As the two helots looked out, they saw that Lophis’s charge had sent the Spartans reeling. His horsemen had stunned their hoplite advance. Before the reds had recovered, the Theban phalanx was upon them, killing all those who had not been trampled by their own horse. The Theban left wing seemed as one iron hammer, its head battering and flattening a sheet of bronze. Suddenly Gorgos cowered a bit. “Fire burns Spartans and enflames the king.” The two had no hint that they in fact were watching the acme of Epaminondas himself and the Sacred Band under Pelopidas-in concert with the furious onslaught of Chion. After their cavalry charge, the Theban hoplites on the left had rammed obliquely into the Spartans. They tore apart the slow Spartan march, as if order and music meant nothing to the mass of farmers who split that red line in two. Then the defeated Spartan horsemen galloped back into the ranks and only fouled the king’s reply.
Neto could see that almost immediately a lochos or so of Thebans, maybe six hundred, were well inside the Spartan ranks and were burning their way through to within a few paces of the king himself. For a moment only she stopped begging Gorgos to rescue Lophis. Instead she yelled to the sky, “Chion’s swell”-to oidma Chionos-and it would be named just that for the big slave who first cut the Boiotians’ way in. From here above, it looked as if the entire right wing of the Spartan line was like some pitiful mole caught in the jaws of a huge fanged hound, being shaken and torn apart, as the forest of spears was thinned out, ten or twelve at a time.
The two helots above the battle had not forgotten Lophis. But for just a blink the scene below stunned even Neto. It would have scattered the wits of any Hellene who saw the death throes of the Spartan army. When the Theban mass went left and plowed through the Spartans, the allies of Peloponnesos on the left wing fled to the hills of Kithairon. For all the Boiotians’ fear the night before, the grand battle of Leuktra ended up just as Epaminondas and Ainias of Stymphalos had always foreseen-a Spartan king with his head in a Boiotian noose and his Peloponnesian friends happy enough to see it. Then Neto, who likewise had predicted this end of the Spartans at Leuktra from the livers and lungs of the sacrificial animals, turned to Gorgos. “Lophis lives. My-our-Melon is near, near him somewhere. You foul gorgon, go down there; wherever the killing is hottest, his spear will be there. Our Chion, too. This is a great day for the Malgidai and the farmers of Helikon. Go down. Your new friends have lost. This is your final chance to prove yourself and get back to Helikon without your head in a noose. Lophis was good, or so you used to swear.”
Gorgos nodded, for Lophis as a boy had ridden atop his shoulders in the high-trellised vineyard, spanking his back and calling the old slave his centaur. And when grown, he had cut off the flank of the goat and the tongue of the bull to take out to the shed of Gorgos and make sure the helot had his good share of meat from the sacrifices. But the head of Gorgos was now downcast, as the sound of the Spartan pipes faded and end of the king’s army was growing clear. Gone for now were his wild visions of his old masters marching into Thebes, perhaps with Gorgos as new retainer, maybe even the new Lord Kuniskos, Spartan harmost of Thespiai. Instead he muttered to Neto, now back in his simple helot voice of Helikon, “Our kin, our Dorians, all in Hades. Dead. Go back to the ox. Go home as you were ordered. Else I take lash to you. But for the sake of the good Lophis, I hike down to find our master. I will carry him to Helikon, just as I did the dead Malgis. Our Sturax comes with me. He will find the scent of his Lophis. Yes, give me the dog of Lophis. Wait for us at the camp of Epaminondas.” For all his talk of Spartans, Gorgos would plunge into the din to find his master’s son. He at least believed that he would do so also for Melon, for all his Spartan boasting, still the loyal slave of the Malgidai.
Neto went for the wagon, confident that mania had passed and Gorgos was at least divided between his Spartans and Thebans, and so would get down to the battlefield to find Lophis. But first she turned to watch the path of the helot down the hill. She clenched her blade as she grimaced, determined to ensure he descended to the battlefield to Lophis. Then without a word, Gorgos quickly hiked down to the battle, out of sight beneath the crest of the hill.
The entire plain below was thick with the dusty haze of the Dog Star days. A light drizzle up on the mountains had long ago stopped. The late-summer ground coughed up its dust under thousands of heavy feet. For all the swirling dirt, Neto grasped better the true picture of the battlefield below, as the hordes of the Peloponnesian allies were beginning to throw down their gear and flee to the hills beneath Kithairon. Their dust trail wafted hundreds of feet up into sky. Perhaps Lophis had risen to his feet after all. He might have made his way through the advancing hoplites to find a new mount.
From this lookout, Neto saw the Boiotian allied right wing stop its pursuit of the panicked Peloponnesians-also just as Epaminondas had ordered. Then these allied Boiotians below turned to their left, to help the advancing Thebans under Epaminondas surround and annihilate the final Spartan stand. The few alive of the vaunted Spartan royal wing were surrounded and trapped. No farmer, she sensed, wished to miss out on the bloodletting of a Spartan king. She didn’t either. “Oh, One God of us all, look.” Neto turned to the dumb ox at her side. “They are broken. So ends Sparta. Here, right here, is the end of Sparta.” Now on the road downward Neto climbed into the wagon, hitting Aias with a switch. She would drive the creaky wagon around the gentle slope of the hillside to find Lophis below and perhaps reach Melon and Chion as well. But as Neto reached the trail that led to the camp of Epaminondas, a stream of rustics swarmed ahead of her, all unhinged in their bloodlust. Hundreds of Boiotians-wives, men, archers, horsemen, armed or not-were calling out in unison, “On to Sparta, on to Sparta.” Then a new chorus rose of “O Epaminondas. Crush the head of the snake.”
Another madness had taken hold as the mob of onlookers scrambled over the mess of the battlefield. Hundreds of the widows of Boiotia were on their knees, tearing off the jewelry of the dead Spartans, indeed fighting one another for their red tunics and clasps. Neto thought from the bench of the wagon that the battle was over and won. All that had once been ridiculed was now accepted as dogma: “Like wheat stalks these Spartans-and mowed down by the scythes of our Pythagoras.”
CHAPTER 9
Leuktra had ceased to be an othismos aspidon, a push of shield against shield, since most of the enemy who were not trapped here were either dead or running. The Boiotians were battering with their shields the few stumbling Spartans who were left. Some fell and were stabbed by oncoming ranks, a few tried to join the shrinking circle around Kleombrotos. “Their king is trapped. Drag them away,” rippled out through the Boiotian ranks. Always they were answered with a chorus from the mob rushing forward, “On to Sparta. On to the Peloponnesos.”
For a moment only, both sides of the battlefield paused at the sight of the surrounded Spartan king and his huge Kleonymos barring the way forward. The king’s man was swinging fiercely with spear and shield as he hit Thebans foolish enough to charge alone such a man. A skilled bowman from Phokis tried to bring him down from a distance. His missiles bounced off Kleonymos’s shield and hit more of his own than of Sparta.
Four or five Spartan guardsmen rushed in behind Kleonymos. All raised shields to block the way to the king. In some places Spartans in the ring were nearly back-to-back. A tiny but solid mass was moving backward and for now was unbreakable. Maybe three hundred, maybe four were alive and had not fled, still killing all the Thebans who bounced off their spears. But this last circle was tightening, ever smaller, as it was pounded on all sides. Where was their Lichas? Where his son Antikrates?