The End of Sparta: A Novel by Victor Davis Hanson Page A

begin the killing at the fore, as the better men you are—shielding with your dust our new moves from the king?” When he saw the light in the cavalry commanders’ eyes, Epaminondas went on. “Kleombrotos will not expect our horsemen in his face. Even he will not think that fifty shields are coming his way behind our cavalry. Their king will see something different at Leuktra—something that no Hellenic general has ever witnessed. I plan to hit him right after his midmorning meal. Then his men are full of food and wine—slow on their feet, and dizzy in their ranks.”
    Epaminondas paused again. Too much battle talk, and now he could see the eyes of his hoplites wander. But he pressed a bit more. “Allies on the right—give us a little time tomorrow to hold fast. Do not move against the spears of the Peloponnesos. Don’t cross the battle line. Watch us first kill their idle Spartan overlords. Stay put. Hold. These allied farmers of Sparta need not die. Our business is only with the braid-hairs and smooth-lips. We have no killing lust for the allied yeomen of the Peloponnesos. They plow their own ground. Do not kill today who will be a friend tomorrow.”
    He finished with a warning. “Today we talk about killing Spartans on our ground, but that I fear will not be the end of it. Better to ask how we let Kleombrotos in here in the first place. Or why he comes with praise from the Athenians and most others who do not so much hate us as fear and worship him. But there will come a day soon that Hellas, as we know it, ends—and ends, I hope, for the better. There shall be no more unfree in Messenia—and beyond that no slaveholders anywhere even among us, the liberators who free serfs. This is a war not just to free us from Sparta, or even to free the helots from Sparta, but to free us all in Hellas from what makes some masters and others slaves. We fight to free ourselves from ourselves.”

    Mêlon murmured to Chiôn, “This man is either crazy or himself a god, and I suppose we will find out by daybreak. He seems as worried about keeping us alive as he is about killing Spartans. Does he know that most Boiotians here are scared, so scared that they would bolt at the sight of a Lichas or Sphodrias, even with all the war lore of Ainias and Epaminondas?”
    The slave answered only, “That is why we are here, master—to make sure none runs.” But the assembly was not quite over. On some sort of cue, Proxenos, the Plataian aristocrat, strutted to the center like the oligarch that he was. It was fine and good to have new ideas like a deepened phalanx, a slanted march, and the left wing stacked to fifty shields deep. But most of the ignorant and superstitious could not follow the logic of the tactics. That is why Nêto and Proxenos, long ago on his estate above the Asopos, had figured a far better way to rally the Boiotians: to remind them that the gods, the Olympian gods of the ignorant and superstitious, had promised victory to them should the Thespian Mêlon join the ranks.
    Now Proxenos began to walk and point. He wore a white cloak and heavy gold around his neck and on his fingers. He trampled over the sand without a care, as he did his polished marble halls at home over the Asopos—and the chart of Ainias disappeared beneath his boots. His newfound protector and friend Ainias did nothing. If the ragged Epaminondas was willing to crash into the red-capes for ideas and helots and freedom, well, then, it was likely because he was poor, and old and without wife or child. But why so, the hoplites wondered, was this rich man, with a deep-breasted wife and sons, and plow land above the Asopos? Why would a Plataian with a big gold ring fight for Thebes or, worse still, for things beyond Thebes? He knew well enough the answer if others did not. He had come to leave the idle rich estate owners of his Plataia, to build entire new cities rather than hang a city-gate in a backwater polis of Boiotia.
    Nêto, the slave girl of