Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/369

 EFFECT UPON THE ARMY. . t/ true, since it contradicts the sympathies of the reciting t/iiness. Nothing but the pressure of undeniable evidence could have con- strained Xenophon to record a scene so painful to him as the Lacedaemonian army beaten, in full flight, and rescued from de- struction only by the untimely wound of the Theban general. That Epaminondas would leave no successor either equal or sec- ond to himself, now that Pelopidas was no more, that the army which he commanded should be incapable of executing new movements or of completing an unfinished campaign, we can readily conceive. But that on the actual battle-field, when the moment of dangerous and doubtful struggle has been already gone through, and when the soldier's blood is up, to reap his reward in pursuit of an enemy whom he sees fleeing before him that at this crisis of exuberant impatience, when Epaminondas, had he been unwounded, would have found it difficult to restrain his sol- diers from excessive forwardness, they should have become at once paralyzed and disarmed on hearing of his fall, this is what we could not have believed, had we not found it attested by a witness at once contemporary and hostile. So striking a proof has hardly ever been rendered, on the part of soldiers towards their general, of devoted and absorbing sentiment. All the hopes of this army, composed of such diverse elements, were centred in Epaminondas ; all their confidence of success, all their security against defeat, were derived from the idea of acting under his orders ; all their power, even of striking down a defeated enemy, appeared to vanish when those orders were withdrawn. We are not indeed to speak of such a proceeding with commendation. Thebes and her allied cities had great reason to complain of their soldiers, for a grave dereliction of military duty, and a capital dis- appointment of well-earned triumph, whatever may be our feel- ings about the motive. Assuredly the man who would be most chagrined of all, and whose dying moments must have been embit- tered if he lived to hear it, was Epaminondas himself. But when we look at the fact simply as a mark and measure of the ascendency established by him over the minds of his soldiers, it will be found hardly paralleled in history. I have recounted, a few pages ago, the intense grief displayed by the Thebans and their allies in Thessaly over the dead body of Pelopidas 1 on the 1 Plutarch, Pelopidas, c. 33, 34