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The Historians' History of the World 04 [Greece to the Roman Conquest]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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[379-362 B.C.]
The effort of strategic genius—then for the first time devised and applied, of bringing an irresistible force of attack to bear on one point of the hostile line, while the rest of his army was kept comparatively back until the action had been thus decided—is clearly noted by Xenophon, together with its triumphant effect, at the battle of Mantinea; though the very same combination on the field of Leuctra is slurred over in his description, as if it were so commonplace as not to require any mention of the chief with whom it originated. Compare Epaminondas with Agesilaus—how great is the superiority of the first—even in the narrative of Xenophon, the earnest panegyrist of the other! How manifestly are we made to see that nothing except the fatal spear-wound at Mantinea prevented him from reaping the fruit of a series of admirable arrangements, and from becoming arbiter of Peloponnesus, including Sparta herself!
The military merits alone of Epaminondas, had they merely belonged to a general of mercenaries, combined with nothing praiseworthy in other ways, would have stamped him as a man of high and original genius, above every other Greek, antecedent or contemporary. But it is the peculiar excellence of this great man that we are not compelled to borrow from one side of his character in order to compensate deficiencies in another. His splendid military capacity was never prostituted to personal ends—neither to avarice, nor ambition, nor overweening vanity. Poor at the beginning of his life, he left at the end of it not enough to pay his funeral expenses; having despised the many opportunities for enrichment which his position afforded, as well as the richest offers from foreigners. Of ambition he had so little, by natural temperament, that his friends accused him of torpor. But as soon as the perilous exposure of Thebes required it, he displayed as much energy in her defence as the most ambitious of her citizens, without any of that captious exigence, frequent in ambitious men, as to the amount of glorification or deference due to him from his countrymen. And his personal vanity was so faintly kindled, even after the prodigious success at Leuctra, that we find him serving in Thessaly as a private hoplite in the ranks, and in the city as an ædile or inferior street magistrate, under the title of Telearchus. An illustrious specimen of that capacity and good-will, both to command and to be commanded, which Aristotle pronounces to form in their combination the characteristic feature of the worthy citizen. He once incurred the displeasure of his fellow-citizens for his wise and moderate policy in Achaia, which they were ill-judged enough to reverse. We cannot doubt also that he was frequently attacked by political censors and enemies—the condition of eminence in every free state; but neither of these causes ruffled the dignified calmness of his political course. As he never courted popularity by unworthy arts, so he bore unpopularity without murmurs, and without any angry renunciation of patriotic duty.
The mildness of his antipathies against political opponents at home was undeviating; and, what is even more remarkable, amidst the precedents and practice of the Grecian world, his hostility against foreign enemies, Bœotian dissentients, and Theban exiles, was uniformly free from reactionary vengeance. Sufficient proofs have been adduced in the preceding pages of this rare union of attributes in the same individual—of lofty disinterestedness, not merely as to corrupt gains, but as to the more seductive irritabilities of ambition, combined with a just measure of attachment towards partisans, and unparalleled gentleness towards enemies. His friendship with Pelopidas was never disturbed during the fifteen years of their joint political career—an absence of jealousy signal and creditable to both, though most creditable to Pelopidas, the richer, as well as the inferior man of the two. To both, and to the harmonious co-operation of both, Thebes owed her short-lived splendour and ascendency. Yet when we compare the one with the other, we not only miss in Pelopidas the transcendent strategic genius and conspicuous eloquence, but even the constant vigilance and prudence, which never deserted his friend. If Pelopidas had had Epaminondas as his companion in Thessaly, he would hardly have trusted himself to the good faith, nor tasted the dungeon, of the Pheræan Alexander; nor would he have rushed forward to certain destruction, in a transport of frenzy, at the view of that hated tyrant in the subsequent battle.
In eloquence, Epaminondas would doubtless have found superiors at Athens; but at Thebes, he had neither equal, nor predecessor, nor successor. Under the new phase into which Thebes passed by the expulsion of the Lacedæmonians out of the Cadmea, such a gift was second in importance only to the great strategic qualities; while the combination of both elevated their possessor into the envoy, the counsellor, the debater, of his country, as well as her minister at war and commander-in-chief. The shame of acknowledging Thebes as leading state in Greece, embodied in the current phrases about Bœotian stupidity, would be sensibly mitigated, when her representative in an assembled congress spoke with the flowing abundance of the Homeric Ulysses, instead of the loud, brief, and hurried bluster of Menelaus. The possession of such eloquence, amidst the uninspiring atmosphere of Thebes, implied far greater mental force than a similar accomplishment would have betokened at Athens. In Epaminondas, it was steadily associated with thought and action—that triple combination of thinking, speaking, and acting which Isocrates and other Athenian sophists set before their hearers as the stock and qualification for meritorious civic life. To the bodily training and soldier-like practice, common to all Thebans, Epaminondas added an ardent intellectual impulse and a range of discussion with the philosophical men around, peculiar to himself.
He was not floated into public life by the accident of birth or wealth, nor hoisted and propped up by oligarchical clubs, nor even determined to it originally by any spontaneous ambition of his own. But the great revolution of 379 B.C., which expelled from Thebes both the Lacedæmonian garrison and the local oligarchy who ruled by its aid, forced him forward by the strongest obligations both of duty and interest; since nothing but an energetic defence could rescue both him and every other free Theban from slavery. It was by the like necessity that the American Revolution, and the first French Revolution, thrust into the front rank the most instructed and capable men of the country, whether ambitious by temperament or not. As the pressure of the time impelled Epaminondas forward, so it also disposed his countrymen to look out for a competent leader wherever he was to be found; and in no other living man could they obtain the same union of the soldier, the general, the orator, and the patriot. Looking through all Grecian history, it is only in Pericles that we find the like many-sided excellence; for though much inferior to Epaminondas as a general, Pericles must be held superior to him as a statesman. But it is alike true of both, and their mark tends much to illustrate the sources of Grecian excellence—that neither sprang exclusively from the school of practice and experience. They both brought to that school minds exercised in the conversation of the most instructed philosophers and sophists accessible to them—trained to varied intellectual combinations and to a larger range of subjects than those that came before the public assembly, familiarised with reasonings which the scrupulous piety of Nicias forswore, and which the devoted military patriotism of Pelopidas disdained.