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 The capture of Athens (B.C. 404), which ended the long Peloponnesian war, left Sparta without a rival in Greece. Her domineering and treacherous conduct soon produced disaffection even among her old allies. At Thebes, the chief city of Bœotia, the famous pair of friends EPAMINONDAS and Pelopidas, by a sudden rising, overthrew the philo-Spartan oligarchy (B.C. 379). Hitherto Thebes had not been a State of the first magnitude, nor had her past history been very creditable. The Bœotians were sneered at as a dull and somewhat brutal race, excelling in nothing but athletics.
All this was changed under the influence of Epaminondas, in whom political and military abilities of the highest order were combined with a singularly noble and beautiful character. It had been his fortune as a youth to fall under Pythagorean teaching, the only Greek philosophy which, by virtue of the training which it gave to the heart and character as well as the intellect, deserved to be called a religion. Throughout life he was conspicuous not only for all the qualities and accomplishments which often adorned his countrymen, but for the very non-Greek virtues of steadfastness, abnegation, humility, chastity, and absence of jealousy or rancour. His was a most perfect moral and intellectual nature cultivated to the highest pitch, and placed by good fortune in circumstances which thoroughly tested and displayed it. His impulse and example produced nothing less than a moral and spiritual renovation among his fellow-citizens, especially the younger of them, and at once changed the whole face of affairs in Greece.
At the battle of Leuctra (B.C. 371), the new military drill introduced by Epaminondas, and his masterly tactics, inflicted upon Sparta the first great defeat she had suffered in her history. Thebes now became the leading State in Greece. It was the aim of Epaminondas to unite the Greek States under the leadership of Thebes in one confederacy in which the independence of each should be respected instead of being crushed as under the Spartan and Athenian supremacies. It was a project impracticable, as we know, but not to be called chimerical. After a splendid career of seventeen years Epaminondas fell at the battle of Mantinea in the moment of victory over the combined armies of Sparta and Athens. Thebes did not maintain her commanding position after his death.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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