The End of Sparta: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

an amulet around his neck and invited in the witches to chant in hopes that they might abate the boils and fevers from the great plague that ate his body away each hour.
    The gear of this Iron Gut— sidêroun splangchon , his hoplites called Epaminondas—was cheap bronze, as dull as the panoply of Antikrates shone in the campfires across the way. The breastplate was cracked and dented. Cheap bronze patches were badly hammered on everywhere. Epaminondas wore no greaves. But he should have. His lower legs were scarred from ugly wounds. A tattered green cloak blew up over his shoulders. Mêlon’s eye fixed on his bare right spear arm. It was nearly as wide as Chiôn’s. A long scar went from his shoulder to his elbow. A worse oulê had reached his neck, right above the edge of his breastplate.
    Mêlon looked for a general’s horsehair crest, a leader’s scarlet cloak, surely a gold sash of the usual Theban stratêgos . There was none—just an old round-topped Boiotian helmet and a cracked wooden shield without worn blazon. All those cuts and scars and he had still ended up a bald man with no money about to die fighting the Spartans. He was no peacock general. Or maybe one so marked by Ares that he more often suffered than gave blows in the mix-up. Whatever he believed in, he had believed in for a long time—and had fought for it, too. The nondescript, the poor and needy looking, these are far more dangerous revolutionaries than those with gold clasps and purple cloaks. Mêlon knew that, but he also sighed to Chiôn at his side, “Poor ugly Theban. He’s a walking wound. They must call him ho traumatias . And he is to lead us tomorrow?”
    Five or six other stratêgoi of the Boiotian Confederation—the elected Boiotarchs of substance and repute—in new armor, were there to urge Epaminondas to start talking with King Kleombrotos. The generals chimed in that it was time to back out of the valley and beg Kleombrotos for peace. The army was outnumbered and out-positioned, the Boiotarchs protested. They offered talk and money as well to pay the Spartans to leave. The best of the Boiotarchs, Ladôn of seventy summers, who owned five hundred pomegranate trees near Anthedon on the coast and was too old to earn a fist for his slurs, threw his wadded-up cloak in the face of Epaminondas and spat out, “Blood will be on your hands, Pythagorean. I figure Lichas would gladly take in payment some cows and grain to leave. Then he might let us be until next year. Unlike you, he prefers to do business than kill us.”
    Epaminondas ignored them. They all had white beards or big bellies, or wore purple cloaks or had hammered silver blazons to their shields, and so seemed to Epaminondas to think that their property mattered more than their honor. The generals were terrified that they would die en masse soon, given that they believed neither themselves nor any in the tent could stand up to the wall of Spartan shields and spears. And most liked the sun on their faces in the morning and were not about to give it up for the price of having Sparta ravage their grain each spring or some olive limbs in the fall, and install a few of their bothersome fixers on their acropoleis . Meanwhile the officers of the army looked only at their Epaminondas for a nod to fight or a sigh to go home. One look of hesitation, and seven thousand Boiotian hoplites would pack up their armor and head back to their fields. A fight broke out in back and knocked over two torches. Mêlon drew his curved knife—and wondered whether to unleash Chiôn, who cared little how many trees or years Ladôn claimed.
    It now was almost dark, and the meeting was still little more than shouts and shoves. The Thebans of the Sacred Band, the three hundred elite hoplites who followed their general Pelopidas, were again playing their flutes in disdain, mocking the wavering generals and throwing the brawlers out into the latrine. Now they quietly put them away on the smile of Epaminondas.