Some events are like this.

They creep up like a stalking wolf.

Or, as Nietzsche put it, on doves’ feet.

We don’t hear them coming and need a third ear to make out, behind the ‘still, small voice’, the echo of the explosion.

It happened at Leuctra, in Boeotia, on that day in the 4th century BC when the sacred band of Thebes cut 400 Spartiate equals to pieces, tolling the end of Lacedaemonian hegemony, though no one knew it at the time.