Epaminondas the soldier has been much admired. His two great battles rank as masterpieces of the military art. Epaminondas himself perhaps regarded them as his greatest achievements, to judge by his last words as reported by Diodorus. He had been carried from the battlefield of Mantinea with a spear stuck in his chest. The doctors declared that when the spear was removed he would die. After hearing that his own shield was safe and that the Boeotians had won, he ordered (...) that the spear be removed. One of his friends said to him ‘But you die without a son.’ He answered ‘I do, by God, but I leave two daughters, my victory of Leuctra and my victory of Mantinea’, and then he died. Nor were his ‘daughters’ unadmired. By remarkable chance the future Philip II of Macedon was hostage at Thebes at the very time of Epaminondas' pre-eminence and did not fail to learn, as Chaeronea was to show. (shrink)

Scholarly interest in epiteichismos has, for various reasons, been centred almost exclusively upon the Athenian occupation of Pylos and the Spartan occupation of Decelea. In occupying Pylos the Athenians were adopting epiteichismos for the first time, as were the Spartans in occupying Decelea. Both enterprises were on a considerable scale and deeply influenced the course of the Peloponnesian war, though neither so decisively as had initially seemed likely. Another source of interest in them is their link with the perennial problem (...) of speeches in Thucydides. The Thucydidean versions of speeches delivered shortly before the outbreak of the Archidamian war include references to the possibility that epiteichismos might be attempted by both sides , although in fact Athens did not do so until 425, and then partly by accident, and Sparta not until much later. These puzzling references have been thought by some scholars to be anachronistic, while others have disputed this inference, maintaining that even before the war military leaders had in mind the possibility of epiteichismos. A similar if less vexed problem arises from the fact that the occupation of Decelea, vigorously recommended by Alcibiades in the Thucydidean version of his speech at Sparta at the end of 415 and apparently accepted with enthusiasm , was not implemented until the spring of 413. (shrink)