During the confusion of the melee(s) on their right, some Athenians are attacked and killed by friendly formations. The Thespian contingent suffers significant losses the other contingents on this side of the line are forced to give ground. Phase 9 - The Boeotian left is bested by the Athenians. Phase 8 - The wings of each army cannot come to grips as the terrain on this part of the field is, apparently, impassable. Evidently, both phalanxes crash into each other at a run. Phase 6 - The Boeotians receive a few more words of encouragement from Pagondas, start chanting or singing, and advance down or off the hill to engage the enemy. Phase 5 - The Athenians, drawn up for the engagement, are given a pep talk by Hippocrates. Phase 4 - Pagondas moves the Boeotians across the crest of the hill and then has them sit down, under arms and in battle order. As an additional security measure, he stations 300 cavalry in Delium as a garrison. Phase 3 - Hippocrates receives notification that the Boeotians are on the march. Phase 2 - The Boeotian army draws up behind a large hill which prevents either force from seeing the other. Phase 1 - Pagondas gives a long pep talk/speech and convinces the Boeotians to advance and give battle, even though daylight is fading. As to presentation, I elected to adapt the format used by Aaron Bell in his well-written and well received article on the battle of Thapsus, which appeared in the March-April 2019 issue of Slingshot, The Journal of The Society of Ancients. To the extent that a battle from the pages of history can be divided neatly into episodes or phases, the following is a numbered summary of Thucydides’ narrative account.
( Battle Notes for Wargamers, 11) To develop a certain level of knowledge-always subject to correction and expansion-about what happened at Delium in 424 BC, I secured the online translations of the narrative accounts written by Thucydides and Diodorus, and then read, studied, and annotated the printed copies of these versions until the pages were rather crowded with highlighter markings as well as scribbled notes. What did attract my interest was staging a refight of Delium wherein, if I may borrow the words of the venerable Donald Featherstone, I would try to “follow the original course of events reasonably well, but allow some leeway, without too much imaginative stretch, for a reversed result”. However, I do think that a demonstration of the historical battle of Delium, in the capable and talented hands of someone like Simon Miller, or Simon MacDowall, or James Roach, or Ron Ringrose, or Rick Priestley, or the Perry brothers, would certainly be a crowd pleaser as well as offer an excellent showcase of the hobby. I was not interested in conducting an exercise of the not very well known but quite important engagement that took place in 424 BC between an army of Boeotians commanded by Pagondas and an army of Athenians led by Hippocrates.