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Epaminondas (c. 418–362 BC) was a Theban general and statesman who raised Thebes from subjection to Sparta to preeminence throughout Greece. In the process he forever smashed the power of Sparta with his victory at Leuctra and liberated the Messenian helots, who had been enslaved for some 200 years. He reshaped the political map of Greece, fragmenting old alliances, creating new ones, and supervising the construction of entire new cities. In military matters he invented several major battlefield tactics.

Celebrated throughout the ancient world (Cicero called him "the first man of the Greeks"), Epaminondas has since fallen into relative obscurity. The changes he wrought on the Greek political order did not long outlive him, as the cycle of shifting hegemonies and alliances continued unabated; a mere 27 years after his death, a recalcitrant Thebes was obliterated by Alexander the Great. Thus Epaminondas, praised by many of his time as an idealist and liberator, is largely remembered as the man whose decade of campaigning, from 371 to 362 BC, sapped the strength of the great land powers of Greece, paving the way for Macedonian conquest.

Youth, education and personal life

Epaminondas's father was Polymnis, an impoverished member of an old Theban noble family. In his youth he received an excellent education in a number of arts and disciplines. His musical teachers were among the best in their disciplines, as was his dance instructor. Most notable, however, was his philosophy instructor, Lysis of Tarentum, the last of the great Pythagorean philosophers, who had come to live with Polymnis in his exile. Epaminondas was uniquely devoted to Lysis and was noted for his excellence in philosophical studies.

Epaminondas was noted for his physical prowess, and in his youth devoted much time to strengthening and preparing himself for combat. In 385 BC in a skirmish near the city of Mantinea, Epaminondas saved the life of his future colleague Pelopidas. Throughout his career he would continue to be noted for his skill as a warrior and as a general.

Epaminondas never married, a fact that brought criticism from countrymen who believed that he was denying his country the benefit of sons as great as himself. In response he said that his victory at Leuctra was his daughter, and would live forever. An anecdote told by Cornelius Nepos indicates that Epaminondas was intimate with a young man by the name of Mycithus; he is sometimes listed as a notable example of a gay public figure in history. It seems certain that Epaminondas enjoyed the company of young men; given the fluid nature of Greek sexuality, however, drawing conclusions from this fact is difficult, and attempts to apply modern notions of sexual orientation to ancient Greek historical figures is an endeavor laden with pitfalls; only the facts as recorded may be stated with certainty.

Epaminondas lived his entire life in near poverty, disdaining the wealth he could easily have secured by using his powerful position. Cornelius Nepos notes his incorruptibility, describing his rejection of a Persian ambassador who came to him with a bribe. In the tradition of the Pythagoreans, he gave freely to his friends and encouraged them to do likewise with each other. These aspects of his character contributed greatly to his renown after his death.

Early career

Epaminondas lived at a turbulent point in Greek and Theban history. Sparta, after the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC, embarked on an aggressively unilateralist policy towards the rest of Greece, and quickly alienated many of its former allies. Thebes, meanwhile, had greatly increased its own power during the war and sought to gain control of the other cities of Boeotia. This policy, along with other disputes, brought Thebes into conflict with Sparta, and by 395 BC Thebes found itself arrayed against its erstwhile ally in the Corinthian War, alongside Athens, Corinth, and Argos. That war, which dragged on inconclusively for eight years, saw several bloody Theban defeats at Spartan hands, and by its end Thebes had been forced to check its expansionist ambitions and return to its old alliance with Sparta; at the time of Epaminondas's action at the Mantinea in 385, he was fighting alongside Sparta.

In 382 BC, however, the Spartan commander Phoebidas made a misstep that would soon turn Thebes against Sparta for good. Passing through Boeotia on campaign, Phoebidas took advantage of civil strife within Thebes to secure entrance to the city for his troops. Once inside, he seized the Cadmea (the Theban acropolis), forcing the anti-Spartan party to flee the city. Epaminondas, although associated with that faction, was believed to be nothing more than an impoverished philosopher, and was allowed to remain.

Theban coup

In the years following the Spartan takeover, the Thebans exiled by the new government regrouped at Athens and prepared, with the covert support of the Athenians, to return to their city. In 379 BC a small group of exiles, led by Pelopidas, infiltrated the city and assassinated the Spartan commander at his evening meal. Inside the city Epaminondas and Gorgidas organized young men who broke into armories, took weapons, and surrounded the Spartans on the Cadmea, assisted by a force of Athenian hoplites. In the Theban assembly the next day, Epaminondas and Gorgidas brought Pelopidas and his men before the audience and exhorted the Thebans to fight for their freedom, at which the assembly acclaimed Pelopidas and his men as liberators. Fearing for their lives, the Spartan garrison surrendered and were evacuated; the Thebans of the pro-Spartan party were also allowed to surrender, but were then butchered by the victorious insurgents.

After the coup

When news of the uprising at Thebes reached Sparta, an army under Agesilaus was dispatched to subdue the restive city. The Thebans refused to meet it in the field, and instead occupied a strong point outside the city; the Spartans ravaged the countryside and departed, leaving Thebes independent. In short order the Thebans were able to reconstitute their old Boeotian confederacy in a new democratic form. The cities of Boeotia united as a federation with an executive body composed of seven generals, or Boeotarchs, elected from seven districts throughout Boeotia. So successful was this political fusion that from this time forward the words Theban and Boeotian came to be used interchangeably, demonstrating the newfound solidarity of the region. Seeking to squelch this new state, the Spartans invaded three times over the next seven years. At first fearing to fight, the Boeotians eventually gained confidence to take the field and fought the Spartans to a standstill. Then, in 375 BC an outnumbered force of Boeotians under Pelopidas cut their way through the heart of a Spartan phalanx to safety at Tegyra. Although Sparta remained the supreme land power in Greece, the Boeotians had demonstrated that they too could fight. Meanwhile, in Thebes, Pelopidas, one advocate of an aggressive policy against Sparta, established himself as a strong leader; he would collaborate with Epaminondas in overseeing Theban foreign policy in the years to come.

371 BC

Peace Conference of 371

Sources do not clearly state when Epaminondas was first elected as a Boeotarch, but by 371 BC he was clearly holding the office, and led the Boeotian delegation to the peace conference held at Sparta in that year. A feeble attempt at a Common Peace had been made in 375, but desultory fighting between Athens and Sparta had resumed by 373 at the latest. Thebes, meanwhile, was strengthening its new confederation. By 371 Athens and Sparta were again weary and ready for peace, so a conference was called. There, Epaminondas caused a drastic break with Sparta when he insisted on signing not for the Thebans alone, but for all the Boeotians. Agesilaus refused to allow this, insisting that the cities of Boeotia should be independent; Epaminondas countered that if this were to be the case, the cities of Laconia should be as well. Irate, Agesilaus struck the Thebans from the document; the delegation returned to Thebes, and both sides marshaled for war.

Leuctra

Main article: Battle of Leuctra

Immediately upon the failure of the peace conference, orders were sent out from Sparta to the king Cleombrotus, who was in Phocis at the head of an army, commanding him to march directly to Boeotia. Skirting north to avoid mountain passes in which the Boeotians were prepared to ambush him, Cleombrotus entered Boeotian territory from an unexpected direction and quickly seized a fort and captured several tiremes. Marching towards Thebes, he camped at Leuctra, in the territory of Thespiae. Here, the Boeotian army drew up opposite him. The Spartan army contained some 10,000 hoplites, at the core of which were 700 Spartiates. The Boeotians opposite them numbered only 6,000, although their cavalry was superior to the Peloponnesians'.

In arranging his troops before the battle, Epaminondas utilized a strategy unheard of in Greek warfare up to this time. Traditionally, a phalanx lined up for battle with the elite troops on the right flank—the "flank of honor." Thus, in the Spartan phalanx, Cleombrotus and his Spartiates were on the right, while the less experienced Peloponnesian allies were on the left. Needing to counter the Spartans' numerical advantage, Epaminondas implemented two tactical innovations. First, he and his Thebans lined up on the left, with the elite Sacred Band under Pelopidas on the extreme left flank. Second, recognizing that he could not extend his troops to match the width of the Peloponnesian phalanx without unacceptably thinning his line, he abandoned all attempt to match the Spartans in width and instead deepened his phalanx on the left, making it fifty ranks deep instead of the conventional eight to twelve. When battle was joined, the strengthened flank was to march forward to attack at double speed, while the weaker flank was to retreat and delay combat. Thus, Epaminondas had invented the tactic of refusing one's flank.

The fighting opened with a cavalry encounter, in which the Thebans were victorious. The Spartan cavalry was driven back into the ranks of the phalanx, disrupting the order of the infantry. Seizing the advantage, the Boeotians pressed the attack. The issue was briefly in doubt, but the weight of the deepened Theban phalanx and the timely action of Pelopidas, who led the Sacred Band in charging ahead of the rest of the phalanx, eventually carried the day for the Thebans. Cleombrotus was killed, and although the Spartans held on for long enough to rescue his body, their line was soon broken by the sheer force of the Theban assault. The allies, seeing the Spartans put to flight, also broke and ran, and the entire army retreated in disarray. Four thousand Peloponnesians were killed, against some 300 Boeotians; most importantly, 400 of the 700 Spartiates on the scene were killed, a catastrophic loss that posed serious threats to Sparta's ability to make war in the future.

The 360s BC

First Invasion of the Peloponnese

For about a year after the victory at Leuctra, Epaminondas occupied himself with consolidating the Boeotian confederacy, compelling the previously Spartan-aligned polis of Orchomenus to join the league. In late 370 BC, however, as the Spartans under Agesilaus attempted to discipline their newly restive ally Mantinea, Epaminondas decided to capitalize on his victory by invading the Peloponnese and shattering Sparta's power once and for all. Forcing his way past the fortifications on the isthmus of Corinth, he marched southward toward Sparta, with contingents from Sparta's erstwhile allies flocking to him along the way. In Arcadia he drove off the Spartan army threatening Mantinea, then supervised the founding of the new city of Megalopolis and the formation of an Arcadian League modeled on the Boeotian confederacy. Moving south, he crossed the Eurotas, the famous frontier of Sparta, which no hostile army had crossed in historical memory, and ravaged Laconia. The Spartans lingered inside their city, refusing to come out for battle. Epaminondas briefly returned to Arcadia, then marched south again, this time to Messenia, a territory which the Spartan's had conquered some two centuries before, and which comprised one-third of their land, and, most critically, contained half of their helots. There, he rebuilt the ancient city of Messene on Mount Ithome, with formidable new fortifications, and issued a call to Messenian exiles all over Greece to return and rebuild their homeland. With these actions Epaminondas had created two powerful states to oppose Sparta's power, shaken the foundations of its economy, and crippled its prestige. This accomplished, he led his army back home.

Trial

Upon his return home, Epaminondas was greeted not with a hero's welcome but with a trial arranged by his political enemies, on the charge that he had retained his command longer than he was constitutionally permitted. The charge was indisputably true—in order to accomplish all that he wished to in the Pelopponese, Epaminondas had needed to persuade his fellow Boeotarchs to remain in the field for some months after their term of office had expired. In his defense Epaminondas merely requested that, if he be executed, the inscription regarding the verdict should read

Epaminondas was punished by the Thebans with death, because he obliged them to overthrow the Lacedaemonians at Leuctra, whom, before he was general, none of the Boeotians durst look upon in the field, and because he not only, by one battle, rescued Thebes from destruction, but also secured liberty for all Greece, and brought the power of both people to such a condition, that the Thebans attacked Sparta, and the Lacedaemonians were content if they could save their lives; nor did he cease to prosecute the war, till, after settling Messene, he shut up Sparta with a close siege.

The defense was successful, the charges were dropped, and Epaminondas was reelected as Boeotarch for the next year.

Later campaigns

In 369 BC Epaminondas again invaded the Peloponnese, but achieved little besides winning over Sicyon to an alliance with Thebes. He was put on trial again when he returned to Thebes and was once again acquitted, but was out of office the next year for the only time between the battle of Leuctra and his death. That year, he served as a common soldier while the army marched into Thessaly to rescue Pelopidas, who had been imprisoned by Alexander of Pherae while in Thessaly on an embassy. The commanders who led this expedition were outmaneuvered and forced to retreat to save their army. Back in Thebes, Epaminondas was reinstated in command and led the army straight back into Thessaly, where he outmaneuvered the Thessalians and secured the release of Pelopidas without a fight.

In 366 BC a common peace was drawn up in a conference at Thebes, but negotiations could not resolve the hostility between Thebes and other states that resented its influence. The peace was never fully accepted, and fighting soon resumed. In the spring of that year, Epaminondas returned to the Peloponnese for a third time, seeking on this occasion to secure the allegiance of the states of Achaea. Although no army dared to challenge him in the field, the democratic governments he established there were short-lived, as pro-Spartan aristocrats soon returned to the cities, reestablished the oligarchies, and bound their cities even more closely than before to Sparta.

Throughout the decade after Leuctra, numerous former allies of Thebes defected to the support of Sparta or other hostile states. As early as 371, the Athenian assembly had reacted to the news of Leuctra with stony silence. Thessalian Pherae, a reliable ally during the 370s, similarly turned against its newly dominant ally in the years after that battle. By the middle of the next decade, even some among the Arcadians, whose league Epaminondas had established in 369, had turned against him; only the Messenians remained firmly loyal. Boeotian armies campaigned across Greece as opponents rose up on all sides; in 364 Epaminondas even led his state in attempting to challenge Athens at sea. In that same year, Pelopidas was killed while campaigning against Alexander in Thessaly. His loss deprived Epaminondas of his greatest political ally at Thebes.

It was in this context of increasing opposition to Theban dominance that Epaminondas launched his final expedition into the Pelopponese in 362 BC. The immediate goal of the expedition was to subdue Mantinea, which had been opposing Theban influence in the region. As he approached Mantinea, however, Epaminondas received word that so many Spartans had been sent to defend Mantinea that Sparta itself was almost undefended. Seeing an opportunity, Epaminondas marched his army towards Laconia at top speed. The Spartan king Archidamus was alerted to this move by a runner, however, and Epaminondas arrived to find the city well defended. Hoping that his adversaries had denuded the defenses of Mantinea in their haste to protect Sparta, he countermarched back to his base at Tegea and dispatched his cavalry to Mantinea, but a clash outside the walls with Athenian cavalry foiled this stratagem as well. Realizing that a hoplite battle would be necessary if he was going to preserve Theban influence in the Peloponnese, Epaminondas prepared his army for combat.

Battle of Mantinea

Main article: Battle of Mantinea

What followed on the plain in front of Mantinea was the largest hoplite battle in the history of Greece. Nearly every state in Greece participated on one side or the other. With the Boeotians stood a number of allied states—the Tegeans, Megalopolitans, and Argives chief among them. On the side of the Mantineans and Spartans stood the Athenians, Eleans, and numerous others. Both armies numbered between twenty and thirty thousand infantry. As at Leuctra, Epaminondas drew up the Thebans on the left, opposite the Spartans and Mantineans with the allies on the right. On the wings he placed strong forces of cavalry strengthened by infantry. Thus, he hoped to win a quick victory in the cavalry engagements and begin a rout of the enemy phalanx.

The battle unfolded as Epaminondas had planned. The stronger forces on the wings drove back the Athenian and Mantinean cavalry opposite them and began to attack the flanks of the enemy phalanx. In the hoplite battle, the issue briefly hung in the balance, but then the Thebans on the left broke through against the Spartans, and the entire enemy phalanx was put to flight. It seemed that another decisive Theban victory on the model of Leuctra was about to unfold until, as the victorious Thebans set off in pursuit of their fleeing opponents, Epaminondas was mortally wounded and quickly died on the battlefield. As news of his death spread, the allies across the field ceased in their pursuit of the defeated troops—a testament to Epaminondas's centrality to the war effort. With his dying words, Epaminondas is said to have advised the Thebans to make peace, as there was no one left to lead them. After the battle a common peace was arranged on the basis of the status quo.

Aftermath

Historical record

For all Epaminondas's contemporary fame, comparatively little information about his life remains to us. Cornelius Nepos wrote a short extant biography, and a few details about his life are found in Pausanias's Description of Greece. Plutarch wrote a biography, but it has been lost; some information may be found in his Lives of Pelopidas and Agesilaus. Of the narrative histories of the time, Diodorus Siculus gives a few details; Xenophon, on the other hand, who idolized Sparta and Agesilaus, avoids mentioning him whenever possible and does not even note his presence at Leuctra. Thus, there is much about Epaminondas which a historian might wish to know which cannot be uncovered; perhaps as a result, he has fallen into relative obscurity compared to other notable figures of his time, such as Alcibiades and Alexander the Great.

Legacy

Epaminondas's biographers have universally described him as one of the most talented produced by the Greek city-states in their dynamic final century and a half of independence. In military affairs he stands above every other tactician in Greek history, with the possible exception of Philip of Macedon, although modern historians have questioned his larger strategic vision. His innovative strategy at Leuctra allowed him to defeat the vaunted Spartan phalanx with a smaller force, and his novel decision to refuse his right flank was the first successful use of a battlefield tactic of this sort. Some sources credit this innovative thinking to his early philosophical training. Likewise, in matters of character, Epaminondas was above reproach in the eyes of the ancient historians who recorded his deeds. Contemporaries praised him for disdaining material wealth, sharing what he had with his friends, and refusing bribes. One of the last heirs of the Pythagorean tradition, he appears to have lived a simple and ascetic lifestyle even when his leadership had raised him to the position of first man of Greece.

In some ways Epaminondas utterly altered the face of Greece during the ten years in which he was the central figure of Greek politics. By the time of his death, Sparta had been humbled, Messene freed, and the Peloponnese completely reorganized. In another respect, however, he left behind a Greece no different than that which he had found; the bitter divides and animosities that had poisoned international relations in Greece for over a century remained as deep as or deeper than they had been before Leuctra. The brutal internecine warfare that had characterized the years from 432 BC onwards continued unabated until the rise of Macedon ended it forever.

At Mantinea, Thebes had faced down the combined forces of the greatest states of Greece, but the victory brought it no spoils. With Epaminondas removed from the scene, the Thebans returned to their more traditional defensive policy, and within a few years, Athens had replaced them at the pinnacle of the Greek political system. No Greek state ever again reduced Boeotia to the subjection it had known during the Spartan hegemony, but Theban influence faded quickly in the rest of Greece. Finally, at Chaeronea in 338 BC, the combined forces of Thebes and Athens, driven into each others arms for a desperate last stand against Philip of Macedon, were crushingly defeated, and Theban independence was put to an end. Three years later, heartened by a false rumor that Alexander the Great had been assassinated, the Thebans revolted; Alexander squashed the revolt, then destroyed the city, slaughtering or enslaving all its citizens. A mere 27 years after the death of the man who had made it preeminent throughout Greece, Thebes was wiped from the face of the Earth, its thousand-year history ended in the space of a few days.

Epaminondas, therefore, is remembered both as a liberator and a destroyer. He was celebrated throughout the ancient world as one of the greatest men of history. Cicero eulogized him as "the first man, in my judgement, of the Greeks," and Pausanias records an honorary poem from his tomb:

By my counsels was Sparta shorn of her glory,

And holy Messene received at last her children.
By the arms of Thebes was Megalopolis encircled with walls,

And all Greece won independence and freedom.

Epaminondas's actions were certainly welcomed by the Messenians and others who he assisted in his campaigns against the Spartans. Those same Spartans, however, had been at the center of resistance to the Persian invasions of the 5th century BC, and their absence was sorely felt at Chaeronea; the endless warfare in which Epaminondas played a central role weakened the cities of Greece until they could no longer hold their own against their neighbors to the north. The cruel irony of Epaminondas's career was that as he campaigned to secure freedom for the Boeotians and others throughout Greece, he brought closer the day when all of Greece would be subjugated by an invader. Victor Davis Hanson has suggested that Epaminondas may have planned for a united Greece composed of regional democratic federations, but even if these assertions are correct, no such plan was ever implemented. For all his noble qualities, Epaminondas was unable to transcend the Greek city-state system, with its endemic rivalry and warfare, and thus left Greece more war-ravaged but no less divided than he found it.

References

• Diodorus Siculus, Library From the Perseus Project.
• Fine, John V.A. The Ancient Greeks: A critical history (Harvard University Press, 1983) ISBN 0674033140
• Hanson, Victor Davis. The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny. (The Free Press, 1999) ISBN 0385720599
• Hornblower, Simon, and Anthony Spawforth ed., The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2003) ISBN 019866172X
• Cornelius Nepos, Lives From ccel.org
• Pausanias, Description of Greece From the Perseus Project.
• Plutarch, Parallel Lives From MIT.
• Xenophon, Hellenica From the Perseus Project.

Footnotes

1. All information in this section from Cornelius Nepos, Life of Epaminondas
2. All information in this section from J.V. Fine, The Ancient Greeks: A Critical History
3. Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas
4. Xenophon, Hellenica 5.4.10-19
5. All details regarding Boeotian confederation and politics from Victor Davis Hanson, The Soul of Battle
6. Plutarch, Life of Agesilaus
7. For these events and the description of the battle itself, see Diodorus, Library 15.52-56, Xenophon, Hellenica 6.4.4-20, and Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas. For a synthesis, see Fine, The Ancient Greeks.
8. For the invasion and liberation of Messene, see Diodorus, Library 15.66, Xenophon, Hellenica 6.5.27-32, and Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas. For a synthesis, see Fine, The Ancient Greeks.
9. Cornelius Nepos, Life of Epaminondas
10. Fine, The Ancient Greeks
11. Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas
12. Fine, The Ancient Greeks
13. Xenophon, Hellenica 7.1.41-43
14. Fine, The Ancient Greeks
15. Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas
16. For these this campaign and the battle of Mantinea, see Diodorus, Library 15.82-89, Xenophon, Hellenica 7.5.9-27, and Plutarch, Life of Agesilaus. For a synthesis, see Fine, The Ancient Greeks.
17. James F. Lazenby, "Epaminondas," from The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Hornblower, Simon, and Anthony Spawforth ed.
18. Fine, The Ancient Greeks
19. Hanson, The Soul of Battle
20. Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.15.6

• 418 BC births
• 362 BC deaths
• Ancient Greek generals