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Updated: June 16, 2025
Ismenias, also, the Theban, and Pelopidas, who had already gained the victory at Leuctra, arrived at the Persian court; where the latter did nothing unworthy of himself. But Ismenias, being commanded to do obeisance to the king, dropped his ring before him upon the ground, and so, stooping to take it up, made a show of doing him homage.
The only thing in favour of Thebes was that Agesilaus’ lame leg had become so diseased that he could not for five years go out to war; but the other king, Cleombrotus, was at the head of 11,000 men marching into Bœotia, and Epaminondas could only get together 6000, with whom he met them at Leuctra.
Yet the king always said that he had learned the manoeuvre from Epaminondas, and was only fighting the battle of Leuctra over again. But look there!"
But that this war was undertaken more upon passion than judgment, the event may prove; for the treaty was finished but the fourteenth of Scirophorion, and the Lacedaemonians received their great overthrow at Leuctra, on the fifth of Hecatombaeon, within twenty days.
If these things seem probable, let us consider farther, that it is the first work of a fighter to strike his enemy and ward the other's blows; the second, when they come up close and lay hold of one another, to trip and overturn him; and in this, they say, our countrymen being better wrestlers very much distressed the Spartans at the battle of Leuctra. And Aeschylus describes a warrior thus,
The Athenians stood aloof from the contending parties. They had not received the news of the battle of Leuctra with any pleasure, for they now dreaded Thebes more than Sparta.
But to these you may perhaps oppose those two most glorious battles at Leuctra and Tegyrae; and we have no statement of any achievement of Marcellus, by stealth or ambuscade, such as were those of Pelopidas, when he returned from exile, and killed the tyrants at Thebes; which, indeed, may claim to be called the first in rank of all achievements ever performed by secrecy and cunning.
The principal Boeotian leader was Epaminondas, one of the noblest patriots in all Grecian history, in his disinterested spirit and self-government resembling Washington. At this time the rage of party knew no bounds. The wholesale massacre of political antagonists in a city was no uncommon occurrence. THEBAN HEGEMONY. The victory of Leuctra gave the hegemony to Thebes.
In quite as many instances as are presented by the opposite, the forces which put an unexpected end to the military supremacy long possessed by their antagonists were themselves, in the strictest sense of the word, 'regulars. The Thebans whom Epaminondas led to victory over the Spartans at Leuctra no more resembled a hasty levy of armed peasants or men imperfectly trained as soldiers than did Napoleon's army which overthrew the Prussians at Jena, or the Germans who defeated the French at Gravelotte and Sedan.
Lysander erected out of the spoils brazen statues at Delphi of himself, and of every one of the masters of the ships, as also figures of the golden stars of Castor and Pollux, which vanished before the battle at Leuctra. In the treasury of Brasidas and the Acanthians, there was a trireme made of gold and ivory, of two cubits, which Cyrus sent Lysander in honor of his victory.
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