Cleomenes went dead still. Then he turned and stared at Leonidas. The tears had smeared the blood on his face and washed some of it into his beard. “What did you say?” asked Cleomenes, staring blankly at Leonidas. His eyes were white in his filthy, bloody face, and Leonidas could see his chest heaving. The only sound was the crackling of the burning wood.
“While you are butchering and burning the already defeated, the city of Argos lies as unprotected as a bride to the north!” Leonidas pointed. “We need only march the rest of our troops north to take it.”
Cleomenes stared at Leonidas and then said in a hoarse but apparently calm voice, “Who are you?”
“By all the Gods, Cleomenes! I’m your brother. Leonidas.”
“Leonidas,” Cleomenes repeated, as if the name meant nothing to him.
“We need to form up and march on Argos,” Leonidas told him bluntly, thinking he had pierced the apparent fit of madness.
“No!” Cleomenes screamed, and the eyes were wide and wild again. “No! We cannot do that! We cannot do that! I have taken Argos here. This is Argos! The prophecy has been fulfilled! We will be destroyed if we advance further!”
“By whom and what?” Leonidas asked back sharply. “The women of Argos, perhaps? For their men lie here!” He gestured more widely now, beyond the heap of corpses around his brother to the broader field, paved with Argive dead or dying.
“The Gods!” Cleomenes screamed at him, in a voice so high and unearthly it made the hair stand up at the back of Leonidas’ neck. “The Gods themselves will stop us!”
Leonidas kicked aside the body parts separating him from his brother, and walked straight up to Cleomenes until they were standing face to face and eye to eye. “You’ve gone mad,” Leonidas told him softly.
They stared at one another. Leonidas was frightened, because the look in his brother’s eye was inhuman.
“You think so?” Cleomenes asked softly, almost timidly. For a moment it seemed as if he were looking to Leonidas for guidance or reassurance or help. But before Leonidas could answer, Cleomenes’ mind moved on. He announced abruptly and almost jubilantly, “We will consult the Gods! Yes! We will consult Hera!” Turning to shout over his shoulder at no one in particular, he ordered, “Bring my horse! We will consult Hera!”
They had passed a major temple to Hera on the road earlier in the day. At the time, they had skirted around it politely.
To Leonidas’ horror, Cleomenes was giving furious orders to march back to the temple so he could offer sacrifice, and Leonidas was even more appalled to see Cleomenes’ insane orders followed. He heard Niokles mutter under his breath, “Anything to get away from here!” Arkesilos and Diodoros had already hurried away to try to stop the slaughter and the burning. Only the usually wooden-headed Hyllus seemed to grasp the significance of what Cleomenes had just done. “Retreat?” he asked in amazement. “Retreat from victory? That’s madness!”
But the pipes were wailing “reform/withdraw,” and the Spartan units were dutifully breaking off whatever they had been doing and starting to fall in. Behind them the sacred woods burned out of control, and the corpses of Argos’ young men lay littered in heaps as far as the eye could see. Leonidas found himself looking for Talthybiades and the other ephor. They ought to have been here stopping this! There was no going back. After invading and inflicting such heavy losses on the Argives, to withdraw was to risk terrible retribution—not to mention the likely reaction of the Assembly. Leonidas was reminded of the joke he had made to Gorgo about the consequences of a lost battle. This battle hadn’t been lost, but the fruits of victory were on the brink of being thrown away.
Cleomenes’ horse had been brought over, but the stallion was unnerved by the sight and smell of the slaughter, and especially by the blood still glistening on Cleomenes’ arms and face. He reared and flailed with his hooves. Maybe, Leonidas thought, that would delay them long enough to make Cleomenes change his mind. He started after his brother, but before he reached him a second horse was brought up, and his brother successfully mounted and galloped away.
Leonidas reached the helots holding the still unnerved first stallion and shouted, “Give him to me!” The startled helots did not even protest, although this was one of the king’s favorites from his own stables.
Leonidas galloped after his brother, while behind him the entire Spartan army started to retreat from the field they had so decisively won.
The temple to Hera was a large, modern temple surrounded by a double colonnade of solid Doric columns. The pediment depicted Hera, flanked by her daughters Hebe and Eileithyia, holding a pomegranate in her hand. The priests had spilled out of the building as the Spartan army marched north and were still crowding the porch. They could see the billowing smoke in the sky to the north, though not its source. At the sight of a mounted Spartan encrusted with dried blood riding toward them, they started chattering among themselves in confused but excited agitation. Surely this could only mean the Spartans had suffered a resounding defeat? But why the smoke? Smoke suggested that Argos or Sepeia was on fire, and that suggested the Spartans had overrun the Argive army. Unable to make sense of the contradictory signs, they argued among themselves.
Cleomenes flung himself off his horse and stormed up the stairs. The younger priests parted before him—alarmed, offended, and frightened by the sight of him—but the head priest stepped directly into Cleomenes’ path. He stretched out his arms to block his way. “Who are you to dare come here drenched in blood! Go cleanse yourself!”
“i am king cleomenes of sparta!” Cleomenes roared.
“That does not make you any less filthy!” the priest replied.
Leonidas had arrived in time to hear this exchange. He dismounted and started up the steps; behind him Diodoros, Niokles, and Talthybiades were galloping up. Farther down the road, a company of Guardsmen were jogging as fast as they could to try to catch up with their king.
Cleomenes, meanwhile, was raging at the priest. “get out of my way! i’ve come to sacrifice to hera!”
“You are a stranger and have no right to sacrifice here!” the priest told him proudly.
“i am king of sparta! get out of my way or i’ll have you thrashed!”
“King or commoner, no Lacedaemonian has the right to enter here!”
Leonidas was still two steps away from his brother. He saw, but could not prevent, his brother knocking the priest aside with a sweeping thrust of his arm, uttering an inhuman roar of rage as he lunged forward. The priest lost his footing on the stairs and fell, tumbling down the marble steps to land with a groan of pain, sprawled at the foot, while Cleomenes charged headlong into the temple.
Leonidas looked from the priest to the temple, and opted to go back down the steps to see if the priest was badly hurt. He reached him at almost the same moment as Talthybiades and Diodoros.
“Your brother’s mad!” Talthybiades snapped at Leonidas, as if he were to blame. “He’s ordered the entire army to return to Sparta! He’s throwing away the advantage we’ve won with this great victory!”
“Leo, try to talk sense to him,” Diodoros urged, at the same time gesturing frantically for the other priests to come and see to their colleague.
Leonidas started up the steps again, but did not make the top step before Cleomenes re-emerged. His anger and even his madness appeared to have vanished entirely. His expression was normal, and he was even making embarrassed attempts to scratch the dried blood off his face and out of his beard. He looked at Leonidas with evident recognition, and then he flung his arm over his shoulder as if they were bosom friends and remarked as they descended the stairs together, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Leo, but we must go home. Flames shot out of Hera’s breast when I approached her, and you must see what that means. We have come far enough. She will not let us take the city of Argos. To try would be madness. It is time to go home. If we hurry, we can be there for Artemis Orthia,” he added with a smile, as if offering a sweet to a child.
“You ca
n’t order the army home!” Talthybiades objected, overhearing this last remark.
Cleomenes looked at him with disdain and answered in a normal tone, “I can and I do. I am the king.”
“If you take the army back to Sparta, I’ll charge you with treason!” Talthybiades threatened.
Cleomenes shrugged.
Hyllus, the Guard commander, the second ephor, and Arkesilos arrived. Niokles told them what had transpired, while Talthybiades insisted in a low, threatening voice, “I’ll see you deposed for this! You’re mad and traitorous! I’ll see Brotus put in your place!”
“Calm down, Talthybiades,” Cleomenes urged, patting his arm patronizingly. “You’re getting confused. It’s Demaratus you want to bring down, not me.”
While Talthybiades snapped for breath, Hyllus took up the refrain, “Treason is treason! You can’t just order the army to go home with the job half done.”
“I can and I do. All of you! Go back to your troops. I’m taking the army back to Lacedaemon as the Gods demand.” Then he snapped his fingers at the Guard commander and gestured for him to follow, as he collected his horse and remounted.
The four lochagoi, the two ephors, and Leonidas were left at the foot of the temple steps. Diodoros gestured for them all to move out of hearing range of the Argive priests, who were still trying to calm their shaken leader after his fall down the steps. He was sputtering about being threatened with a “thrashing” and spitting insults at the “godless and brutal Lacedaemonians,” as if Cleomenes were representative of the whole nation.
“If we pull back now, the Argives will claim victory!” Hyllus reminded his colleagues in horror.
“They’ve suffered the loss of more than five thousand men! They can’t call that victory,” Arkesilos countered.
“But they will!” Hyllus insisted. “If we retreat, they will say—rightly—that they remained in possession of the field and made us retreat!”
“Hyllus is right; but no matter what they call it, it will take them decades to recover from the casualties we inflicted,” Niokles mediated between the other two.
“No defeat, no treaty, no end to attacks,” Leonidas pointed out.
“With what could they attack? Ghosts and women?” Arkesilos asked, exasperated.
“Mercenaries,” Leonidas answered. “Unless we can force them to acknowledge the defeat we inflicted or deny them the means to hire mercenaries, they will seek revenge for today’s work before the solstice.”
“We can’t continue the campaign with Cleomenes in this state—even if we could convince him to change his mind,” Diodoros countered, his eyes fixed on Leonidas.
“A thousand men could do a lot of damage—and we don’t need a ruling king to deploy a single lochos.”
“An active lochos, no,” Talthybiades admonished in his best legal voice; “but we called up fifteen classes of reserves. To keep them in the field, we need the approval of all five ephors and a king in command.” His words were accompanied by vigorous nodding from the other ephor.
“We could form a unit one thousand strong by pulling one active-duty pentekostus from each lochos,” Diodoros pointed out.
“You won’t get me to command such a force! I won’t risk it after offending the Gods as we have done.” Hyllus gestured vaguely toward the smoke-smudged sky behind them. “You heard what Cleomenes said! Hera forbids us from taking Argos! We must camp on the field overnight and send a herald to Argos demanding surrender. Then we must all go home.”
“Surrender, after hearing and seeing us retreat?” Talthybiades scoffed, gesturing to the troops that were already marching past in good order. “The Argives will never do that!”
“An active-duty force need not attempt to take Argos,” Leonidas countered; “only deliver the message that they are no longer defensible with their own strength, while destroying the source of the wealth with which they could hire mercenaries.”
“I won’t command it!” Hyllus again declared stubbornly.
Diodoros smiled faintly, but he let Arkesilos give the answer. “You don’t have to. We have an Agiad prince to do that.”
Hyllus’ expression showed he had not even thought of such a thing; and Talthybiades frowned and seemed on the brink of protest, but then held his tongue. The others just looked at Leonidas for confirmation, and he nodded.
Chapter 22
The Price of Honor
Mycenae. Agamemnon’s city. It crowned a hill that nestled against the backdrop of the majestic peaks of Mount Zara and Profitis Ilias. Deep ravines encased it, and the natural slopes leading up to the sheer walls were steep and treacherous. Mycenae, “rich in gold,” was also a nearly impregnable citadel.
Of course, it was not Agamemnon’s city. That had been burned and plundered and razed in the reign of Orestes’ son Tisamenus. Somewhere nearby there must be ancient graves, perhaps still filled with the treasure of Troy. But the survivors of that final catastrophe had not been many; the descendants of Agamemnon’s army had submitted to the invading Dorians and intermarried with them. This was a new city, built upon the ruins of Agamemnon’s capital some three hundred years ago, and it was neither particularly large, nor rich.
Their intelligence suggested that the city consisted of no more than eight hundred citizens and held a total population of thirty-five hundred souls, including women, children, and slaves. The city was, according to the merchants they questioned, “allied” with Argos, but the alliance appeared to have been forced on them none too willingly fifteen or more Olympiads ago. The Tegean trader who was their principal informant insisted that the Mycenaeans were very proud of their individual identity and did not consider themselves Argives, although they were clearly within the Argolid and paid heavy tribute to Argos.
Leonidas knew that, but it was the other Mycenae that transfixed him. Agamemnon had commanded a united Greek force—a thousand ships filled with fighting men—and he had taken the army across the Aegean to defeat the leading power of Asia. The key to that success had been unity, based on the oath sworn at the Horse Grave above the Eurotas valley. Surely, unity could give them even greater strength in defense? United against Persia, Hellas could be made invincible. But how could you unite if you spent half your time destroying each other’s crops, burning down mills, breaking bridges, and slaughtering livestock, as he had just spent the last month doing?
Leonidas had, from the start, given the order that they would take no slaves. Resistance was to be overwhelmed and anyone who fought them killed, but the women, children, aged, and infirm were sent back to Argos. The policy had two advantages. First, his troops were not distracted by guarding captives; and second, it increased the number of Argive mouths to be fed on dwindling supplies as the destruction of stores and crops started to bite. It was a rational policy, but hardly an inspiring one. Leonidas, no less than his troops, was tired of chopping down orchards, choking up irrigation ditches with debris, tearing down bridges, burning mills, and slaughtering more livestock than they could eat.
Combined with the devastating defeat Argos had suffered at Sepeia, Leonidas believed they would succeed in pacifying the Argive border for a generation. What came after that, he supposed, was a renewal of the fighting at a higher level of intensity. He might not live to see it, but his children would—unless they could come up with a more permanent solution. Kyranios had always said war was the failure of diplomacy …
Oliantus had served with Leonidas over a decade now, and he was the first to notice that Leonidas was brooding. “What are you planning, Leo?”
“I’m just thinking.”
“You aren’t listening to what we’ve been saying about the gates or the watch.”
“I’ve listened enough to know we’re not likely to take Mycenae without casualties. That’s the damned thing about walls. We may scorn them, but they do serve a purpose.”
The others, who had been discussing various means of attack, drawing figures in the dirt and moving pebbles representing units around in it, stopped an
d looked at Leonidas expectantly. To state anything this obvious was almost unworthy of a Spartan, and so the others waited to find out what he was really thinking. “I think we should offer to negotiate.”
That stunned them for a moment, and then they all seemed to be talking at once. Their remarks and objections boiled down to: “What is there to negotiate?” Their orders were to weaken Argos’ ability to wage war on Lacedaemon without attacking the city itself.
Leonidas walked away from the dirt sketch and stood leaning against a long-needled pine tree, gazing at the city backed up against Mount Zara. They would be attacking uphill without the support of archers or javelins. Even if they reached the walls without undue casualties, they would find it difficult to force the gates or scale the walls. Just two days ago, Leonidas had lost three men in a surprise encounter with mercenaries coming down from Arcadia. That put total losses to date at more than ten. Leonidas did not want more. “I think I’ll go and talk to them.”
“No, you won’t,” Oliantus countered instantly, straightening up from his crouch over the map in the dirt. “If you want to negotiate, you can send one of us,” he told his commander and friend.
“I could,” Leonidas agreed with a grin, “but then I wouldn’t see the city and its defenses or its defenders for myself, would I? I’ll go, but I’ll take you with me, if you like.”
They sent a herald first, of course, to announce their desire to parley; and after a very short time the herald returned with an olive branch. Leonidas removed his sword and handed it to Meander; then he set his helmet on his head, tipped back to show his face, and set out with a similarly unarmed Oliantus at his side. He designated the commander of the Heraklid Company, Pitanate Lochos—the debonair Dienekes—as his successor if he failed to return.
“Any orders, sir?” Dienekes asked.
“If they are so barbaric as to murder a man carrying the olive branch, take and raze the town to the ground, and then slaughter all the inhabitants, old and young.”
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