As the enemy steadily approached, Clearchus dismounted and strode over to the seers waiting before the front lines of troops. Like Euripides, he believed that it is with the gods' favor that wise commanders launch an attack, never against their wishes, and so he ordered a goat sacrificed to Zeus and then to Phobos, God of Fear and Rout, seeking to avert the latter's eyes from our men and to focus them instead on the Persians. Clearchus himself began the ritual, and despite the relentless advance of the enemy troops, he carefully and deliberately followed the prescribed protocol, slicing his blade through the beast's exposed throat and letting the blood spurt and gush, placating the gods. As it fell, it soaked into the hot, parched earth, leaving only a dark, steaming stain which itself would be effaced within minutes by the stifling dust, as the earth healed itself of the scars and stains inflicted by men in their puny affairs.
Clearchus had not yet called his troops to attention. Though they carefully watched the advancing hordes and the sacrifices, they feigned nonchalance, glancing out of the corners of their eyes, their shields leaning against their legs and the gripcords exposed, some of the men still sitting down. Xenophon and I had been warned in advance by Proxenus of this unsettling habit of the Spartans, a calculated effect designed to indicate their scorn for the advancing enemy. It was not until the Persian archers, some 200 yards distant, finally began finding their range that the men casually stood up and mounted their shields.
At a signal from Clearchus' trumpeter the Greeks bellowed the watchword we had devised, Zeus soter kai Nike! "Savior Zeus and Victory!" clanging their shields and increasing the volume of their roar with each repetition until the very earth seemed to shudder. After a moment, the reedy, high-pitched wailing of the battle pipes soared over our voices, an otherworldly top-note rising in arrhythmic counterpoint to the bass of the hellish chorus. The rising, rolling beat of the oxhide drums, which we felt as a thumping tremor in our bellies, resonated through the ranks, and as the throbbing beat suddenly doubled we broke as one into the chanted war hymn, the paean to Apollo. The thunder of the massed ten thousand voices and the explosive clanging and crashing of spears on shields rolled over the field between the opposing forces, and seemed to hit the Persians almost physically, like a wall. The enemy companies directly across the field from our right wing faltered and their front visibly wavered as the troops behind them began to cluster in bunches. At another deafening blast from the salpinx we broke toward the Persians' left wing in a trot. Our hoplites maintained a flawless, tight phalanx formation on the slightly downward sloping plain, while the light infantry followed close behind, fitting their arrows on the run, forever chanting the bloody hymn. As we approached to within fifty yards of the enemy lines, the heavy infantry broke off the rhythm of the war chant and commenced a full-throated, wordless wail, a howl as if of pent-up rage, summoning Ares, the implacable god of war, with the deafening cry, "Eleleu! Eleleu! Eleleu!" They snapped their spears down in perfect unison to full horizontal, the freshly sharpened edges and tips glinting their promise of painful death in the blinding sun. The mouths of the terrified enemy soldiers before us worked soundlessly, contorted in fear, and their officers' horses rolled their eyes wildly and reared their heads to the side in an effort to escape the bellowing wall of men and metal fast approaching.
The enemy line faltered, its front ranks stopping dead. The rearward Persian marchers, unable to see what was happening uphill beyond their leading comrades, kept pushing forward, tripping over those who had halted in front, and in turn being pushed by their fellows in the rear. Encouraged at this sign of hesitation, the Greek heavy infantry picked up its pace to a full sprint, armor and shields crashing madly. The discipline of the Greek forces was heart-stopping-men prepared against those unprepared, good order against disorder, troops surging forward in absolute, deadly precision, as tight and as uniform as the scales on an asp.
As for what happened next, it is impossible to say whether the gods were responsible, or whether no enemy could resist a tide of men as determined as ours. The Persian ranks collapsed without a struggle in the face of the Greek hell-storm, unable to muster even the deafening crash one usually hears as the lead warriors of the opposing forces collide and fold into one another in a chaos of metal, body fluids, and screams. The front line broke and we plowed over them as if they were so many molehills, neglecting even to kill those we ran over, but simply trampling them and moving on to the next rank, a seething, roaring wall of iron and death. The frenzied camp followers swarming close behind us stripped the dead of their valuables and food, using clubs and discarded spearheads to make short work of any enemy soldiers who remained twitching or sobbing after being mowed down by our surging hoplites. The Persians in the front lines tried desperately to wheel and run to the rear, but their comrades behind, fifteen or twenty ranks thick, marched doggedly forward like the slaves they were, under the whips and threats of their sergeants, blocking the path of the panic-stricken front ranks and hindering their retreat. Slaughter ensued, panic fed upon panic. Even those few Persians originally inclined to take a stand and fight lost heart when they saw they had been deserted on all sides, and then they themselves joined the terrified mob.
Our archers took special aim at the enemy chariot drivers, who had held slightly back behind their heavy infantry, waiting for a gap in the fighting to open up through which they could drive their lethal scythes without cutting apart their own men. The Spartans loathed such machines, and had not used them in their own forces for a hundred years. They did, however, relish the thought of facing them, for they had mastered the trick of calmly opening up gaps between which the chariot drivers would charge harmlessly, while one or two Spartans darted in from the side and stabbed the horse or driver. In his youth, Clearchus was known to be well accomplished in this trick.
The Spartans were to be disappointed, however, for not a single Persian scythe-chariot even made it to the Greek lines. Our bowmen toppled several of the drivers, and in the ensuing chaos none of the Persian infantry even bothered to pick up their comrades' reins. The panicked horses raced about aimlessly among their own men, the razor-sharp blades violating the sanctity and virginity of fragile skin, lopping off an arm here, a head there, gouging through men's breastplates and ribs as if they were cheese, exposing the gods' secrets to the eyes of leering and terrified onlookers. I watched as two Boeotians from Proxenus' battalion, brothers as it happened, each took charge of a runaway chariot and began lending method and discipline to the general carnage they were wreaking, turning the Persians' most terrifying weapons against them with devastating effect. They cut a bloody swath through the most densely packed of the enemy lines, and then calmly drove their captured trophies up to Proxenus, grinning, with odd pieces of bloody flesh and dripping helmet leather still hanging off the murderous tines. Socrates once said that to peer inside a human being, you can make him laugh or observe him in love; he neglected to note that you can also use a blade or a spear point. The latter method proves beyond a doubt that people are more alike inside than they are outside, and in fact are scarcely different from pigs or asses.