The End of Sparta Read Online Free

from the creek water. Cagey Gorgos had guided Chiôn well here. He laughed out loud, as he thought how clever he was to have known the spot in advance—maybe as a back escape path down the hill should the slave Chiôn turn feral and try to kill him right here? Or was it a way to get out the backside, should the Boiotians lose—or even win? About four stadia away on an opposite gentle rise, the three could make out through the haze where King Kleombrotos and his horde of Spartans had settled down for the night. The ditch and brush ramparts of the invading Spartans were already finished—and all done in just the two days since the king’s arrival in Boiotia. The outline of shadowy Mt. Kithairon loomed to the enemy’s rear.
    Mêlon knew how to compute numbers. He had long ago measured borders when the farm squabbles broke out on the upper plots on Helikon. Now he saw there was a far larger army of invaders than there was in the new Boiotian tent town of Epaminondas below them. What had his son Lophis talked him into—and into what had Epaminondas talked the Boiotians? The old man turned to Chiôn. “I gauge at least ten thousand of them, maybe twelve or even fifteen thousand more Spartans over there, who need killing. Three to two, against Epaminondas, maybe closer to two to one. For all his fine talk of freeing the unfree, that is all that is left. Either they keep ravaging Boiotia or we stop them. You stop them only by knocking down the royal Spartan bunch on the right wing where they need killing the most. Only the spear arm stops them. Nothing else. They won’t parley, won’t surrender, won’t stop—until killed. No need to count them. They aren’t going anywhere. Why should they when they outnumber us?”
    Chiôn paid him no heed. Mêlon could smell the campfires of the Spartans as they roasted their sacrificial goats for their early meal. He kept talking to himself. For stadia well beyond their ditch and camp wall, early evening fires were flickering everywhere on the hills opposite, on the other side of the gully in the growing twilight. The whole world tonight seemed Spartan. How were they to beat men like that, said to be better and known to be more numerous? King Kleombrotos, Mêlon said to himself, if he wins, he will be supping inside the seven gates of Thebes. By tomorrow at dusk we will all speak Doric on our way down into Hades as well.
    The two slaves still ignored their babbling master and kept unpiling their gear.

CHAPTER 2
    Lichas the Spartan
    Across the way, the Spartans were working, not thinking—stacking brush as a wall on their backside. They had the dry streambed and now a ditch as rampart at their front. Unlike the Boiotian camps, there was order here in their huge circle—a taxis , a plan of marching hoplites in drill and to pipe music. On this night before the battle, the stewards on cue brought kettles of black barley soup and spits of roasted goat. Over there, Gorgos knew, stalked bald Lichas, son of Lichas, the best of the old Spartan breed. Lichas had fought the Athenians forty summers earlier. He knew enough of Epaminondas that if the fool had his way in making everyone equal who were not, then there would be no place for the better ones like Lichas himself in the new softer Hellas. Only Lichas and a few of his Spartan henchmen stood in the way between the old and better ways of the Hellenes and this polis-wrecker Epaminondas.
    Now in confidence Lichas went from campfire to campfire rousing his men on. “Comb your hair who have it, men. Shave your upper lips clean. Look like the better men you are when we face these pigs. We are no different from the tall men who once broke the Persians at Plataia. Why, we could still sail into Athens, as our grandfathers did, and tear down its walls. So chant your Tyrtaios. Tomorrow, right at mealtime we eat on their acropolis, atop their Kadmeia. The Boiotian pigs? Why, they will soon sup in Hades. Listen to your king. Our Kleombrotos, king of