The Historians' History of the World 04

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.

On one point, the policy recommended by Epaminondas to his countrymen appears of questionable wisdom—his advice to compete with Athens for transmarine and naval power. One cannot recognise in this advice the same accurate estimate of permanent causes—the same long-sighted view of the conditions of strength to Thebes and of weakness to her enemies, which dictated the foundation of Messene and Megalopolis. These two towns, when once founded, took such firm root, that Sparta could not persuade even her own allies to aid in effacing them; a clear proof of the sound reasoning on which their founder had proceeded.

What Epaminondas would have done—whether he would have followed out maxims equally prudent and penetrating, if he had survived the victory of Mantinea—is a point which we cannot pretend to divine. He would have found himself then on a pinnacle of glory, and invested with a plenitude of power, such as no Greek ever held without abusing. But all that we know of Epaminondas justifies the conjecture that he would have been found equal, more than any other Greek, even to this great trial; and that his untimely death shut him out from a future not less honourable to himself, than beneficial to Thebes and to Greece generally.d

CONFUSION FOLLOWING EPAMINONDAS’ FALL

[362-361 B.C.]