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have a look.”
    Any evolution by the army of Thebes will be spearheaded by the Sacred Band. Far more significant, however, will be its signature formation: the oblique order. As we ride across in the failing light, our eyes scour the terrain and the foe’s configuration, seeking clues to how he will deploy.
    The oblique order was invented by Thebes’s legendary general, Epaminondas. Before his time, Greek wars were simple slugfests. Armies lined up across from each other, came to close quarters, and proceeded to beat one another’s brains out, until one side cried quit. Often one army bolted before the other had even struck a blow. That served just as well to settle whatever issue had been in dispute.
    The Spartans had made themselves masters of this type of shoving match and regularly thrashed the Thebans and all other rivals.
    The oblique order ended that. Epaminondas never favored that term. He called it
systrophe
, “amassment.” It worked like the fists of a boxer, who does not punch with both hands simultaneously but holds one back while striking with the other. Epaminondas lined up his army as before, on a parallel front across from the foe. But instead of clashing with equal weight along the full length of the line, he concentrated his strength on one wing, the left, and held the other wing back, or “refused” it. In battle the Spartans always placed their superior troops on the right: This was their post of honor; it was where their king fought, surrounded by his
agema
—the bodyguard of his corps of knights. By setting his power on the left—immediately opposite the Spartan king—Epaminondas took the enemy head-on. If he could make their crack companies break, he believed, all lesser elements would turn and run.
    How did Epaminondas strengthen his left? First he arrayed it, not eight shields in depth, as the Spartans did, or sixteen, as Theban generals had done in the past, but thirty- , even fifty-deep. Next he put into his soldiers’ fists a new weapon—the twelve-foot pike, which outreached the Spartan eight-foot spear by half. Last, Epaminondas reconfigured his countrymen’s shields, scalloping recesses left and right and taking up the weight by straps around the neck and shoulder, so that his pikemen had both hands free to wield the long spear.
    Epaminondas met the Spartans on the plain at Leuctra and annihilated them. This was the overthrow Greece had awaited for centuries. At one blow, long-downtrodden Thebes became the dominant land power of Hellas and he, Epaminondas, its singular hero and genius.
    My father knew Epaminondas. At the height of Thebes’s new power, it had taken hostages of the house of Macedon. My father was one of them. He was thirteen. His period of detention at Thebes proved three years. He was treated well, and he kept his eyes open. By the time he came home, there was no wrinkle of the Theban phalanx he had not mastered.
    When he became king, Philip made over the Macedonian army in the image of the Theban. But he went Epaminondas one better. He added six feet to the two-hand pike, making it eighteen instead of twelve. This was the sarissa. Now, projecting before the army’s foremost rank came a hedge of honed iron, not just of the first three ranks but of the first five. Into this no enemy, however brave or heavily armored, could hope to advance and survive. Philip did not leave it at that, however. He transformed the army of Macedon into a full-time professional force, billeted in barracks and paid in wages, month by month. He and his great generals Parmenio and Antipater drilled the phalanx until it could deploy from column to line, turn to flank, countermarch, and execute every evolution the old-fashioned hoplite could, faster, smarter, and with absolute cohesion. The world had never seen a weapon like the sarissa phalanx of Macedonia. Bring Epaminondas back from the grave and Philip’s pike infantry will obliterate