History of the Peloponnesian War

It turned out, then, as he gave this order at the very moment of the attack and on a sudden, that Aristocles and Hipponoïdas refused to move over—for which offence they were afterwards exiled from Sparta, as they were considered to have acted as cowards; and that the enemy were too quick for him in coming to close quarters; and then, when the companies did not move over to replace the Sciritae, and he gave orders to the Sciritae to join the main body again, even these were now no longer able to close up the line.

Yet in the most striking way the Lacedaemonians, although they were in all respects proved inferior in point of tactical skill, did on this occasion show that they were none the less superior in courage.

For when they came to close quarters with the foe, the right wing of the Mantineans routed, it is true, the Sciritae and the Brasideans, and then the Mantineans and their allies and the thousand picked men of the Argives, rushing into the gap that had not been closed, played havoc with the Lacedaemonians; for they surrounded and put them to rout, and drove them in among the wagons, slaying some of the older men stationed there.

In this quarter, then, the Lacedaemonians were worsted; but in the rest of the army, and especially in the centre, where King Agis was, and about him the three hundred who were called knights,[*](Chosen from the flower of the Spartan youth and serving as a royal body-guard, on foot as well as on horseback.) they fell upon the older men of the Argives, the so-called five companies, and upon the Cleonaeans, the Orneates, and those of the Athenians that were arrayed with them, and routed them. Most of the enemy did not even wait to come to blows, but when the Lacedaemonians came on gave way at once, some of them being trodden underfoot in their effort to get out of the way before being hemmed in by the Lacedaemonians.