provinces, crowded together in a closed circle around the general. As Chiôn strode in with Mêlon, no Boiotian wished to ask of his business. Most knew of this slave from Chios. They remembered that a few years earlier Chiôn had bashed Spartan skulls at Tegyra as he left the baggage train and joined in the pursuit. His branded face and bull’s neck won him offers of seats, even from men of Anthedon under the rich Boiotarch Ladôn. He said that he was here at Leuktra for his master. But who knew—maybe also for their own farms as well, or even to restore the name of disgraced Thespiai, since he planned to kill a Spartan king and walk over the corpses of the royal guard to get to him—Lichas’s most of all.

  This was at last his moment. Chiôn, the “Chian” who never knew the island of Chios of his birth; Chiôn the “snowy white one” who had no affinity with the whiter Thrakians; Chiôn the slave who hated the slaves he knew far more than he did any free man. Chiôn was of nothing to anyone, nor anyone to him—except in battle, where his killing of the Spartans, or so he thought, would do far more for Hellas than any philosopher Alkidamas or Platôn.

  Epaminondas moved over to a small bench, sipping some light barley and pork soup out of a black clay bowl with a long handle. He looked back over at the misanthrôpos Mêlon. He had never met the hoplite, but he sensed a kindred outsider who likewise had earned the distrust of the mob. Both perhaps would know each other by creed and need no formal greeting. Epaminondas rose in silence and laid an arm on Mêlon’s shoulder. He sat him down gently. Then the general began to laugh as if all these bad things had in fact turned out as he wished—as if he enjoyed the ruckus and the brawling over his plans.

  “Kleombrotos has come in from Kreusis by the sea—not where I thought by Chaironeia beneath Helikon. Now I reckon only seven thousand of our Boiotians bar his way from the agora of Thebes itself. They will have us as well for their relish.” Epaminondas paced in tiny circles, and pointed to a few stools at the front of the crowd. “Sit down in front of us over here, Mêlon of Helikon. The seers cry out that you, the lame one from Helikon, will not lose this battle. Yes, he—you—will cut down a Spartan king. Or so the mouths of the gods quietly sing in prophecy. Your name alone is worth a thousand hoplites. Most came here to join my army for you—not me—convinced a king would fall if you fight in the ranks beside them. But I knew you would come even without the prophecy, you alone of the Thespians, because you are the son of Malgis, the greatest hoplite that we Boiotians have yet put on the field of battle. You had no choice, you are of the Malgidai, and I wager you will prove tomorrow as good as or better than your father whom we knew well.”

  “Well, Chiôn and I come as we are,” Mêlon softly replied. “The two of us fight in the ranks. Somewhere, my son Lophis, my only one, is with the horse. Take care of him. I wish only that we break their ranks tomorrow and kill their king or Lichas or both—then go home to Helikon without fear of Spartans in our vineyards.” Mêlon was suddenly restless. He got up and continued as he paced, pointing his black iron sword at Epaminondas. “Die or not, yes, we three will battle for the name of Malgidai. As for the rest of you—you, Lord Epaminondas—may say it is justice, for the equality of Pythagoras and for the freedom of helots to the south, and for democracy where men end up equal when they were not born that way, and for the promise that your souls will live on forever after your bodies rot—or for anything that you wish.”

  Epaminondas smiled at that. But then he rose and raised his voice as he strode into the center of the throng with his arms extended at last to address the crowd of officers. He knew the men were scared, but at least they were not as terrified as they had been before the arrival of the Malgidai. “The men of Sparta will go nowhere until it is over. The king is here to stay and to fight. He cannot leave—even if he wished to—until he knocks us out of his way. Lichas the Ephor, they say, is with him—to force their poor king to spear us. No, this time they will not run back to their Lakonia. Tomorrow we will become Spartans or they Boiotians. There is no third way. Leuktra is not the end of things, but the beginning of the end of the Spartans. Our road from Leuktra leads on to their hearths beneath Mt. Taygetos a thousand stadia to the south.”

  Epaminondas in a blink had silenced the crowd, as the Boiotarch drifted to the back of the tent in the shadows. The Boiotians whistled for their leader to go on, and had forgotten the old Ladôn and his five hundred pomegranate trees on the high ground above the Euripos. The general walked back over closer to Mêlon and changed his topic and voice. “The deserters from Sparta tonight claim as well that we will have quite a royal parade tomorrow. Their Deinon the polemarch, and Sphodrias, our friend who used to rule Thebes as Sparta’s harmost, their overlord, are here. The son of Sphodrias marched out as well, the big one, Kleonymos, the favorite of the royal blooded Archidamos. Kleonymos, I remind you, sent ten Thebans to Hades at Tegyra. The spies also say the Theban killer Antikrates, the son of Lichas, comes as well. They swear that he will kill most of us in this assembly. The worst of the Spartans are here at last. I know them all from my trip to the south last summer. If they die in Boiotia, there are none like them to bar the passes of the Sparta to the south. Pelopidas will show us how.”

  Three of the Sacred Band stepped forward on cue to pour two baskets of sand over the ground and rearrange the torches in a circle. Then they sprinkled water over the surface to make it hard. They smoothed it all out with straw brooms and a long board, and let Pelopidas with a spear butt mark out the armies. But for some reason, the foreigner Ainias, the Arkadian from the lake at Stymphalos, south of the Isthmos, now stepped up with his own shaft. To murmurs he stood right at the side of Pelopidas. Was this outsider to have his own hand in the battle planning of the Boiotians—a bought Peloponnesian advising them how to kill Peloponnesians? Mêlon muttered to himself, “We have come to fight. Not to draw lines and boxes with Spartan-lovers.” But the more he watched this mercenary, noticed his wide shoulders and big hands, heard his measured speech, the more he liked what he saw—especially his shredded right ear. He looked as dangerous as Chiôn and had the same stare as the slave as well. Before Ainias began talking, Pelopidas had been able to put the scouting reports of his own Sacred Band into some sort of larger sense. Now he quickly marked out two rectangles, faced off against each other. The Spartan phalanx in his drawing was nearly twice as broad. Both its flanks went well beyond those of the Thebans.

  Pelopidas and Ainias huddled and were whispering a bit. Those around Ainias had welcomed this killer and knew that he would cut down untold Spartans—and yet might cause themselves even greater grief. Now Pelopidas began poking the sand in places as his voice went up and he pointed with the spear end. “There is a king there, Kleombrotos, along with his royal guards; we at least know that much. They will all be on
their right wing as usual—the Spartan Right that scares so many of us. Maybe two thousand or three thousand of Sparta’s finest, I reckon. All on the right wing. At least three, maybe four lochoi. The gods alone know how deep they will stack. Most likely at least eight. But I also reckon this time maybe even twelve shields in mass.” Pelopidas went on. “You know the Spartans. The middle of their long line will be riffraff. Those are always the half-helots or the freedmen from Lakonia. Some of these northern scavengers from Herakleia and Phlios will drift in. But on the left, these are the good allies from the Peloponnesos. They are the tough farming lot. Mêlon over there knows these southerners well from the fight at the Nemea.” He repeated himself for a moment, “I said these are allies, not enemies. The hoplites of the left wing of the Peloponnesians that the king counts on to hit our best on our right.”

  “That is not the worst of it, Pelopidas. We must fight in the morning.” Epaminondas calmed him and strolled to the middle of the map because he knew the reaction to what would follow next. He began to add in the sand some lines of retreat very slowly and carefully with his own spear. “We cannot hold this army together for over a day or two ourselves—not outnumbered as we are and with even more cracks in our alliance than the king’s army. Too many Boiotians and northern tribes are wagering that the Spartans will march over us when the flutes begin to play. Or that we will crack as we did at Nemea. They always wait to praise us should we win, and join the Spartans if we lose. Their only creed is to be the winners—whether with us or not.”

  The Stymphalian Ainias still stayed silent, but edgy, at his side. Next Epaminondas turned around quickly and addressed the assembled officers directly. “We must fight these invaders by tomorrow or there will be no dêmokratia anywhere north of Athens. Otherwise we won’t even have seven thousand of this army left. The traitors promise that our farms will be spared. They boast at least everyone would be better off with the dynasteia of Spartans back in control.” Epaminondas glared at Ladôn, and then backed up a bit. “But Pelopidas—step out of the way for a moment. Ainias of Stymphalos over here and I have been talking. We’ve worked something up a little different from what our enemies—or you generals here—expect. Let our southern guest speak.”

  Ainias took off his cape and stepped forward again. His helmet was on the floor at his feet. His gloves and arm bands were off. His pockmarks were shadowed in the torchlight. Long matted oily hair covered his shoulders, his half-ear now and then hidden. His black beard stubble highlighted rather than covered the furrows and creases on his face. From what cave in Arkadia had Epaminondas dragged this wolf-beast out? He made Epaminondas look soft. The captains whispered he’d worked for that rogue archon down south, Lykomedes of Mantineia. Still, few in Boiotia apparently had ever seen him, much less knew of any Ainias of Stymphalos—that wild Arkadian place where the birds of Ares once flung their iron feathers at Herakles by the vast and gloomy lake.

  Ainias eyed Pelopidas’s sand map. He pushed away others who stood in his light. For all his gaze at the sand below, Ainias looked as if he’d been out in the byways the night before, robbing and throat-slitting for his pleasure along the taverns on marshy Kopais. The Thebans listened in fear that he might draw his long sword and take off a nose or ear, Persian-style—the way his own ear had been lost.

  Instead he startled them by talking, much louder than the voice of either Epaminondas or Pelopidas. “Your wars of trumpets and boasts are over. Over. We live in the age of logos, of science. I kill by an art, a skill, a technê. Not by the livers of goats. Not your prayers to Artemis. Not even numbers and muscles win battles. Battle is as much of the mind as the heart.” Few wanted to argue with this man’s blasphemy—but what a voice, what long words came out of the mouth of an uncouth killer. “Listen up to the new war. We all know what Kleombrotos and his royal guard will do tomorrow: what they always do whenever they fight. A suckling child without teeth could tell us in advance.”

  Ainias then waved his hands as he went through the Spartan way of war bit by bit. The entire crowd was hypnotized; those who had just before been punching each other were now pushing to get nearer this curious sand map. “The flutes will start up. The army will walk out on their heavy feet. They stare. They do their slow two-step. The king and his wing slant. They swerve to the right. We will be blinded by the sun at their backs. Or scared by the glare of their polished shields—a thousand and more of the Spartan Similars, all shuffling in the king’s charge. Flute music all the while. These shaved lips come on. On always—like the crab we see on the seashore that can only walk sideways and at an angle. They hope, they expect to break you rustics from the provinces. Their strong right wing faces off against our weak left. Then they get to your rear. Then stab you in the back. Then turn. And they come up behind your best Thebans on your right. Then you all die. And we are burned and float away as ash. I know this. I did just this as an ally alongside them for twenty seasons. I killed many of your fathers at the Nemea and Koroneia.”

  He calmed and with almost a murmur finished, “But this they will not do. Not tomorrow. Not ever. I swear to you all that Leuktra will be no Nemea.” Ainias, bathed in sweat under the summer torchlight, tore off his leather tunic and was focused on the captains. Epaminondas then stepped up and yelled to his men, “Watch and learn.”

  “Says who, Arkadian?” a loudmouth interrupted the trance of the crowd, and yelled in a high pitch. They nicknamed the barker Backwash. He was some sort of low official of the Confederation, who had borrowed his father’s breastplate and agreed to a safe slot in the back of the phalanx for the price of haranguing the officers before battle and upping the hoplite pay to a full silver drachma. But if he could not talk the army out of battle, then he had some lamb’s blood in his pouch that he would smear on his helmet as he peeled out at the back of the column before the first collisions with the Spartans. His real name was Menekleidas. He was from Aulis, on the narrow strait between Boiotia and Euboia, and thought he could steal the crowd back from the Arkadian. “Tell us something we do not already know, foreigner. My lads from the Euripos can stay put and hide well enough from the Spartans over on the big island of Euboia. Tell us why we need to fight and how we can win. Does this foul bird of Stymphalos think he can wing in here and squawk to us, scratching up a fantasy victory from his fancy drawings in the dirt?”

  Laughs and growls arose from behind. “You tell them, Backwash.” Menekleidas turned around to bask in them. Mêlon had had enough. He pushed away two or three rustics to grab Backwash by the neck, then bent him down and kicked his rear so hard with his good right leg that the would-be orator flew out like an arrow into the goat carcasses outside the tent—and to greater laughs than he had just earned with his smart talk. Backwash was lucky Mêlon had struck first; Chiôn had been about to use iron, not a fist or kick. The council was again almost reduced to a brawl. The Stymphalian hadn’t even begun his attack plans. Across the ravine the Spartans were ready to follow Lichas. Here the Boiotians were fighting each other.

  Mêlon raised his voice, “Shut up, all of you. Especially this slimy eel from the Euripos. I know my Homer and this here man is an ugly Thersites. Remember the poet’s words: ‘I swear there is no worse man than you are.’ Yes, this Thersites, this Backwash, knows well enough to charge us jacked-up tolls for those who pass over to Euboia. Like the double current, his men know how to collect coming and going. But so far he won’t fight for his fellow Boiotians.” Then Mêlon, son of Malgis, gave his own brief speech in the way he did to his pruners on Helikon. “I’ve heard all this before. It leads nowhere—except to a few fistfights and a Spartan army over there at Leuktra already chopping down our olives. They’re trampling our vines while we bicker and moan. You decide, all of you, whether you wish to be the dragon-sown men of Old Thebes, the bronze giants of our grandfathers’ age—or the connivers and trimmers of this new low era of Backwash.” Mêlon then put his arm around Ainias and raised his voice even louder. “Let this stranger from Stymphalos speak and fi
nish his work in the sand—unless you know the Spartan better than he. But I recognize none of you from the battle at Haliartos. Is there any more than a handful here from the fights at Koroneia? See whether the Stymphalian bird has talons or not. I have fought him and his kind from Pellene before at the river Nemea. I would not wish to again. If you know spear work like he does, go on; if not keep still.”

  The crowd grew quiet along with Backwash. Murmurs went around that this fellow was the son of Malgis of myth. Here was Mêlon of prophecy of the falling apple—and here no less with his brand-faced slave.

  Ainias resumed drawing in the sand. “As I said, this they will not do. No, no—tomorrow the best of our army on the right will not kill their worst on their left. Our lesser folk won’t be harvested by the king across the field on his right. Instead Epaminondas and Pelopidas with his Sacred Band will take the harder path. They will veer toward the royal Spartan spears. They and the veterans of Thebes muster on our left, facing Kleombrotos and his royal right. Chiôn and I, with Mêlon here, go helmet to helmet with Lichas from Pythagoras’s noble left.”

  A louder rustling began at mention of the strange trick. Ainias once again raised both hands to warn them all he would finish. “I said on our left. I promise to you this: The Thebans and their generals will fight on the unlucky side of our battle line, head-to-head against King Kleombrotos to the death. We few will end everything once and for all tomorrow spear-to-spear. Let their royal right hit our choice left—best against best. Let your gods on Olympos at that very spot decide who wins Boiotia. We live or die with one blow.”