Epaminondas
Epaminondas was a prominent Theban general and statesman who played a crucial role in transforming the power dynamics of ancient Greece during the 4th century BCE. Born around 410 BCE into a modest yet distinguished family, he developed a reputation for intellect and military prowess, especially after leading Thebes to a major victory at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE, where he employed innovative tactics to defeat the once-invincible Spartan army. This triumph marked the decline of Spartan dominance and elevated Thebes as a principal power in Greece.
Throughout his career, Epaminondas championed the autonomy of allied city-states, contrasting with the oppressive practices of previous powers like Athens and Sparta. He was instrumental in liberating Messenia, establishing it as an independent state, and founding Megalópolis, a fortified city that further secured Theban interests against Sparta. Despite his successes, Epaminondas faced challenges in maintaining a cohesive political structure among the varied Greek city-states, which ultimately contributed to the fragility of his alliances.
His legacy is marked by military innovation and a vision for a more egalitarian Greek political landscape. Tragically, his life ended at the Battle of Mantinea in 362 BCE, where he was mortally wounded, leading to the disintegration of the gains made under his leadership. Epaminondas remains a pivotal figure in Greek history, celebrated for his strategic genius and commitment to the liberation of allied states.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Epaminondas
Theban general
- Born: c. 410 b.c.e.
- Birthplace: Thebes, Greece
- Died: 362 b.c.e.
- Place of death: Mantinea, Greece
The greatest military tactician of the classical Greek period, Epaminondas broke the hegemony of Sparta and made Thebes the most powerful state in Greece.
Early Life
Little is known of the early life of Epaminondas (ee-PAM-ih-nahn-dahs). His father, Polymnis, was from a distinguished yet impoverished Theban family, and the relative poverty of his youth may explain the simple lifestyle for which Epaminondas was later famous. The young man displayed an intellectual bent and formed a close attachment to the Pythagorean philosopher Lysis of Tarentum, who served as his primary tutor. Another close friend was Pelopidas, with whom he would eventually share the leadership of Thebes. While the ancient writers’ contrast between the rich, athletic, daring family man—Pelopidas—and the reflective, frugal bachelor—Epaminondas—is no doubt overdrawn, it may reflect something of their characters and relationship. If the story is true that the young Epaminondas saved the life of his wounded friend during battle in 385, then he was probably born about 410.
![The illustration of Epaminondas By Веселин Ђисаловић [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 88258725-77580.jpg](https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/ers/sp/embedded/88258725-77580.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNHX8kSepq84xNvgOLCmsE2epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS)
Epaminondas’s city-state, the home of the legendary Cadmus and Oedipus, was the largest of the dozen or so towns in Boeotia, a district in central Greece whose inhabitants shared a distinct dialect and ethnic identity. Because its central location so often made Boeotia the arena for battles between the major Greek city-states, Epaminondas referred to his land as “the dancing floor of Ares.” Although in the fifth century Thebes rose to considerable influence as head of a federation of Boeotian towns, the city remained a secondary power behind Athens and Sparta.
The Thebans sided with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 b.c.e.), which destroyed the Athenian Empire and made Sparta supreme in Greece, but they were quickly disillusioned by Sparta’s selfish settlement of the war. As Sparta aggressively exercised its hegemony and extended its area of control, Thebes led Athens and other resentful city-states against Sparta in the Corinthian War (395-386 b.c.e.). Sparta’s superior military capabilities gave it the upper hand in the war, however, and an accommodation with Artaxerxes II of Persia allowed Sparta to force its opponents to accept the “King’s Peace” on terms favorable to Sparta.
Thebes was the biggest victim of this settlement, which did not recognize the Boeotian confederacy. Thebans, among them the maturing Epaminondas, then had to watch as Sparta dismembered the federation and installed pro-Spartan oligarchies in the newly autonomous towns of Boeotia. The nadir of Theban fortunes came in 382, when a faction headed by Leontiades betrayed the city to a Spartan force. Backed by a Spartan garrison, Leontiades’ pro-Spartan oligarchy ruled the city for three years, and many anti-Spartan Thebans, including Pelopidas, went into exile. Perhaps because he was not yet politically active, Epaminondas remained in Thebes without suffering harm.
Life’s Work
When Pelopidas returned with other exiles in 379 to liberate the city, Epaminondas made his political debut in a decisive fashion. As the exiles entered the city at night to begin their revolt, Epaminondas came to their aid with a group of armed men whom he had recruited. The next day, he presented the exiles to the Theban assembly and rallied citizens to support the revolution. Following the liberation, the Thebans formed an alliance with Athens and, despite repeated Spartan invasions of Boeotia, gradually reconstituted the Boeotian federation on a democratic basis. By 373, citizens from practically all the Boeotian towns voted at Thebes in a common assembly and annually elected seven Boeotarchs who had wide powers as the primary administrative, diplomatic, and military officials of the confederacy. Epaminondas’s role in these developments is not clear, but it is likely that he honed his military skills in various operations with the federal army. By 371, his reputation was such that he was elected Boeotarch, a position he subsequently would hold almost every year.
As a member of the Boeotian delegation to the peace conference at Sparta in 371, Epaminondas faced a dilemma. If he acquiesced in the Spartan refusal to recognize the Boeotian League and signed the treaty for Thebes alone, the newly reconstructed federation would crumble, and Sparta would again be able to dominate the individual towns of Boeotia. If, on the other hand, he refused to sign except as representing all Boeotia, he would place Thebes in a precarious position: A Spartan army was already poised on the frontier of Boeotia, and Athens had deserted Thebes in favor of reconciliation with Sparta. Apparently Epaminondas wavered and at first signed the peace treaty for Thebes alone. Before the conference ended, however, he spoke out strongly against Spartan arrogance and infuriated King Agesilaus II of Sparta by asserting that Thebes would dissolve its confederacy when Agesilaus made independent the many Laconian towns dominated by Sparta. Agesilaus immediately excluded Thebes from the peace agreement, and Epaminondas hastened home to prepare for the impending Spartan attack.
At Leuctra in July, 371, Epaminondas stunned the Greek world when he led a smaller Boeotian force to victory over the heretofore invincible Spartan army. By his innovative use of an unequally weighted battle line in an oblique attack, Epaminondas overwhelmed the strongest part of the enemy formation, and his troops killed four hundred Spartans, among them the junior king Cleombrotus. This victory made Epaminondas famous throughout Greece and encouraged a number of Sparta’s southern allies to defect.
While some Boeotians were now content to consolidate the confederacy’s position in central Greece, others, including Epaminondas, successfully argued for a more aggressive policy toward Sparta. Consequently, Boeotia joined in alliance with those southern city-states that had defected from the Spartan alliance after Leuctra, and in the winter of 370 Epaminondas took the federal army south to aid these states against Spartan retaliation. This campaign was to be a short one in defense of allies, but, on discovering the extent of Sparta’s weakness, Epaminondas seized the opportunity to strike at Sparta itself.
When his fellow Boeotarchs objected that extending the campaign would be illegal, Epaminondas promised to take full responsibility and led the army in a daring invasion of Sparta’s home district of Laconia. Although he did not dare assault the city itself, he secured the defection of many Laconian towns around Sparta and ravaged a rich land that had not seen an invader in centuries. Worst of all for the future of Sparta, Epaminondas liberated Messenia, the rich agricultural district west of Sparta, where the bulk of Sparta’s huge slave population resided. He then organized the freed Messenians into an autonomous city-state and oversaw the construction of a marvelously fortified capital city. The freeing of Messenia impoverished Sparta and presented it with a hostile new neighbor.
By his victory at Leuctra and the invasion of Laconia, Epaminondas had broken Sparta’s hold over Greece. He then undertook to establish the hegemony of Thebes in its place. Some Thebans opposed this effort, but his enormous prestige usually allowed Epaminondas to pursue his goals as he saw fit. When a political rival brought him to trial for his illegal extension of the campaign against Sparta, Epaminondas made no defense and agreed to accept the death penalty—provided his tombstone bear a list of his accomplishments, which he proudly enumerated. On hearing this, the judges laughed the case out of court, and Pelopidas soon obtained the banishment of Epaminondas’s accuser.
The two friends shared the conduct of Boeotian foreign policy. While Pelopidas secured the northern frontier with his operations in Thessaly, Epaminondas devoted his attentions to the southern alliance. Twice he led invasions designed to force further defections from the Spartan league and strengthen the band of allies that hemmed in Sparta. One notable success of the second invasion was the founding of Megalópolis, a great fortified city in Arcadia that permanently blocked Spartan access to Messenia.
Epaminondas’s efforts reached their peak of success in 365, when Sparta’s most powerful traditional ally, Corinth, along with several of its neighbors, made peace with Thebes on terms that recognized the autonomy of Messenia. Athens and Sparta refused to accept Theban ascendancy, but the Persian king looked on Thebes as the preeminent state of Greece and subsidized the construction of a Boeotian fleet with which Epaminondas hoped to disrupt Athens’s revived naval league.
Within a year, however, the Theban position began to deteriorate. To be sure, Epaminondas was given warm receptions by three of Athens’s most important naval allies when he sailed with the new Boeotian fleet in 364. His expedition failed to defeat the Athenian naval league, however, and the Persians suspended their subsidy of the Boeotian fleet, which never sailed again. On returning home, Epaminondas learned that Pelopidas had met his death in battle in Thessaly. He also discovered that in his absence the Thebans had destroyed the Boeotian town of Orchomenus. Provoked by an oligarchic conspiracy and fed by an ancient rivalry, this act of vengeance engendered suspicion and criticism from abroad. Worst of all, Epaminondas had to reckon with serious dissension among his southern allies. Resentful of Theban preeminence, the Arcadians had formed an alliance with Athens and now waged a territorial war that led Elis, the westernmost member of the anti-Spartan alliance, to renew its tie with Sparta. Complicating matters further, Arcadian democrats struggled against the resurgent Arcadian oligarchs of Mantinea, who also reestablished links with Sparta.
To prevent the complete collapse of his anti-Spartan coalition, in June of 362 Epaminondas undertook his fourth invasion of southern Greece. Aware that the combined might of his opponents would be formidable, he sought to confront and destroy them one by one, before they could unite. Unfortunately, misinformation led him to abandon the ambush he had set for the Athenians near Corinth, and the treachery of a deserter prevented him from taking Sparta unguarded. Consequently, near Mantinea Epaminondas drew up his force for a conflict that would involve contingents from every major Greek city-state. Against the combined forces of Sparta, Athens, Mantinea, and their allies, he employed the same tactics that had brought him victory at Leuctra but on a far grander scale in this battle, which involved nearly fifty thousand men. Catching his enemy off guard, Epaminondas opened the battle with an effective attack of his excellent cavalry and then crushed the Spartan formation with an oblique strike by his massively overbalanced left wing.
Tragically, as his troops stood poised to pursue the broken enemy and complete a brilliant victory, Epaminondas himself fell, mortally wounded. At the news of their leader’s fall, the stunned Boeotians immediately abandoned the fight and allowed the beaten enemy to escape. When he was informed of the seriousness of his wound, Epaminondas reportedly advised the Thebans to make a speedy peace. The loss of Epaminondas completely nullified any gains that this well-fought battle brought and marked the end of the Theban ascendancy.
Significance
A brave and resourceful general, Epaminondas was without question the outstanding tactician of the Greek classical period. His masterful use of cavalry and his oblique, unbalanced battle formation won for him two great victories and transformed the Greek art of war. He successfully employed his military skills to break the oppressive hegemony of Sparta and to make Thebes the most powerful state in Greece. The victory at Leuctra, the liberation of Messenia, and the foundation of Megalópolis ensured that Sparta would never again dominate Greece.
To his credit, Epaminondas did not imitate the earlier imperial practices of Athens and Sparta: He respected the autonomy of his allies and refused to impose garrisons or levy tribute. Unfortunately, his attempt to rule Greece could not succeed without some institutional means of expressing consensus and resolving disputes among the many autonomous Greek city-states. A formal league headed by Thebes could have been a viable vehicle, but Epaminondas’s simple anti-Spartan alliance inevitably required repeated armed interventions of the kind that led to the conflict at Mantinea. If he failed to envision a new political order for Greece, his achievements were nevertheless substantial. They are well expressed in the funeral verses that the Thebans inscribed on his statue:
This came from my counsel:
Bibliography
Adcock, Frank E. The Greek and Macedonian Art of War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. This short volume provides an excellent brief introduction to Greek warfare, with appropriate references to Epaminondas.
Anderson, John K. Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. This work provides a thorough analysis of military developments during Epaminondas’s time. It includes plates and battle diagrams. See especially chapter 10 on the Battle of Leuctra, with a diagram and discussion of the sources.
Boardman, John, et al., eds. The Cambridge Ancient History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Chapters 2 through 4 of volume 6 provide a detailed treatment of Spartan, Athenian, and Theban developments during Epaminondas’s time.
Buckler, John. The Theban Hegemony, 371-362 B.C. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. This thorough work is the starting point for serious study of Epaminondas’s career. It provides excellent analysis of the political and constitutional questions and full treatment of the diplomatic and military developments. Includes an evaluation of the sources for Boeotian history in this period and a full bibliography of modern works.
Pausanias. Guide to Greece. Translated by Peter Levi. 2 vols. New York: Penguin, 1979. In book 9 this first century traveler preserves valuable details of Epaminondas’s life, probably largely derived from Plutarch’s lost biography.
Plutarch. “Pelopidas.” In Plutarch’s Lives, translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982-1990. This brief (fifty-page) biography describes the friendship of Pelopidas and Epaminondas and provides important details of Epaminondas’s early life and his role in the liberation of Thebes, as well as a description of the Battle of Leuctra.
Xenophon. A History of My Times. Translated by Rex Warner. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. In this work, the Athenian soldier-historian provides a contemporary narrative of Epaminondas’s life, the only such account to survive complete. Xenophon participated in many of the events he describes and provides many revealing details. Unfortunately, he is biased in favor of Sparta and suppresses many of Epaminondas’s accomplishments. Note especially the descriptions of the Battles of Leuctra and Mantinea.