XLVI. WHEN THEBES WAS SUPREME
JOINT WORK OF EPAMINONDAS AND PELOPIDAS
The Thebans had every inducement to husband their strength and guard their commonwealth against civil divisions, for the number of their adversaries increased with their good fortune. If they could look back with pride on what had been accomplished, still their future was by no means secure. They had indeed baffled the unjustifiable designs of their enemies. The Spartans, who eighteen months before had cherished the hope of decimating the divided Thebans for the benefit of the god, were now reduced to complete impotence, while they were threatened by the Thebans with almost the same fate by which the latter had themselves been confronted; the foundation of a city which offered a safe refuge to all oppressed and outlawed inhabitants of Laconia, had inflicted a mortal wound on the ruling Dorian state; the annihilation of the Peloponnesian league had permanently broken the Spartan supremacy.
But the very rapidity with which the fetters had been shaken off had created many difficulties which the Thebans had to face when they came to reunite the dismembered limbs into a new whole. The hegemony of Sparta, like that of Athens, rested on the foundation of ancient popular tradition; each had its justification in the eminent qualities of the respective states, in the exclusive military training and bravery of the Spartans, in the cultivation and democratic judicial life of the Athenians; all the Greek commonwealth had been pledged to one or the other of these states for a shorter or longer period; consequently subordination to one of them was no disgrace to any town, since the ancestors of its inhabitants had already stood in a similar relation.
The position was quite different in the case of Thebes, which neither by her historical past, nor by the greatness and importance of her intellectual and moral progress and civil institutions, seemed justified and qualified for the assumption of so eminent a position. Much as the Peloponnesians admired the bravery, the discipline, and the excellent disposition of the Theban troops, their military reputation was too recent to allow of its measuring itself in the eyes of the Hellenes with the glory of Sparta’s arms and her military practice; and yet warlike courage and bodily dexterity were the only merits which the Thebans could bring forward to support their claim to supremacy in Hellas. They had neglected navigation, though the favourable situation of the country, with its extensive coast on both shores and the excellent roadsteads, especially at Aulis, offered many advantages; they had at all times shown a disinclination and contempt for commerce and industry, and were consequently often in distress for money; in intellectual and artistic progress, they had not only remained behind Athens and the Hellenes of Asia Minor, but the Dorian states of Sparta, Corinth, Sicyon, and Ægina had also developed a richer culture; the composition of lyrics and the art of playing on the flute were the only accomplishments in which the Bœotians had attained to any skill.
The sense of justice and humanity were little cultivated; savage and cruel in their disposition, they pursued their enemies and their rivals with bloodthirsty passion, so that on his second expedition into the Peloponnesus Epaminondas only saved a number of aristocratic fugitives from Bœotia from an agonising death by denying their origin. Beside this, the inclination of the Thebans to sensual pleasures and their delight in luxurious feasts and banquets, formed a striking contrast to Athenian simplicity and moderation, and to the stern and joyless lives of the Spartans.
It has been already remarked that Epaminondas was free from all these defects and vices and did all in his power to remove them; but he stood so far above his fellow-citizens that his influence was diminished by that very fact. Judging his countrymen by himself, and assuming in them the same virtue and morality, the same enthusiasm for the glory and greatness of their native land as he felt in his own great soul, he drew them into undertakings to which neither their strength nor their capacity was equal; he entered on courses which they, with their defective political training, could not pursue with safety. Consequently it has been justly said that with the corpse of Epaminondas the glory of Thebes was also carried to the grave.
When the period of his command in the field expired, Epaminondas returned home, where he was once more to experience the ingratitude of his fellow-citizens. Not only did the people, now again roused against him, pass him over in the election of the Bœotarchs; it is related that the deluded mob appointed him overseer of roads and canals (telearchus), but that by his conscientious administration he gave importance to this insignificant office. Alike in the highest and in the lowest position, this magnanimous man endeavoured to work for the good of his country; his soul was free from the petty human weaknesses which so often cling, like a dark shadow, to talent and worth. This was exhibited in another scene in the year which followed.
From his expedition in Thessaly he, to save Pelopidas, returned joyfully home too late to preserve the Theban state from a disgraceful act of bloodshed. In the interval, armed mobs, stirred up by passionate demagogues, had marched against Orchomenos, where an aristocratic conspiracy was said to have been discovered, had destroyed the detested city, murdered the nobles and chief citizens, and sold the rest into servitude, together with their wives and children. Thus the ancient and famous city of Orchomenos, once the wealthy seat of the Minyæ, disappeared from the number of Greek towns. “Had I been at home,” Epaminondas lamented, “this atrocity would never have been committed.”
At Susa, in spite of his refusal to bend the knee, Pelopidas had won such high favour with the king, by reason of the fame of his deeds and the recollection of the ancient brotherhood in arms so long subsisting between Thebes and Persia, that the conditions of peace which Artaxerxes declared to the envoys proved to be entirely in accordance with the ideas and interests of Thebes and her skilful representative.
But this award whose fulfilment, and with it the supremacy over Hellas, was entrusted to the Thebans, provoked indignation and resistance in the other states. At Athens, the envoy, Timagoras, was condemned to death for his intimacy with Pelopidas; at Sparta, exception was taken to the recognition of the rebellious Messenians; in Arcadia, the people resented the recognition of the Elean claims to suzerainty over the district of Triphylia, which had joined the Arcadian confederacy, and the deputy, Antiochus, famous as a pugilist and wrestler, vented his anger at home in ridicule of the Persians: “The king,” he said, “had bakers, cooks, cup-bearers, and door-keepers in large numbers, but in spite of a zealous search he had not been able to find men who should be able to stand against the Hellenes in a fight; abundance of money and wealth was a vain show; the celebrated golden plane tree could hardly give shade to a locust.”
[Sidenote: [368-365 B.C.]]
Such being the state of opinion, it is not surprising that the acceptance of the peace should have encountered insuperable difficulties. The ambassadors summoned to Thebes in the ensuing spring had refused to swear to it, and the Arcadian deputy, Lycomedes, even took exception to the place of assembly, by means of which the Thebans would have invested their town with their pre-eminence, and went away in anger. The endeavours to win the concurrence of the separate states were not more successful, so the general war resumed its course and with it sanguinary party strifes in every city, and flight and pursuit for the defeated. In vain Epaminondas, on his third Peloponnesian expedition, endeavoured to bring the principles of mildness and civil tolerance into effect in Achaia: the Theban commonwealth, stirred up by the Arcadian democrats, abolished his institutions and sent magistrates into the country, who countenanced the expulsion of the oligarchs and the erection of unrestricted popular governments, until the refugees assembled together, forcibly compelled their recall, and once more carried Achaia over to the Spartan alliance, whereupon the persecution assumed a different form.
In Sicyon, Euphron, a rich and influential citizen, supported by Arcadian and Argive auxiliaries, placed the new commonwealth under the protection of Thebes, and with the confiscated property of his expelled enemies he obtained mercenaries, with whose aid he made himself ruler of his native city in the capacity of demagogue and tyrant. By wiles and treachery, robberies and crimes, he maintained himself in the government for a long time until, having at last been overpowered and put to flight by an aristocratic army, he was slain in Thebes, whither some of his enemies had followed him, under the eyes of the council. The perpetrator of the deed managed to defend himself so skilfully that he got away unpunished; but the townspeople of Sicyon honoured Euphron, who had freed them from the yoke of the aristocrats, as the second founder of their city.
Thus throughout the Peloponnesus the most terrible party rage was the order of the day; communities and individuals, prompted by passion and revenge, perpetrated wild misdeeds and crimes. Isocrates, in his oration called Archidamus, thus paints the situation in the Peloponnesus:
“Every town has its adversaries about it and therefore we have devastation of the country, destruction of the towns, subversion of governments, disregard of laws. Men fear their enemies less than their own fellow-citizens. The rich would rather throw their property into the sea than give to the poor; on the other hand the poor desire nothing better than to rob the rich. The sacrifices are suspended; men slay each other at the altars. There are more exiles from a single city than formerly in the whole of Peloponnesus.”
The laws had no longer any general application, since Sparta’s ancient supremacy had collapsed and the pre-eminence of Thebes was not yet established; all common interests vanished, and in alliances and secessions nothing but the momentary advantage was kept in view. Even religious awe was extinguished in men’s minds; votive offerings and temple treasures were seized to pay hired troops. The greatest feats of arms were performed for no purpose; valour and military spirit were squandered in adventurous combats and enterprises. Yet in spite of this distracted state of affairs, Sparta could not recover her power and consideration: the want of a free citizenhood and the restoration of Messenia ceased to be spoken of. With the help of Syracusan mercenaries, whom the younger Dionysius had sent them, the generals did, indeed, succeed in bringing the town of Sellasia with the passes into Arcadia again under their power; but on the other hand they had to permit not only the Corinthians, but the Phliasians also, the most faithful of the allies of Sparta, who had executed many brave deeds and conducted so many expeditions against the Sicyonians and Argives, to conclude a separate peace with Thebes. They themselves refused to accede to it, notwithstanding the persuasions of their friends, because they could not make up their minds to the recognition of the independence of the Messenians, which was demanded.
[Sidenote: [368-367 B.C.]]
As Corinth, Phlius, Epidaurus, and other cities now allied themselves with Thebes, Arcadia drew up an offensive and defensive treaty with Athens, which Epaminondas, in his capacity of ambassador, vainly endeavoured to counteract by a speech against Callistratus before the national council of the Ten Thousand. But Lycomedes, the creator of this union, was not to reap the fruit of his labours. On his way home he met with a violent death at the hands of some Arcadian refugees. The dream of an Arcadian hegemony was buried with him. No other statesman had it in his power to lead that uncultivated, divided nation of soldiers and shepherds, strangers as they were to any sort of common action, to higher and patriotic aims. Petty border feuds again claimed the whole attention of the Arcadians, and the increasing estrangement between Mantinea and Tegea, and the jealousy of both in regard to Megalopolis, stood in the way of the strengthening and development of a united state. Soon disputes with Elis led to other complications fraught with consequences which necessitated a new military expedition on the part of the Thebans.
After the battle of Leuctra, the Eleans had again taken possession of the territory of Triphylia, which had once been wrested from them by the Spartans; but the inhabitants, dissatisfied with the rule of the Eleans, had turned to the Arcadians, and, appealing to the ancient connection between the races, had requested and obtained admission into the Arcadian confederacy. The suzerainty of Elis over Triphylia had indeed, as it seems, been recognised in the peace prescribed by Persia, but the latter’s dispositions received as little acceptance here as elsewhere; both sides were therefore prepared to vindicate their claims by force of arms.
[Sidenote: [365-364 B.C.]]
To strengthen their position the Eleans concluded an alliance with Sparta, and vacated the border town of Lasion on the western slope of Erymanthus in favour of a flock of oligarchical refugees from Arcadia. In this settlement the government of Megalopolis saw a hostile intention, for from thence the oligarchs had no difficulty in forming traitorous connections with those who thought with them, and they seized the occasion to visit the peaceful little country with a devastating war. They carried robbery and destruction up to the very capital, excited a sanguinary civil war between the popular party and the oligarchical families, and reduced the inhabitants to a state of despair. In vain the Eleans brought about an invasion of the friendly Spartans into the territory of Megalopolis; after an heroic struggle the Arcadians forced the Lacedæmonian king, Archidamus, to surrender the strong hill town of Cromnus, which he had occupied by a rapid movement, and forced him to a disastrous retreat during which a hundred Lacedæmonian citizens fell into the hands of the victors. And as it chanced that the time of the Olympic games was approaching, they took possession of the holy site and bestowed the office of judge of the contests on the Pisatans.
The Eleans, furious at this infringement of their rights, marched up with their collected forces, and on the sacred ground, before the eyes of those assembled for the festival, they delivered a sanguinary battle which was finally decided against them. The Eleans had to give place to the Arcadians and content themselves with omitting the festival from the series of Olympic years, on the grounds of its having been celebrated contrary to law and order. The confederate government of Arcadia laid hands on the temple treasure, and in spite of the protests of the Mantineans, they used it to defray the cost of the war and the pay of the national levies and epariti. This was the means of widening the schism and the difference of opinion which had for some time divided the Arcadian confederacy into two camps and which now developed into a breach destined to lead to serious consequences. The Mantineans, outnumbered in the federal government and national council, again turned to the Spartans, while the democrats of Tegea, who then had the upper hand in the guidance of united Arcadia, adhered to the alliance with Thebes.
THE END OF PELOPIDAS
[Sidenote: [364-357 B.C.]]
The Thebans had taken no part in these events in the Peloponnesus, beyond keeping provincial governors (harmosts) and garrisons in Tegea, Sicyon, and other towns, for the purpose of guarding their own interests and upholding the cause of democracy. The complications in Thessaly and the attempts to wrest the command of the sea from the Athenians claimed the whole energies of their statesmen. Soon after the retreat of Epaminondas and Pelopidas after the latter’s rescue, Alexander, the cruel tyrant of Pheræ, had renewed his plans of conquest in the mountain country, had subdued the cities of the Achæans, Phthiotæ, and Magnetes, and extended his military despotism over the whole country. Then the oppressed and threatened people turned once more for help to the Thebans, who now fitted out an army of seven thousand hoplites to take stern vengeance on the disturber of the peace. But on the day fixed for its departure, an eclipse of the sun occurred and spread so much terror among the superstitious people that the march had to be put off.
Pelopidas, the Bœotarch who had been selected to conduct the enterprise, was not deterred by the agitation, and determined to carry out the project by himself at the head of two hundred horsemen, in the conviction that on his appearance the Thessalian soldiers and volunteers would join him in crowds. And his expectation was not disappointed. Even at Pharsalus he found himself in command of such forces that he ventured on storming the line of hills called the “Dogs’ heads” (Cynoscephalæ), which Alexander held with a far superior army. The ranks of the enemy were already giving way, when Pelopidas, in the passion of victory and revenge, rushed impetuously on the flying tyrant, and, becoming separated from his own men, met his death at the spears of the bodyguard. Maddened by the fall of their brave leader, the Thebans and their companions in arms put renewed energy into the attack and won a complete victory. And as if the honour of this success belonged solely to the dead general, they piled the spoils and weapons of the slaughtered foes beside his corpse, as a monument of the victory, and abandoned themselves to the deepest grief. Many cut off their hair or their horses’ manes, many spent the day in their tents without eating or lighting a fire. And as the body was being conducted to Thebes, all the towns along the route manifested their sympathy by mourning celebrations, and in his own native city the great funeral solemnities bore witness to the deep love and honour of the Thebans for the fellow-citizen who had served them so well, who from the glorious days of the Liberation had been always included in the number of the Bœotarchs, whose name was associated with the most famous deeds and the proudest memories, and who had been no less eminent for his chivalrous and magnanimous character than for his heroic spirit and pure patriotism.
The whole army now took the field to avenge his death, and, in conjunction with the Thessalian allies, they soon reduced the tyrant to such straits that he sued for peace, which the victors with more magnanimity than foresight granted him. He had to abandon the towns he had occupied, to confine his dominion to Pheræ and the surrounding district, and to render military service to the Thebans; a compact which neither provided satisfactory security against the repetition of similar encroachments, nor secured a powerful alliance for the Thebans. As in the Peloponnesus, so now there prevailed in Thessaly a condition of distraction and dissolution which was eventually to prepare for the northern conqueror a way into the heart of Hellas.
For seven years longer Alexander continued his nefarious practices, henceforth turning his attention to piracy and the plunder of the islands and coast towns. In the general confusion his audacity went so far that he is said to have once surprised the Piræus in an unguarded hour and carried off a rich booty. Finally, at the instigation of his wife, Thebe, who on a former occasion had excited the imprisoned Pelopidas against her cruel husband, he was murdered by her brothers.
[Sidenote: [366-362 B.C.]]
The piratical expeditions with which Alexander afflicted the northern waters, were probably carried out with the knowledge and connivance of Thebes, for the purpose of annoying the Athenians. The latter, especially since their alliance with Sparta, had made the most eager efforts to re-establish their influence over the maritime states, though their means and forces were small and the mercenaries and peltasts who manned their ships little fitted to supply the place of the old citizen army. Iphicrates cruised in the northern waters for the space of three years, attempted to bring back the Greek cities in Thrace and Macedon to their old relation with Athens and made repeated attacks on Amphipolis, but without being able to win back this ancient colony; Timotheus brought Samos into subjection, and, with the help of the revolted Persian governor Ariobarzanes, acquired Sestos and Crithote on the Thracian Chersonesus, whereby the relations with Byzantium were restored, and also won a firm footing in Chalcidice and the Gulf of Thermæ by taking Potidæa and Torone, as well as Methone and Pella. These successes of Athens, though small in comparison with her former dominion over the sea and coasts, and insecure as they were in face of the impossibility of permanently providing the hired troops with pay and maintenance, nevertheless awakened the jealousy of Thebes.
The keen eye of Epaminondas did not fail to perceive that his native city could only attain to the hegemony of Greece if the dominion of the sea were snatched from the Athenians, and being as bold and enterprising as he was sagacious, he endeavoured to persuade his countrymen to build a fleet. Thebes must become a sea power, in order, as he declared before the people, “to place the Propylæa of the Athenian Acropolis under the superintendence of the Cadmea”; not that he wished to accustom the powerful national forces to the seductive life on the sea and thus weaken the heavy-armed militia; the old manner of warfare, which rested on custom, education, and tradition, was to continue to prevail; but for the foundation of a secure ascendency in Hellas a fleet was indispensable. And so influential was the voice of this great general, that in spite of the remonstrance of the popular orator Meneclidas, the Theban people immediately resolved on the building and equipment of a hundred triremes and the establishment of shipyards of their own.
He undertook the command of the fleet himself, and on his advent the islands of Chios and Rhodes and the important city of Byzantium were induced to fall away from Athens. It was the fatal destiny of Thebes and her patriotic leader, that her appearance had everywhere the effect of simply loosening such federal bonds as still existed and dissolving every force, but without enabling her to herself attain to the height of a great power. No foreign enemy could have found a means so well adapted to break up and enfeeble the Hellenic nation as was the disorganising and disintegrating policy of the Theban general.
THE BATTLE OF MANTINEA AND THE DEATH OF EPAMINONDAS
The Athenians, bitterly incensed against the Thebans by this attack on their maritime supremacy and by the occupation of the town of Oropus on the northeastern frontier, soon found an opportunity to give expression to their resentment by force of arms. In Arcadia the enmity of the supporters of a democratic state unity, with the Tegeans at their head, against the defenders of the ancient federative organisation on oligarchical principles under the standard of the Mantineans, had reached a high pitch of excitement. This was further aggravated when the Theban governor arrested a number of citizens from Mantinea who were of Laconian sympathies, and were, at Tegea, celebrating the peace recently concluded with Elis, and intended so it was said to take advantage of the opportunity for executing a stratagem which would place the city in the hands of the Spartans: frightened by the threatening attitude of their sympathisers, the governor again set them at liberty; but on complaint being made to Thebes, the aggrieved Arcadians were not granted the desired satisfaction for this breach of the peace, but on the contrary the release of the prisoners was disapproved. On this the Mantineans allied themselves with the Lacedæmonians, Athenians, Achæans, and Eleans and prepared for a struggle against the popular party in Tegea and Megalopolis, and against the Thebans who were approaching for the protection of the latter and the preservation of the frontier against Lacedæmon.
[Sidenote: [362 B.C.]]
In the spring of 362 Epaminondas and a considerable army, composed of allied Bœotians, Eubœans, Thessalians, etc., marched through Nemea without opposition to Tegea, where he collected around him the troops of the Arcadian, Argive, and Messenian allies, whilst the opposing side assembled its forces in Mantinea. When the Theban general learned that Agesilaus and the Lacedæmonian host were on the way to the meeting-place of their party, and had already reached the town of Pellana on the Arcadian and Laconian frontier, he hastily resolved to advance on Sparta by a night march, and seize the enemy’s capital, thus denuded of its defenders “like an empty nest.”
The plan would doubtless have succeeded, since only a small number of the citizens had remained behind, had not Agesilaus, hearing of the project from a deserter, despatched a messenger to his son Archidamus, with the command immediately to put the town in a state of defence, while he himself at once set out to return with the cavalry. Thus when Epaminondas approached the banks of the Eurotas, almost at the same time as Agesilaus, he found the town so well watched and guarded that, after a hotly contested battle, he was obliged to retreat with loss. It is true that he managed to penetrate to the market-place, but when he attempted to storm the upper parts of the town, he encountered an obstinate resistance. The inhabitants had torn down their houses and thrown up barricades to bar the approaches. Protected by these dispositions and filled with patriotic enthusiasm, the Spartan citizenhood under the guidance of the old king and his son performed prodigies of valour, and gave evidence, as Xenophon says, that no one can easily maintain his ground against despairing men. Even women and children did their part by hurling down stones, utensils, and missiles from the roofs. Isadas, the handsome son of Phœbidas, specially distinguished himself by his heroism and his bold courage. Disappointed in his expectation of surprising Sparta undefended, Epaminondas desisted from the attack, the more readily when he learned that the whole united army of the enemy had started from Mantinea and was hastening to the assistance of the beleaguered town.
He now formed a plan to make up for the failure of the undertaking against Sparta by seizing the town of Mantinea, now denuded of its troops, or at least to make spoil of the stores of grain and herds of cattle collected there. Deceiving the enemy by means of watchfires and a simulated attack, he led the army back to Tegea by a difficult night march. Here he accorded a brief rest to the wearied infantry, whilst the mounted troops proceeded towards Mantinea. But Epaminondas now learned that fate was against him. The Thebans had already advanced to within seven stadia [nearly a mile] of the town, when they saw the Athenian auxiliaries entering the gates from the opposite side. Hegesilaus, the leader of the Athenian cavalry, was assailed by the prayers of the Mantineans, in alarm for their property; and he at once marched against the enemy, to whom he gave battle under the walls of the town, in a sharp cavalry action, from which the Athenians eventually retired victorious. In this preliminary skirmish at Mantinea fell the brave Athenian leaders, Cephisodorus, and Gryllus, the son of Xenophon. Their memory continued to be held in honour by their fellow-citizens. Gryllus was represented by the painter Euphron in the act of slaying a Theban with his spear, and this circumstance, by a confusion of the previous encounter with the main battle, may have given rise to the story that Epaminondas was slain by Gryllus.
The whole forces of both sides now concentrated in the plain of Mantinea and Tegea, determined to settle the future destiny of Greece by a decisive battle. Epaminondas had pressing reasons for desiring this settlement. The two unsuccessful enterprises, with the strenuous and fruitless marches, were not calculated to enhance his reputation as a general; while a long delay would necessarily weaken the spirit of his soldiers, who adhered to him with such great devotion, and would undermine the prestige of Thebes. Moreover his followers were superior in number to those of the adversary. The size of his army is set down at thirty thousand heavy-armed troops and three thousand cavalry; the enemy’s force was smaller by ten thousand hoplites and one thousand mounted men. Faith in Epaminondas had inspired his soldiers with the greatest enthusiasm for the conflict; they eagerly polished their helmets and shields and sharpened their swords and lances, while the Arcadian club-men assumed the Theban ensign.
In the disposition and order of his line of battle, Epaminondas followed much the same plan which had been found to answer so well at Leuctra, only that in order to deceive and make sure of the foe, he caused the troops ranged for the conflict to make a feint of retreating towards the western heights; then, when the enemy, fancying that the encounter would be delayed, began to break up their order of battle, he suddenly made a rapid and vehement attack, so that at the first onset his left wing, where the Thebans and the bravest of the allies had their place, broke the enemy’s left, composed of the Spartans and Mantineans. Already the whole wing had begun to waver and plunge into a confused flight; when, at the very moment that he was about to win a complete victory, Epaminondas, pressing boldly forward, was struck in the breast by a spear thrown from the hostile ranks, and with such force that the shaft broke off and the iron remained fixed in the wound.
He was still living when he was carried out of the mêlée; but the fall of their leader shook the spirit and confidence of the troops, and produced such dismay that the advancing column stood still as if paralysed and did not take advantage of its victory. The right wing, composed of the cavalry and peltasts, was overthrown by the opposing Athenians, and thus the battle remained without any decisive issue, though the Thebans retained possession of the field and the Spartans were the first to seek the usual truce for the burial of the dead, a request always looked upon as a token of defeat. Both sides, however, set up memorials of victory. Epaminondas was sorely wounded and the physicians had declared to him that the withdrawal of the spear would result in his death. From a wooded height he watched the battle, covering the wound with his hand, till his shield, which had been lost in the press, was brought to him and he was informed of the victory of the Thebans. Then he said, “Now it is time to die.” He asked for his two brave colleagues, Daïphantus and Iolaïdas, and when he learned that they, too, had lost their lives in the battle he advised his fellow-citizens to make peace; and then with a quiet and serene countenance he drew the iron from his breast and delivered up his heroic spirit. His beloved Cephisodorus had fallen at his side and was buried by him on the field of battle. When the friends who stood round him lamented that he left no children, he is reported to have said jestingly, “Am I not leaving you two noble daughters--the battles of Leuctra and Mantinea?”[b]
In the last chapter of his Hellenics, Xenophon does tardy justice to the genius of Epaminondas, whom he did not even name in his account of Leuctra. In this splendid and Panhellenic struggle at Mantinea, Xenophon lost a son who died bravely and was honoured with a monument by the Mantineans. The father, himself a soldier, has left a less perishable monument in his history, the conclusion of which we quote as follows:[a]
XENOPHON’S ACCOUNT OF HOW EPAMINONDAS FOUGHT
Epaminondas now reflecting that he must quit Tegea in a few days--as the time allotted for the expedition would soon expire--and that, if he should leave those undefended to whom he came as an ally, they would be besieged and reduced by their enemies and he himself would suffer greatly in reputation--having been repulsed at Sparta with a numerous body of heavy-armed troops, by a handful of men; having been defeated in a cavalry engagement at Mantinea, and having been the cause, by his hostile expedition into the Peloponnesus, of the Lacedæmonians, Arcadians, Achæans, Eleans, and Athenians, forming a union--judged it, on these accounts, impossible for him to withdraw without fighting; for he thought that, if he should conquer, he should cause all his previous failures to be forgotten, and conceived that, if he should die, his death would be glorious in the endeavour to leave the sovereignty of the Peloponnesus to his country. That he should have reasoned thus, appears to me by no means surprising, for such are the reasonings of men ambitious of honour; but that he had so disciplined his army that they sank under no toil, either by night or day, shrank from no danger, and, though they had but scanty provisions, were yet eager to obey, seems to me far more wonderful. For when at last he gave them orders to prepare for battle, the cavalry, at his word, began eagerly to polish their helmets; the heavy-armed troops of the Arcadians marked the clubs on their shields as if they were Thebans, and all the men sharpened their spears and swords, and brightened their bucklers.
After he had led them out thus prepared, it is well to consider how he acted. First of all, as was to be expected, he drew up his forces, and in doing so appeared to give manifest indications that he was preparing for a battle. When his army however was drawn up as he wished, he did not lead it the shortest way towards the enemy, but conducted it towards the mountains on the west and over against Tegea--so as to produce a notion in the enemy that he would not fight that day; for when he came near the hills, after his main body was drawn out to its full extent, he ordered his men to file their arms at the foot of the heights, so that he appeared to be encamping. By acting in this manner, he slackened the determination for engaging which was in the hearts of most of the enemy, and caused them to quit their posts on the field. But when he had brought up to the front the companies which on the march had been in the wings, and had made the part in which he was posted strong and in the shape of a wedge, he immediately gave orders for his troops to resume their arms, and began to advance, while they followed him. As for the enemy, when they saw the Thebans advancing, contrary to what they had expected, not one of them could remain quiet, but some ran to their posts, some formed themselves in line, others bridled their horses, others put on their breastplates; yet all were more like men going to suffer some harm than to inflict any on others.
Epaminondas led on his army like a ship of war with its beak directed against the enemy, expecting that wherever he assailed and cut through their ranks he would spread disaster among their whole force; for he was prepared to settle the contest with the strongest part of his troops; the weaker he had removed to a distance, knowing that if they were defeated they would cause dismay among his own men and confidence in the enemy. The enemy, on their part, had drawn up their cavalry like a body of heavy-armed infantry, of a close depth, without any foot to support them; but Epaminondas, on the contrary, had formed of his cavalry a strong wedge-like body, and had posted companies of foot to support them, judging that when he had broken through the cavalry of the enemy, he would have defeated their whole force, since it is hard to find men that will stand when they see some of their own party in flight; and that the Athenians might not send succour from their left wing to the part of the enemy nearest them, he posted over against them, upon some high grounds, parties of horse and heavy-armed foot, wishing to inspire them with the apprehension that if they stirred to aid others his own troops would attack them in the rear.
Such was the mode in which he commenced the engagement; nor was he deceived in his expectations; for, being successful in the part on which he made his attack, he forced the whole body of the enemy to take to flight. But when he himself fell, those who survived him could make no efficient use of their victory; for though the main body of the enemy fled before them, his heavy-armed troops killed none of them, nor even advanced beyond the spot where the charge took place; and though the cavalry also retreated, his own cavalry did not pursue, or make any slaughter either of horse or foot, but, like men who had been conquered, slipped away in trepidation amidst their fleeing adversaries. The other parties of foot, indeed, and the peltasts, who had shared in the success of the cavalry, advanced up to the enemy’s left wing, as if masters of the field, but there the greater part of them were put to the sword by the Athenians.
When the conflict was ended, the result of it was quite contrary to what all men had expected that it would be; for as almost the whole of Greece was assembled on the occasion, and arrayed in the field, there was no one who did not suppose that, if a battle took place, one side would conquer and be masters, and the other be conquered and become subjects; but the divine power so ordered the event, that both parties erected trophies as being victorious, neither side hindering the other in the erection; both parties, as conquerors, restored the dead under a truce, and both parties, as defeated, received them under truce; and neither party, though each asserted the victory to be its own, was seen to gain any more, either in land, or towns, or authority, than it possessed before the battle took place. Indeed there was still greater confusion and disturbance in Greece after the conflict than there had been before it.[c]
GROTE’S ESTIMATE OF EPAMINONDAS
Scarcely any character in Grecian history has been judged with so much unanimity as Epaminondas. He has obtained a meed of admiration--from all, sincere and hearty; from some, enthusiastic. Cicero pronounces him to be the first man of Greece. The judgment of Polybius, though not summed up so emphatically in a single epithet, is delivered in a manner hardly less significant and laudatory. Nor was it merely historians or critics who formed this judgment. The best men of action, combining the soldier and the patriot, such as Timoleon and Philopœmen, set before them Epaminondas as their model to copy. The remark has been often made, and suggests itself whenever we speak of Epaminondas, though its full force will be felt only when we come to follow the subsequent history--that with him the dignity and commanding influence of Thebes both began and ended. His period of active political life comprehends sixteen years, from the resurrection of Thebes into a free community, by the expulsion of the Lacedæmonian harmost and garrison, and the subversion of the ruling oligarchy--to the fatal day of Mantinea, 379-362 B.C. His prominent and unparalleled ascendency belongs to the last eight years, from the victory of Leuctra, 371 B.C. Throughout this whole period, both all that we know and all that we can reasonably divine, fully bear out the judgment of Polybius and Cicero, who had the means of knowing much more. And this too, let it be observed, though Epaminondas is tried by a severe canon; for the chief contemporary witness remaining is one decidedly hostile. Even the philo-Laconian Xenophon finds neither misdeeds nor omissions to reveal in the capital enemy of Sparta--mentions him only to record what is honourable, and manifests the perverting bias mainly by suppressing or slurring over his triumphs. The man whose eloquence bearded Agesilaus at the congress immediately preceding the battle of Leuctra--who in that battle stripped Sparta of her glory, and transferred the wreath to Thebes, who a few months afterwards, not only ravaged all the virgin territory of Laconia, but cut off the best half of it for the restitution of independent Messene, and erected the hostile Arcadian community of Megalopolis on its frontier--the author of these fatal disasters inspires in Xenophon such intolerable chagrin and antipathy, that in the first two he keeps back the name, and in the third, suppresses the thing done. But in the last campaign, preceding the battle of Mantinea, whereby Sparta incurred no positive loss, and where the death of Epaminondas softened every predisposition against him, there was no such violent pressure upon the fidelity of the historian. Accordingly, the concluding chapter of Xenophon’s Hellenica contains a panegyric, ample and unqualified, upon the military merits of the Theban general; upon his daring enterprise, his comprehensive foresight, his care to avoid unnecessary exposure of soldiers, his excellent discipline, his well-combined tactics, his fertility of aggressive resource in striking at the weak points of the enemy, who content themselves with following and parrying his blows (to use a simile of Demosthenes) like an unskilful pugilist, and only succeed in doing so by signal aid from accident.
[Sidenote: [379-362 B.C.]]
The effort of strategic genius--then for the first time devised and applied, of bringing an irresistible force of attack to bear on one point of the hostile line, while the rest of his army was kept comparatively back until the action had been thus decided--is clearly noted by Xenophon, together with its triumphant effect, at the battle of Mantinea; though the very same combination on the field of Leuctra is slurred over in his description, as if it were so commonplace as not to require any mention of the chief with whom it originated. Compare Epaminondas with Agesilaus--how great is the superiority of the first--even in the narrative of Xenophon, the earnest panegyrist of the other! How manifestly are we made to see that nothing except the fatal spear-wound at Mantinea prevented him from reaping the fruit of a series of admirable arrangements, and from becoming arbiter of Peloponnesus, including Sparta herself!
The military merits alone of Epaminondas, had they merely belonged to a general of mercenaries, combined with nothing praiseworthy in other ways, would have stamped him as a man of high and original genius, above every other Greek, antecedent or contemporary. But it is the peculiar excellence of this great man that we are not compelled to borrow from one side of his character in order to compensate deficiencies in another. His splendid military capacity was never prostituted to personal ends--neither to avarice, nor ambition, nor overweening vanity. Poor at the beginning of his life, he left at the end of it not enough to pay his funeral expenses; having despised the many opportunities for enrichment which his position afforded, as well as the richest offers from foreigners. Of ambition he had so little, by natural temperament, that his friends accused him of torpor. But as soon as the perilous exposure of Thebes required it, he displayed as much energy in her defence as the most ambitious of her citizens, without any of that captious exigence, frequent in ambitious men, as to the amount of glorification or deference due to him from his countrymen. And his personal vanity was so faintly kindled, even after the prodigious success at Leuctra, that we find him serving in Thessaly as a private hoplite in the ranks, and in the city as an ædile or inferior street magistrate, under the title of Telearchus. An illustrious specimen of that capacity and good-will, both to command and to be commanded, which Aristotle pronounces to form in their combination the characteristic feature of the worthy citizen. He once incurred the displeasure of his fellow-citizens for his wise and moderate policy in Achaia, which they were ill-judged enough to reverse. We cannot doubt also that he was frequently attacked by political censors and enemies--the condition of eminence in every free state; but neither of these causes ruffled the dignified calmness of his political course. As he never courted popularity by unworthy arts, so he bore unpopularity without murmurs, and without any angry renunciation of patriotic duty.
The mildness of his antipathies against political opponents at home was undeviating; and, what is even more remarkable, amidst the precedents and practice of the Grecian world, his hostility against foreign enemies, Bœotian dissentients, and Theban exiles, was uniformly free from reactionary vengeance. Sufficient proofs have been adduced in the preceding pages of this rare union of attributes in the same individual--of lofty disinterestedness, not merely as to corrupt gains, but as to the more seductive irritabilities of ambition, combined with a just measure of attachment towards partisans, and unparalleled gentleness towards enemies. His friendship with Pelopidas was never disturbed during the fifteen years of their joint political career--an absence of jealousy signal and creditable to both, though most creditable to Pelopidas, the richer, as well as the inferior man of the two. To both, and to the harmonious co-operation of both, Thebes owed her short-lived splendour and ascendency. Yet when we compare the one with the other, we not only miss in Pelopidas the transcendent strategic genius and conspicuous eloquence, but even the constant vigilance and prudence, which never deserted his friend. If Pelopidas had had Epaminondas as his companion in Thessaly, he would hardly have trusted himself to the good faith, nor tasted the dungeon, of the Pheræan Alexander; nor would he have rushed forward to certain destruction, in a transport of frenzy, at the view of that hated tyrant in the subsequent battle.
In eloquence, Epaminondas would doubtless have found superiors at Athens; but at Thebes, he had neither equal, nor predecessor, nor successor. Under the new phase into which Thebes passed by the expulsion of the Lacedæmonians out of the Cadmea, such a gift was second in importance only to the great strategic qualities; while the combination of both elevated their possessor into the envoy, the counsellor, the debater, of his country, as well as her minister at war and commander-in-chief. The shame of acknowledging Thebes as leading state in Greece, embodied in the current phrases about Bœotian stupidity, would be sensibly mitigated, when her representative in an assembled congress spoke with the flowing abundance of the Homeric Ulysses, instead of the loud, brief, and hurried bluster of Menelaus. The possession of such eloquence, amidst the uninspiring atmosphere of Thebes, implied far greater mental force than a similar accomplishment would have betokened at Athens. In Epaminondas, it was steadily associated with thought and action--that triple combination of thinking, speaking, and acting which Isocrates and other Athenian sophists set before their hearers as the stock and qualification for meritorious civic life. To the bodily training and soldier-like practice, common to all Thebans, Epaminondas added an ardent intellectual impulse and a range of discussion with the philosophical men around, peculiar to himself.
He was not floated into public life by the accident of birth or wealth, nor hoisted and propped up by oligarchical clubs, nor even determined to it originally by any spontaneous ambition of his own. But the great revolution of 379 B.C., which expelled from Thebes both the Lacedæmonian garrison and the local oligarchy who ruled by its aid, forced him forward by the strongest obligations both of duty and interest; since nothing but an energetic defence could rescue both him and every other free Theban from slavery. It was by the like necessity that the American Revolution, and the first French Revolution, thrust into the front rank the most instructed and capable men of the country, whether ambitious by temperament or not. As the pressure of the time impelled Epaminondas forward, so it also disposed his countrymen to look out for a competent leader wherever he was to be found; and in no other living man could they obtain the same union of the soldier, the general, the orator, and the patriot. Looking through all Grecian history, it is only in Pericles that we find the like many-sided excellence; for though much inferior to Epaminondas as a general, Pericles must be held superior to him as a statesman. But it is alike true of both, and their mark tends much to illustrate the sources of Grecian excellence--that neither sprang exclusively from the school of practice and experience. They both brought to that school minds exercised in the conversation of the most instructed philosophers and sophists accessible to them--trained to varied intellectual combinations and to a larger range of subjects than those that came before the public assembly, familiarised with reasonings which the scrupulous piety of Nicias forswore, and which the devoted military patriotism of Pelopidas disdained.
On one point, the policy recommended by Epaminondas to his countrymen appears of questionable wisdom--his advice to compete with Athens for transmarine and naval power. One cannot recognise in this advice the same accurate estimate of permanent causes--the same long-sighted view of the conditions of strength to Thebes and of weakness to her enemies, which dictated the foundation of Messene and Megalopolis. These two towns, when once founded, took such firm root, that Sparta could not persuade even her own allies to aid in effacing them; a clear proof of the sound reasoning on which their founder had proceeded.
What Epaminondas would have done--whether he would have followed out maxims equally prudent and penetrating, if he had survived the victory of Mantinea--is a point which we cannot pretend to divine. He would have found himself then on a pinnacle of glory, and invested with a plenitude of power, such as no Greek ever held without abusing. But all that we know of Epaminondas justifies the conjecture that he would have been found equal, more than any other Greek, even to this great trial; and that his untimely death shut him out from a future not less honourable to himself, than beneficial to Thebes and to Greece generally.[d]
CONFUSION FOLLOWING EPAMINONDAS’ FALL
[Sidenote: [362-361 B.C.]]
So died Epaminondas--the ablest commander, the noblest citizen, the most stainless character, even if not the greatest statesman, of the Hellenic world. The combination of military ability with civic virtue, of physical prowess with intellectual culture and eloquence, of manly daring with humane feeling, of practical capacity with ideal aspirations, of merit with modesty, of glory with humility, of power with simplicity, has won for him the admiration of succeeding generations as of the whole ancient world. He fell a victim to a deplorable fratricidal war; and cities and citizens, instead of weeping and beating their breasts in penitence over the corpse of the high-hearted man, disputed jealously among themselves the honour of having transfixed his breast with the fatal thrust. But so great was his influence even in death that soon afterwards all the Greek states followed the counsel he had given, and concluded a peace based upon the recognition of the status quo. They all needed time for coming to fresh resolutions and collecting fresh forces. Sparta alone held aloof, refusing with obstinate consistency to acknowledge the political independence of Messenia.
Agesilaus did not long survive his opponent. A year after the battle of Mantinea he marched to Egypt with an army of mercenaries, accompanied by thirty Spartan citizens, to fight in the service of the rebellious kings Tachus and Nectanebo against the Persians, out of revenge for Messenia’s having been declared independent by Artaxerxes. But he obtained little glory. Instead of being appointed commander-in-chief of the fighting forces, as he had hoped, he had to be contented with the position of a captain of mercenaries. The Egyptians were very much disappointed in their expectations to behold, instead of a knightly king, crowned with glory, an old man of eighty years, infirm, of small stature and poorly dressed, who, devoid of oriental royal dignity and the pomp and ceremonious state of oriental sovereigns, sat down on the grassy ground with his followers, to partake of a meagre repast. After some time he took his departure from the country of the Nile to return by way of Cyrene to his own country, having been royally rewarded by Nectanebo, but without having met the Persians in combat. He died however en route. His mourning companions took the corpse of Agesilaus to bury it in Sparta, the city of his fathers, whose highest power and decline he had witnessed. As regards generalship and magnanimity of disposition, the Spartan king stood far below the Theban citizen, but he equalled him in simplicity of habits and manner of living, in voluntary poverty, in disdain of earthly possessions, and in incorruptible rectitude and ardent patriotism. These were the last bright stars in free Hellas; but while Epaminondas shone forth to the following generations as the model of a high-hearted patriotic general, Agesilaus pointed out to his countrymen the adventurous path of foreign travel and accustomed them to the dishonourable vocation of a mercenary, to which henceforth Sparta’s rude citizens abandoned themselves more and more.
[Sidenote: [361-360 B.C.]]
The Athenians made better use of their opportunities. As long as Epaminondas lived, their enterprises on the sea were without success; so that several of their generals were condemned to death (as Leosthenes and Callisthenes), or a mulct was imposed upon them (as on Cephisodotus) because they had caused losses to the state on account of their negligence and their unsuccessful undertakings. But after the battle of Mantinea they not only succeeded in driving the Thebans completely away from the sea, but they were again successful in uniting the greatest part of the islands of the Ægean Sea (Eubœa, Chios, Samos, Rhodes, etc.) under their sea-hegemony; in strengthening their sovereignty in Chalcidice and Macedonia and on the Gulf of Thermæ; and, after the murder of the Thracian sovereign Cotys by two youths who had been brought up in Athens, in again bringing the Thracian Chersonesus under their power and opening the sea-route to the fertile coast of the Pontus by way of the Hellespont. As the murderers of a tyrant, the young men of Ænus, who executed this “divine” deed on the person of Cotys, were honoured by the Athenians with the rights of citizens and golden wreaths. But with the good fortune of the Athenians there also returned the old abuses. The dissolute mercenaries, poorly paid, committed acts of extortion and oppression; the sovereign assembly often violated the treaties based on equality of rights, imposed taxes and aids upon the allied cities, divided territories among Attic colonists (cleruchs) and forgot the principles of clemency and moderation which had won so many willing members to their second maritime confederation. Besides, there was a scarcity of able leaders to replace the aging generals, such as Iphicrates, Chabrias, and Timotheus, and there was also a waning of patriotic feeling. Having their own advantage more in mind than the greatness of their city, the generals tried to acquire independent possessions and dominions, an effort which was assisted by the increasing number of the mercenaries, who were taking the place of all the citizen levies. These conditions, combined with the secret intrigues of the Thebans, caused new dissatisfaction and brought about the deplorable social war, which led to the dissolution of the second Athenian maritime confederation at a time when the latter already comprised about seventy cities, as the disasters of the last years of the Peloponnesian War were the cause of the dissolution of the first.[b]
Great changes have taken place in the history of Greece since we left the Athenian soldiers and sailors rotting in the mines of Sicily. A greater change is about to take place. Of this it is only necessary to say the word “Macedonia.” Before we trace the rise of these northerners it will be well to glance briefly at the busy circumstances of Sicily.[a]
XLVII. THE TYRANTS IN SICILY
[Sidenote: [410-405 B.C.]]
The absence of federation which, in spite of the military superiority of the Greeks, had enabled the king of Persia to become master of Asiatic Greece and arbitrator of European Greece, was about to deliver the whole of Sicily into the hands of the Carthaginians. Segesta, constantly at war with Selinus, called them to its assistance in 410 B.C., as some years previously it had called the Athenians. Carthage was then at the height of its power; it raised an army of one hundred thousand mercenaries, and sent them into Sicily under the command of Hannibal, grandson of that Hamilcar who had been killed in the battle of Himera seventy years before this time. He began by taking possession of Segesta in the name of Carthage, then besieged Selinus, which was taken in 409, after a heroic resistance. All the inhabitants, men and women, old and young, were slain. The town was razed to the ground; the scattered ruins of its temples are still to be seen. Himera was also entirely destroyed. The greater number of the inhabitants had succeeded in escaping before the last assault; about three thousand were left, whom Hannibal put to death by torture in the very spot where his grandfather had fallen.
Two years later he again came to Sicily with Himilco, at the head of 180,000 mercenaries, Libyans, Numidians, Iberians, and Campanians, and laid siege to the large commercial town of Agrigentum, the most important in Sicily, after Syracuse. He caused the tombs to be destroyed for the construction of an embankment; the plague which spread through his army, and of which he himself died, was considered a vengeance of the gods. His colleague, Himilco, offered up children to Moloch as an expiatory sacrifice. The Syracusans, who had come to the help of Agrigentum, completely defeated a body of forty thousand Iberians and Campanians. But the town began to suffer from famine; a large convoy of corn was seized by the Carthaginians. The inhabitants of Agrigentum, spoilt by luxury and incapable of supporting the fatigues of military life, had taken mercenaries into their service; these latter betrayed them and passed over to the enemy. At the end of a siege of six months, most of the inhabitants left the town by night and escaped to Gela. Himilco immediately entered the town and gave it up to pillage, massacred all the inhabitants who were left, and destroyed the buildings which had been erected by the Carthaginian prisoners after the battle of Himera. Magnificent ruins still bear witness to the splendour of Agrigentum, the richest of the Greek cities and one of the most beautiful in the world (406).
Since her victory over the Athenian armies and fleets, Syracuse had become the capital of Sicily. A new code of laws, drawn up by Diocles, had made her constitution still more democratic; magistrates were chosen by vote. Little is known of this legislation, which is said to have been adopted by other Siceliot towns. The chief of the aristocratic party, Hermocrates, who had distinguished himself in the war against the Athenians, commanded the fleet sent by Syracuse to the help of the Peloponnesians and was defeated with them at Cyzicus. The Syracusans withdrew from a war in which they had nothing to gain and exiled Hermocrates. He tried to return to his country by armed force and perished in the attempt. Among those who had fought with him was a scribe named Dionysius, who was wounded and left for dead; this circumstance enabled him to escape the sentence of exile which was pronounced on the followers of Hermocrates.
The invasion of the Carthaginians was a cause of fresh dissensions in Syracuse; the destruction of Agrigentum awoke alarm. In the assembly of the people Dionysius accused the generals of having caused, either through incapacity or treason, the misfortunes of Sicily. He was condemned to a fine for factiousness; but a rich townsman, the historian Philistus, promised to pay all the fines laid upon him. He continued to stir up the people and persuaded them to choose a new government, of which he himself was a member. The only thing still wanting was to get rid of his colleagues. “They also are betraying the republic,” he said, “and have sold themselves to the Carthaginians.” He recalled the exiles in order to make partisans of them. He was sent to Gela to rescue the people from the oppression of the rich; he condemned certain of the nobles to death and distributed their wealth among his soldiers. On his return to Syracuse he saw the people coming out of the theatre: “It is thus that you are deceived,” he exclaimed, “they keep you amused by entertainments while the soldiers are without the necessaries of life and the enemy is at our gates. Take back the power you have confided to me; I will not share it with traitors.” His friends said: “What honesty! He is the only upright man!” And he was made generalissimo of the troops, whose pay he immediately doubled. Then, as Pisistratus and so many others had done, he declared that there were plots to kill him because he loved the people. A bodyguard was given him of six hundred men; these he increased to a thousand and chose them from among the poorest of the people. He enlisted mercenaries, set the slaves free, filled all the government appointments with men who were devoted to his fortune, and settled in the isle of Ortygia where were situated the arsenals, and which commanded the great port (405).
[Sidenote: [405-368 B.C.]]
Now that he had become tyrant through the folly of the people, Dionysius fought the Carthaginians with no more success than the generals whom he had accused of treason. He was able to save neither Gela nor Camarina, and the entire population of these two towns sought refuge in Syracuse. Displeased by these defeats, the Syracusans tried, but all too late, to rise against him. Supported by his mercenaries, he stifled the rebellion, caused some of his enemies to be put to death, drove the others from the town, and maintained his power by fear. A plague stopped the advance of the Carthaginians and induced them to make peace, but they kept all their conquests, that is to say, more than two-thirds of Sicily, in exchange for a clause of the treaty recognising Dionysius as tyrant of Syracuse. He fortified the isle of Ortygia, of which he made a citadel, after driving out the inhabitants so as to make room for his mercenaries. Then he gave the best part of the Syracusan territory to his friends and to the magistrates; the rest was distributed in equal shares between the citizens, the freed slaves and resident foreigners. This alteration of property caused a rebellion; he shut himself up in his fortress of Ortygia and his mercenaries re-established his authority. Some days later, while the inhabitants were in the fields, busy gathering in the harvest, he had all the houses searched and all weapons removed. When he believed himself absolute master of Syracuse, he wished to extend his rule over the whole of the eastern coast of Sicily. He seized Ætna and Enna, destroyed Naxos and Catana which had been delivered to him by traitors, and sold their inhabitants in order to give their land to the Sicels of the surrounding country and to his Campanian mercenaries. The terrified Leontines opened their gates to him, and were carried to Syracuse. The Rhegians, uneasy at his advance, sent an army into Sicily; but, abandoned by the Messenians, who had at first joined them, they made peace with Dionysius and returned to Italy.
In the meanwhile Dionysius was preparing to revenge himself on the Carthaginians. Syracuse was surrounded by ramparts which made it impregnable. Workmen from all the neighbouring countries, attracted by lure of high wages, were employed to make large supplies of arms and implements of war; it was at this time that the catapult was invented to cast stones and arrows. Numerous warships were built, some of them on a new model with four or five benches of rowers. When these preparations were completed, and mercenaries collected from all sides, Dionysius declared war on the Carthaginians, and, at the head of an army of eighty thousand men, successively re-captured all the towns which they had conquered seven years previously, Gela, Camarina, Agrigentum, Selinus, and Himera, besieged their principal fortress in the isle of Motya on the western point of Sicily, and took it by means of his implements of war (397). But the following year, Himilco landed at Panormus with one hundred thousand men, regained Motya and all the conquests of Dionysius, destroyed Messana, and after a naval victory in sight of Catana, besieged Syracuse by land and sea. Dionysius was obliged to restore to the citizens the arms which he had taken from them, and soon signs of rebellion were again perceived. But once more plague broke out in the Carthaginian army. Himilco paid three hundred talents [£60,000 or $300,000] for permission to withdraw with the Carthaginian citizens who were in his army, abandoning all his mercenaries who were taken and sold as slaves. Hostilities continued for two years longer and the Carthaginians finally made peace by giving up Tauromenium (392).
This treaty gave Dionysius the opportunity to turn his arms against Magna Græcia, the conquest of which he had long meditated. He took Caulonia, Hipponium, Scylacium, and gave their lands to the Locrians who had made an alliance with him. Croton also fell into his power in spite of a vigorous resistance. Rhegium, which he had besieged for eleven months, finally surrendered; he destroyed the town and sold all the inhabitants. The Syracusan exiles sought refuge on the Adriatic Sea and settled at Ancona (387). Dionysius then ravaged the coasts of Latium and Etruria, where he stole a thousand talents from the temple of Agylla, made alliance with the Gauls who had just taken Rome, enlisted a large number of them among his mercenaries and sent them to the assistance of Sparta which had lately renewed its alliance with Syracuse and was now at war with the Thebans. He founded the town of Lissus in Illyria, and re-established an exiled prince in Epirus. In 383 he made a third war against the Carthaginians; after an alternation of victories and defeats, a treaty was made which fixed the limits of their possessions at the river Halycus. In a fourth war he took Selinus, Entella, and Eryx, but, his fleet being destroyed opposite Lilybæum, he did not succeed in driving them from the island, and the war again ended in a treaty.
In the opinion of the ancients, Dionysius was a type of the godless, avaricious, and suspicious tyrant. In the temple of Zeus, in Syracuse, he replaced by a woollen coat the god’s golden coat, which, he said, was too cold in winter and too warm in summer. He stole the gold beard of Æsculapius, saying that the son ought not to have a beard when his father, Apollo, had none. As he was returning with a favourable wind from an expedition in which he had pillaged the temples: “See,” he said, “how the gods protect the ungodly.”
Numerous anecdotes have been told concerning his perpetual fear: he always wore armour under his clothes; his room was surrounded by a moat which could only be crossed by a drawbridge; when he addressed the people it was from the summit of a tower; he did not dare to be shaved, and his daughters singed off his beard for him with red-hot nutshells; the prisons of the quarries were so arranged that he could hear the least sound. One of his courtiers named Damocles was vaunting the happiness of kings: Dionysius said that he would allow him to enjoy it for one hour; he let him lie on a couch of purple and gold before a well-spread table, and suddenly Damocles perceived above his head a sword suspended by a single hair. This anecdote has all the appearance of a philosophic parable. Those which have been related concerning the literary pretensions of Dionysius are scarcely more trustworthy. It is said that he sent Philoxenus, who found fault with his verses, to the quarries; some time later he had him brought back and read him other verses which he thought better; Philoxenus stood up and said, “Let them take me back to the quarries.”
[Sidenote: [368-357 B.C.]]
Dionysius had often sent tragedies to the Athenian competitions, but had had little success; however, at the time of the Theban war he had sent mercenaries to the help of the Spartans, then the allies of the Athenians; the latter, therefore, gave the prize to one of his tragedies called Hector’s Ransom. He celebrated this success by a magnificent feast at which he drank to excess. He was seized with a fever from which he died. Some say that he was poisoned by his son. He had reigned thirty-eight years (367).
Dionysius was a bigamist; he married on the same day a Locrian and a Syracusan, the latter the daughter of one of his most active partisans. The son of the former, named like himself Dionysius, and who is called Dionysius the Younger, succeeded him without difficulty. Dion, the brother of his second wife, had no trouble in taking the direction of the government, for the new tyrant had no thought for anything but pleasure. Dion, a great admirer of Plato, had caused him to come to Sicily during the lifetime of Dionysius the Elder, who received the philosopher somewhat badly and even, it is said, had him sold as a slave. This should have taught Plato that a king’s court is not the place for a philosopher; however, after the death of Dionysius and the accession of his son, he returned at the request of Dion, and was very well received by Dionysius the Younger, who took lessons in geometry, and decreased the magnificence of the table, but made no attempt to carry out Plato’s communistic theories in Syracuse. After a short time, however, he imagined that Dion was only interesting him in philosophy to distract his attention from public affairs. He intercepted a letter which Dion had written to the Carthaginian generals asking them to address their communications only to himself. Dionysius showed the letter to Dion, accused him of treason, and made him embark for Italy. Plato was unable to obtain his friend’s recall. Dionysius even forced his sister Arete, the wife of Dion, to marry some one else (360). Dion returned three years later with eight hundred men whom he had recruited in Greece and appeared before Syracuse during the absence of Dionysius. The inhabitants received him enthusiastically, but he was unable to seize the citadel of Ortygia (357). Dionysius, defeated in a naval fight, retired to Locris with his riches, but his son Apollocrates remained in the citadel whose garrison held out for a long time. There were disputes in the town; an agrarian law was demanded. Dion was driven away, then recalled, and famine having forced the garrison of Ortygia to surrender, he remained master of Syracuse. Now was the time to re-establish the republic as he had promised; but his love of philosophy did not carry him to the point of renouncing power. He even caused a demagogue to be put to death for having demanded the destruction of the fortress of Ortygia which had been built for the sole purpose of protecting tyranny against the people. A short time after this, he, himself, was assassinated by the Athenian Callippus, his intimate friend (354).
[Sidenote: [357-343 B.C.]]
After a reign of two years Callippus was overthrown by Hipparinus and Nysæus, brothers of Dionysius and nephews of Dion. They reigned successively. Then Dionysius, after ten years’ absence, seized the city by surprise. But Hicetas, tyrant of the Leontines, forced him to take refuge in the isle of Ortygia. In the midst of this anarchy, and threatened, moreover, by an attack of the Carthaginians, the Syracusans implored help from Corinth, who sent one of her citizens, Timoleon, to the aid of her colony. Timoleon had previously saved the life of his brother Timophanes in a battle. Later on Timophanes had tried to usurp the tyranny at Corinth, and Timoleon joined his brother’s murderers. Haunted by his mother’s curse and troubled by his conscience, he was living in retirement when the Corinthians entrusted him with the mission of delivering Syracuse from tyranny. He set out with twelve hundred men, and after escaping the Carthaginian fleet, landed at Tauromenium, on the east coast of Sicily. When he reached Syracuse, Dionysius was besieged in his fortress by Hicetas; seeing that he could not defend himself against two enemies at the same time, rather than make terms with Hicetas, he offered to deliver Ortygia up to Timoleon on condition that he should be sent to Corinth with his riches. He lived there for several years, and is said to have opened a school for children, to have at least a similitude of royalty.
Timoleon occupied Ortygia; but his position was difficult, for Hicetas had called the Carthaginians to his assistance, and, under command of Mago, they filled the port with one hundred and fifty vessels and the town with six thousand men. Fortunately Timoleon received from Corinth a reinforcement of ten vessels filled with troops. Catana and other Greek towns along the coast declared for him. Mago, on learning that the Corinthian garrison had succeeded in seizing Achradina, the principal suburb of Syracuse, believed that Hicetas had betrayed him, and feared lest all the Greeks should unite against him. He embarked his soldiers and set sail for Carthage. Hicetas, left with only his own troops, could no longer resist: he returned to Leontini with his army, and Timoleon, without the loss of a single man, was master of Syracuse.
He began by doing what Dion had refused to do; he destroyed the fortress of Ortygia, built on its site courts of justice and restored to power the democratic legislation of Diodes. The town was half deserted; he recalled the exiles, and caused it to be proclaimed at the public games in Greece that Syracuse required colonists. Sixty thousand men answered this appeal. In order to relieve public poverty, he distributed the unoccupied lands to the poor, and sold the statues of the tyrants, except that of Gelo, the conqueror of the Carthaginians. He then turned his attention to the overthrow of tyranny in the other Siceliot towns, and began by forcing Hicetas to live simply as a private citizen. Leptines, tyrant of Engyum, consented to go to the Peloponnesus, as Dionysius had done, for Timoleon was anxious to show the Greeks the tyrants whom he had driven from Sicily. He also seized Apollonia and Entella and restored them their freedom. All the Greek towns sided with him, because he allowed them self-government according to their own inclination. Following their example, several Sican and Sicel towns asked to be admitted into alliance with him.
[Sidenote: [343-337 B.C.]]
Terrified by this commencement of a league between the towns, and by the increasing prosperity of Syracuse, the Carthaginians landed seventy thousand men at Lilybæum. Timoleon, who had only succeeded in collecting an army of eleven thousand men, advanced nevertheless against the enemy, whom he surprised on the banks of the brook Crimisus on Selinuntine territory. He established himself in a strong position, attacked the Carthaginians as they were crossing the river, and killed ten thousand of them, of whom three thousand were Carthaginian citizens. He imposed no onerous conditions, for Syracuse was not in a position to carry on a prolonged war: the limits of their territory were fixed at the river Halycus, to the west of Agrigentum, and they agreed to give no more help to the tyrants (338). Timoleon overcame those who were still left; Hicetas, who had again seized the power, was put to death, as were also Mamercus, tyrant of Catana, Hippon, tyrant of Messana, and some others. Timoleon then helped in the rebuilding and repeopling of the towns destroyed by the Carthaginians, Gela and Agrigentum, for instance, drove from Ætna a band of Campanians, Dionysius’ former mercenaries, who had made the town into a retreat for brigands. At last, his work being complete, he abdicated the power. But he always retained the great moral authority; towards the end of his life he became blind, and whenever there was an important discussion he was carried into the market place and his advice was always followed. He died eight years after his arrival in Sicily (337), and the expenses of his funeral were paid from the public treasury. The Syracusans instituted annual games in his honour, “because,” said the decree, “he drove away the tyrants, defeated the barbarians, repeopled the towns, and restored to the Siceliots their laws and institutions.”[b]
XLVIII. THE RISE OF MACEDONIA
We have seen that Greece was never a unified nation. There was even dispute, throughout the history of the Greeks as a people, as to just who were included under the caption “Greek.” In particular the question rose in reference to the Macedonians when they came to power under the leadership of King Philip, father of Alexander the Great. The Macedonians spoke a dialect of the Greek language, and Philip ardently contended that he and his people were entitled to be considered as true Greeks. The claim was hotly contested so long as the people of Greece, in the narrower sense, had the power to hold out against the man whom they regarded as a usurper; but in the end the claim of Philip received official recognition, and his subjugation of Greece was not regarded as the conquest of a foreigner, but merely as establishing the hegemony of one Greek state over the others, Macedonia now taking that leadership which had been held in turn by Athens, Sparta, and Thebes.
In the broadest view this way of regarding the Macedonians as really Greeks was, perhaps, not illogical. The question of the exact origin of the Hellenes is still much in doubt, but the more the matter is investigated, the more certain it becomes that this wonderful people was a mixed race. Throughout history everywhere, the ethnologist points out that it is the mixed race which develops the greatest potentialities; and the case of Greece is no exception to the rule. One speaks of the Greeks as Aryans, and, therefore, naturally associates them with the Persians and Indians on the one hand and the Germanic races on the other. Yet, in point of fact, it is probably only in relation to their speech that any such close affinity exists. If the theory of the “Mediterranean race” with its central African origin be true, then the Greeks considered ethnologically were much more closely associated with the so-called Hamitic Egyptians and the so-called Semitic Hebrews, Babylonians, Assyrians and Phœnicians, than they were with the other so-called Aryan races.
All discussion of this exact point is still somewhat problematical, but it is quite clear to the most casual physical inspection that the Greek is of a physical type much more closely akin to the dark-skinned and dark-eyed Mediterranean races than to the fair-skinned, blue-eyed, Indo-Germanic tribes. Yet the language of the Greeks is unequivocally of the Indo-Germanic family. Quite possibly, the explanation of this anomaly may be found in the theory of a prehistoric invasion of Greece by a Germanic race from the north, which mingled with the Mediterranean race already in possession of the soil, and gave to it the elements of the Indo-Germanic language, yet failed to stamp the traits of its physical personality upon the original occupants of the little peninsula. Whoever will, for a moment, consider the known history of the English people as an ethnic race contrasted with the history of the language which they speak, will at once see how very misleading may be any inferences as to racial status based solely upon the English language, were not such checked by other historical sources of information. This is but one case of many that might be given illustrating how philologists have slowly awakened to the fact that inferences based solely upon philological evidence must not be made too confidently in their application to questions of ethnology pure and simple. And so with the case of the Greeks, the fact of their Aryan speech must not blind us to the probability that, as a race, the Hellenes were not closely akin in recent times to the other races speaking Indo-Germanic languages. That the Greeks came to their favoured land from some unknown region and that they found a population there before them which gradually disappeared, presumably by intermingling with the invaders, we have already viewed as a current tradition.
But this is only one item of the evidence which makes it clear that when one uses the word “Greek” he is speaking of a mixed race with no certain proof of common lineage and often with no stronger bond than that supplied by a common language. In one sense, then, whoever spoke the Greek language as his mother tongue was a Greek, whether the place of his nativity were the little peninsula of Greece proper, or an Ægean island, or the coast of Asia Minor, or the island of Sicily, or southern Italy, or Macedonia.
Yet, from another point of view, it is quite clear that the Macedonians were in some respects different in temperament from the typical Greeks and, in particular, from the typical Athenians. One can hardly imagine a Philip or an Alexander as being of Athenian birth. We have learned to revere the Athenian for his culture, his love of the beautiful, his artistic instincts, and exceptionally for his abstract philosophy. But with all this one cannot escape the feeling that, in some sense, the Athenian even of the most brilliant period was a child. He was vain, arrogant, emotional, vacillating; in short, the reverse of all that usually goes to make a great leader or a great political people. The Spartan, to be sure, was more akin to the Macedonian, but rarely indeed did any Spartan show that breadth of political view which characterised Philip and Alexander, and at least the germs of which were latent in a considerable company of their associates and generals. And, indeed, in viewing the Macedonian race as a whole one is forced to the conclusion that here was a sturdier race, of firmer fibre, if also, and perhaps inevitably, of a lower æsthetic plane and a less elaborated culture.
In accordance then as one views the case from one point of view or another, it might be made to appear that Philip was right in claiming that his kingdom was a part of Greece; or that the Athenians were right in combating that claim. But, whatever the theoretical right of the matter, here, as always in the history of nations, Might made the practical or political Right, and the Might lay with Philip. He was a great soldier, and he came at a time when the power of Greece proper had been almost utterly shattered by internal dissensions. Still, it was his desire to effect a peaceful conquest; he sought to rule Greece, but to rule it by diplomacy rather than by the sword, and he well-nigh succeeded. But for the stubborn resistance of Athens, urged on by Demosthenes, he would probably have gained all that he sought without striking a single warlike blow against the people whom he was pleased to regard as his fellow-Greeks; but the hostility of Athens at last made an appeal to arms inevitable, and on the field of Chæronea Philip proved the sword to be mightier than voice or pen, and effected the utter subjugation of all Greece.
This accomplished, Philip was ready for that invasion of Persia which he had long planned. But, just as his preparations were completed, he was struck down by the hand of an assassin. His ambition was thus cut short, his life-work left unfinished. What he would have accomplished had he lived remains, of course, problematical. He was only in middle life when he fell, and he had already demonstrated that his powers were of the first order, and it is not improbable, had he been permitted to undertake the Asiatic invasion, which he planned, that he would have carried it out successfully. But all comment on such a question as this is, of course, idle. As the case stands, Philip’s glory has been almost eclipsed by that of his more brilliant son, and the history of the rise of Macedon seems important to after ages, not so much because it is the history of the overthrow of the Grecian independence, as because it is the history of the preparation for Alexander. The narrative of this preparation we must now view in some detail before passing on to the events of that extraordinary period which has been stamped in history for all time as the Age of Alexander the Great.[a]
EARLY HISTORY OF MACEDONIA
Æschylus attributes to King Pelasgus of Argos the statement that the dwellings of his people, named Pelasgians after him, extended to the clear waters of the Strymon, enclosing in their sweep the highlands of Dodona, the district about Pindus, and the wide region of Pæonia. According to the old soldier of Marathon, the inhabitants of the lands watered by the Haliacmon and the Axius were of the same race as those ancient populations which occupied the regions extending from Olympus to the Tænarum, and to the west of Pindus. This high mountain that separates Thessaly from Epirus and the highlands of Dodona forms in its northwestern slope, as far as the Schar-Dagh of ancient Scardus, the wall that divides Macedonia and Illyria, then turns eastward to the source of the Strymon and continues at the left of the river southeastward under the name of Orbelus, till it reaches the coast, thus forming a natural boundary between Macedonia and Pæonia, and keeping off the Thracian populations in the east and north. Within this enclosed territory, crossed by the Haliacmon, the Axius with its tributaries, and the Strymon, are a second and third mountain chain which, concentric like that of Pindus-Scardus-Orbelus, enclose the inner coast lands, Pella and Thessalonica. Hemmed in this double circle of valleys, through which break three streams, those of Haliacmon and Axius making their way side by side to the sea, the inhabitants of this district are set apart by nature as forming a sort of hermit race with the lowlands of the coast as their common territorial centre.
According to Herodotus the people, called Dorians at a later period, were crowded out of Thessaly and established themselves near Pindus in the Haliacmon valley, being known there under the name of Macedonians. According to other accounts Argæus, from whom the Macedonians are supposed to descend, came from Argos in Orestis and settled in the region about the source of the Haliacmon, which explains the origin of the name, Argead, given to the house of the king. There are other traditions, widely received at that time, which assert that three brothers, Heraclidæ of the princely Argive race that sprang from Temenus, travelled north to Illyria, then penetrated into Macedonia and settled at Edessa, close to the mighty falls which mark the entrance of the waters into the fruitful coast lands. In Edessa, also called Ægæ, Perdiccas, youngest of the three brothers, founded the kingdom that was to include in its steady growth and unite in the name of Macedonia the neighbouring districts of Emathia, Mygdonia, Bottia, Pieria, and Amphaxitis.
They belonged to the same Pelasgic race that once peopled all the Hellenic land; but were looked upon by the Hellenes, to whose degree of cultivation they by no means attained, as nothing more than barbarians or semi-barbarians. The religion of the Macedonians and their customs, attest this common origin; and although on the frontiers there was some intermingling with Thracians and Illyrians, the Macedonian speech resembled strongly the older Hellenic dialects.
Up to a very late day the hetæri were retained in the Macedonian system of warfare. Entering the land, as they indubitably did, with the founding of the kingdom, the Macedonian Heraclidæ met the same fate as their forerunners in the Peloponnesus, who, immigrants in a foreign land, were under the necessity of establishing right and might for themselves by the complete overthrow of the native power; with the only difference that here, more than in other Doric lands, the mingling of old and new traits formed a whole, which, retaining the vigour as well as the rough moroseness of the forefathers, presented a picture of heroic times in its least poetic aspect. Certain of the customs were like those of the ancient Franks; the warrior who had never slain a foe must wear the halter about his neck; the hunter who had never brought down a wild boar on the run must sit at the banquet, not recline. At the burning of a dead body the daughter of the deceased was the one designated to extinguish the flames of the pyre after the corpse was consumed; it is also related that the trophies won by Perdiccas in his first victory over the native tribes were torn, in obedience to the will of the gods, by a lion as a sign that friends had been gained, not enemies defeated; and it ever after remained a Macedonian custom never to erect trophies on defeating a foe, whether Hellenic or barbarian, a custom observed by both Philip after Chæronea, and Alexander after the conquest of the Persians and Hindus.
The throne belonged by hereditary right to the reigning race, but the succession was not always so clearly fixed as to exclude all doubt or dispute. The greater the power wielded by royalty, the greater were the wisdom and ability made necessary on the part of those in whom it was vested, and it only too frequently happened that an indolent, incapable minor had to yield the throne in favour of his able brother or cousin.
There was still another danger. Numerous examples show that to the younger sons of kings, also to aliens, portions of the land were yielded over to become hereditary possessions, under suzerainty of the king, it is true, but with such princely privileges and control that the owners were at liberty to maintain troops of their own. Arrhidæus, the younger brother of the first Alexander, had thus come into possession of the principality of Elymiotis in the upper part of the country, which descended from generation to generation of his race; and to Perdiccas’ brother Philip was given an estate on the upper Axius. The kingdom could not gain in power so long as these princely lines were not under complete subjection, and so long as the Pæones, the Agrianes, and the Lyncestæ supported them by establishing independent princes on their borders. Alexander I appears to have been the first to force the Lyncestæ, the Pæones, the Orestæ, and the Tymphæi to recognise the Macedonian supremacy, but the princes of those races retained their rank and all their princely possessions.
[Sidenote: [490-480 B.C.]]
Of the constitution and administration of Macedonia too little has been handed down to enable us to judge accurately of the extent of the king’s power; but when we are told that King Archelaus, during the last decade of the Peloponnesian War, brought into use an entire new set of regulations, that Philip II, in order to make uniform the currency of his realm, instituted throughout an improved system of coinage and also brought about a complete reform in military affairs, we cannot but conclude that to the kingdom belonged a power both great and widespread. Certainly habit and custom had a great deal to do with establishing right and made up for the deficiencies of the constitution. It can be said of the Macedonian rule that it as little resembled that of Asiatic despotism as its people were far removed from the bondage of slavery. “Macedonians are free men,” says an ancient writer. Not penestæ like the mass of the populations of Thessaly, not helots like the Spartans, they were a peasant race, holding independent and hereditary property and possessing a common system of laws and local courts, but all bound to give military service when called upon by the king of the land. Even at a later period the military forces were still held to be a union of the general population, with a place in the public assemblies, councils, and courts of law.
In this army a numerous aristocracy came prominently to the front under the name of hetæri, or “companions of war,” as they are called in the songs of Homer. The members of this class can scarcely be designated as nobles, since the distinguishing marks of their condition were simply large possessions, noble origin, and a close connection with the person of the king, who always rewarded their faithful service with presents and honours. Neither did the families of those princely lines that formerly held independent possessions in the upper country and retained them even after coming under the suzerainty of the more powerful Macedonian kingdom hold aloof, but with their followers submitted themselves to the conditions that prevailed in the kingdom. Large cities, in the Hellenic sense of the word, were not to be found in these lands peopled by aristocrats and peasants; the settlements of the coast were independent Hellenic colonies, in striking contrast to the settlements of the interior.
About the time of the Persian War, under the reign of the first Alexander, there began to appear unmistakable signs of an understanding between Macedonia and Greece. Already Alexander’s father had given refuge to Hippias, son of Pisistratus, after his flight from Athens, and had bestowed upon him lands in the Macedonian domain. Alexander himself, being obliged to follow the Persian army into Hellas, had exerted every means in his power--notably at the battle of Platæa--to assist the Greeks; and by reason of his descent from the Teminedians of Argos, which procured him admission to the Olympian games, had been declared a Hellene.
Like him, Alexander’s immediate successors applied themselves with varying energy and ability to bringing their country into the closest possible touch with the trade, the political life, and the culture of the Greeks. The proximity of the rich commercial colonies of Chalcidice, that brought them into close and frequent relations with the main powers of Hellas, who, continually at war with each other, sought or feared the Macedonian influence; the almost constant, internal strife with which Hellas herself was torn and which drove many distinguished men from home to seek peace and honour at the wealthy court of Pella--were causes which acted powerfully to promote Macedonia’s advance.
[Sidenote: [479-390 B.C.]]
Particularly rich in progress and events was the reign of Archelaus. Though the rest of Hellas was torn and distracted by the Peloponnesian War, under his able guidance Macedonia made constant strides forward. He built fortresses, which the land had previously lacked, laid out streets, and developed the organisation of the army, “accomplishing,” says Thucydides, “more for the good of Macedonia than all the eight kings that had preceded him.” He founded festival games patterned after those of Hellas at Dion, not far from the grave of Orpheus, at which homage was paid to Olympian Zeus and the Muses. His court, the rallying-point of poets and artists and the common centre for all the Macedonian aristocracy, was a model for the growth of the entire race, and Archelaus himself passed in the eyes of his contemporaries for the richest and most fortunate of men.
Upon the reign of Archelaus followed a period of intensified internal strife, brought about probably by a reaction against the innovations introduced by the growing royal power and directed against the new customs and culture instituted by the court. These modern tendencies found, as was natural, their chief supporters among the princely families and a portion of the hetæri, and were furthered by the politics of the leading Hellenic states, whereas the mass of the people, it appears, were quite indifferent to the advantages they offered.
Even in King Archelaus’ time there had been an uprising led by the Lyncestian prince Arrhibæus, in concert with the Elymean Sirrhas, either to avenge the removal of the rightful heir to the throne, or to support the claim of Amyntas, the son of Arrhidæus who was grandson to the Amyntas whom Perdiccas caused to disappear. Archelaus had obtained peace by giving his elder daughter in marriage to Sirrhas, and his younger to Amyntas. He was killed, according to tradition, while on a hunting expedition. His son Orestes, who was a minor, succeeded him under the regency of Æropus, but the regent murdered Orestes, and himself became king. Æropus was undoubtedly the son of that Arrhibæus who belonged to the Bacchiadæ line of Lyncestians settled on the borders of Illyria that had so frequently aided his forefathers in their uprisings against the Macedonian kings. The conduct of Æropus and of his sons and grandsons during the next sixty years shows them to have persistently opposed the new monarchical tendencies of the royal house, and to have steadily upheld the laxer system of former times. The constant succession of revolts and the frequent changes of sovereigns that followed are proof of the struggles that were constantly being waged between the members of the royal line and the particularist party.
Æropus was well able to uphold the dignity of his rank, but at his death in 392 Amyntas took possession of the throne; he was murdered by Derdas in 391 and Æropus’ son, Pausanias, became king. He was deposed in his turn by that Amyntas, son of Arrhidæus (390-369 B.C.), in whose person the oldest line of the royal house came again into its rights.
[Sidenote: [390-360 B.C.]]
The years of his reign were marked by internal disorders that made Macedonia ready to fall an easy prey to any attack. Summoned possibly by the Lyncestians, the Illyrians broke into the land and devastated it, defeated the army of the king, and forced the king himself to take flight beyond the borders. Argæus had been on the throne two years, whether he was Pausanias’ brother or a Lyncestian remains undecided. But aided by Thessaly Amyntas returned, and regained the kingdom, which he found in wretched plight, all the cities and coast lands being in the power of the Olynthians, while even Pella had shut its doors against the king.
There followed as a result of the Peace of Antalcidas, the expedition of the Spartans against Olynthus, which was joined by Amyntas, also by Derdas, prince of Elimea, with four hundred horsemen. But success was not so easy as had been anticipated, and Derdas was taken prisoner. When Olynthus was finally subdued (380 B.C.), Thebes rose in revolt, and Sparta was defeated at Naxos and at Leuctra. Olynthus renewed the Chalcidian alliance; and Jason of Pheræ, uniting the Thessalian powers, compelled Amyntas III to enter his alliance. On the threshold of a brilliant success Jason was assassinated (370 B.C.). The irresolute Amyntas had not succeeded in upholding his sovereignty, and a little later he died. He was succeeded by the oldest of his three sons, Alexander II, who was soon brought by his mother, the Elymean, to an untimely end. She had for long been carrying on a secret love intrigue with Ptolemæus, of uncertain lineage, who was the husband of her daughter. She persuaded him, during an absence of Alexander in Thessaly, to take up arms against Alexander on his return, and the Thebans rushed to join the movement, it being necessary to impair Macedonia’s power before she could gain further victories in Thessaly. Pelopidas arranged a compromise whereby thirty of Alexander’s pages were placed as hostages and Ptolemæus received a part-principality, the name of which he assumed. This compromise seemed to be effected only to hasten the downfall of the king, who was assassinated during the course of a festival dance. His mother bestowed her hand upon the murderer, also the throne, to which he acceded under the name of guardian over the two younger sons, Perdiccas and Philippus (368-365 B.C.).
Summoned from Chalcidice Pausanias, called “of the kingly line,” though to which branch of the royal family he belonged cannot be ascertained, commenced a vigorous campaign against the regent. His success was immediate; Eurydice fled with her two sons to Iphicrates, who was stationed with an Attic fleet in neighbouring waters, and he finally put down the revolt. Still Ptolemæus’ position had not been rendered more secure; the murder of Alexander was a breach of the agreement with Thebes, and the friends of the murdered king applied to Pelopidas, who advanced with a hastily gathered army. But Ptolemæus’ gold brought disaffection in the ranks, and Pelopidas was obliged to content himself with making a new agreement with the king. Ptolemæus placed his son Philoxenus and fifty hetæri as hostages for his good faith; this was perhaps the motive that brought Philippus to Thebes.
When he reached manhood Perdiccas III avenged the death of his brother by causing the assassination of the usurper. To escape the influence of Thebes he devoted himself to the cause of Athens, fighting bravely against the Olynthians by the side of Timotheus. But about this time the Illyrians, doubtless at the instigation of the Lyncestians, came pouring over the borders. Perdiccas made a successful stand against this invasion, but in a desperate battle he and four hundred others lost their lives. The whole country was now devastated by the Illyrians, and laid open to the invasion of the Pæonians on the north.
[Sidenote: [360-350 B.C.]]
This was the situation when Philippus, representing Perdiccas’ son Amyntas, who was not yet of age, took command of the army in 359. He had been established in Macedonia since the death of Ptolemæus, having received a part-principality in consequence of a compromise to which Perdiccas had been advised by Plato, and the troops he already had about him formed a nucleus of support. The Illyrians and the Pæonians had already entered the land, and added to them were the former pretenders to the throne, Argæus, and Pausanias from Athens, with the support of the Thracian princes, and three illegitimate sons of his father, who also advanced claims to the throne. Backed by the sympathy and support of the entire country, Philip was equal to the first great emergencies; by the exercise of foresight, skill, and resolution, he rescued the land from the invaders, the throne from its false claimants, and the royal line from fresh intrigues and disasters. And when the Athenians, who had committed the folly of turning their back on him as thanks for his recognition of their claims on Amphipolis, became alarmed at his successes and formed with Grabos the Illyrian, Lyppæus, the Pæonian, and Cetriporis, the Thracian, an offensive and defensive alliance aiming to break Macedonia’s might before it became thoroughly established, Philip--having already taken Amphipolis and won over its inhabitants--proceeded rapidly to the frontiers and soon brought the barbarians, who were by no means ready for the conflict, under subjection.
About 356, the frontiers were made secure against barbarian invasion for many years to come. Not long after this all the different intriguing parties had vanished from the court. Of the Lyncestians, Ptolemæus and Eurydice were dead; one of Æropus’ sons, Alexander, later became established at court by reason of his marriage with the daughter of the faithful Antipater; the remaining two sons, Heromenes and Arrhibæus, were received into favour by others high in station, and Arrhibæus’ two sons, Neoptolemus and Amyntas, were brought up at court. The two pretenders, Argæus and Pausanias, disappear about this time from historical accounts. The rightful heir to the throne, Perdiccas’ son Amyntas, in whose name Philip had at first carried on the sovereignty, was secured to Philip’s cause by marriage to his daughter, Cynane.
PHILIP THE ORGANISER
[Sidenote: [350-324 B.C.]]
Thus Macedonia, under the rule of a prince who had dexterously and systematically developed and employed her resources, had risen to the height where at last she might entertain the thought of issuing forth, and, at the head of united Greece, entering the lists against the Persian might. In the historical accounts that lie before us the forces that were actually at work to produce Philip’s astonishing success seem curiously to be lost sight of. Though the writers follow, through all its cleverly planned movements, the hand that seized and drew into its owner’s possession all the Greek states one after another, they leave us in the dark as to every detail concerning the personality to which that hand belonged, and to which it owed its strength and firmness. Gold which they always show the hand to dispense at exactly the right moment, seems to be about the only means of effecting his purposes that they attribute to Philip.
On looking closely into the inner life of the state two events stand forth that, arising from earlier causes, were made to yield their full significance by Philip, and in reality formed the basis of his power.
“My father,” said Arrian’s Alexander to the mutinous Macedonians at Opis in 324, “took you under his protection when he was king, and you, destitute and clad in skins, wandered here from your mountains where you had tended your flocks of sheep that you could with difficulty protect against the Illyrians, the Thracians, and the Triballi; he gave you the chlamys of the soldiers and led you down into the plain, where he trained you to be the equal of the barbarian in the fight.” Every man capable of bearing arms had always indeed come forward in time of war, but only to return to his hearth or plough when the need of his services was at an end. The dangers by which Philip was beset when he first assumed the rule, the attacks against which he had to protect a land that was menaced on all sides, gave rise to a measure that, already set on foot in Archelaus’ reign, might have averted much of the subsequent internal strife, had it been brought to full development. On the basis of the duty owed by every man to his country in time of war, Philip brought into existence a standing army of native forces that, constantly increasing in size and strength, finally came to number forty thousand men.
MILITARY DISCIPLINE
Not only did Philip form this army, but he brought it up to a high standard of discipline and efficiency. It is related that, to the great displeasure of the lazy, he did away with the baggage-wagon of the foot-soldiers, and allowed but one groom to each horseman; also that he often, even in the heat of summer, organised marches of twenty-five miles or more, carrying provisions and accoutrements for several days. So severe was Philip’s discipline that in the war of 338 two officers of high rank who introduced a lute-player into the camp were immediately cashiered. In the service itself the strictest obedience was demanded from subordinates to superiors, and the system of advancement was based solely on the recognition of experience and merit.
The benefits of this military constitution soon became apparent. A feeling was aroused in the various provinces and dependencies of the realm that they formed part of an organic whole, and that Macedonia had risen to the dignity of a nation. Above all, in their unity and the confidence inspired by this military system, the Macedonian races had the consciousness of possessing great efficiency in war, and an ethical strength resulting from a firm social organisation at the head of which was the king himself. The peasant population of this kingdom provided the king with hardy, tractable material from which to form his soldiers, and the nobility furnished in the hetæri higher military officials that were distinguished for zeal and a sense of the dignity of their calling. It was natural that an army of this kind should prove vastly superior to the bodies of mercenaries, or even the citizen troops employed by the Hellenic states; and that a people of this physical freshness and vigour should possess a decided advantage over Greek populations whose powers had deteriorated through too close a study of democracy, or from the evil effects of city life. Favoured by fortune in this respect, Macedonia had been enabled to retain her earlier qualities until such time as they should be needed for some great task; and in the conflicts between the king and the aristocracy she had, contrary to the example given by Hellas centuries before, let the victory fall to the king. Indeed, this sovereignty over a free and powerful peasant race, this military monarchy, guided the people in the direction, and made them assume the form and power, marked out by the democrats in Hellas, who had not, however, been able to bring their plans to realisation.
MACEDONIAN CULTURE
[Sidenote: [380-356 B.C.]]
On the other hand education, the most marked result of Hellenic civilisation, must now be made a part of the life of the Macedonian people, thus completing the work already begun by former rulers. In this endeavour the example offered by the court was of utmost importance, the nobility naturally forming the class of highest culture in the land. The demarcation thus made had no parallel elsewhere, inasmuch as the Spartans were all uncultured, and yet had supremacy over the inferior classes of their nation; the free Athenians held themselves all to be without exception of the highest culture; while other states, having given up the ruling class or the introduction of a democracy, had, by emphasising the difference between rich and poor, reduced still lower the general intellectual standard.
In the time of Epaminondas, Philip had lived in Thebes, where a pupil of Plato, Euphræus of Oreus, had exercised a potent influence over his future life. Isocrates calls Philip himself a friend of literature and education, and this esteem is proved by his appointment of Aristotle to the post of tutor to his son. He endeavoured by instructive lectures, instituted especially for the pages and young men about his court, to strengthen their attachment to his person, and to prepare them for the duties devolving upon nobles in their high position. The members of the aristocracy, first as pages, then as hetæri, or bodyguard of the king, and finally as commanders of the different divisions of the army, or as ambassadors to the Hellenic states, had frequent enough occasion to distinguish themselves and receive the reward due to faithful service; but a lack of that polish admired by the king and possessed by him in a high degree was everywhere noticeable. His bitterest adversary must admit that Athens herself could scarcely show his equal in social qualities; and whatever might be the tendency to perpetuate at his court the old Macedonian habits of brawling and drunkenness, the court festivals, receptions to foreign ambassadors, and celebration of national games, were all characterised by that splendour and magnificence dear to the Hellenic taste. The extent of the royal domains, the revenues from land taxes and shipping duties, the mines of Pangea, which yielded one thousand talents annually, and above all the order and economy introduced by Philip into the management of public affairs, elevated his kingdom to a position never before attained by any Hellenic state, save perhaps Athens in the time of Pericles.
Even the Attic envoys were impressed by the character of the nobility gathered at the court of Pella, and by the opulence and military splendour that prevailed. Most of the noble families, such as the Bacchiadæ of Lyncestis, or the house of Polysperchon, or of Orontes, to whom the district of Orestis seems to have belonged, were of princely origin. To Perdiccas, the oldest son of Orontes, was given the command of the Orestian phalanx, which when he became hipparch passed over to his brother Alcetas. The most important of these princely houses was that of Elimea, which was founded by Derdas in the time of the Peloponnesian War. In the year 380, a second Derdas came into possession of the land and joined Amyntas of Macedonia and the Spartans in their attack on Olynthus; later he is mentioned as having been taken captive by the Olynthians. Philip’s motive for taking Derdas’ sister, Phila, to wife was either to bind Derdas’ interests faster to his own or to arrange some dispute that had arisen between them. The brothers of Derdas, Machatas and Harpalus, were given high offices at court. Yet the breach between Philip and this family was never completely healed, being kept open doubtless by the king, for the purpose of keeping the different members at a distance and in uncertainty as to his favour. Scarcely could Machatas be sure of a just decision in the court presided over by the king, and Philip took advantage of a fault committed by a single member of Derdas’ family to turn it to the public confusion of the rest, repulsing with considerable sharpness all Harpalus’ pleas in his kinsman’s favour.
Among the noble families gathered about the court of Pella, two from their prominence deserve especial mention; these were the houses of Iollas and Philotas. Philotas’ son was that wise and faithful general, Parmenion, to whose command Philip repeatedly entrusted the most difficult expeditions. To him Philip owed his victory over the Dardanians in 356, and later his possession of Eubœa. Parmenion’s brothers, Asander and Agathon, as also his sons, Philotas, Nicanor, and Hector, carried on the glory of his name, and his daughters contracted marriages with the highest families of the land; one with Cœnus, the leader of the Phalanx, and the other with Attalus, the uncle of a later wife of the king. That a no less honourable and influential post was assigned to Iollas’ son, Antipater, or as he was called by the Macedonians, Antipas, is attested by the king’s words, “I have slept in peace--Antipas was on guard.” The tried fidelity of this statesman, his clear, cool judgment in military as well as political affairs, seemed to single him out as particularly qualified for the high position of viceregent he was soon to fill. He gave his daughter in marriage to the son of a noble Lyncestian family, as being the surest means of gaining their support; his sons, Cassander, Archias, and Iollas, did not attain prominence till later.
Similar to the development of the court was that of the Macedonian nation under Philip’s rule; but to this statement we will add that, owing as much to the position formerly held by the state as to the power of Philip’s personality, the monarchical element of necessity predominated in the political life of the country. We must first consider all the facts in their relation to each other before we can fully understand Philip’s character and methods of procedure. At the centre of a mass of contradictions and disparities of the most unusual nature, a Greek in his relations to his own people, a Macedonian to the Greeks, he exceeded the latter in Hellenic craft and perfidy, and the former in directness and vigour, while he was superior to both in grasp of purpose, in the logical pursuance of his plans, in reticence, and in rapidity of execution. He was proficient in the art of embarrassing his adversaries, always presenting himself before them under a different aspect, and advancing upon them from a different direction from that expected. By nature voluptuous and pleasure-loving, he was as reckless in the indulgence of his appetites as he was inconstant, remaining withal perfect master of himself even when seeming most under the sway of passion; indeed, it is to be questioned whether it was in his virtues or his faults that his true nature was most prominently displayed. In him are united, as are the physical features of a portrait, all the different characteristics of his time--the shrewdness, the polish, the frivolity, coupled with great suppleness and versatility, and the capacity for high thoughts.
OLYMPIAS, MOTHER OF ALEXANDER
[Sidenote: [359-336 B.C.]]
In striking contrast to that of Philip was the character of Olympias, his wife. She was the daughter of Neoptolemus, the Epirot king, and having known her in his youth at Samothrace, Philip had married her with the consent of her uncle and guardian, Arymbas. Beautiful, reserved, passionate, Olympias was a devotee of the secret rites of Orpheus and Bacchus, and practised in the magical arts of Thracian women. During nocturnal orgies, it is related, she was frequently to be seen rushing through mountain paths with the thyrsus and winding serpents in her hand; and in her dreams were repeated the fantastic pictures with which her brain was filled. The night before her marriage she dreamed, according to tradition, that she was exposed to the fury of a terrific storm, during which a burning thunderbolt fell into her lap which, flaming up ever higher and higher, finally disappeared in its own wild blaze.
When tradition further relates that among other signs given on the night of Alexander’s birth the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, which, with Megabyzus and his eunuchs and the hieroduli of the Hellenes formed a striking example of true oriental heathenism, was burned to the ground; and that simultaneously with the information of the birth of his son, Philip received the news of a triple victory--it simply expresses in popular form the significance of a hero’s entrance into the world, and the great thoughts associated with such an event.
Theopompus says of Philip, “Everything considered, Europe has never produced a man that could equal the son of Amyntas.” Yet the work that he had set as the aim of his existence was not accomplished by the scheming, resolute, tenacious king. He may have used this aspiration, it having root in the very nature of Greece’s history and culture, to bring into union the whole Greek world; but he was compelled rather by the exigencies of the situation in which he was placed than by the inherent power of the inspiration itself, and failed to follow it out to full fruition. Beyond the sea was the land wherein lay greatness and the future of Macedonia; but the glance that he strained towards this land would often become dimmed, and the solid structure of his plans be obscured under the airy figures of his desire. Philip’s ambition to accomplish a great work was shared by all about him, both the aristocracy and the common people; it was the undertone that was heard through every phrase of Macedonian life, the alluring possibility that was continually beckoning out of the future. The Macedonian armies fought against the Thracians and gained victories over the Greeks; but the Orient was the real object for which they fought and conquered.[b]
THE MACEDONIAN PHALANX
[Sidenote: [358-357 B.C.]]
The Spartans had created a system of tactics, that is, a military ordnance, which was adopted by all the other Greeks. The Thebans added to it the system of compact masses, the advantage of which was demonstrated by the victory of Leuctra. Philip, formed in the school of Epaminondas, perfected this system and made of it the Macedonian phalanx, which Plutarch compared to a monstrous beast bristling with iron. It was a mass of hoplites, sixteen files deep, pressed close against each other and armed with a sort of pike seven yards long, called sarissa. The men in the first five ranks held this weapon in both hands, their faces turned to the enemy. The pikes of the first rank extended five yards beyond the line of battle, those of the second, four, and so on to the fifth, whose lance ends were also a yard beyond the breasts of the men next behind. The remaining ranks pressed forward against the first and prevented their retreating, holding their sarissæ with the points upward, resting upon the shoulders of the men in front, and this wilderness of spears effectually warded off the darts of the enemy. Irresistible on level ground, but without ability to make a quick change of front or a rapid evolution, this cumbersome body of infantry was supported in the rear and on the flanks by the light infantry of peltasts, who commenced the conflict.
Before and at the sides ran the archers and frondeurs, an irregular troop composed of strangers, who, when need came, closed in behind the wings. The cavalry of the hetæria, or companions of the king, armed with a javelin and a sabre and formed of young men belonging to the highest nobility, constituted, with the phalanx, the principal force of the Macedonian armies. There was further a body of light cavalry and a corps of engineers attached to the service of the siege artillery, which consisted of balists and catapults, recently invented machines for the purpose of firing darts at the enemy and boulders against the ramparts of towns. The establishment of a permanent army was Philip’s most important military innovation. Under Philip’s weak predecessors the multiplicity of pretenders to the throne had rendered the nobles fractious and virtually independent; but they had under them neither penestæ as in Thessaly, nor a helot as in Sparta.
Without openly abolishing the ancient privileges, Philip contrived to make them inoffensive by transferring them to the army, where there was always a military and political council. The nobles were little by little induced to leave their estates, and were held permanently at court by the attraction of pleasure and high appointments. It was held an honour among them to have their sons received in the corps of the hetæria, and these young members of the king’s bodyguard, fulfilling domestic offices about his person, were in reality hostages delivered over into his hands. “Never,” says Titus Livius, “were seen slaves so servile in the presence of the master, so arrogant elsewhere.”
As regards the common people, nothing whatever was changed in their condition. They had never, as in Greece, formed a political body, and there was no Macedonian city. Apparently everything took place by popular consent, but the army was the Macedonian people. Philip frequently harangued his troops; a proceeding that offered no danger, since the soldiers of a bellicose chief never withhold from him their approbation. Macedonia was a nation of soldiers; hence its government, maintaining a permanent army and engaged in perpetual wars, could be none other than a military monarchy.
THE WAXING OF PHILIP
As soon as he had made his kingdom safe from the attacks of barbarians, Philip wished to extend his dominion to the sea, access to which was closed by the Grecian colonies. Some of these had ranged themselves under the protection of Athens, others under that of Olynthus. Amphipolis was independent; Olynthus and Athens had an equal interest in preserving this independence and Philip himself had formally recognised it; nevertheless it was decided not to hold to this obligation, but to seize Amphipolis. It was necessary to prevent the Olynthians and Athenians from uniting for its defence, and in this endeavour Philip made use of wile, he possessing, even in a greater degree than Lysander, the combined qualities of the fox and the lion. He persuaded the Athenians that his only desire in taking Amphipolis was to deliver it to them in exchange for Pydna, a Macedonian town which had placed itself under their protection. At the same time he made sure of the neutrality of the Olynthians, and even obtained help from them by delivering to them Anthemus, and by promising them Potidæa, which belonged to the Athenians. The latter, over-confident of his good faith, did not respond to the appeal of Amphipolis for help. Philip took the town, and afterwards treacherously entered and took Pydna, keeping them both. The Athenians had been outdone, but they could not seek vengeance for this perfidy, as they were engaged at the time in the war of the allies, and had need of all their forces to carry it to an end. This encouraged Philip to take another step; he seized Potidæa, which was occupied by an Athenian garrison, politely sent back the garrison to Athens, and delivered the town to the Olynthians, whom he wished to place in a position of conflicting interests towards the Athenians (357).
Master of Amphipolis, Philip crossed the Strymon with the intention of possessing himself of the mining region of Mount Pangea. He founded there upon the site of the ancient Thasian city Crenides, a new town which he called Philippi, upon the money of which was imprinted the head of Hercules, ancestor of the Macedonian kings. The city of Philippi was at once a military post, the entrance to Thrace, and a centre of exploitation for the mines of Mount Pangea. These mines, far better operated than they had been by the Thasians and Athenians, furnished Philip with an annual revenue of a thousand talents, [£200,000 or $1,000,000] out of which he made the handsome gold coins which bear his name. This source of riches which enabled him to support his army and to buy traitors in the Greek cities, contributed to his greatness at least as much as the phalanx. He declared that no city was impregnable into which could be driven a mule laden with gold pieces.[c]