Epaminondas
✓ Source-basedfallingTheban general and statesman (419/411-362 BC)
He broke Sparta's three-century grip on Greece in a single afternoon at Leuctra, freed 230 years of enslaved Messenians, and invented the battlefield tactics that made it possible. Then his work collapsed a generation after he died.
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Epaminondas - Temple of Ancient Virtue, Stowe - Buckinghamshire, England - DSC07376 (cropped)
362BCThebanHegemony
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Epameinondas, Nordisk familjebok
Epaminondas - Temple of Ancient Virtue, Stowe - Buckinghamshire, England - DSC07376
Epaminondas on Zurich Rathaus
Epaminondas saves the life of Pelopidas in battleIn their own words 3
It was his habit to appear at all times with a well-groomed body and a cheerful countenance, but on the day after that battle he went forth unwashed and with a look of dejection.
, , 9.1-22, translated by W.H.S. Jones
When the Spartans accused the Thebans of a long list of serious offences, he retorted, "These Thebans, however, have put a stop to your brevity of speech!
Pausanius, Description of Greece, 9.1-22, translated by W.H.S. Jones
His indifference to money was put to the proof by Diomedon of Cyzicus; for he, at the request of , had undertaken to bribe Epaminondas.
Cornelius Nepos, Great Generals of Foreign Nations, translation of J.C. Rolfe
In their orbit 1
Politicians born in the 420s BC 4
About this person
Epaminondas led 4th-century BC Thebes out from under Spartan subjugation and turned it into the dominant Greek power through military innovation - he developed the oblique order and other tactics that shattered Spartan invincibility at Leuctra in 371 BC. He liberated the Messenian helots, a people enslaved since their defeat around 600 BC, and redrew the political map of Greece by breaking old alliances and overseeing the construction of new cities. His contemporary Xenophon admired him in the Hellenica, and Cicero later called him "the first man of Greece." The Theban hegemony he built lasted roughly a decade, from 371 to 362 BC, the year he died. Twenty-seven years later Alexander the Great leveled Thebes, and the brief supremacy Epaminondas had engineered gave way to the Macedonian dominance his campaigns had inadvertently enabled.
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