Chapter 82

From his position at the rear of the phalanx, Cincinnag couldn’t see the details of the fighting at the front, but the fact that his line was retreating was undeniable. The constant screams of the wounded reached his ears, and when he glanced to his flanks, he could see warriors beginning to break and run. Cincinnag was overcome with a mixture of panic and fury. He had no time to ponder how the situation had become so dire. His most urgent task was to stop the rout. Otherwise, his right wing would collapse completely, leading to the defeat of the entire Lucanian tribal league. And although Akperu was his kinsman by marriage, Cincinnag knew that the tyrannical chieftain of Grumentum would not easily forgive Pyxous for such a failure. With his own warriors already locked in combat, he could no longer command them. The only force still under his control was the Bruttian contingent, which had yet to engage.

“Quickly! Go and get the men from Vig! Tell their chieftain that if we lose this battle, the Lucanians will never forgive their city!” Cincinnag roared at one of his guards.

***

“Chieftain, the Lucanians are outrageous!” a young man named Saru said angrily. “It was Cincinnag who thought he could easily deal with the Greeks and told us to stay out of it. Now that he’s failing, he’s trying to say it’s our fault!”

Sedorum gazed at the battle raging a short distance away, saying nothing.

“These Greeks are incredible,” Saru said, his voice a mixture of excitement and hesitation as he watched the front. “They have fewer men, but they’re on the verge of defeating the Lucanians! Chieftain, the Lucanians are about to break! Why don’t we… why don’t we just leave? Maybe… maybe we can even use this as a chance to break away from their league!”

It was then that Sedorum finally spoke. “Even if the Lucanians are defeated today, how many of them will actually die? Do you think the Greeks would dare to pursue them into the mountains? Saru, as long as the Lucanians still have their strength, they will still be the masters of the western mountains. Our only other option is to do as our kinsmen in Cosentia have done and migrate south, to fight with Croton for new lands.” Sedorum sighed. “Give the order to the warriors. Tighten the formation and press forward from the right.”

The two thousand Bruttians, clad in leather armor and armed with wooden shields and long spears, formed a phalanx that was surprisingly tighter than that of the Lucanians. Just as the right end of the Pyxous line was about to collapse, the Bruttians slammed into its rear.

The panicked Lucanians, unable to break through the Bruttian line, were instead pushed forward by it. For the sake of their own survival, most of them had no choice but to turn and fight. The Lucanian formation, after all, was deep. It was panic, not the mercenaries’ blades, that had caused them to flee. With the arrival of reinforcements, the line began to stabilize. The terror of the routed soldiers gradually subsided, and the organization of the formation began to reassert itself.

The Lucanian casualties were still mounting, but now it was the mercenaries who were slowly beginning to fall back. The combined pushing power of the ultra-deep formation created by the Lucanians and Bruttians was simply too much for the mercenaries’ thin line to withstand. As the space between the two armies narrowed, the mercenaries’ superior fighting skills became less effective. Fortunately, the experienced veterans knew to give ground slowly, actively retreating to relieve the pressure and maintain the resilience of their battle line.

Unlike other generals, Davos did not personally join the fighting. Once the battle began, to do so would be to completely abandon any control over its development. Instead, he remained on horseback, riding back and forth behind his phalanx, from left to right and right to left, closely monitoring the progress of the battle and issuing orders through his heralds. He had felt a surge of excitement when the right end of the Lucanian line had been on the verge of collapse. The subsequent reversal of fortunes was, therefore, a bitter disappointment. But he did not order his men to press the attack again. He knew that their stamina was a factor; the ferocious intensity of their initial assault could not be sustained forever. These were men, not gods, and their strength had its limits, especially for heavy infantry. At the critical moment, he had even ordered the light-shielded soldiers who had fallen back to rejoin the fight and attack the enemy’s far right flank, but alas…

If those two thousand mercenaries and two hundred cavalry were under my command, he thought, my men would be chasing a routed army right now! Cursing his own overconfidence, he regretted not having insisted, not having fought tooth and nail to get more men from the Thurians. But the moment the thought of regret appeared, he crushed it. In war, anything can happen. A general cannot possibly foresee every eventuality. The only thing he could do now was to keep a clear head and not allow his emotions to cloud his judgment.

The mercenaries’ battle line, which had been a concave “arc,” was now being slowly flattened. As the phalanx was pushed back step by step, Davos realized that his soldiers were fighting on three fronts: they had to resist the immense pushing power of the enemy, prevent their own thin line from being broken, and inflict as many casualties as possible in the melee. The cost in stamina and concentration was enormous. To have maintained their current state for so long was already a remarkable achievement. Barring some major, unforeseen event, there would be no further breakthroughs on the left wing. As for the center, Axistes’s reports were equally grim, perhaps even worse than their own situation. The only wing that held an advantage was the right, and that advantage was slight (this was the assessment made by Axistes, who had ridden out to scout the position, based on the fact that the Tarentine line had only advanced a short distance). Understanding that the overall situation on the battlefield was unfavorable, Davos cast aside any lingering hope and forced himself to consider the problem of how his army would retreat after the battle was lost.

On a plain ten miles in circumference, nearly thirty thousand soldiers were locked in a struggle of life and death. Dust filled the air, the clash of spear and shield was deafening, and blood splattered the ground. After more than an hour of fierce fighting, the Greek army was beginning to falter.

The Lucanian tribal league outnumbered the Thurian allied army by sixty-five hundred men. Based on their observations, the scouts from Thurii and Davos’s army had originally estimated the Lucanian force at around thirteen thousand. But the cunning Akperu had hidden a portion of his troops behind a hill in the rear of his camp, and the two thousand men from Vig had only joined at the last moment. This had led to a critical miscalculation by the Greek intelligence. Pheresus’s own impression of the Lucanians was still stuck several years in the past (he had not participated in last year’s battle). In truth, the Lucanians had developed rapidly in recent years. Grumentum, in particular, was beginning to transition from a tribal league into a kingdom. In their recent wars of tribal consolidation, the warriors of Grumentum had been baptized in blood, becoming ever more courageous and resilient.

In the outdated view of the Thurian senators, the disorganized Lucanians would inevitably be shattered by the might of the Greek hoplite phalanx in a frontal engagement. The reality of the battle proved how laughable this idea was, especially in the Greek center. The three components of the center—the mercenaries in the front, the Thurian citizens in the middle, and the freemen in the rear—were never able to effectively merge into a single, cohesive force. Under the ferocious assault of the Grumentum warriors, the Greek center had been retreating from the very beginning. As the battle dragged on, the soldiers from these three different backgrounds, each with their own agenda, began to have second thoughts. The mercenaries fought for money; with victory looking hopeless, their first thought was naturally to save their own skins. The Thurian citizens were indeed fighting with all their might, but half of them were middle-aged men whose stamina was at its limit. They were still holding on only because Thurii was their home, and they could not let the barbarians trample it. As for the freemen, they had joined the battle on a gamble; if they won, they would gain citizenship, but if they lost, they would simply flee Thurii and seek a new life in another city-state.

As the Greek center retreated faster and faster, the gaps between it and the two wings widened. When the warriors of Grumentum poured into these gaps and began to attack the flanks of the Greek center, the entire formation shattered with a deafening roar. The soldiers broke and fled in all directions.

Davos, who had been watching the situation closely, let out a long sigh. Suppressing his immense disappointment, he gave the decisive order to retreat. The retreat signal he had designed was unique, very different from that of other Greek armies. It began with one long note, immediately followed by the same melody as the charge. The signalman sounded it three times. Most of the Lucanian soldiers, hearing it, thought the mercenaries were about to charge again. In that moment of hesitation, the mercenaries created a bit of distance. The light-shielded soldiers at their rear then unleashed another volley of javelins (an act of incredible skill and daring; without rigorous training, it would have been easy to hit their own comrades). As the Lucanians were busy defending themselves, the mercenaries, with swift and practiced unity, executed a perfect about-face and began their retreat.