Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [38]
In those days, honey, men didn’t fight as they do today. Well – the Spartans did. They were orderly and careful, but most men didn’t even form a proper phalanx with ranks and files – something every city does today. No, back then, we were still like the war bands of the lords in the Iliad. Men would cluster around the leaders like trees around a spring, and if a leader died, all his men would run.
But my father paid attention to things he saw and heard, and it was he who had suggested that the men of Plataea should each have a place – a rank and a file – and should practise in those places, the way the Spartans and the best of the Thebans did – their apobatai, the elite fighters, who had once been the charioteers. And now Pater had ordered them to fight in a very deep order – in those days, twelve deep was twice as deep as most men fought.
But I digress, as usual. I could tell that my brother was afraid. I wasn’t afraid. I thought that it would be like deer hunting. I imagined that I’d run around the flank of their line and throw my javelins into this packed mass, killing a Spartiate with every cast. Calchas had told me the truth about war, but my ears had been closed.
It may sound odd to you, but I took quite a shine to young Callicles. He was arrogant but he was older, and that matters to peasants. And when he saw how far I could throw a javelin – he only had one – he treated me differently. In an afternoon of rock- and javelin-throwing on the height beside the tower, I became his second man, his phylarch, and we copied our elders, speaking at length about our ‘tactics’. As boys will, we made the other boys do as we did, and we practised running and jumping and throwing javelins and rocks. Most boys merely had rocks. The slaves hung back.
Fair enough. It wasn’t their fight. Those who had been freed had everything to gain by fighting well, but those who were still slaves had no interest in the fight at all. They sat around until we yelled at them, and then the older ones were slow and so obviously unwilling that they poisoned our confidence. These men were masters of avoiding work, and a couple of teenaged boys were nothing to them. These were men who were used to dealing with the wrath of Pater or Epictetus the Elder.
By the third day, it looked to all of us as if there would be no fight, and the Athenians heaped praise on us. Just by coming, we’d given the Peloponnesians pause. Now they were outnumbered. And, it appeared, they’d expected the Thebans to join them, but the Thebans weren’t there yet. Or weren’t coming at all.
I’ll have a lot to say about war, honey. I may put you to sleep with it for a month while I weary you with my story. And one thing I’ll say a thousand times is that every army has its own heart, its own soul, its own eyes and its own ears. In that army, that Peloponnesian army, they didn’t really want to be in Attica. They were all too aware that the Spartans were only there to support their alliance with Thebes, and the Spartans, as was their way, had shown their lack of interest by sending only a token force under the junior king.
As they did again later, against the Medes. Never trust a Spartan, honey.
Anyway, they should have known that the bloody Thebans were coming. They were a hundred stades away or less. Ares must have laughed.
Cleomenes finally committed to fight because the Peloponnesians were starting to leave him. Allies were freer in those days. They told the king of Sparta what they thought, and then they marched away. Not many of them, but enough to make old Cleomenes decide to fight before he had no army at all.
We knew that the Thebans were coming. It was said around every fire. The Athenians and all the farmers of Attica – they had farmers too – were already looking over their shoulders and doubting the new leaders that they’d elected. But Miltiades and his father were everywhere – even among us – putting bars of iron into the spines of every man. Miltiades even came and watched our boys practising. He praised my javelin throw, and an