Fifty? Fifty shields on the left. How? Why? Now at more of these crazy taktika, the throng began pushing to see this map of Ainias in the sand, to find out whether he was mad or drunk or both. In the midst of the crowd’s chattering, a tough Boiotarch of wide shoulders from Tanagra came forward, with cratered face, a burn scar down his chin, and a smashed nose. He was no trembler like the whiny wide-butt Backwash or lord of pomegranates, Ladon. No, this veteran scowled and he forced his way to the fore in a well-earned swagger. Hoplites parted since they had seen him cut a similar wide swath in the mess of battle. Ainias himself was not sure whether to hit this man-or, better yet, pull his sword out. For now the Stymphalian kept his blade in his scabbard on his shoulder.
“Enough of this sophistry. Philliadas, I claim to be. Son of Philostratos. You all know me,” he yelled as he turned back to the crowd. The coarse farmer had cleared his barley ground near the battlefield of Tanagra. He was covered with ugly welts and healed-over rips, from both spears and goat horns. Grime and splinters were under his nails. Worse was on his hob-nailed sandals. This Philliadas also knew his numbers. In the past he had earned an Athenian drachma a day settling fights as a surveyor on the borders at Panakton near Attika. Philliadas could measure boundaries in his head-and box any who questioned his number reckoning. He would have done the judging free, just for the chance to kill a man without the charge of blood guilt.
He stared down Ainias. “I wouldn’t try to slap me, sophist. Keep that shield still, or we’ll settle it here.” He stuck his finger almost into the chest of Ainias. “But listen, Arkadian, all you big fellows over there on the left will be only sixty men wide in your square-if even three thousand of you show up tomorrow and I can square my numbers. I figure Kleombrotos and his Spartans on the right wing will add up to twenty-five hundred, if not three thousand-at least as much as the men of Thebes. They may be eight shields to the rear. Or they may be twelve deep at most. Either way, with your sixty shields wide in the front row, you men on the left will be facing two or three hundred of them. I say you will be swallowed up in an eye blink one against four or maybe five. You Pythagoreans talk big about numbers and the good left hand. But these you don’t have a clue about.”
This Philliadas had the crowd’s attention, even though most could not add or subtract, much less multiply his numbers. But they grasped well enough his point: The king’s wing of the far bigger army would be broader and quickly outflank the narrow deep column of the outnumbered Epaminondas on the left. It was madness to put your small head into a wide Spartan noose. Philliadas was chewing on the stem of a dried fig as he growled. “With that wider bunch, the king’s Spartans will go around you in no time. They’ll be at your rear and in the baggage in eye blinks. Even if my boys of Tanagra are out of the storm, soon they will be left naked in the center. We’ll be cut and spliced from our backsides. You Thebans will spear nothing but shadows way over on the naked left.”
Voices of agreement followed. This torn-nose Philliadas had seen his share of crashing shields. “Maybe this will happen,” Ainias nodded, “if our mass charges straight ahead or to our right, dear Philliadas, as you seem to think. But why in your Apollo’s name should we when fifty deep?” Ainias then threw out the rest of his wine on the dirt. “Instead Epaminondas and Pelopidas with the mass will veer left from the left. They lead their Thebans leftward to the king himself-at an angle, or loksen as you say. The rest of the line must follow them. The whole army will go out double-time at an angle leftward. Boiotians too can be crabs in their walk-although left-clawed crabs at that.”
As he talked, Ainias clapped his hands to signal the collision of the armies, and then hit the dirt with his spear. Most in the crowd could not see his lines in the sand. But the hoplites felt that he seemed to know what he talked about to be able to draw and talk numbers at the same time-and not get a stab from Philliadas for his efforts. “No, our left mass will angle left for the king. It will kill him. Kill his flank guard, too. Our strong against their strong. We’ll hit them fifty shield deep from their open sides before they encircle us. The red-capes have not a clue of our ship’s ram that will smash them tomorrow with full oars.” Ainias finished, “If the Thebans do as we say, the Spartans will carry off their dead king in defeat packed in honey, back to the River Eurotas before Sparta itself-and the rest will flee.”
Philliadas was left mumbling something about himself and his men filling in gaps when the left wing went on its slanted march. Then he headed back to the rear of the crowd, which hooted in approbation that one of their own had at least stood up to the Arkadian high talker.
Epaminondas had quietly translated Ainias’s talk into even more crude lines and arrows in the sand. Then he paused to add a few twists of his own. To the hipparchs, about ten or so of the cavalry commanders of Thebes, he pointed. “You ride better than the Spartans. They scoff at horse battle. Why not move away from the flanks and ride out at our front? Why not 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.”
Melon murmured to Chion, “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 Neto 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 Melon join the ranks.