Page:History of Greece Vol VII.djvu/100

82 82 HISTORY OF Gin:i-;(JK forty-four by eight, and adding the six hundred Skiritaj, this would make a total of four thousand one hundred and eighty-four hoplites, besides a few horsemen on each flank. Respecting light-armed, nothing is said. I have no confidence in such an estimate but the total is smaller than we should have expected, considering that the Lacedaemonians had marched out from Sparta with their entire force on a pressing emergency, and that they had only sent home one-sixth of their total, their oldest and youngest soldiers. It does not appear that the generals on the Argeian side made any attempt to charge while the Lacedasmonian battle-array was yet incomplete. It was necessary for them, according to Gre- cian practice, to wind up the courage of their troops by some words of exhortation and encouragement : and before these were finished, the Lacedaemonians may probably have attained their order. The Mantineian officers reminded their countrymen that the coming battle would decide whether Mantineia should con- tinue to be a free and imperial city, with Arcadian dependencies of her own, as she now was, or should again be degraded into a dependency of Lacedasmon. The Argeian leaders dwelt upon established about the Lacedaemonian military distribution. Nor ought we reasonably to expect to find that these words endmoty, pentckosty, lochus, etc.. indicate any fixed number of men : our own names regiment, company, troop, btigade, division, etc., are all more or less indefinite as to positive number- and proportion to each other. That which was peculiar to the Lacedtemonian drill, was, the teaching a ftnall number of men like an enomoty (twenty-five, thirty-two, thirty-six lien, as we sometimes find it), to perform its evolutions under the com- mand of. its enomotarch. When this was once secured, it is probable that the combination of these elementary divisions was left to be determined in every case by circumstances. Thucydides states two distinct facts. 1. Each enomoty had four men in front. 2. Each enomoty varied in depth, according as every lochagus chose. Now Dobrce asks, with much reason, how these two assertions are to be reconciled? Given the number of men in front, the depth of the enomoty is of course determined, without any reference to the discretion of any one. These two assertions appear distinctly contradictory; unless we suppose (what seems very difficult to believe) that the lochage might make one or two of the four files of the same enomoty deeper than the rest. Dobrce proposes, as a means of removing this difficulty, to expunge some word* from the text. One cannot have confidence, howovor, in the conjecture