Statesman and general Epaminondas (c.418-362 BCE) was born into the Theban aristocracy, a descendant of the Phoenician conquerors led by the legendary king Cadmus. In his late teens, Epaminondas began serving as a soldier. He participated at Mantinea in 385 BCE, where he saved the life of his fellow Theban Pelopidas, who would be his partner in political matters for the next twenty years.
Pelopidas was one of the exiled Thebans who regrouped in Athens after the Spartan general Phoebidas took advantage of unrest within Thebes to enter the city, seize the Cadmeia (the Theban acropolis), and force anti-Spartan elements to flee the city in 382. While Epaminondas was associated with that faction, he was regarded as impotent.
After the Spartans installed a puppet government and garrisoned the Cadmeia to ensure that the Thebans behaved themselves, Epaminondas began surreptitious preparations to fight the Spartan garrison.
The opportunity came in the winter of 379 BCE when Pelopidas and a small group of exiles infiltrated the city and assassinated the pro-Spartan leadership. A group of young Thebans and a force of Athenian hoplites surrounded the Spartans in the Cadmeia.
The Spartans eventually surrendered and were allowed to march away unharmed. When they met the force sent to relieve them and subdue the city, everyone turned back without engaging the Thebans.
Another punitive expedition under Agesilaus II reached Thebes. However, it could only ravage the countryside when the Thebans entrenched themselves in the city and refused to meet them in battle.
Newly independent Thebes then reconstituted the former Boeotian confederacy. The new federation had an executive body composed of seven generals (Boeotarchs) elected from seven districts.
Epaminondas served with the Theban armies through the 370s. By 371 BC, he had become a Boeotarch.
Sparta had invaded Boeotia three times following the Theban coup, with Athens also drawn into the fighting. While feeble attempts at peace had been made, by 371, Athens and Sparta were war-weary. A conference to discuss a common peace convened in Sparta in 371.
Epaminondas led the Boeotian delegation to the peace conference. While peace terms were agreed fairly quickly, disagreements over the status of the other cities within the Boeotian Confederacy saw the conference break up. The delegation returned to Thebes, as both sides mobilised for war.
Immediately following the failure of the peace talks, the Spartan king Cleombrotus, leading an army in Phocis, marched directly to Boeotia. Avoiding mountain passes where he could be ambushed, he entered the Boeotian territory and marched towards Thebes.
The Boeotian army met his ten thousand hoplites at Leuctra, with around six thousand men bolstered by cavalry.
In command of the Boeotian army, with the other six Boeotarchs to advise him, Epaminondas countered the Spartans' numerical superiority with innovatory tactics. To counter the Greek phalanx formation's distinct tendency to veer to the right during a battle, he placed his best troops on the army's left directly opposite the Spartan elite troops. He then arranged them fifty ranks deep rather than the usual eight to twelve.
Then since he did not have the numbers to match the width of the Peloponnesian phalanx, even before he strengthened the left side, he did not even try.
The weaker troops on the right flank were instructed to avoid battle and withdraw gradually. While the deep phalanx had been used before, reversing the position of the elite forces and an oblique line of attack were innovations.
After an initial cavalry clash, the Theban left flank advanced at double speed. The right side retreated, and the impetus of the reinforced phalanx told after intense fighting in which Cleombrotus was killed. The Spartans held on for long enough to rescue his body before their line broke. Their allies on the left wing also broke and ran. On the Peloponnesian side, the losses were about a thousand, while the Boeotians lost three hundred. Most significantly, more than half of the seven hundred elite Spartiates present at the battle died.
After Leuctra, the Thebans considered following up their victory. They invited Athens to join them in taking vengeance on Sparta. Still, the Thessalian allies dissuaded them from further short term action. Instead, Epaminondas set about consolidating the Boeotian confederacy.
By late 370, he had created a network of alliances in central Greece that made Thebes secure and offered the opportunity to break Spartan power once and for all.
The fall out from Leuctra included a peace conference in Athens. The peace terms proposed earlier were almost universally ratified, and the Peloponnesian cities Sparta had dominated became, notionally, independent.
However, when their former allies established a new Arcadian alliance, the Spartans declared war on Mantinea. The Arcadian cities grouped to oppose them and requested assistance from Thebes.
Epaminondas and Pelopidas led a Theban force into Arcadia in 370. They were joined by armed contingents from Sparta's former allies, swelling their numbers to somewhere between fifty and seventy thousand. With an army that size, Epaminondas, Pelopidas and the Arcadians persuaded the other Boeotarchs to continue into the Spartan heartland.
Moving south, they crossed the Spartan frontier and found the Spartans unwilling to engage them in battle. The Spartans retreated within their walls while the Thebans and their allies ravaged the countryside and encouraged more of Sparta's neighbours to renounce their allegiances.
After a brief return to Arcadia, Epaminondas marched south again into Messenia. The Spartans had conquered the area two centuries earlier. It contained about half of the helot (slave) population that allowed the Spartans to operate a full-time army. Epaminondas freed the helots, and rebuilt the ancient city of Messene and called on Messenian exiles all over Greece to return to their homeland.
So, in a couple of months, Epaminondas had created two new states to oppose Sparta in their heartland. He had also shaken the foundations of Sparta's economy and undermined their authority in the Greek world. He led his army home, victorious.
However, in accomplishing what he had achieved, Epaminondas and his fellow Boeotarchs had stayed in the field well after their term of office expired.
Faced with impeachment by his political enemies, Epaminondas reputedly employed a novel defence. He suggested an appropriate inscription detailing his recent achievements if he was found guilty.
"Epaminondas was punished by the Thebans with death, because he obliged them to overthrow the Lacedaemonians at Leuctra, whom, before he was general, none of the Boeotians durst look upon in the field, and because he not only, by one battle, rescued Thebes from destruction, but also secured liberty for all Greece, and brought the power of both people to such a condition, that the Thebans attacked Sparta, and the Lacedaemonians were content if they could save their lives; nor did he cease to prosecute the war, till, after settling Messene, he shut up Sparta with a close siege."
(Cornelius Nepos, Lives of Eminent Commanders, XV, viii)
The jury burst into laughter, the charges were dismissed, and Epaminondas was re-elected as Boeotarch the following year.
A second excursion to support the Arcadians and their allies in their war against Sparta saw Epaminondas fight his way across the heavily guarded Isthmus of Corinth with a dawn attack on his encamped enemies' weakest spot.
However, the rest of the expedition achieved little beyond ravaging the countryside and enlisting another couple of allies. A second impeachment followed his return, and his political enemies succeeded in blocking his appointment as Boeotarch in 368.
As a result, he was a private soldier when the Theban army marched into Thessaly in 368. They were there to rescue Pelopidas and Ismenias, who had been imprisoned while serving as ambassadors. When the Theban force got into serious difficulties, the rank and file turned to Epaminondas to extricate them from their problems. He succeeded and was reappointed as Boeotarch in early 367.
He then led a second expedition to free the prisoners. After outmanoeuvring the Thessalians, he secured the release of the ambassadors without a fight.
Another incursion into the Peloponnesus in the spring of 367 was unchallenged in the field. In Achaea, the ruling oligarchies, who had previously been neutral, agreed to align themselves with Thebes. When Epaminondas' accepted their change of allegiance with the oligarchies in place, his political rivals set up democracies and exiled the oligarchs. When pro-Spartan aristocrats banded together, attacked each city in turn and reestablished the oligarchies, the new regimes aligned themselves with Sparta.
In 364, Epaminondas led a fleet of a hundred triremes to win over Rhodes, Chios, and Byzantium and challenge Athens at sea. However, there were no lasting gains on the voyage. In the same year, Pelopidas was killed campaigning in Thessaly, depriving Epaminondas of his greatest political ally.
In 362, Epaminondas launched his final expedition into the Peloponnese, leading an army drawn from Boeotia, Thessaly and Euboea to subdue Mantinea, which opposed Theban influence in Arcadia. Mantinea requested and received assistance from Sparta, Athens, and Achaea. At the same time, the rest of Arcadia split into pro- and anti-Theban camps. In the end, almost every city-state in Greece ended up aligned with one side or the other.
However, it seems neither side wanted to start actual hostilities without some clear advantage. In a campaign characterised bu move and counter-move, the two sides manoeuvred back and forth through the campaigning season without managing to catch their opponents off-guard.
Finally, with time for campaigning running out, Epaminondas decided to stake everything on a pitched battle. If he withdrew for the winter without defeating the enemy, Theban influence in the south of Greece would be destroyed.
The resulting engagement in front of Mantinea was the largest hoplite battle in Greek history. Thirty thousand Theban infantry with three thousand cavalry faced an opposing force about two-thirds their size.
After preliminary manoeuvres intended to catch his opponents off guard, Epaminondas replicated the strengthened left-wing he had employed at Leuctra and gave the order to advance. As at Leuctra, the weakened right wing held back, avoiding action. In the infantry clash, the Theban left-wing broke through their opponents' line and put the entire Spartan phalanx to flight. Epaminondas was mortally wounded at the height of the battle and died shortly afterwards. The Thebans and their allies made no effort to pursue the fleeing enemy.
Universally described as one of the most talented generals in Greek history, Epaminondas reshaped Greek politics, fragmented old alliances and created new ones. Philip II of Macedon, who spent time as a hostage in Thebes as a youth, employed many of Epaminondas' innovations. Philip's tactics, in turn, went on to influence his son, Alexander the Great.
However, the changes Epaminondas wrought in Greek politics in the last decade of his life did not last and paved the way for the Macedonian conquest. Just twenty-seven years after his death, Alexander the Great obliterated Thebes.
Sources:
Chambers Biographical Dictionary
Cornelius Nepos, Lives of Eminent Commanders
Wikipedia