The Historians' History of the World 04 [Greece to the Roman Conquest]

Epaminondas led on his army like a ship of war with its beak directed against the enemy, expecting that wherever he assailed and cut through their ranks he would spread disaster among their whole force; for he was prepared to settle the contest with the strongest part of his troops; the weaker he had removed to a distance, knowing that if they were defeated they would cause dismay among his own men and confidence in the enemy. The enemy, on their part, had drawn up their cavalry like a body of heavy-armed infantry, of a close depth, without any foot to support them; but Epaminondas, on the contrary, had formed of his cavalry a strong wedge-like body, and had posted companies of foot to support them, judging that when he had broken through the cavalry of the enemy, he would have defeated their whole force, since it is hard to find men that will stand when they see some of their own party in flight; and that the Athenians might not send succour from their left wing to the part of the enemy nearest them, he posted over against them, upon some high grounds, parties of horse and heavy-armed foot, wishing to inspire them with the apprehension that if they stirred to aid others his own troops would attack them in the rear.

Such was the mode in which he commenced the engagement; nor was he deceived in his expectations; for, being successful in the part on which he made his attack, he forced the whole body of the enemy to take to flight. But when he himself fell, those who survived him could make no efficient use of their victory; for though the main body of the enemy fled before them, his heavy-armed troops killed none of them, nor even advanced beyond the spot where the charge took place; and though the cavalry also retreated, his own cavalry did not pursue, or make any slaughter either of horse or foot, but, like men who had been conquered, slipped away in trepidation amidst their fleeing adversaries. The other parties of foot, indeed, and the peltasts, who had shared in the success of the cavalry, advanced up to the enemy’s left wing, as if masters of the field, but there the greater part of them were put to the sword by the Athenians.

When the conflict was ended, the result of it was quite contrary to what all men had expected that it would be; for as almost the whole of Greece was assembled on the occasion, and arrayed in the field, there was no one who did not suppose that, if a battle took place, one side would conquer and be masters, and the other be conquered and become subjects; but the divine power so ordered the event, that both parties erected trophies as being victorious, neither side hindering the other in the erection; both parties, as conquerors, restored the dead under a truce, and both parties, as defeated, received them under truce; and neither party, though each asserted the victory to be its own, was seen to gain any more, either in land, or towns, or authority, than it possessed before the battle took place. Indeed there was still greater confusion and disturbance in Greece after the conflict than there had been before it.c

GROTE’S ESTIMATE OF EPAMINONDAS

Scarcely any character in Grecian history has been judged with so much unanimity as Epaminondas. He has obtained a meed of admiration—from all, sincere and hearty; from some, enthusiastic. Cicero pronounces him to be the first man of Greece. The judgment of Polybius, though not summed up so emphatically in a single epithet, is delivered in a manner hardly less significant and laudatory. Nor was it merely historians or critics who formed this judgment. The best men of action, combining the soldier and the patriot, such as Timoleon and Philopœmen, set before them Epaminondas as their model to copy. The remark has been often made, and suggests itself whenever we speak of Epaminondas, though its full force will be felt only when we come to follow the subsequent history—that with him the dignity and commanding influence of Thebes both began and ended. His period of active political life comprehends sixteen years, from the resurrection of Thebes into a free community, by the expulsion of the Lacedæmonian harmost and garrison, and the subversion of the ruling oligarchy—to the fatal day of Mantinea, 379-362 B.C. His prominent and unparalleled ascendency belongs to the last eight years, from the victory of Leuctra, 371 B.C. Throughout this whole period, both all that we know and all that we can reasonably divine, fully bear out the judgment of Polybius and Cicero, who had the means of knowing much more. And this too, let it be observed, though Epaminondas is tried by a severe canon; for the chief contemporary witness remaining is one decidedly hostile. Even the philo-Laconian Xenophon finds neither misdeeds nor omissions to reveal in the capital enemy of Sparta—mentions him only to record what is honourable, and manifests the perverting bias mainly by suppressing or slurring over his triumphs. The man whose eloquence bearded Agesilaus at the congress immediately preceding the battle of Leuctra—who in that battle stripped Sparta of her glory, and transferred the wreath to Thebes, who a few months afterwards, not only ravaged all the virgin territory of Laconia, but cut off the best half of it for the restitution of independent Messene, and erected the hostile Arcadian community of Megalopolis on its frontier—the author of these fatal disasters inspires in Xenophon such intolerable chagrin and antipathy, that in the first two he keeps back the name, and in the third, suppresses the thing done. But in the last campaign, preceding the battle of Mantinea, whereby Sparta incurred no positive loss, and where the death of Epaminondas softened every predisposition against him, there was no such violent pressure upon the fidelity of the historian. Accordingly, the concluding chapter of Xenophon’s Hellenica contains a panegyric, ample and unqualified, upon the military merits of the Theban general; upon his daring enterprise, his comprehensive foresight, his care to avoid unnecessary exposure of soldiers, his excellent discipline, his well-combined tactics, his fertility of aggressive resource in striking at the weak points of the enemy, who content themselves with following and parrying his blows (to use a simile of Demosthenes) like an unskilful pugilist, and only succeed in doing so by signal aid from accident.