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met escaped my boyish grilling. Tell me about Sparta. Her double kings. The three hundred Knights who protected them. The
agoge
which trained the city’s youth. The
syssitia,
the warriors’ messes. We heard a tale of Kleomenes. Someone had asked the king why he did not raze Argos once and for all when his army had stood at the gates and the city lay prostate before him. “We need the Argives,” Kleomenes responded. “Who else will our young men train on?”
    In the winter hills we were starving. Bruxieus was getting weaker. I took to stealing. Diomache and I would raid a shepherd’s fold at night, fighting off the dogs with sticks and snatching a kid if we could. Most of the shepherds carried bows; arrows would whiz past us in the dark. We stopped to grab them and soon had quite a cache. Bruxieus hated to see us turning into thieves. We got a bow one time, snagging it right out from under a sleeping goatherd’s nose. It was a man’s weapon, a Thessalian cavalry bow, so stout that neither Diomache nor I could draw it. Then came the event which changed my life and set it on the course that reached its terminus at the Hot Gates.
    I got caught stealing a goose. She was a fat prize, her wings pegged for market, and I got careless going over a wall. The dogs got me. The men of the farm dragged me into the mud of the livestock pen and nailed me to a hide board the size of a door, driving tanning spikes through both my palms. I was on my back, screaming in agony, while the farm men lashed my kicking, flailing legs to the board, vowing that after lunch they would castrate me like a sheep and hang my testicles upon the gate as a warning to other thieves. Diomache and Bruxieus crouched, hidden, up the hillside; they could hear everything…
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    H
ere the captive drew up in his narration. Fatigue and the ordeal of his wounds had taken severe toll of the man, or perhaps, his listeners imagined, it was memory of the instance he was recounting. His Majesty, through the captain Orontes, inquired of the prisoner if he required attention. The man declined. The hesitation in the tale, he declared, arose not from any incapacity of its narrator, but at the prompting of the god by whose inner direction the order of events was being dictated, and who now commanded a momentary alteration of tack. The man Xeones resettled himself and, granted permission to wet his throat with wine, resumed.

    T wo summers subsequent to this incident, in Lakedaemon, I witnessed a different kind of ordeal: a Spartan boy beaten to death by his drill instructors.
    The lad’s name was Teriander, he was fourteen; they called him Tripod because no one of his age-class could take him down in wrestling. Over the succeeding years I looked on in attendance as two dozen other boys succumbed beneath this same trial, each like Tripod disdaining so much as a whimper in pain, but he, this lad, was the first.
    The whippings are a ritual of the boys’ training in Lakedaemon, not in punishment for stealing food (at which exploit the boys are encouraged to excel, to develop resourcefulness in war), but for the crime of getting caught. The beatings take place alongside the Temple of Artemis Orthia in a narrow alley called the Runway. The site is beneath plane trees, a shaded and quite pleasant space in less grisly circumstances.
    Tripod was the eleventh boy whipped that day. The two
eirenes,
drill instructors, who administered the beatings, had already been replaced by a fresh pair, twenty-year-olds just out of the
agoge
and as powerfully built as any youths in the city. It worked like this: the boy whose turn it was grasped a horizontal iron bar secured to the bases of two trees (the bar had been worn smooth by decades, some said centuries, of the ritual) and was flogged with birch rods, as big around as a man’s thumb, by the
eirenes
taking turns. A priestess of Artemis stood at the boy’s