[Illustration: PLATE LXV. THE HERMES OF PRAXITELES
dash for Peiræus, but was fortunately foiled. Another had played the same trick on Thebes, this time successfully, for he seized and garrisoned the citadel. His outrageous performance was approved at home, but it seems at last to have roused the sluggish spirit of the dwellers in the Bœotian marshes. There was a delightfully romantic conspiracy organised from Athens, and a body of Theban patriots liberated their city. Among the patriots was Pelopidas, a brave and skilful soldier, and his friend was Epaminondas, one of the greatest men in all history.
Two qualities, in addition to the ordinary human virtues of courage and wisdom, seem to distinguish Epaminondas: he showed originality even in the art of war, and he had the broad mental vision which we demand from statesmen but seldom find in Greeks. I do not see any proof that he possessed the full spirit of Panhellenism; he was emphatically a Theban first, whatever he might be afterwards. But he had, it seems, an eye for an international situation. It is the measure at once of his success and of his failure that the rise and fall of Thebes is exactly conterminous with the rise and death of Epaminondas.
Thebes and Athens had both suffered from the wanton aggression of Sparta. They now made common cause to avenge it, and at the battle of Leuctra (371) Sparta suffered defeat in a pitched land battle on a great scale for the first time in her history. The victory of Thebes was wholly due to the new tactics of Epaminondas. He had formed a Theban _corps d’élite_, composed, in a fashion strikingly characteristic of the Greek mind, of 150 pairs of lovers sworn to conquer or die together. Thus he pressed into his service the only romantic feeling which the Greeks understood, the relation between David and Jonathan or between Achilles and Patroclus. This Sacred Band formed the front of the left wing. Further, whereas the whole Spartan line was drawn up as usual with a uniform depth of twelve spears, Epaminondas made his left fifty deep and flung it forward in the attack. The extra weight of this deep wing broke the Spartan right. King Cleombrotus and a thousand Spartans were slain. The loss of men was serious for a little state like Sparta, but the loss in prestige was even worse. This, in Xenophon’s story, is how the news came to Sparta: “It chanced to be the last day of the Boys’ Gymnastic Festival, and the choir of men were therefore at home. When the Ephors heard of the disaster they were sorely grieved, as in my opinion was bound to be the case, but they did not send the men’s choir out or stop the games. They communicated the names of the fallen to their relatives, but they warned the women to bear their loss in silence and not to make lamentation. So next day you could see the families of the slain going about in public with cheerful, smiling faces, but as for those whose menfolk had been announced as living, they went about in gloom and shame.” So Lacedæmon set itself with dogged resolution to endure what the gods might send.