The Isle of Stone

10

Three years later, the Spartan army stood on a plain near the Peloponnesian city of Mantinea, facing an allied army of Argives, Arcadians, Mantineans, and Athenians. A battle was going to be fought because the treaty ending the war with Athens had been a sham: in the ensuing years, neither side had fulfilled its obligations. The Athenians were firmly entrenched at Pylos, and the Lacedaemonians still occupied the Athenian ally of Amphipolis. All the Greek powers sent out secret emissaries to negotiate defensive alliances against their adversaries, frightening each other with vague fears of Spartan-Athenian hegemony, an Argive-Corinthian plot to take control of the Peloponnese, or a Spartan-Theban dagger pointed at the heart of Athens. Each party insisted on terms that would make it finally, completely secure-until the hard bargaining pushed the negotiations to collapse and the diplomats went off to try their luck with the other side. This, in turn, magnified the fears of everyone else, who redoubled their own underhanded dealings.

In Sparta, the capitulators of Sphacteria remained in disgrace. The 120 Spartiates were still forbidden to attend their dining clubs, hold public office, or engage in any financial business; the 171 under-thirties faced permanent status as landless Inferiors. Yet, even as the people shunned them, there was a general fear that the survivors might abandon the Spartan cause. The army was by now undermanned and overstretched, having fewer than a third of the eight thousand troops it had in the time of Leonidas. To forestall their loss, all the ex-Equals were given new panoplies, free from the state, by magistrates who would barely look at them. Rumors were allowed to circulate that the capitulators might be pardoned after all-if they showed themselves worthy on the battlefield.

Antalcidas stood in the ranks of the Inferiors with his state-granted shield and spear. It was the first time since his return from Athens that he had left Laconia. His old Spartiate comrades would barely have recognized him: he had lost his lean, hungry look, his face having filled out in a sudden lapse into middle age; his beard, which fell now to his navel, was prematurely white. In his shame, forbidden to wear the crimson of Lacedaemonians in good standing, he wore gray to the occasion of his death.

The Spartans had been late to realize their enemies were on their way. As the battle would occur on Mantinean soil, the natives took pride of place on their right wing, with the Arcadians, Argives, and Athenians stretching out to their left. Guided by their training, the Lacedaemonians formed their lines rapidly, with the Sciritan Nigh-dwellers facing the Mantineans, the ranks of Inferiors-including Antalcidas-against the Arcadians, and almost all the surviving Spartiates filling out the line opposite Argives and Athenians. The Eurypontid king Agis, who occupied the center with his three hundred knights, would fight with very heavy burden that day: to win the field, or find the Lacedaemonian army broken in his hands. Sparta herself, unwalled and unguarded, lay only two days’ march away.

Antalcidas picked up his shield. He had made sure to get command of a twenty-four man platoon, with himself in the front rank. This would make him visible to all his men when his time came. Turning to examine them, he faced a gallery of greenhorns, Nigh-Dwellers, reprobates, and reformed cowards like himself.

“Your orders are simple, scum: keep the pace-and watch how men should die!”

He cracked the head of his spear against his shield, and waited for the others to do the same. He heard their answer, the percussion of iron against bronze, the ancient music of the ranks, stretching back to echo the battle order of the Homeric heroes before the walls of Priam. Satisfied, he raised his cheek guards, spat, and pulled his helmet down low around his ears.

The enemy line came down the hill, approaching on the double-quick. The boy-pipers behind the Spartans began to play. Without thinking, the Lacedaemonians moved their feet to that deliberate cadence, marching at a slower pace but good order. Antalcidas’ heart was pounding now, surging with exhilaration, for there was no feeling like being swept before a clanking human beast of ten thousand legs, propelled unstoppably toward that wall of hostile spears. His urine coursed down his legs, but not in fear-in time, with the inevitability of it, he would ejaculate too, for there would be much fucking to do that day. He would rip pussies for them all, the men he would penetrate with his spear. As his men watched in wonder, he charged into the arms of the enemy, letting out as he ran a wail of joy like a man coming into his beautiful bride.

Those who witnessed it spoke for years of Stone at Mantinea.