The Historians' History of the World 04

When the period of his command in the field expired, Epaminondas returned home, where he was once more to experience the ingratitude of his fellow-citizens. Not only did the people, now again roused against him, pass him over in the election of the Bœotarchs; it is related that the deluded mob appointed him overseer of roads and canals (telearchus), but that by his conscientious administration he gave importance to this insignificant office. Alike in the highest and in the lowest position, this magnanimous man endeavoured to work for the good of his country; his soul was free from the petty human weaknesses which so often cling, like a dark shadow, to talent and worth. This was exhibited in another scene in the year which followed.

From his expedition in Thessaly he, to save Pelopidas, returned joyfully home too late to preserve the Theban state from a disgraceful act of bloodshed. In the interval, armed mobs, stirred up by passionate demagogues, had marched against Orchomenos, where an aristocratic conspiracy was said to have been discovered, had destroyed the detested city, murdered the nobles and chief citizens, and sold the rest into servitude, together with their wives and children. Thus the ancient and famous city of Orchomenos, once the wealthy seat of the Minyæ, disappeared from the number of Greek towns. “Had I been at home,” Epaminondas lamented, “this atrocity would never have been committed.”

At Susa, in spite of his refusal to bend the knee, Pelopidas had won such high favour with the king, by reason of the fame of his deeds and the recollection of the ancient brotherhood in arms so long subsisting between Thebes and Persia, that the conditions of peace which Artaxerxes declared to the envoys proved to be entirely in accordance with the ideas and interests of Thebes and her skilful representative.

But this award whose fulfilment, and with it the supremacy over Hellas, was entrusted to the Thebans, provoked indignation and resistance in the other states. At Athens, the envoy, Timagoras, was condemned to death for his intimacy with Pelopidas; at Sparta, exception was taken to the recognition of the rebellious Messenians; in Arcadia, the people resented the recognition of the Elean claims to suzerainty over the district of Triphylia, which had joined the Arcadian confederacy, and the deputy, Antiochus, famous as a pugilist and wrestler, vented his anger at home in ridicule of the Persians: “The king,” he said, “had bakers, cooks, cup-bearers, and door-keepers in large numbers, but in spite of a zealous search he had not been able to find men who should be able to stand against the Hellenes in a fight; abundance of money and wealth was a vain show; the celebrated golden plane tree could hardly give shade to a locust.”

[368-365 B.C.]

Such being the state of opinion, it is not surprising that the acceptance of the peace should have encountered insuperable difficulties. The ambassadors summoned to Thebes in the ensuing spring had refused to swear to it, and the Arcadian deputy, Lycomedes, even took exception to the place of assembly, by means of which the Thebans would have invested their town with their pre-eminence, and went away in anger. The endeavours to win the concurrence of the separate states were not more successful, so the general war resumed its course and with it sanguinary party strifes in every city, and flight and pursuit for the defeated. In vain Epaminondas, on his third Peloponnesian expedition, endeavoured to bring the principles of mildness and civil tolerance into effect in Achaia: the Theban commonwealth, stirred up by the Arcadian democrats, abolished his institutions and sent magistrates into the country, who countenanced the expulsion of the oligarchs and the erection of unrestricted popular governments, until the refugees assembled together, forcibly compelled their recall, and once more carried Achaia over to the Spartan alliance, whereupon the persecution assumed a different form.

In Sicyon, Euphron, a rich and influential citizen, supported by Arcadian and Argive auxiliaries, placed the new commonwealth under the protection of Thebes, and with the confiscated property of his expelled enemies he obtained mercenaries, with whose aid he made himself ruler of his native city in the capacity of demagogue and tyrant. By wiles and treachery, robberies and crimes, he maintained himself in the government for a long time until, having at last been overpowered and put to flight by an aristocratic army, he was slain in Thebes, whither some of his enemies had followed him, under the eyes of the council. The perpetrator of the deed managed to defend himself so skilfully that he got away unpunished; but the townspeople of Sicyon honoured Euphron, who had freed them from the yoke of the aristocrats, as the second founder of their city.