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Updated: June 8, 2025
So too, as I have already mentioned, Pelopidas and Epaminondas after rescuing Thebes, their native city, from Spartan thraldom, in a short time made such valiant soldiers of the Theban peasantry, as to be able with their aid not only to withstand, but even to defeat the Spartan armies.
This was a very ambitious plan; and in order to carry it out, Philip knew that he would need a good army. He therefore began to train his men, and, remembering how successful Epaminondas had been, he taught them to fight as the Thebans had fought at Leuctra and Mantinea.
Epaminondas broke through the defenses of the Spartans, and opened a communication with his Peloponnesian allies, and with these increased forces was more than a match for the Spartans and Athenians. He ravaged the country, induced Sicyon to abandon Sparta, and visited Arcadia to superintend the building of Megalopolis.
A few days after this there was another battle fought near Mantinea, in which Epaminondas, having routed the van of the Lacedaemonians, was eager in the pursuit of them, when Anticrates, the Laconian, wounded him with a spear, says Dioscorides; but the Spartans to this day call the posterity of this Anticrates, swordsmen, because he wounded Epaminondas with a sword.
The next morning I asked her where the moon was, and she turned towards the window with a questioning tone. Last evening my better than Epaminondas was stretched upon the floor, for her entertainment. It was the prettiest sight that ever was. Una is as strong as a little lion, and I could dance at any moment.
But this noble Art was not common to Greece in general, but almost peculiar to Athens. For who has ever heard of an Argive, a Corinthian, or a Theban Orator at the times we are speaking of? unless, perhaps, some merit of the kind may be allowed to Epaminondas, who was a man of uncommon erudition. But I have never read of a Lacedemonian Orator, from the earliest period of time to the present.
Diogenes is said to have asked whether the robber Pataecion was better off in the other world than the hero Epaminondas, because the former had been initiated, and the latter had not. But Orphism, though liable to degradation, purified and elevated the old Bacchic rites. As Miss Harrison says, the Bacchanals hoped to attain unity with God by intoxication, the Orphics by abstinence.
But Agesilaus put the city in the best possible defense, while every means were used to secure auxiliaries from other cities. Epaminondas dared not to attempt to take the city by storm, and after ravaging Laconia, returned into Arcadia. This insult to Sparta was of great moral force, and was an intense humiliation, greater even than that felt after the battle of Leuctra.
For we see, as I have said a little way back, that a city which owing to its pervading corruption has once begun to decline, if it is to recover at all, must be saved not by the excellence of the people collectively, but of some one man then living among them, on whose death it at once relapses into its former plight; as happened with Thebes, in which the virtue of Epaminondas made it possible while he lived to preserve the form of a free Government, but which fell again on his death into its old disorders; the reason being that hardly any ruler lives so long as to have time to accustom to right methods a city which has long been accustomed to wrong.
Hannibal, it would seem, like Epaminondas and Alexander, brought to bear his heavy cavalry, under Hasdrubal, upon the weakest point of the enemy, after the conflict had continued awhile without decisive results. The weaker right of the Roman army, led by Paulus, after bravely fighting, were cut down and driven across the river.
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