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

rural folk who had flocked to the nearby hills to gaze on the spectacle. Each man filed into neat rows to the sounds of pipes and the signals of flags. The teeming crowd of their camp was slowly unfurling into a red line that grew ever deeper across the gentle rolling plain of Leuktra. One by one, files of twelve deep walked out—and halted on the crest of the low rise to the blare of trumpets. Slowly, side-by-side, these columns filled out the phalanx. Hoplites in long lines raised their bronze-coated shields, with even their red lambdas, the insignia of Lakedaimon, visible in the distance. The army was stretching fifteen stadia along the crest above the streambed.
    Suddenly on a trumpet blast, helots of Sparta ran among the ranks and stripped off their masters’ cloaks. The bronze fronts twinkled now and then in the darting sunlight—outlined at the shoulders, and arms and waists, by their red chitons beneath. Mêlon focused on the battle line where the enemies’ tall black-and-white crests bobbed. Now they lowered their spears and jostled shields just a stade away. Spartans had no pause in their walk. They seem to have emptied their whole damn city.
    Then, for a blink only—the first and final time at Leuktra—Mêlon lost his nerve, as he thought about their spear work to come. Dying was no dread, he thought, not even losing Chiôn or Nêto, or even his son Lophis with the horse. No, the rub was the sound, and especially the look, of the death-bringing Spartans across the way. The bristles of their phalanx and the pitch of the music made all afraid, if just for that moment, about how they were to die, the pain and cutting to take them into the final sleep. Are these killers even human as other hoplites? he wondered. His bowels rumbled and his bladder felt full. The men from the south across the way looked like hemi-gods on the high stone altars who did not tremble, drink, or tire as other men did. No living thing could get between their solid line of shields. There was no reprieve from their spears. These men did not lag or slow. It would take a god, he feared, to stop their onset. No, they came on at a steady pace—always to the tune of pipes, never too fast, but never slow, either. They stopped only when cut down.
    Then the terror vanished as quickly as it had come. The madness of the war god Pan had no more hold over him, a god that left the glens at the sound of bronze and the chance to confuse thousands. In hopes the madness would not infect his men, Mêlon stared back at the ghost of the hoofed god in front of him in anger. “Be gone, foul god. Back to the herds and flocks!” Mêlon took in the Spartan line opposite him, ever nearing and now little more than two hundred paces away. He imagined that he could see these brutes smiling, even in their helmets, stomping their stiff legs on the ground in unison, in their eagerness. He looked at them with reason rather than fright. Spartan targets offered little open flesh. Maybe a spot beneath the shield in the upper groin, maybe some skin of the neck between the breastplate and the chinstrap. Always there was a peep of bare flesh or an open fold of their chitons when they turned, on their sides between the front and back plates.
    For all his efforts, Mêlon could not calm all the men at his side. Too many other young Boiotians at his side shuddered at such killers. They had let the shade of clever Pan into their ranks as the ghost god galloped toward the front lines. They trembled at the shrieking of the horned spirit, of the wild goat god in their ears who struck men dumb before the crash with his screeches—oooha, oooohaa, ooooohaaa. And they for a moment ignored their officers who went among them answering the god. “No fear,” bellowed Pelopidas. “No fear of these red-shirts. Forget the mad goat-horned ghost of Pan who gallops across the field and strikes your shield with his back kicks. Forget him and watch him vanish back into the woods where he belongs.