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Richelieu
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Gatineau
Dec 2001
time: 00:25
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Great stuff!
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Lazarus and the Gimp
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Whale-raping abomination
Aug 2000
time: 05:25
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Part 7. Thermopylae, 6th day
We were rested on the second day of the battle. Leonidas ordered us back to our base at the southern entrance to the pass, and moved up the Thespians and a reserve company of Athenians to take our place at the front. There they fought Xerxes' Cissian spearmen. Eumolpas and Simoniedes couldn't resist nipping back down the pass occasionally to insult the Persians- they had spent the morning trying to come up with new and breathtakingly obscene curses and wanted to try them out on the enemy.
That meant that we were kept informed of events at the front. Simoniedes was so keen to make sure he had an attentive audience that he would scramble up the mountain's face to scream his insults at them, getting a clear view of the fighting in the process. Eumolpas was scared of heights, so he settled for shouting his insults up to Simoniedes to relay on to the Persians. From their reports we learned that the Thespians had been badly shaken when their shield wall was broken and were driven back to the second line of barricades. For the first time the Persians held the northern mouth of the pass, but the Athenians held them at bay at the second line which was set at a particularly narrow stretch of the pass. At that point they held the Cissians back with a shield wall just four men wide, and the Cissians lost many men in the crush.
It was a strange day. We idled and tried to talk while the sounds of battle echoed down the pass. Among my friends, only Eumolpas and Simoniedes were unscathed. Philotas was dead. Perdiccas had only a scabbing gash across his eyebrow from a blow to his helmet, but was inconsolable at the loss of his pair, Philotas. Iannis carried the worst injuries- a Persian spear had stabbed clean through his thigh and his collarbone had been broken as he fell. He had come close to bleeding to death, and was carried back south on a stretcher before we had a chance to say goodbye.
My spear-gash was stitched up by Simoniedes and bandaged. I wasn't leaving the battlefield, so I limped around and winced with pain whenever my stitches pulled.
As dusk fell, the sounds of battle eased again as the two sides disengaged. The Persians had fallen back to the captured first barricades while the Athenians held the line just before the second barricades. It was an uneasy stand-off, with occasional flurries of arrows flying in both direction throughout the night. Surprisingly, the Persians started up the drumming and clamour again- the first time since the third night. We settled down around our fires and tried to grab what sleep we could.
*******************************
It must have been around midnight when I woke from a fitful sleep. Simoniedes was lying next to me, and from his breathing I could tell he was awake. I rolled over towards him.
"Can't sleep?"
"No" he replied. "I nodded off for a while, but I had a bad dream."
"What did you dream about?"
"About you, partly". He turned over onto his elbow and grinned at me, but he looked strained. "Should have been a good dream, shouldn't it?"
"Come on. What happened? It could be an omen"
"I was in a field of wheat. It was all swaying in the breeze- you know how it makes that whispering sound that's sort of quiet and loud all at once?"
"I know."
He lay back, looking up at the stars. "I had a sickle in my hand and I was harvesting the wheat. Just me in this great golden sea that went on for ever. Slash, slash, slash, leaving rows of cut wheat behind me. Then you were standing in front of me, screaming at me."
He paused a while, troubled by the memories. "What was I screaming?" I asked.
"Just screaming. Like you were terrified of something. Then I felt my hand was wet, and I saw that the sickle was dripping with blood. I was covered in it. I looked back and there was row after row of hacked bodies behind me, lying in pools of blood and guts. Millions of them- they stretched back as far as I could see. Some were still moving and thrashing about."
He paused again, for several minutes. This time I didn't try to prompt him, but he continued anyway.
"Perdiccas, Eumolpas....their bodies were there. Then Iannis was in front of me, and I hacked him to pieces with my sickle. There was this sea of blood and bodies, and I couldn't get out of it. All I could do was keep hacking away at everything and try to cut a path out. Philotas tried to run away, but I caught up with him and cut him down. All the time I was screaming and crying for forgiveness."
Another pause.
"Then it was you in front of me. I hacked my sickle straight at your face."
He didn't speak again. Some time after that, he fell asleep and I joined him
*********************************
Panic. Confusion.
Still dark, but with the deep blue light of pre-dawn in the sky. Screaming.
I'm staggering upright, still fogged by sleep. Alarm calls on the trumpets. Simoniedes is scrabbling for his shield. Shouting. It's Eumolpas.
"THEY'RE BEHIND US!"
********************************
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Lazarus and the Gimp
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Whale-raping abomination
Aug 2000
time: 05:25
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Part 8. Thermopylae- final day.
It's funny how history hinges on the smallest things, isn't it? One word can bring down an empire....
In this case it was leaves. That's all- just fallen leaves. The usual autumn fall had covered the pathway, and the noise of feet crunching on dried leaves alerted a sentry's attention. Had it not been for that, the Persians would have pinned us in at Thermopylae and had a clear run to Athens before it could be evacuated fully.
The pass of Thermopylae was not the only path over the mountains. There were narrow and daunting goat-paths that ran over them. Leonidas knew of them, and had set a guard on the most obvious of them. On the others he took a gamble that they would not be found. He lost. He failed us.
Ephialtes was the name of the goat-herd. His name is now the most reviled in Athens and Sparta, for he revealed a path to the Persians. Though he’s known as a traitor, I can’t blame him. Having a Persian sword at your throat could turn near anyone into a traitor. Leonidas should have placed patrols on all the known paths. It wouldn’t have taken many men- a few dozen could have held those paths for weeks.
So Xerxes knew of the paths, and had known from the first day of the battle. He always seemed to know everything we did even before we had acted. If Leonidas had possessed half as much intelligence as Xerxes we’d control all Asia Minor by now. Xerxes had thrown wave after wave of assaults at us, while all along he was quietly threading soldiers along the goat-path, awaiting an assault on our flanks. To move his entire army along that narrow mountain path would have taken weeks, but in a couple of nights he had a few hundred men poised and ready to attack our supply depots and pin us in the pass. Without water, we would have been finished in a day or two.
His plan almost succeeded- they had enough men down to cause panic. In the semi-darkness we had no idea how many of them there were. Suspecting a much larger force than actually emerged, Leonidas pulled all the Athenians and Messenians out of the pass, and ordered them to retreat towards Athens in an attempt to hold up a Persian advance some miles back from the pass. The Thebans and Thespians were also pulled out, and launched at the Persian assault party that was already burning our supplies.
We Spartans were to hold the pass. We were to hold the pass in the face of an all-out frontal attack from the Immortals, while praying that the Thebans and Thespians could hold back the assault from behind. Just 250 of us to hold the last barricade.
This was bad. The Immortals had attacked furiously, trying to prevent us getting an orderly shield-wall up. Simoniedes and myself were a few rows back from the frontline, but the front rows were broken into disorganised fighting. We were the first row to form a tight line. I was on the right extreme, with the cliff-edge by my side and Simoniedes crouching into my shield. We braced hard, and watched the front rows get slaughtered.
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Lazarus and the Gimp
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Whale-raping abomination
Aug 2000
time: 05:25
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This was bad. This was really bad.
"Come on! Put your back into it!" Simoniedes screamed into my ear. I braced against my shield and flailed around the edge with my sword. Each thrust pulled on the partially-healed gash in my side and I could feel blood running down the inside on my breastplate.
In the first minutes, the rows behind us had tried to use their spears but we were so few that the Immortals had started forcing us back down the pass. Now we were all just braced and pushing, just trying to hold back the onslaught while our rearguard dealt with the assault to our rear. If they could rejoin us, perhaps we could hold the pass for another day.....
Useless.
The Immortal facing me was being forced across my shield. I waited unto he was desperately focussed on keeping his balance on the cliff-edge, then thrust the point of my sword straight at his face. It cut through his lips, there was a brief scrape of bronze on teeth, then the point emerged through the back of his neck. With a coughing gurgle, he pitched over the cliff. His replacement was caught off-balance and fell straight after his comrade without coming near my sword. The next one stayed upright and slammed into my shield. I started raining blows around the side of my shield, feeling the crunch and bite of bone beneath my sword, trying to ignore the blood now running down my leg.
For an hour we held up. I spent the first few minutes killing, but my arm became leaden. "I can't do it!" I said to Simoniedes. "I can barely lift my arm".
"Just keep pushing! Let them force themselves off the edge!"
I was a rock in a wall. Braced hard into my shield. Eyes shut and just the blood in my head pounding...
.....pounding....
....pounding...
"Keep going! Stand up!". His voice came as if from far away. He could feel my legs starting to buckle.
....pounding....
...pounding....
"Don't do this!! Keep fighting!!"
....pounding....
....pounding...
.....pounding....
.....pounding...
"Fight, you bastard! You'll kill us all!! FIGHT!!!".
....pounding....
I'm so sorry, Simoniedes. If I could speak, I would tell you how ashamed I am that I'm failing. I would tell you how much you meant to me. I would tell you what an honour it was to serve with you. I would tell you that I loved you. But I can't do it anymore. I'm too tired of it all. Can't fight. Can't speak. Can't even keep pushing. I'm so sorry.
...and my shield dropped. And my legs gave way.
....and the Immortals surged forward, breaking our shield wall. As I pitched backwards over the cliff, I saw the fear in Simoniedes' eyes as a Persian spear impaled him through the throat...
Then nothing.
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Richelieu
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Gatineau
Dec 2001
time: 00:25
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Yes!
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Lazarus and the Gimp
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Whale-raping abomination
Aug 2000
time: 05:25
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How many men had fallen down that cliff before me? Thousands, surely. When I landed, it was on yielding flesh and bone instead of rock. In a way, it's funny how all that death saved my life. I was unconscious for no more than an hour, and I could hear the battle still raging when I finally opened my eyes.
I made no attempt to rejoin it. Instead I buried my face in the corpses below me and played dead.
Others did the same. Two Messenians hid behind bodies in the battlefield beyond the pass, and it was from them that I learned of how the battle ended.
My collapse broke our shield-wall, and the Spartans were unable to rebuild it. The sheer weight of numbers on the Persian side forced them out of the pass, and for the first time they were fighting in open ground. In open ground, surrounded by enemies, hoplite tactics were largely useless and the closing stages of the battle for Thermopylae was a furious riot of man-to-man free combat with sword and shield. "Heroic combat", we call it, for it is a throwback to the time of heroes in the Trojan wars. It's the greatest misnomer ever- it's a confused slaughter.
What made them carry on? There was no hope of victory and no hope of rescue. The pass was lost, they were hopelessly outnumbered and were forced to break away from their tradition of organised close-rank combat. They were just fighting out of habit- to kill as many Persians as they could before they were cut down.
They were incredible.
Two loose knots of Spartans had formed, as they tried to reassert some degree of order. The smaller force was centred around King Leonidas and was fighting close to the pass of Thermopylae. The second and larger group (which included my friends Eumolpas and Perdiccas) had taken up a position on a small hill further back. Inevitably, Leonidas became the focus of attention. With his bodyguards whipped into a killing frenzy, our king took his final stand in a bid to turn this battlefield defeat into a heroic legacy. Though his judgement was suspect, his courage was never in doubt, and the Messenians described sprays of blood flying around him as he hacked at the remnants of Xerxes' Immortals with his sword.
It took the best part of an hour for his force to be overwhelmed. Sheer numbers of enemy wore them down and Leonidas was among the last to fall, still struggling despite carrying dozens of killing wounds. Our king was dead.
Amazingly, the real heroics were yet to come. The second Spartan force holding the hill, defying all credibility, launched a counter-attack towards the point where Leonidas had fallen. Eumolpas, the little joker, was at the front of the assault team as they attempted to force their way over to where our king's body lay. Twice they were forced back, but on the third charge they reached their target and started dragging the body back to the hill. A burly hoplite did the dragging while his comrades fought around him. Every few metres or so, one of them would fall to a Persian sword.
By the time they reached the hill, only a handful remained. Eumolpas was now carrying Leonidas' body, and struggling under the weight of the far bigger man. As he started to ascend the slope, a spear took him through the thigh and he collapsed. His last living minutes were spent writhing on the bloody ground, still lashing out at Persian limbs as their spears went in. His exploits you will know from the closing verses of "The battle-hymn of Leonidas", and he is justly remembered as a hero. To me, however, he'll always be that laughing boy ready to taunt anyone to distraction, not some celebrated corpse.
Perdiccas? Quiet and thoughtful Perdiccas, so heartbroken by the death of his friend. No songs name him, but he was the bravest of us all. He was one of the very last to fall. Despite their massive superiority in numbers, the Persians were demoralised. The Immortals were decimated, and they had no shock troops ready to take on these blood-drenched and crazed Spartan remnants. They could not take the hill. Every advance they made was beaten back, and their dead piled up on the slopes. Perdiccas was one of those at the redoubt- no-one will ever know just how many he killed, but it must have been hundreds. They would not give up. They would not die.
Xerxes was enraged, but even he failed to drive his terrified infantry back towards the slopes. Finally he massed all of his archers around the hill, and had them fire wave after wave of volleys at the Spartans. Tens of thousands of arrows fell on them, so many that the sky was screaming as they ripped through the air. One by one, hit repeatedly by the arrows, they fell. One of the last was Perdiccas, still trying to keep Persians back from the body of his king.
It was over.
***********************************
Sparta 450 BC
"That night, as I hobbled away from Thermopylae with the Messenians, we watched the first glows in the sky as Athens started to burn. The city was sacked, but the people had mostly been evacuated. In time it was rebuilt.
I stayed with the Messenians and lived as a helot. I never returned to my old life- how could I? About ten years after the battle, I saw Iannis again. He was a wealthy landowner- famed and rewarded as one of the few survivors of Leonidas' force. As far as he knows, he is the last survivor of our group, because I couldn't let him know I was alive."
The old soldier wiped the sweat from his eyes. "I never saw Simonides' body. I wanted to remember him for what he was, not as some butchered piece of meat. I was never really worthy of him. Never worthy of any of this". He stood up, and started to walk away from us.
"Wait!" called Cimon. "We don't even known your name."
He turned on his heel, and there in his eyes was the killing fury of the Spartan hoplite he once was. "Call me "coward". Or "traitor". They're the only names I've ever earned."
With that, he was gone. An awkward silence fell. Mardonius attempted to rouse us by singing "Leonidas", but no-one joined in and he quickly stammered to a halt.
The end.
*************************
Thanks for reading.
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Easthaven I
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Whoa! Outstanding! Recently I began studying and getting into the battle of Thermopylae and figured it would be a perfect story to write about. Then I remembered coming across this one, and I came here and read it all just now. It is fantastic, man. At first, frustrated you beat me to it, but after reading it you did justice to the story, bro. I, too, planned to have the 'sole' survivor Spartan tell the story or a Spartan squire, but damn, I couldn't compete with this.
Good show, man! Good show!
Maybe there could be a Thermopylae 2 hanging around history somewhere that I could write about.
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21-02-2003 23:32
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