He was the type of temperance and sobriety. He made it a rule never to assist at a festive banquet; and no Athenian could remember to have seen Pericles, since he stood at the head of the state, in the company of friends over the wine-cup. He was known to no man except as one serious and collected, full of grave thoughts and affairs. His whole life was devoted to the service of the state, and his power accompanied by so thorough a self-denial and so full a measure of labor that the multitude in its love of enjoyment could surely not regard the possession of that power as an enviable privilege. For him there existed only one road, which he was daily seen to take, the road leading from his house to the market-place and the council-hall, the seat of the government, where the current business of state was transacted.
EPAMINONDAS.
By ERNST CURTIUS.
[The greatest of the Theban generals and statesmen, and one of the greatest men of antiquity; born about 418 B.C., killed on the battle-field of Mantinea in the hour of victory, 362. He raised Thebes from a subordinate place to the leadership of Greece by his genius in arms and wisdom in council. Eminent as soldier, statesman, and orator, Epaminondas was a model of virtue in his private life, and was not only devoted to his native republic, but in the largest sense a Greek patriot. References: Grote’s “History of Greece,” Curtius’s “History of Greece,” Plutarch’s “Lives.”]
It would be difficult to find in the entire course of Greek history any two statesmen who, in spite of differences in character and outward conditions of life, resembled one another so greatly and were as men so truly the peers of one another as Pericles and Epaminondas. In the case of both these men the chief foundation of their authority was their lofty and varied mental culture; what secured to them their intellectual superiority was the love of knowledge which pervaded and ennobled the whole being of either. Epaminondas like Pericles directs his native city as the man in whom the civic community places supreme confidence, and whom it therefore re-elects from year to year as general. Like Pericles, Epaminondas left no successor behind him, and his death was also the close of an historical epoch.
Epaminondas stood alone from the first; and while Pericles with all his superiority yet stood essentially on the basis of Attic culture, Epaminondas, on the other hand, was, so to speak, a stranger in his native city. Nor was it ever his intention to be a Theban in the sense in which Pericles was an Athenian. The object of his life was rather to be a perfect Hellene, while his efforts as a statesman were likewise simply an endeavor to introduce his fellow-citizens to that true Hellenism which consisted in civic virtue and in love of wisdom.
In the very last hour of his life, when he was delighted by the preservation of his shield, he showed himself a genuine Hellene; thus again it was a genuinely Greek standpoint from which he viewed the war against Sparta and Athens as a competitive contest for the honor of the hegemony in Hellas, an honor which could only be justly won by mental and moral superiority. The conflict was inevitable; it had become a national duty, because the supremacy of Sparta had become a tyranny dishonorable to the Hellenic nation. After Epaminondas liberated the Greek cities from the Spartan yoke it became the object of his Bœotian patriotism to make his own native city worthy and capable of assuming the direction.
How far Epaminondas might have succeeded in securing a permanent hegemony[5] over Greek affairs to the Thebans who shall attempt to judge? He fell in the full vigor of his manhood on the battle-field where the states, which withstood his policy, had brought their last resources to bear. Of all statesmen, therefore, he is least to be judged by the actual results of his policy. His greatness lies in this—that from his childhood he incessantly endeavored to be to his fellow-citizens a model of Hellenic virtue. Chaste and unselfish he passed, ever true to himself, through a most active life, through all the temptations of the most unexampled success in war, through the whole series of trials and disasters.
Epaminondas was not merely the founder of a military organization. He equally proved the inventiveness of his mind in contriving to obtain for his country, which was wealthy neither by trade nor manufactures, pecuniary resources sufficient for maintaining a land-army and a war-navy commensurate with the needs of a great power. He made himself master of all the productive ideas of earlier state administrations; and in particular the Athenians naturally stood before his eyes as models and predecessors.
On the one hand, he turned to account for his native city the improvements made in arms and tactics, which were due to Xenophon, Chabrias, and Iphicrates; on the other, the example of the Athenians taught him that the question of the hegemony over Greece could only be settled by sea. Finally, Epaminondas, more than any other Greek statesman, followed in the footsteps of Periclean Athens in regarding the public fostering of art and science as a main duty of that state which desired to claim a position of primacy.
Personally he did his utmost to domesticate philosophy at Thebes, not only as intellectual discourse carried on in select circles, but as the power of higher knowledge which elevates and purifies the people. Public oratory found a home at Thebes, together with the free constitution; and not only did Epaminondas personally prove himself fully the equal of the foremost orators in Athens—of Callistratus in particular—in power of speech and in felicitous readiness of mind, but, as the embassy at Susa shows, his friends too learned in a surprisingly short time to assert the interests of Thebes by the side of the other states, which had long kept up foreign relations with vigor, skill, and dignity.