The battle of Leuctra is significant in showing that the course of Grecian empire was taking a northward way. In its passage, Thebes was only a stepping-stone to Macedonia. Once out of the little peninsula it had thus far dwelt in, Grecian ambition was to find itself upon an unlimited field of conquest whence it would turn, not logically to the West, where Rome was young and inglorious, but to the East, with its ancient and rotting civilisation and its hoarded opulence.
For the present, however, it is enough to realise that Sparta has fallen never to lift her head again. Remembering all the better side of the Spartan life and the Spartan philosophy, one is disposed to feel a deep sense of regret. It seems to be a moment for elegy. But to certain historians who can see in Sparta at best only a stupid mountain of conservatism, and at worst a monster of hypocrisy, of cruelty and of inertia, it seems to be a time for rejoicing that a blot has been removed from the Grecian escutcheon. No one is more severe and no one more eloquent than Cox who says in his self-defence, “I have been charged with being over-severe to Sparta. I would gladly be convinced that I have been; but until I am so convinced, I cannot modify my words.” Then he launches forth into a glowing philippic from which we may quote a portion:
“So ended the fight which left Epaminondas the first general of his age, and so fell a power which had fully earned its title to stability, if grinding tyranny and law-defying oppressiveness could confer such a right. The Lycurgean discipline, which crushed all that imparted grace and beauty of life at Athens, would indeed have been worth little if it had failed to produce the semblance of an unconcern which treated the more generous and tender instincts of humanity as the worst of vices.
“Another act in the great drama had been thus played out; and the whole Hellenic world had at length learned that the promises of freedom made by Sparta had been from beginning to end a lie—a lie scantily veiled at first by the rhetoric of Brasidas, but put forth afterward in the nakedness of unblushing effrontery. Not a single pledge had she redeemed; not a single burden had been removed, not a single abuse redressed. She had hailed the downfall of Athens as the beginning of a golden age for Hellas, and in order to realise it she had aided and abetted her victorious generals in setting up everywhere societies of murderers. Her enemies were prostrate; and she trampled on them without a touch of commiseration. Her allies were too much overpowered by the consciousness of their inferiority really to dispute her will; and she refused to share her spoils with the partners of her robberies. She had put down the Athenian empire with the courts, which, at the least, offered to the free or the subject allies the means of redress for wrongs inflicted or received; and by way of improving matters she had, with gigantic cruelty, let loose upon them a crowd of rapacious and lustful tyrants against whom she would hear no complaint.
“In short the supremacy of Sparta had been from first to last the supremacy of high-handed violence and wanton tyranny. Nor could it have been anything else but what it was. Much has been said of the golden opportunities which the course of events offered to Sparta, and which she deliberately threw away, opportunities presented first in the unlimited freedom of action which followed the seizure of the Athenian fleet at Ægospotami, and again when the return of the Cyrean Greeks placed her at the head of a splendid army in her involuntary conflict with the Persian king. But in truth it is absurd to speak of opportunities of feasting on the loveliest of landscapes, to the man who has extinguished in himself all sense of beauty, of opportunities for generous action to the man whose whole life exhibits nothing but the working of unvarying and consistent selfishness. Whether after Ægospotami, or after the return of the Ten Thousand, it was impossible for Sparta to do anything towards establishing a real Panhellenic union, in other words, a real Greek nation, without reverting in greater or less degree to the works of Athens. To go back to any such system would be for the Spartans what the changing of his skin would be to the Ethiopian, or of his spots to the leopard.”
Before returning to the crescent glory of Epaminondas, it is necessary to pause to note the sudden phenomenon of a singular genius, Jason of Pheræ, who flares up and overawes Greece only to expire at once. He is a striking personage, and important as a forewarning flash of the irresistible storm rising in the North.[a]
JASON OF THESSALY
Intelligence of the fatal blow at Leuctra, carried to Lacedæmon, was borne with much real magnanimity, and with all that affectation of unconcern which the institutions of Lycurgus commanded. It happened to be the last day of the festival called the Naked Games; and the chorus of men was on the stage, before the assembled people, when the officer charged with the despatches arrived. The ephors were present, as their official duty required, and to them the despatches were delivered. Without interrupting the entertainment they communicated the names of the slain to their relations, with an added admonition, that the women should avoid that clamorous lamentation which was usual, and bear the calamity in silence. On the morrow all the relations of the slain appeared as usual in public, with a deportment of festivity and triumph, while the few kinsmen of the survivors, who showed themselves abroad, carefully marked in their appearance humiliation and dejection.
It was a large proportion of the best strength of the commonwealth that, after so great a loss in the battle, remained in a danger not in the moment to be calculated. Every exertion therefore was to be made to save it. Of six moras, into which for military purposes the Lacedæmonian people were divided, the men of four, within thirty years after boyhood (such was the term, meaning perhaps the age of about fourteen), had marched under Cleombrotus; those however being excepted who bore at the time any public office. The ephors now ordered the remaining two moras to march, together with those of the absent moras, to the fortieth year from boyhood, and no longer allowing exception for those in office. The command, Agesilaus being not yet sufficiently recovered to take it, was committed to his son Archidamus. Requisitions were at the same time hastened off for the assistance of the allies: and the Lacedæmonian interest, or the interest adverse to the pretensions and apprehended purposes of Thebes, prevailed so in Tegea, Mantinea, Phlius, Corinth, Sicyon, and throughout the Achæan towns, that from all those places the contingent of troops was forwarded with alacrity.
Meanwhile the leading Thebans, meaning to pay a compliment that might promote their interest in Athens, had hastened thither information of their splendid success. But the impression made by this communication was not favourable to their views: on the contrary, it showed that the jealousy, formerly entertained so generally among the Athenians towards Lacedæmon, was already transferred to Thebes. Thus the incessant quarrels among the Grecian republics, source indeed of lasting glory to some, brought however, with their decision, neither lasting power nor lasting quiet to any; but, proving ever fertile in new discord, had a constant tendency to weaken the body of the nation. Relief to Lacedæmon in its pressing danger came, not from its own exertion, not from the interest which all the Grecian republics had in preventing Thebes from acquiring that overbearing dominion with which in a Lacedæmon had oppressed them, but from a power newly risen, or revived, in a corner of the country whence, for centuries, Greece had not been accustomed to apprehend anything formidable.