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

according to reason. Did you not see, woman, that I was dead when I was idling on my farm, wondering whether I had the good number five thousand forty or the bad number five thousand forty-one of olive trees after all? I am not here to save Epaminondas. I am here to be saved by him, just like you persuaded me once.”
    Nêto turned and headed out of the tent before Chiôn and Mêlon could scold her for having snuck to the battlefield.

CHAPTER 4
    Helikon
    Hold up, man.” Chiôn and Mêlon yelled to the approaching riders. The two Thespian hoplites had beaten the throng out of the assembly. Now both were looking for a place to sleep near the tent of Epaminondas. They had decided to let Gorgos stay back by himself at the wagon up on the hill. As they spread out their gear, four horsemen galloped up—Thespians like themselves. “Lophis is here.” Chiôn immediately yelled to his master.
    Lophis pulled his reins and tossed his head up. “We rode out yesterday and camped on the water by White Creek across from the Spartans last night.” He teased his father, “I figured you three had gone back in your old men’s wagon to Helikon to hunker down in the farm tower and wait all this out.” He had his helmet off. Lophis liked riding bareheaded around the camp. His hair was braided Spartan-like for show. He was taller than his father, thinner as well, with fairer skin.
    The hoplite grabbed the saddle cinch of his horse, Xiphos, as his son slid off to greet Chiôn. “Hoa, you! Well, here we all are in the Thebans’ cauldron, it seems.” Chiôn nodded and looked to see if the hooves were cracked. Mêlon did not wait for the slave’s answer but walked around Xiphos, his eye checking the leather flank guards that Nêto had stitched, worried that his son could afford no lapse if he were to survive the charge into the Spartans. “Your lance, son, does it go well with Xiphos?”
    “Well enough,” and the three young longhairs at his side assented. Mêlon knew none of them. But he grabbed his son’s lance to test its balance. As Lophis watched his father jab with the huge shaft, he was reminded that none of us knows the whole past of even those we see each day. But arise a chance moment, a move, a word, perhaps just a gaze, and a keyhole opens to a hidden, larger life on the other side. It both frightens and excites us to see that one so dear to us has another, an unknown, perhaps a deadly side.
    Lophis watched Mêlon take up his clumsy lance as if it were a light spear. As he stabbed about, even Lophis cowered a bit. His father’s round shield was larger than most, closer to four than three feet in width, with stains of Spartan blood and brains soaked deep within its grain. The breastplate was one of Malgis’s and had patches of tin and bronze and layers of paint that hid cracks and dents. Bora, his spear on the ground, had notches at its head, thirty and more, to mark all the Spartans who had fallen from it at the hands of Malgis and Mêlon. His father, Lophis could see now, handled a cornel spear as if it were not much more than a pruning hook.
    Lophis then felt even smaller as he tried to stop his father’s shadow jousting. “Epaminondas has told us that he has about three hundred of the horsemen of Boiotia. We will hit the Spartans first. We will give you hoplites some summer dust for your surprise. No doubt Sparta will send its horse first out as well. We’ll have a real mix-up for all of you to see. The Spartans are not mounted folk. We will kill them for sport. All can watch. They will have no warning that you with fifty shields are on the left about to cut down their king.”
    “If only it were so plumb and square,” his father replied, unsure what would happen when his son learned that battle was an awful thing, a deinon , nothing like the stabbing and romantic spearing of the stone Amazons and Lapiths far above on the friezes and pediments of the high temples. Still, it was good that young men like Lophis