SPARTA’S NEMESIS
Epaminondas may be largely forgotten today, but he brought Greece’s warrior elite to their knees
At the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE, Epaminondas led the outnumbered Theban phalanx to an overwhelming victory against an army of Spartan hoplites. Theban victory that day forever changed the political map of Greece. In order to achieve this, Epaminondas had created a military revolution that would indelibly change warfare. His tactics and strategies are studied and implemented to this day, yet the man himself remains a figure of some mystery and controversy.
Prelude
In the aftermath of the victory in the Peloponnesian War against Athens (431-404 BCE), Sparta sought to impose its will on all of Greece. This included several states in the plains of Boeotia – an area over which the city of Thebes considered itself the natural leader. Despite having supported Sparta against Athens, Thebes switched its support to Athens and led an anti-spartan coalition of cities that was able to gain some success against Sparta in the Corinthian War (395-387 BCE).
With the peace of 387 BCE, known as ‘The King’s Peace’ because it was underwritten by the Persian King Artaxerxes II, all Greek states were to remain autonomous city-states. The Persians also backed the authority of Sparta and established them as the dominant force in Greece.
Buoyed by this foreign support, Sparta proceeded to attack the supposedly autonomous city-states of Greece under the pretext that they threatened the peace. In 383 BCE a coup in Thebes led to the establishment of a pro-spartan oligarchy and the installation of a garrison. Four years later an anti-spartan coup led by Pelopidas overthrew this regime and re-established the city as the dominant force in Boeotia. Thebes then consolidated power in the region by creating the Boeotian League, a coalition of cities with Thebes at its head. Thebes became the champion of a free Greece against the tyranny of Sparta.
Sparta moved to put an end to this resistance. Despite negotiations in 371
BCE peace could not be reached, and King Cleombrotus marched at the head of a Spartan-peloponnesian army to crush Thebes.
A hero emerges
Epaminondas’s role in Thebes’s return to freedom and ascendancy is difficult to pinpoint. This is partially down to a problem with available sources. The life of Epaminondas as written by Plutarch does not survive and several other writers (especially Xenophon, whose history the Hellenica is vital for the period) show a distinctly anti-theban bias. Several aspects of Epaminondas’s life are tied up with academic debates that remain unsettled.
Yet we do know that Epaminondas was vitally important to Theban politics, warfare and history in the period 371-362 BCE, and a vast array of fragmentary and anecdotal accounts reinforce this importance. We also have traces of him in other sources that do survive, such as Plutarch’s Life of Pelopidas and Life of Agesilaus and in Cornelius Nepos’s Book of Great Generals of Foreign Nations.
Epaminondas was one of the liberators who overthrew of the pro-spartan government at Thebes, although he is not named by Xenophon – who equally does not name Pelopidas, despite being the ringleader of the uprising.
This highlights the problem of Xenophon, who is an otherwise reliable source for the period. His version of Theban history, however, can be seriously questioned, and his accounts of Epaminondas, Pelopidas and the defeat of Sparta are unreliable. Xenophon was prospartan in all his writings, which seems to have seriously affected his judgement when it came to Theban history.
Epaminondas was the leader of the Theban peace delegation at Sparta in 371 BCE and then in the Leuctra campaign, and it is clear he was already respected as a leader and speaker. We are told that he was the best speaker in Thebes and, using widespread sources, we are able to piece together a picture.
His father Polymnis was from an honourable Theban family although one of little wealth. Nonetheless, Epaminondas was educated as well as any other Theban. We know that he never took advantage of his more wealthy friends , such as Pelopidas, and refused their offers of financial help. He was also impervious to attempted bribes made by various cities and individuals. He learned to play the lyre, to sing and dance and studied athletics and wrestling. All of these, we are told, he saw could have a military application. Cornelius Nepos in
Epaminondas tells us that he thought agility would be useful in warfare rather than just physical strength. There are later anecdotes