The Historians' History of the World 04

The leaning of the Athenian deputies had been adverse rather than favourable to Thebes throughout the congress. They were disinclined, from their sympathies with the Platæans, to advocate the presidential claims of Thebes, though on the whole it was to the political interest of Athens that the Bœotian federation should be maintained, as a bulwark to herself against Sparta. Yet the relations of Athens with Thebes, after the congress as before it, were still those of friendship, nominal rather than sincere. It was only with Sparta, and her allies, that Thebes was at war, without a single ally attached to her. On the whole, Callistratus and his colleagues had managed the interests of Athens in this congress with great prudence and success. They had disengaged her from the alliance with Thebes, which had been dictated seven years before by common fear and dislike of Sparta, but which had no longer any adequate motive to countervail the cost of continuing the war; at the same time the disengagement had been accomplished without bad faith. The gains of Athens, during the last seven years of war, had been considerable. She had acquired a great naval power, and a body of maritime confederates; while her enemies the Spartans had lost their naval power in the like proportion. Athens was now the ascendant leader of maritime and insular Greece, while Sparta still continued to be the leading power on land—but only on land; and a tacit partnership was now established between the two, each recognising the other in their respective halves of the Hellenic hegemony. Moreover, Athens had the prudence to draw her stake, and quit the game, when at the maximum of acquisitions, without taking the risk of future contingencies.e

FOOTNOTES

[11] [That is, the organisation of a group of settlements into one city or capital.]

Greek Seals

CHAPTER XLV. THE DAY OF EPAMINONDAS

It was not a new enemy which Sparta had found, but rather an old one which had come to new power, in the city of Thebes. In that city an extraordinary man had come to light, and by his sole influence he raised his people to the head of Grecian affairs. This man was Epaminondas, certainly one of the greatest men—some would have it even the very greatest—that Greece ever produced.

There have been philosophical historians who have doubted the influence of the individual man in moulding the course of human events. According to one point of view it is the events always that make the man, the great man coming forward when he is needed, and because he is needed. But such cases as that of Epaminondas ill accord with this theory. Nothing seems clearer than that Thebes rose into great influence and wrested the sceptre of power from Sparta solely because the great leader Epaminondas chanced to be a Theban. For it is quite beyond dispute, that in all the previous years in which she had constantly participated in the Grecian struggles, Thebes had occupied a subordinate place, and it is equally clear that she sank back at once into relative insignificance the moment that Epaminondas was gone.

It was Epaminondas who led the Thebans in person against the Spartans, in the first engagement in which a Spartan army was ever put to flight in open combat, and the success of Epaminondas was probably due to the fact that his genius had developed a new form of tactics. The method of massing the heavy-armed soldiers in what came afterwards to be famous as the Macedonian phalanx—the weapon with which Alexander won his victories—was, it is said, really due to Epaminondas. Philip of Macedon, who was afterwards to become the master of Greece, was a captive in Thebes during his boyhood, and it is supposed that he there gained the germ of the idea, which afterwards, when put into practice, enabled his Macedonian warriors to scatter the true Greeks as easily as in an earlier day the Greeks had scattered the Persians. What else Philip may have learned through the example of Epaminondas it would be difficult to say, but in this view it is clear that the genius of the great Theban leader may have entered much more potently into the story of the final overthrow of Greece than might at first sight appear.