The Battle of Thurii (Part 4)

Sininag, positioned at the rear of the phalanx, couldn’t grasp the battle’s details ahead, but the undeniable truth was that their line was retreating. Screams kept ringing out. Glancing to both sides, he even saw warriors fleeing in the distance… Sininag was both frantic and furious. He had no time to ponder why things had turned so dire. The urgent task was to halt the decline, or the right wing would surely collapse, dragging the entire Lucanian tribal coalition down with it! Though Acipirus was a relative by marriage, Sininag doubted that the overbearing great leader of Grumentum would easily forgive Pyxous for its actions. Now that Pyxous’s warriors were already engaged, he could no longer command them. The only troops he could still direct were the Bruttian fighters who hadn’t yet entered the fray.

“Go call the men from Vig City at the rear to come help! Tell their leader that if this battle is lost, the Lucanians will never forgive Vig City!” Sininag roared hurriedly to his bodyguard.

…

“Great leader, the Lucanians are too much! Sininag thought he could handle the Greeks easily and wouldn’t let us interfere—now they say it’s our fault if they lose!” the young Saru said angrily.

Sedorum gazed at the nearby battle without replying.

“These Greeks are really something. With so few men, they’re about to beat the Lucanians!” Saru looked ahead, speaking with both excitement and hesitation. “Great leader, the Lucanians are going to lose! Maybe… maybe we shouldn’t fight, let’s leave! Perhaps… perhaps we can use this chance to break away from their alliance!”

Then Sedorum spoke. “Even if the Lucanians are defeated, how many of them can die? Would the Greeks dare to enter the mountains?… Saru, as long as the Lucanians still have strength, they’ll still rule the western mountains! Unless we do like our kinsmen in Cosentia and migrate south, forced into war with Croton for land…” Sedorum sighed. “Order the warriors to tighten formation and press in from the right edge!”

Two thousand Bruttians, wearing leather armor, carrying wooden shields and spears, formed a phalanx even denser than the Lucanians’. They pushed up to the rear of the Pyxous formation just as its right end was about to collapse.

The fleeing Lucanians couldn’t break through the Bruttian battle line, and instead were shoved forward. To survive, most Lucanian warriors had to turn and fight. After all, the Lucanian formation was quite thick; panic had caused their rout, not the mercenaries cutting through their lines. Once reinforcements arrived, their composure gradually stabilized, and the line began to re-form…

Lucanian casualties kept rising, but the mercenaries were slowly falling back. The sheer shoving force of the combined Lucanian-Bruttian super-thick formation was far more than the thin mercenary line could match. When the gap between the two armies narrowed, supreme fighting skill couldn’t achieve much. Fortunately, the experienced mercenaries actively and slowly retreated to relieve the pressure, maintaining the line’s resilience…

Unlike other commanders, Davos did not personally throw himself into the fight. Once battle began, he let the situation develop on its own. Mounted on horseback, he moved from left to right and right to left behind the phalanx, closely monitoring the battle’s progress and issuing orders through messengers at any moment. Earlier, when the right end of the Lucanian formation seemed about to crumble, his heart had stirred with excitement. But then the tide turned, and his disappointment was palpable. Yet he did not urge his men to attack again, knowing that besides the enemy reinforcements, it also had to do with the soldiers’ stamina. Such fierce and violent attacks could not last long—after all, they were human, with limited endurance, especially as heavy infantry. At a critical moment, Davos even ordered the peltasts, who had fallen back, to join the assault on the enemy’s extreme right flank. But alas…

If those two thousand mercenaries and two hundred cavalry had been under his command, his men would now be pursuing the fleeing troops! The fault lay in his own overconfidence; he hadn’t pressed hard enough or insisted on demanding more troops from Thurii… A flicker of regret surfaced in his mind, but Davos quickly snuffed it out. In war, any kind of unexpected event could happen, and no commander could foresee everything. Right now, his only task was to keep a cool head and avoid letting extreme emotions cloud his judgment.

The mercenary line, originally shaped like an upward-curved arc, had now been gradually flattened. As the phalanx stepped back, Davos realized: the soldiers had to simultaneously resist the enemy’s powerful shoving force, prevent their thin formation from being broken, and try to kill as many foes as possible in the melee. The physical and mental drain was enormous. Maintaining such a stance was already quite an achievement! Unless something major happened, the left wing of the Thurian coalition was unlikely to improve. As for the center, Asiastes’ report was equally grim, even worse than the left. The only advantage was on the right, but it was slight—a judgment Asiastes made after riding ahead to scout, based on the fact that Tarentum’s line had only advanced a little. With the overall battlefield situation unfavorable, Davos abandoned any remaining hope and had to consider the army’s retreat after the battle…

Across ten *li* of the Sybaris Plain, nearly thirty thousand soldiers were locked in a life-and-death struggle. Dust flew, war cries shook the sky, shields and spears clashed, blood splattered… After more than an hour of fierce combat, the Greek forces began to falter.

The Lucanian tribal coalition outnumbered the Thurian coalition by six thousand five hundred men. Based on observations from scouts, Thurii and Davos had originally estimated the Lucanians at about thirteen thousand. In fact, the cunning Acipirus had hidden some troops behind the camp’s rear hill, and the two thousand men from Vig City joined only at the last moment, causing the Greeks to misjudge. Feris’ impression of the Lucanians was still several years old—he hadn’t participated in last year’s battle. In truth, the Lucanians had developed rapidly in recent years, especially Grumentum, which had begun to show signs of evolving from a tribal alliance into a kingdom. In the tribal wars of annexation over the past two years, Grumentum’s warriors, baptized in frequent bloodshed, had become braver and more tenacious.

According to the outdated notions of Thurii’s generals, a frontal engagement would surely shatter the loosely organized Lucanians with Greek heavy infantry might. Reality proved how laughable that idea was. Particularly in the Greek center, where the front line of mercenaries, the middle of Thurian citizen soldiers, and the rear of freemen never managed to merge effectively. Under the fierce assault of Grumentum’s warriors, the Greek center began retreating from the very start… As the battle dragged on, these three groups of soldiers, all of different origins and each harboring their own thoughts, began to waver: the mercenaries fought for pay, and with no hope of victory, they naturally thought first of saving their own skins; the Thurian citizen soldiers were indeed giving their all, but half of them were middle-aged, already at their physical limits—they endured only because Thurii was their home, and they couldn’t let barbarians trample it; the freemen had joined with a trial attitude—win and gain citizenship, lose and flee Thurii to seek new lives in other city-states.

As the Greek center retreated faster and faster, the gaps between it and the left and right wings widened. When Grumentum’s warriors poured into those gaps and struck the Greek center from the flanks, the entire central phalanx collapsed in a rout, soldiers scattering in all directions…

Dacos, who had been closely watching the situation, sighed, forcibly suppressed his deep disappointment, and decisively ordered a retreat. The retreat signal Davos had designed was rather unique, quite different from typical Greek armies: first a long note, followed by a melody identical to the charge call. The trumpeter repeated it three times. Most Lucanian soldiers thought these mercenaries and Thurian troops were about to charge again. In that moment of startled hesitation, the mercenaries opened a slight gap, and the peltasts in the rear hurled their javelins once more—truly a feat of high skill and boldness, as anything less than rigorous training would easily wound their own comrades. While the Lucanians scrambled to defend, the mercenaries quickly and uniformly turned, ran, and executed a series of retreat maneuvers.

Note: Cosentia, the central town of the Bruttian region.