The cavalry first engaged, in front of both lines; and here the superiority of the Thebans soon became manifest. The Lacedæmonian cavalry,—at no time very good, but at this moment unusually bad, composed of raw and feeble novices, mounted on horses provided by the rich,—was soon broken and driven back upon the infantry, whose ranks were disturbed by the fugitives. To reëstablish the battle, Kleombrotus gave the word for the infantry to advance, himself personally leading the right. The victorious Theban cavalry probably hung upon the Lacedæmonian infantry of the centre and left, and prevented them from making much forward movement; while Epaminondas and Pelopidas with their left, advanced according to their intention to bear down Kleombrotus and his right wing. The shock here was terrible; on both sides victory was resolutely and desperately disputed, in a close hand-combat, with pushing of opposite shields and opposite masses. But such was the overwhelming force of the Theban charge,—with the sacred band or chosen warriors in front, composed of men highly trained in the palæstra,[379] and the deep column of fifty shields propelling behind,—that even the Spartans, with all their courage, obstinacy, and discipline, were unable to stand up against it. Kleombrotus, himself either in or near the front, was mortally wounded, apparently early in the battle; and it was only by heroic and unexampled efforts, on the part of his comrades around, that he was carried off yet alive, so as to preserve him from falling into the hands of the enemy. Around him also fell the most eminent members of the Spartan official staff; Deinon the polemarch, Sphodrias, with his son Kleonymus, and several others. After an obstinate resistance and a fearful slaughter, the right wing of the Spartans was completely beaten, and driven back to their camp on the higher ground.
It was upon this Spartan right wing, where the Theban left was irresistibly strong, that all the stress of the battle fell,—as Epaminondas had intended that it should. In no other part of the line does there appear to have been any serious fighting; partly through his deliberate scheme of not pushing forward either his centre or his right,—partly through the preliminary victory of the Theban cavalry, which probably checked a part of the forward march of the enemy’s line,—and partly also through the lukewarm adherence, or even suppressed hostility, of the allies marshalled under the command of Kleombrotus.[380] The Phokians and Herakleots,—zealous in the cause from hatred of Thebes,—had quitted the line to strike a blow at the retiring baggage and attendants; while the remaining allies, after mere nominal fighting and little or no loss, retired to the camp as soon as they saw the Spartan right defeated and driven back to it. Moreover, even some Lacedæmonians on the left wing, probably astounded by the lukewarmness of those around them, and by the unexpected calamity on their own right, fell back in the same manner. The whole Lacedæmonian force, with the dying king, was thus again assembled and formed behind the entrenchment on the higher ground, where the victorious Thebans did not attempt to molest them.[381]
But very different were their feelings as they now stood arrayed in the camp, from that exulting boastfulness with which they had quitted it an hour or two before; and fearful was the loss when it came to be verified. Of seven hundred Spartans who had marched forth from the camp, only three hundred returned to it.[382] One thousand Lacedæmonians, besides, had been left on the field, even by the admission of Xenophon; probably the real number was even larger. Apart from this, the death of Kleombrotus was of itself an event impressive to every one, the like of which had never occurred since the fatal day of Thermopylæ. But this was not all. The allies who stood alongside of them in arms were now altered men. All were sick of their cause, and averse to farther exertion; some scarcely concealed a positive satisfaction at the defeat. And when the surviving polemarchs, now commanders, took counsel with the principal officers as to the steps proper in the emergency, there were a few, but very few, Spartans who pressed for renewal of the battle, and for recovering by force their slain brethren in the field, or perishing in the attempt. All the rest felt like beaten men; so that the polemarchs, giving effect to the general sentiment, sent a herald to solicit the regular truce for burial of their dead. This the Thebans granted, after erecting their own trophy.[383] But Epaminondas, aware that the Spartans would practise every stratagem to conceal the magnitude of their losses, coupled the grant with a condition that the allies should bury their dead first. It was found that the allies had scarce any dead to pick up, and that nearly every slain warrior on the field was a Lacedæmonian.[384] And thus the Theban general, while he placed the loss beyond possibility of concealment, proclaimed at the same time such public evidence of Spartan courage, as to rescue the misfortune of Leuktra from all aggravation on the score of dishonor. What the Theban loss was, Xenophon does not tell us. Pausanias states it at forty-seven men,[385] Diodorus at three hundred. The former number is preposterously small, and even the latter is doubtless under the truth; for a victory in close fight, over soldiers like the Spartans, must have been dearly purchased. Though the bodies of the Spartans were given up to burial, their arms were retained; and the shields of the principal officers were seen by the traveller Pausanias at Thebes five hundred years afterwards.[386]
Twenty days only had elapsed, from the time when Epaminondas quitted Sparta after Thebes had been excluded from the general peace, to the day when he stood victorious on the field of Leuktra.[387] The event came like a thunderclap upon every one in Greece, upon victors as well as vanquished,—upon allies and neutrals, near and distant, alike. The general expectation had been that Thebes would be speedily overthrown and dismantled; instead of which, not only she had escaped, but had inflicted a crushing blow on the military majesty of Sparta. It is in vain that Xenophon,—whose account of the battle is obscure, partial, and imprinted with that chagrin which the event occasioned to him,[388]—ascribes the defeat to untoward accidents,[389] or to the rashness and convivial carelessness of Kleombrotus; upon whose generalship Agesilaus and his party at Sparta did not scruple to cast ungenerous reproach,[390] while others faintly exculpated him by saying that he had fought contrary to his better judgment, under fear of unpopularity. Such criticisms, coming from men wise after the fact, and consoling themselves for the public calamity by censuring the unfortunate commander, will not stand examination. Kleombrotus represented on this occasion the feeling universal among his countrymen. He was ordered to march against Thebes with the full belief, entertained by Agesilaus and all the Spartan leaders, that her unassisted force could not resist him. To fight the Thebans on open ground was exactly what he and every other Spartan desired. While his manner of forcing the entrance of Bœotia, and his capture of Kreusis, was a creditable manœuvre, he seems to have arranged his order of battle in the manner usual with Grecian generals at the time. There appears no reason to censure his generalship, except in so far as he was unable to divine,—what no one else divined,—the superior combinations of his adversary, then for the first time applied to practice. To the discredit of Xenophon, Epaminondas is never named in his narrative of the battle, though he recognizes in substance that the battle was decided by the irresistible Theban force brought to bear upon one point of the enemy’s phalanx; a fact which both Plutarch and Diodorus[391] expressly refer to the genius of the general. All the calculations of Epaminondas turned out successful. The bravery of the Thebans, cavalry as well as infantry, seconded by the training which they had received during the last few years, was found sufficient to carry his plans into full execution. To this circumstance, principally, was owing the great revolution of opinion throughout Greece which followed the battle. Every one felt that a new military power had arisen, and that the Theban training, under the generalship of Epaminondas, had proved itself more than a match on a fair field, with shield and spear, and with numbers on the whole inferior,—for the ancient Lykurgean discipline; which last had hitherto stood without a parallel as turning out artists and craftsmen in war, against mere citizens in the opposite ranks, armed but without the like training.[392] Essentially stationary and old-fashioned, the Lykurgean discipline was now overborne by the progressive military improvement of other states, handled by a preëminent tactician; a misfortune predicted by the Corinthians[393] at Sparta sixty years before, and now realised, to the conviction of all Greece, on the field of Leuktra.
But if the Spartan system was thus invaded and overpassed in its privilege of training soldiers, there was another species of teaching wherein it neither was nor could be overpassed,—the hard lesson of enduring pain and suppressing emotion. Memorable indeed was the manner in which the news of this fatal catastrophe was received at Sparta. To prepare the reader by an appropriate contrast, we may turn to the manifestation at Athens twenty-seven years before, when the trireme called Paralus arrived from Ægospotami, bearing tidings of the capture of the entire Athenian fleet. “The moan of distress (says the historian)[394] reached all up the Long Walls from Peiræus to Athens, as each man communicated the news to his neighbor: on that night, not a man slept, from bewailing for his lost fellow-citizens and for his own impending ruin.” Not such was the scene at Sparta, when the messenger arrived from the field of Leuktra, although there was everything calculated to render the shock violent. For not only was the defeat calamitous and humiliating beyond all former parallel, but it came at a moment when every man reckoned on victory. As soon as Kleombrotus, having forced his way into Bœotia, saw the unassisted Thebans on plain ground before him, no Spartan entertained any doubt of the result. Under this state of feeling, a messenger arrived with the astounding revelation, that the army was totally defeated, with the loss of the king, of four hundred Spartans, and more than a thousand Lacedæmonians; and that defeat stood confessed by having solicited the truce for interment of the slain. At the moment when he arrived, the festival called the Gymnopædia was actually being celebrated, on its last day; and the chorus of grown men was going through its usual solemnity in the theatre. In spite of all the poignancy of the intelligence, the ephors would not permit the solemnity to be either interrupted or abridged. “Of necessity, I suppose, they were grieved,—but they went through the whole as if nothing had happened, only communicating the names of the slain to their relations, and issuing a general order to the women, to make no noise or wailing, but to bear the misfortune in silence.” That such an order should be issued, is sufficiently remarkable; that it should be issued and obeyed, is what could not be expected; that it should not only be issued and obeyed, but overpassed, is what no man could believe, if it were not expressly attested by the contemporary historian. “On the morrow (says he) you might see those whose relations had been slain, walking about in public with bright and cheerful countenances; but of those whose relatives survived, scarce one showed himself; and the few who were abroad, looked mournful and humbled.”[395]
In comparing this extraordinary self-constraint and obedience to orders, at Sparta, under the most trying circumstances,—with the sensitive and demonstrative temper, and spontaneous outburst of feeling at Athens, so much more nearly approaching to the Homeric type of Greeks,—we must at the same time remark, that in reference to active and heroic efforts for the purpose of repairing past calamities and making head against preponderant odds, the Athenians were decidedly the better of the two. I have already recounted the prodigious and unexpected energy displayed by Athens, after the ruinous loss of her two armaments before Syracuse, when no one expected that she could have held out for six months: I am now about to recount the proceedings of Sparta, after the calamity at Leuktra,—a calamity great and serious indeed, yet in positive amount inferior to what had befallen the Athenians at Syracuse. The reader will find that, looking to the intensity of active effort in both cases, the comparison is all to the advantage of Athens; excusing at least, if not justifying, the boast of Perikles[396] in his memorable funeral harangue,—that his countrymen, without the rigorous drill of Spartans, were yet found noway inferior to Spartans in daring exertion, when the hour of actual trial arrived.
It was the first obligation of the ephors to provide for the safety of their defeated army in Bœotia; for which purpose they put in march nearly the whole remaining force of Sparta. Of the Lacedæmonian moræ, or military divisions (seemingly six in the aggregate), two or three had been sent with Kleombrotus; all the remainder were now despatched, even including elderly citizens up to near sixty years of age, and all who had been left behind in consequence of other public offices. Archidamus took the command (Agesilaus still continuing to be disabled), and employed himself in getting together the aid promised from Tegea,—from the villages representing the disintegrated Mantinea,—from Corinth, Sikyon, Phlius, and Achaia; all these places being still under the same oligarchies which had held them under Lacedæmonian patronage, and still adhering to Sparta. Triremes were equipped at Corinth, as a means of transporting the new army across to Kreusis, and thus joining the defeated troops at Leuktra; the port of Kreusis, the recent acquisition of Kleombrotus, being now found inestimable, as the only means of access into Bœotia.[397]
Meanwhile the defeated army still continued in its entrenched camp at Leuktra, where the Thebans were at first in no hurry to disturb it. Besides that this was a very arduous enterprise, even after the recent victory,—we must recollect the actual feeling of the Thebans themselves, upon whom their own victory had come by surprise, at a moment when they were animated more by despair than by hope. They were doubtless absorbed in the intoxicating triumph and exultation of the moment, with the embraces and felicitations of their families in Thebes, rescued from impending destruction by their valor. Like the Syracusans after their last great victory[398] over the Athenian fleet in the Great Harbor, they probably required an interval to give loose to their feelings of ecstasy, before they would resume action. Epaminondas and the other leaders, aware how much the value of Theban alliance was now enhanced, endeavored to obtain reinforcement from without, before they proceeded to follow up the blow. To Athens they sent a herald, crowned with wreaths of triumph, proclaiming their recent victory. They invited the Athenians to employ the present opportunity for taking full revenge on Sparta, by joining their hands with those of Thebes. But the sympathies of the Athenians were now rather hostile than friendly to Thebes, besides that they had sworn peace with Sparta, not a month before. The Senate, who were assembled in the acropolis when the herald arrived, heard his news with evident chagrin, and dismissed him without even a word of courtesy; while the unfortunate Platæans, who were doubtless waiting in the city in expectation of the victory of Kleombrotus, and of their own speedy reëstablishment, found themselves again struck down and doomed to indefinite exile.
To Jason of Pheræ in Thessaly, another Theban herald was sent for the same purpose, and very differently received. The despot sent back word that he would come forthwith by sea, and ordered triremes to be equipped for the purpose. But this was a mere deception; for at the same time, he collected the mercenaries and cavalry immediately near to him, and began his march by land. So rapid were his movements, that he forestalled all opposition,—though he had to traverse the territory of the Herakleots and Phokians, who were his bitter enemies,—and joined the Thebans safely in Bœotia.[399] But when the Theban leaders proposed that he should attack the Lacedæmonian camp in flank, from the high ground, while they would march straight up the hill and attack it in front,—Jason strongly dissuaded the enterprise as too perilous; recommending that they should permit the enemy’s departure under capitulation. “Be content (said he) with the great victory which you have already gained. Do not compromise it by attempting something yet more hazardous, against Lacedæmonians driven to despair in their camp. Recollect that a few days ago, you yourselves were in despair, and that your recent victory is the fruit of that very feeling. Remember that the gods take pleasure in bringing about these sudden changes of fortune.”[400] Having by such representations convinced the Thebans, he addressed a friendly message to the Lacedæmonians, reminding them of their dangerous position, as well as of the little trust to be reposed in their allies,—and offering himself as mediator to negotiate for their safe retreat. Their acquiescence was readily given; and at his instance, a truce was agreed to by both parties, assuring to the Lacedæmonians the liberty of quitting Bœotia. In spite of the agreement, however, the Lacedæmonian commander placed little faith either in the Thebans or in Jason, apprehending a fraud for the purpose of inducing him to quit the camp and of attacking him on the march. Accordingly, he issued public orders in the camp for every man to be ready for departure after the evening meal, and to march in the night to Kithæron, with a view of passing that mountain on the next morning. Having put the enemy on this false scent, he directed his real night-march by a different and not very easy way, first to Kreusis, next to Ægosthena in the Megarian territory.[401] The Thebans offered no opposition; nor is it at all probable that they intended any fraud, considering that Jason was here the guarantee, and that he had at least no motive to break his word.
It was at Ægosthena that the retreating Lacedæmonians met Archidamus, who had advanced to that point with the Laconian forces, and was awaiting the junction of his Peloponnesian allies. The purpose of his march being now completed, he advanced no farther. The armament was disbanded, and Lacedæmonians as well as allies returned home.[402]