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spur beneath extinction’s scythe lightened of all, save surrender to that outcome known only to the gods. There is no mystery to this. All soldiers do it. They must, or they could not fight at all.
    This is what Telamon meant when he pared his soldiers’ packs or trekked to frozen peaks to show two boys the cold kill of predation.
    Another time when we were youths, Hephaestion and I asked Telamon if self-command had a place in the soldier’s kit. “Indeed,” he replied, continuing to stitch his overcloak, which chore our query had interrupted. “For the self-control of the warrior, which we observe and admire in his comportment, is but the outward manifestation of the inner perfection of the man. Such virtues as patience, courage, selflessness, which the soldier seems to have acquired for the purpose of defeating the foe, are in truth for use against enemies within himself—the eternal antagonists of inattention, greed, sloth, self-conceit, and so on. When each of us recognizes, as we must, that we too are engaged in this struggle, we find ourselves drawn to the warrior, as the acolyte to the seer. The true man-at-arms, in fact, can overcome his enemy without even striking a blow, simply by the example of his virtue. In fact he can not only defeat this foe but also make him his willing friend and ally, and even, if he wishes, his slave.” Our mentor turned to us with a smile. “As I have done with you.”
    There is a clue here.
    Perhaps in the simple virtues I learned as a boy lies a way back, for myself and for this army. Time is short. The men will not wait, nor will this river.
    Let us retrace the route then, my young friend—I to recount and you to attend. From the start.
    From Chaeronea.

B
ook
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wo

    L OVE OF G LORY

F
ive
    THE OBLIQUE ORDER
    C HAERONEA IS A PLAIN NORTHWEST OF THEBES. Here, in his forty-fifth year (and my eighteenth), Philip led the army of Macedonia against the assembled corps of the Greeks. It was the last great battle of his life and the first of mine.
    The plain at Chaeronea runs northwest by southeast. The ground is in lavender and fragrant herbs, perfume plants, with the fortified acropolis on the rising ground to the south and Mount Acontion opposite across the pan. An army advancing from the northwest enters the plain at its widest part, where it stretches beyond three thousand yards. You cross a stream called the Haemus. Blood River. On the left is the course called Cephisus. Upon this the Greeks anchored their right wing. Their left rested on the citadel of the city. The foe’s front was something under two miles across, or about twenty-eight hundred shields.
    For centuries Chaeronea has been the site of clashes at arms. It is a natural theater of war, as are the neighboring plains of Tanagra, Plataea, Leuctra, Coronea, and Erythrae. The history of Greece has been written here. Men have bled and died on these fields for a thousand years.
    This day a different kind of battle will be fought. This day my father will put an end to the preeminence of the Greeks. We will be the Greeks now. We of Macedon. We whom our cousins of the south have spurned and despised, whom Demosthenes of Athens has called “suppositious bastards.” Today we will wring from Greece’s grasp the standard of the West. From this day, we will be civilization’s champions.
    The enemy force is between thirty-five and forty thousand; our own just shy of forty. The foe has sufficient strength to stack his infantry between eight and sixteen shields deep across the entire front.
    The elite regiment of Greece is the Sacred Band of Thebes. Its numbers are three hundred. The unit is constituted, so the poets declare, of pairs of lovers. The notion is that each man, dreading disgrace in the eyes of his beloved, will fight like one possessed, or, if overrun, stand by his comrade to the last.
    â€œWhat rubbish!” Telamon is corrosive on the subject. “If bungholing