The End of Sparta: A Novel by Victor Davis Hanson Read Free Book Online

at least everyone would be better off with the dynasteia of Spartans back in control.” Epaminondas glared at Ladôn, and then backed up a bit. “But Pelopidas—step out of the way for a moment. Ainias of Stymphalos over here and I have been talking. We’ve worked something up a little different from what our enemies—or you generals here—expect. Let our southern guest speak.”
    Ainias took off his cape and stepped forward again. His helmet was on the floor at his feet. His gloves and arm bands were off. His pockmarks were shadowed in the torchlight. Long matted oily hair covered his shoulders, his half-ear now and then hidden. His black beard stubble highlighted rather than covered the furrows and creases on his face. From what cave in Arkadia had Epaminondas dragged this wolf-beast out? He made Epaminondas look soft. The captains whispered he’d worked for that rogue archon down south, Lykomedes of Mantineia. Still, few in Boiotia apparently had ever seen him, much less knew of any Ainias of Stymphalos—that wild Arkadian place where the birds of Ares once flung their iron feathers at Herakles by the vast and gloomy lake.
    Ainias eyed Pelopidas’s sand map. He pushed away others who stood in his light. For all his gaze at the sand below, Ainias looked as if he’d been out in the byways the night before, robbing and throat-slitting for his pleasure along the taverns on marshy Kopais. The Thebans listened in fear that he might draw his long sword and take off a nose or ear, Persian-style—the way his own ear had been lost.
    Instead he startled them by talking, much louder than the voice of either Epaminondas or Pelopidas. “Your wars of trumpets and boasts are over. Over. We live in the age of logos, of science. I kill by an art, a skill, a technê . Not by the livers of goats. Not your prayers to Artemis. Not even numbers and muscles win battles. Battle is as much of the mind as the heart.” Few wanted to argue with this man’s blasphemy—but what a voice, what long words came out of the mouth of an uncouth killer. “Listen up to the new war. We all know what Kleombrotos and his royal guard will do tomorrow: what they always do whenever they fight. A suckling child without teeth could tell us in advance.”
    Ainias then waved his hands as he went through the Spartan way of war bit by bit. The entire crowd was hypnotized; those who had just before been punching each other were now pushing to get nearer this curious sand map. “The flutes will start up. The army will walk out on their heavy feet. They stare. They do their slow two-step. The king and his wing slant. They swerve to the right. We will be blinded by the sun at their backs. Or scared by the glare of their polished shields—a thousand and more of the Spartan Similars, all shuffling in the king’s charge. Flute music all the while. These shaved lips come on. On always—like the crab we see on the seashore that can only walk sideways and at an angle. They hope, they expect to break you rustics from the provinces. Their strong right wing faces off against our weak left. Then they get to your rear. Then stab you in the back. Then turn. And they come up behind your best Thebans on your right. Then you all die. And we are burned and float away as ash. I know this. I did just this as an ally alongside them for twenty seasons. I killed many of your fathers at the Nemea and Koroneia.”
    He calmed and with almost a murmur finished, “But this they will not do. Not tomorrow. Not ever. I swear to you all that Leuktra will be no Nemea.” Ainias, bathed in sweat under the summer torchlight, tore off his leather tunic and was focused on the captains. Epaminondas then stepped up and yelled to his men, “Watch and learn.”
    “Says who, Arkadian?” a loudmouth interrupted the trance of the crowd, and yelled in a high pitch. They nicknamed the barker Backwash. He was some sort of low official of the Confederation, who had borrowed his father’s breastplate