Antikrates, still advancing on the Spartan right after the crash, almost alone cared little that his wing behind was buckling under the Theban weight. He thought that he could give room to Kleonymos and his guardsmen to range out to kill these pigs, even as enemy hoplites from three sides started to bang their shields against his collapsing wing. We can’t kill enough of these men, Antikrates knew now, to stop the mass-even as he bashed down Eurynomos from the hills of Kithairon, and speared in the groin his brother Antalkidas who rushed in to take his fallen sibling’s place. But it was not easy to kill brothers like these, not here on their soil. They did not run, these gnarled farmers who took three or more blows before stumbling. Nonetheless, Antikrates kept telling himself, we can kill the Malgidai and still save our king. We of the line of Lichas, alone the professional killers of Hellas, can kill Epaminondas, kill their best and teach others before we die the price of fighting men like us.
Or so he thought, but for every Eurynomos and Antalkidas of the enemy who were on the ground, four Spartiates had already been ground down. And they were the best of the Spartiates: Dorrusas, nephew of Agesilaos, himself screaming as a black iron spearhead broke the barrier of his teeth; the ephor Araios buried beneath five spear stabs-under the jaw, in the armpit, below the navel, above the knee, through the groin; and now even Anaxilas, the henchman of Antikrates. Anaxilas had married his cousin Kreusa, was hamstrung and flailing like a crushed scorpion on the red ground of Leuktra, as the rustics under Philliadas from Tanagra shredded his thighs, slamming down their butt-spikes. Worse still, few Spartans stepped up from the files to plug the holes. The Boiotians were now even into the middle ranks. And the terrified Spartans were backing up, some even turning about, and fighting their way through their own hoplites to flee the crazed men of Boiotia. It was not just Antikrates who noticed the novelty of Spartan failure; the catastrophe was spreading throughout the army as the royal guard screamed orders to stay fast, commands that were never heard and were as shrill as they were brief.
At this moment beside the stream of Leuktra, for the first time in three hundred summers, the dreaded thrust of the Spartan Right ended and went for good from the memory of the Hellenes. Instead, the unaccustomed stiffening of the enemy already sent a shiver throughout the entire Spartan column. The king’s guard felt the unease in the ranks that an enemy line had not collapsed when hit hard, but had grown rather than receded with the blow. Of course, the old hands like Deinon and Kleonymos and Sphodrias, too, were spearing the Thebans as they always had. Yet why, Antikrates wondered, were even they not moving forward, not even holding their ground, but slowing being pushed backward? Antikrates through his eye-slits saw the bobbing crests about him. The horsehair plumes of his confused men began nodding in all directions. The circle of Spartans was collapsing around their king.
Far too late, Kleombrotos and Lichas ordered Sphodrias and his folk at the tip of the spears to get the men moving to the far right, to bypass this onrushing mob so much deeper than anything they had ever fought. Melon was now right in front of the king’s line. Yes, he was to face Lichas once more, perhaps as Malgis had. But now Melon took heart that once more Lichas would bear out a Spartan king on his back, perhaps this time dead rather than wounded. He pressed on; yes, this time Lichas would carry out a dead king.
Melon could feel that gaping holes were opening, as yet more pockets of Theban rustics surged in. Too few Spartans stepped up to plug the gaps made by such spearmen. Melon and Chion, with Staphis and Antitheos and his men to the left, were already, at this very beginning of battle, three or four ranks beyond the Spartan front line. They were almost as far into the enemy phalanx as Pelopidas and the Sacred Band fifty or so feet farther to their left on the wing. Over there out of sight, the Sacred Band had avoided the crash. Instead they had already trotted around the Spartan line, and well past the king. From the side and now from the rear, the Sacred Band began to encircle the Spartan horn. Pelopidas’s men were herding the enemy back into the spears of the advancing left under Epaminondas, Melon, and Chion. Already the Spartans were nearly surrounded, their entire right flank blocked at every side. Melon’s Thebans were like Helikon goat dogs, nipping the ankles of the rams, herding them together as they were forced into the pen. The Spartans were in danger not of losing, but of being destroyed to a man.
Across the way, Lichas saw the disaster. Almost alone he felt this doom of his royal right. He pointed to the king’s guard to keep to the right. “Break out of the pig jaws. Trot out. We break out of their ring, quick time, now. March on the double-step. Listen to our pipers.”
As the Spartans tried to spear a way out of the closing circle, Staphis, Chion, and Melon held firm. The three were drifting more and more to the left as planned, batting down spear thrusts, jabbing Spartans as they worked their way onward toward the royal guard itself. More Spartan bodies lay at their feet as they stepped ahead-twitching like the fishermen’s speared tunny, but trapped in their scales of armor. Staphis crushed a prone man’s throat with his hobnailed sandal. Those coming up behind with their still-raised spears finished him off, slamming their butt-spikes straight down through his eye-slits, once the Spartan’s shield was splintered and then hammered down flat. For these in the rear who would not meet the first storm of the Spartan, their grand tales back home at the pottery stalls would be of pushing their friends ahead and smashing their spear-butts, their sauroteres, into hundreds of Spartans that they trampled and stepped on. Soon the Thebans, as song would have it in the years to follow, were walking over the dreaded schoolmasters of war-Spartans cast down like mere scraps of meat on the dirty floor of the raucous banquet hall.
Just then Melon felt a surge of warm power in his arms, a flow, a rheuma of heat. It came without warning over him. As he moved more freely, his muscles became fluid, no longer stiff, his leg limber, his knee no longer fused, his back loose. I am now an ephebe, he thought, younger even than at Koroneia some twenty-three seasons ago, more like at Haliartos when I was a down-beard. Just as if Melon had left the tall trees over the gloomy pass of Mt. Kithairon and reentered on the downward hike the sunlight of the rolling foothills, so he pressed on as fewer spears glanced off his wood and bronze. The battlefield had changed yet again. He now had far more space to swing wide his arms. Above Helios had long ago come out; the clouds of gloom were gone. He could hear and see far better now. For all the dust and noise, his senses sharpened with each step ahead as he saw fewer shapes and shadows. His shield felt as if the willow was instead oak, his breastplate more like iron than thin bronze, his helmet impenetrable to a jab from Zeus himself.
Everything was clear. This was the aristeia, the surge of victory and power that Homer sung of Achilles in battle. Now it was infused in him. He was light on his feet, his arms were supple and hot-and he would win this day. No more Cholopous. No, he was Okupous. Lord of the fast feet. Like swift-footed Achilles of old. Then Melon felt that the grip on his shield was not quite right, that the straps and clasp, the porpax and antilabe, had been torn and bent and were out of balance. His shield string had long ago snapped. From the corner of his left eye he saw the problem: a Spartan spearhead and two fingers’ worth of the wood of its broken socket still stuck into his boss. How forceful the collision a moment earlier had been with the front line of the enemy.