The End of Sparta Read Online Free Page B

“Get out your whetstones. Sharpen your cleavers. Our blades will go through these pigs as spits do fat pork. Sharper still. Always file your iron, men. Ready your iron for your king.”
    Finally King Kleombrotos himself appeared and yelled out to his Spartan subjects. He was standing on the back of a wagon surrounded by a throng of his royal hoplites. The lord was a young sort, maybe no more than forty years. As the king of the Agiad line, he had already held his office for the past nine. Kleombrotos had not wanted to fight this day. He had headed north for Thebes only because he feared the wrath of Lichas and the ephors—overseers who audited the king’s campaign—should he slink and file out of the plain without battle. Although he knew his Spartans would win, Kleombrotos did not expect to survive the battle. Even back in the south he had heard of the helot Nêto’s prophecies of his own doom at White Creek where he would meet her master Mêlon. Kleombrotos feared Epaminondas as much as he did Zeus. Now the eye blinks he had suffered since childhood, and his bad head tilt of the past year, made him talk more in the fashion of a slave or half-helot than a king of Sparta.
    “Men of Sparta. Another spring in Boiotia, so another victory over the pigs. Nothing ever changes for us, the better men of Sparta—unchanged since the days of the founder Lykourgos. Right after our breakfast and wine, we go out. You know the Spartan way: We fight each other for targets and enemy hoplites. Pray there will be enough of them for our spears. We go always to the right across the field—rightward all the way to their rear without a break in our stride. Tomorrow we mass twelve deep—not our eight shields of the past. All the better to crush the Theban pigs at the first spear thrust. No worry about our flanks. Men of Sparta, Homoioi tôn Lakaidaimoniôn , we have more good men there than we need. Our army has wide horns, more men than we need on the flanks.”
    But the voice sounded too high, too shrill for a Spartan king. The king spoke as if battle with Epaminondas were to be avoided rather than sought. He finished weakly, “If every Spartan peer, if every ephor, if even a Spartan king should fall tomorrow, so be it. It would be worth that great price to kill Epaminondas and stop his democratic madness. Follow me to victory. Follow me up their Kadmeia.”
    His army murmured. Only a few raised their fists at their king’s notion that any Spartan would need die at all against these pigs. Most of the companions in disgust turned to finish off their wine. Then the pipes took up and the king’s guard took the frightened royal into his tent. Before the men laid out their reed bedrolls, and smothered their cook fires, Lichas the ancient ephor climbed back up on the wagon bed. He bounded up as if he were no more than twenty. The brute Kleonymos, captain of the king’s guard, stood on one side, Lichas’s son Antikrates on the other, his shield still on his forearm. Both were a quarter royal and, better yet, claimed bloodlines from Brasidas himself. The two always had fought side-by-side and argued only over the number of their kills. Yet the sly night-killer Sphodrias came too and towered behind them all, even if he usually sought to hide rather than strut his size as he crawled about the campfires of the enemy. He planned this very night to go behind the lines and bring back a Theban shield—or, better, a hand or foot.
    Lichas was becoming tired of his reluctant king. He could care not a whit whether the odds, or the omens, or the weather, or the battleground favored either Spartans or Boiotians. He was of the old ones, a Spartan like Leônidas. An ephor. In defeat or victory, Lichas, son of Lichas, of the greatest polis of Hellas, in its greatest age. He would fight like his grandfathers at Thermopylai. He would kill Boiotians and he would bring untold misery to them and endless glory to his own. If their own king was fated to die,