When Farmers Fight for Freedom
Anyone who has seen movies like 300 or Alexander must know their Greek history, right? After all, doesn’t everyone learn in high school world history class that Athens and Sparta led a Pan-Hellenic alliance to hold back a Persian invasion – the Spartan ground forces holding back the Persian army at Thermopylae while the Athenians logistically ending the war by the naval victory at Salamis – only to turn on each other, thus paving the way to a Macedonian invasion under Phillip II and his son Alexander? This is certainly the narrative I was raised with. Indeed, the modern student of history is often left with the impression that Spartans stood alongside Athenians once more – this time against Phillip’s Macedonian army – at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC and that the Greeks fell together under the weight of the Macedonian machine.
But this is simply not the case.
In his book, The Soul of Battle, Victor Davis Hanson corrects our history by telling the story of Thebes and their greatest leader: Epaminondas. As it turns out, the once utterly defeated Athens was present at Chaeronea while the renowned Spartans could no longer field a sizeable army. More surprising was the fact that the key ally of Athens at Chaeronea was Thebes, not Sparta. Somehow in the short 66 years between Athens’ capitulation to Sparta in 404 BC and the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, the Thebans under Epaminondas had achieved something that Athens never accomplished in almost thirty years of war with Sparta.
And it only took Epaminondas three months to do it.
I first came across the name Epaminondas while reading the classic work of Liddell Hart, Strategy, a book dedicated to teaching military theory via a broad narrative of military history. In it Hart asks, “…what was the decisive factor in ending Sparta’s ascendency? The answer is – a man… Epaminondas.” Hanson describes the man as: “…a follower of the teachings of the mathematician-philosopher-mystic Pythagoras, proponent of democracy, tactical innovator and strategic thinker, unmarried and without children, elected general of the army for at least nine years… Epaminondas rebuked pacifists at Thebes [and he was] incorruptible by money, power, food, or sex, and obsessed with his singular goal of liberating both serfs and free men from the autocracy of Sparta.”
To understand Epaminondas’ contempt for Sparta is to recall that Sparta’s military prowess existed for a singular reason: to keep its Helot slaves under control. Indeed, the Spartans were vastly outnumbered by the Helots and only a strong Gestapo-like secret police, combined with a professional army, could keep the slaves from revolt. Nevertheless revolts did periodically occur but were brutally put down. Sparta’s military might, however, was also used to force the other city-states in the Peloponnese (the southern-most peninsula of Greece) into an alliance very similar to the Soviet Union’s eastern European satellite states. Thus with 200,000 Helots in direct slavery and the northern Peloponnesian city-states like Corinth giving a buffer to Sparta, the Peloponnese was firmly in the hands of tyrants and no foreign army had marched there in 600 years.
It also meant that the first major non-Peloponnese city-states in Sparta’s path were Athens and Thebes, both situated respectively just to the east and west of the Corinthian isthmus connecting the Peloponnese to mainland Greece. After Athens’ defeat in 404 BC, Sparta set up a short-lived pro-Sparta government in Athens known as the Thirty Tyrants, and in 382 the Spartans invaded the Theban Cadmea, which served as both the spiritual and political center for the Theban people. It took three years, but the Spartans were eventually pushed out and something very unique happened in Greece: the rise a new democratic confederacy named not for the city-state of Thebes, but rather for the region in which Thebes was located: Boeotia.
The Boeotian Confederacy was unlike the imperialistic and navy-driven Athenian Empire as well as the oligarchic Sparta with its professional army. Athens, remembered for its democracy, never extended the franchise to surrounding city-states in Attica or to its non-landowning inhabitants. Thebes, on the other hand, built a confederacy of Boeotian city-states and broadened the requirements of citizenship. Like other Greek city-states, however, citizens were required to be soldiers. In this way, Boeotia could rapidly mobilize the first true nation at arms – and in July of 371 it did just that in the face of a new Spartan invasion. Though outnumbered nearly 2-1, the Thebans and their Boeotian brethren stood united against tyranny under the leadership of the greatest Greek general of antiquity: Epaminondas.
At the Battle of Leuctra, Epaminondas arrayed his confederate allies against the weaker portion of the Spartan line while he placed his own Theban troops in a new formation against the Spartan elite troops. Stacking his phalanx fifty men deep, as opposed to the typical twelve deep, the rugged farmers of Boeotia tore through the Spartan elite troops and rolled up Sparta’s right flank. By the end of the battle, the Boeotian Confederacy stood victorious and the new allies of Thebes knew they were not being used as mere cannon fodder by Epaminondas, who used his own Thebans to take on the best troops Sparta brought to the field. Furthermore, the King of Sparta, personally leading his army, was killed in the battle.
In the months directly following the devastating defeat of Sparta, Epaminondas consolidated the new confederacy while Sparta’s satellite states in the Peloponnese, seeing a potential ally in Boeotia, began inching their way towards independence. When Sparta finally moved to put down the brewing revolution, a frantic call for help was sent to Epaminondas and the men of the Boeotian confederacy. By this point, five months following Leuctra, Greece was settling down into winter and no one knew if an army untried outside Boeotia was really ready to mount any kind of winter invasion anywhere in Greece, much less into the heart of Sparta.
Hanson recounts the dangers inherent in a midwinter invasion of a land untouched by foreign troops in 600 years. It meant taking an army out of its own farm lands and into the unknown. It meant passing through the narrow, enemy-held Corinthian isthmus and over snowy mountains whose passes could be easily blocked by Spartan troops. It also meant a sacrifice back home: Boeotia was unlike Athens in that its primary mode of sustenance came not from maritime trade but rather through farming – and the winter months of Boeotia were jam-packed with preparations for the next season. Thus to invade Sparta with her army of farmers was to place the entire Boeotian livelihood in jeopardy.
Convinced, however, by the words of Epaminondas, the confederacy placed the entire command of the army in his hands and allowed him to travel south. Passing through the Corinthians isthmus, Epaminondas and his army arrived in the heart of the Peloponnese. Soon enough, the Boeotians would be doubly surprised. First off, the Peloponnesians, eager to break the yoke of Spartan tyranny, sent enough troops to swell Epaminondas’ ranks to 70,000 men – thus becoming the largest Greek army to be fielded since the wars with Persia. If Epaminondas was surprised to find new friends in numbers south of the boarder, he was even more surprised that the democratic Athens placed the balance of power above freedom from tyranny in that Athens now formally allied with Sparta against the Boeotian confederacy and the revolting Spartan satellite states.
Nevertheless, Epaminondas continued on. Using a dangerous tactic, he divided his army into four columns and had each cross the mountains of the Peloponnese’ interior at separate points. The Spartan defenders were unable to hold each pass and soon the entire Spartan defense collapsed as the successful Boeotian columns came to support the other columns still held up by Spartan defenders. Epaminondas’ next move was to take his massive citizen army unto the Laconian plains of Sparta itself where its very presence would shake Sparta to the core. While Sparta was not sacked, the Spartan army itself hid inside the city, refusing to fight. The lands around the city were plundered, Helots freed, and the entire Peloponnese saw the cowardice of Spartan men.
Epaminondas then ravaged a nearby Spartan coastal port and withdrew his army back over the mountains. Sparta quickly recalled all its forces through the Peloponnese to defend the capital – which is exactly what Epaminondas was counting on. To the east of Spartan Laconia lay a region named Messenia whose inhabitants had centuries before been conquered and placed into permanent helotage. Like the Ukraine for the Soviet Union, Messenia was Sparta’s breadbasket. Now, with Sparta’s troops recalled, Epaminondas quickly took his army into Messenia and freed this land from the tyranny of her Spartan overlords.
But Epaminondas knew that it wasn’t enough to humiliate Sparta or even march his own army freely around the Peloponnese. If any results were to be lasting, the newly freed Helots and city-states of the Peloponnese would need to be protected. Giving up his army’s loot from the recent march on Sparta, Epaminondas and his farmers joined in with local inhabitants to create a new and free city along a high mountain at the heart of Messenia. It was called Messene and practically overnight it became the center of a free and democratic Messenia, with a larger population and more wealth than Sparta itself. Nestled against the mountain side, her walls were eight feet thick, fourteen feet tall, and ringed with thirty towers. In The Soul of Battle, Hanson aptly asks: “How can an impoverished people construct such beautiful, massive fortifications in the dead of winter? And how much more elegant and impressive are the ruins of Messene than the scattered blocks and rubble that litter the classical Spartan acropolis!” Indeed, when a Spartan army did approach the new fortress, the Messenians - unlike the Spartans - marched out from behind their walls to meet the Spartans in open battle, ready to fight for their new gift of freedom.
The Spartans turned around and went home.
But Messene was not the only city to be built with the help of the Boeotians of the north. A new city called Megalopolis, across the mountains north of Sparta, was built as another refuge for freed Helots along with any other oppressed man under the tyranny of Sparta. Mantinea was yet a third city to be enhanced with new protective walls and towers. In effect, Epaminondas had created a concentric ring of new states to hem in Sparta and remain free of her conquest. Furthermore, the freeing of Sparta’s slaves meant that the men of Sparta’s army were no longer free to live in the barracks training for war, but were now to return to their farms and do the work for which they had enslaved others to complete.
It should be noted that Epaminondas did not force any of the new Peloponnesian free city-states into an alliance or treaty with the Theban-led confederacy, nor did he force them to create democracies based on his own confederacy’s constitution, nor did he require any tribute to be paid for the work he and his army had done for their freedom. Indeed, when Epaminondas returned from his work in the Peloponnese, he came home empty handed and was almost executed for acting in part without the full permission of the confederate governing council. On this note, Hanson tells us that every good general must be willing to risk his career in order to press his men on and accomplish what is right and just. “Would that the American generals Schwarzkopf and Powell,” Hanson writes, “had risked resigning for insisting that American troops march unto Baghdad to liquidate the Hussein regime!”
Ironically, Epaminondas also returned home to find a young Phillip II of Macedon held hostage but eager to hear of Epaminondas’ exploits in the Peloponnese and the new tactics he used for victory. Phillip would one day use these same tactics to conquer all of Greece a few decades later in 338 BC. While our school textbooks sing the praises of Athens, Sparta, and the megalomaniac Alexander, we must never forget that the first truly Greek nation existed for a short time in the farm lands of Boeotia. These farmers, led by Epaminondas, knew that a nation at arms could unseat tyrants and enable the oppressed to form new and free governments, protected by high walls and the mutual protection of free nations.
The real strength of Thebes relied on the leadership of Epaminondas, and with his death in 362 BC the confederacy began to deteriorate. The Boeotian Confederacy was the greatest step forward the Greeks would take, but former British colonist-farmers would one day learn that a confederacy does not always make the strongest nation. It takes more than a military agreement between men on foriegn battlefields to build a nation - the statesmen must also gather to forge a political agreement built upon the sacrifice of its men, farming and fighting in the field.
But this is simply not the case.
In his book, The Soul of Battle, Victor Davis Hanson corrects our history by telling the story of Thebes and their greatest leader: Epaminondas. As it turns out, the once utterly defeated Athens was present at Chaeronea while the renowned Spartans could no longer field a sizeable army. More surprising was the fact that the key ally of Athens at Chaeronea was Thebes, not Sparta. Somehow in the short 66 years between Athens’ capitulation to Sparta in 404 BC and the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, the Thebans under Epaminondas had achieved something that Athens never accomplished in almost thirty years of war with Sparta.
And it only took Epaminondas three months to do it.
I first came across the name Epaminondas while reading the classic work of Liddell Hart, Strategy, a book dedicated to teaching military theory via a broad narrative of military history. In it Hart asks, “…what was the decisive factor in ending Sparta’s ascendency? The answer is – a man… Epaminondas.” Hanson describes the man as: “…a follower of the teachings of the mathematician-philosopher-mystic Pythagoras, proponent of democracy, tactical innovator and strategic thinker, unmarried and without children, elected general of the army for at least nine years… Epaminondas rebuked pacifists at Thebes [and he was] incorruptible by money, power, food, or sex, and obsessed with his singular goal of liberating both serfs and free men from the autocracy of Sparta.”
To understand Epaminondas’ contempt for Sparta is to recall that Sparta’s military prowess existed for a singular reason: to keep its Helot slaves under control. Indeed, the Spartans were vastly outnumbered by the Helots and only a strong Gestapo-like secret police, combined with a professional army, could keep the slaves from revolt. Nevertheless revolts did periodically occur but were brutally put down. Sparta’s military might, however, was also used to force the other city-states in the Peloponnese (the southern-most peninsula of Greece) into an alliance very similar to the Soviet Union’s eastern European satellite states. Thus with 200,000 Helots in direct slavery and the northern Peloponnesian city-states like Corinth giving a buffer to Sparta, the Peloponnese was firmly in the hands of tyrants and no foreign army had marched there in 600 years.
It also meant that the first major non-Peloponnese city-states in Sparta’s path were Athens and Thebes, both situated respectively just to the east and west of the Corinthian isthmus connecting the Peloponnese to mainland Greece. After Athens’ defeat in 404 BC, Sparta set up a short-lived pro-Sparta government in Athens known as the Thirty Tyrants, and in 382 the Spartans invaded the Theban Cadmea, which served as both the spiritual and political center for the Theban people. It took three years, but the Spartans were eventually pushed out and something very unique happened in Greece: the rise a new democratic confederacy named not for the city-state of Thebes, but rather for the region in which Thebes was located: Boeotia.
The Boeotian Confederacy was unlike the imperialistic and navy-driven Athenian Empire as well as the oligarchic Sparta with its professional army. Athens, remembered for its democracy, never extended the franchise to surrounding city-states in Attica or to its non-landowning inhabitants. Thebes, on the other hand, built a confederacy of Boeotian city-states and broadened the requirements of citizenship. Like other Greek city-states, however, citizens were required to be soldiers. In this way, Boeotia could rapidly mobilize the first true nation at arms – and in July of 371 it did just that in the face of a new Spartan invasion. Though outnumbered nearly 2-1, the Thebans and their Boeotian brethren stood united against tyranny under the leadership of the greatest Greek general of antiquity: Epaminondas.
At the Battle of Leuctra, Epaminondas arrayed his confederate allies against the weaker portion of the Spartan line while he placed his own Theban troops in a new formation against the Spartan elite troops. Stacking his phalanx fifty men deep, as opposed to the typical twelve deep, the rugged farmers of Boeotia tore through the Spartan elite troops and rolled up Sparta’s right flank. By the end of the battle, the Boeotian Confederacy stood victorious and the new allies of Thebes knew they were not being used as mere cannon fodder by Epaminondas, who used his own Thebans to take on the best troops Sparta brought to the field. Furthermore, the King of Sparta, personally leading his army, was killed in the battle.
In the months directly following the devastating defeat of Sparta, Epaminondas consolidated the new confederacy while Sparta’s satellite states in the Peloponnese, seeing a potential ally in Boeotia, began inching their way towards independence. When Sparta finally moved to put down the brewing revolution, a frantic call for help was sent to Epaminondas and the men of the Boeotian confederacy. By this point, five months following Leuctra, Greece was settling down into winter and no one knew if an army untried outside Boeotia was really ready to mount any kind of winter invasion anywhere in Greece, much less into the heart of Sparta.
Hanson recounts the dangers inherent in a midwinter invasion of a land untouched by foreign troops in 600 years. It meant taking an army out of its own farm lands and into the unknown. It meant passing through the narrow, enemy-held Corinthian isthmus and over snowy mountains whose passes could be easily blocked by Spartan troops. It also meant a sacrifice back home: Boeotia was unlike Athens in that its primary mode of sustenance came not from maritime trade but rather through farming – and the winter months of Boeotia were jam-packed with preparations for the next season. Thus to invade Sparta with her army of farmers was to place the entire Boeotian livelihood in jeopardy.
Convinced, however, by the words of Epaminondas, the confederacy placed the entire command of the army in his hands and allowed him to travel south. Passing through the Corinthians isthmus, Epaminondas and his army arrived in the heart of the Peloponnese. Soon enough, the Boeotians would be doubly surprised. First off, the Peloponnesians, eager to break the yoke of Spartan tyranny, sent enough troops to swell Epaminondas’ ranks to 70,000 men – thus becoming the largest Greek army to be fielded since the wars with Persia. If Epaminondas was surprised to find new friends in numbers south of the boarder, he was even more surprised that the democratic Athens placed the balance of power above freedom from tyranny in that Athens now formally allied with Sparta against the Boeotian confederacy and the revolting Spartan satellite states.
Nevertheless, Epaminondas continued on. Using a dangerous tactic, he divided his army into four columns and had each cross the mountains of the Peloponnese’ interior at separate points. The Spartan defenders were unable to hold each pass and soon the entire Spartan defense collapsed as the successful Boeotian columns came to support the other columns still held up by Spartan defenders. Epaminondas’ next move was to take his massive citizen army unto the Laconian plains of Sparta itself where its very presence would shake Sparta to the core. While Sparta was not sacked, the Spartan army itself hid inside the city, refusing to fight. The lands around the city were plundered, Helots freed, and the entire Peloponnese saw the cowardice of Spartan men.
Epaminondas then ravaged a nearby Spartan coastal port and withdrew his army back over the mountains. Sparta quickly recalled all its forces through the Peloponnese to defend the capital – which is exactly what Epaminondas was counting on. To the east of Spartan Laconia lay a region named Messenia whose inhabitants had centuries before been conquered and placed into permanent helotage. Like the Ukraine for the Soviet Union, Messenia was Sparta’s breadbasket. Now, with Sparta’s troops recalled, Epaminondas quickly took his army into Messenia and freed this land from the tyranny of her Spartan overlords.
But Epaminondas knew that it wasn’t enough to humiliate Sparta or even march his own army freely around the Peloponnese. If any results were to be lasting, the newly freed Helots and city-states of the Peloponnese would need to be protected. Giving up his army’s loot from the recent march on Sparta, Epaminondas and his farmers joined in with local inhabitants to create a new and free city along a high mountain at the heart of Messenia. It was called Messene and practically overnight it became the center of a free and democratic Messenia, with a larger population and more wealth than Sparta itself. Nestled against the mountain side, her walls were eight feet thick, fourteen feet tall, and ringed with thirty towers. In The Soul of Battle, Hanson aptly asks: “How can an impoverished people construct such beautiful, massive fortifications in the dead of winter? And how much more elegant and impressive are the ruins of Messene than the scattered blocks and rubble that litter the classical Spartan acropolis!” Indeed, when a Spartan army did approach the new fortress, the Messenians - unlike the Spartans - marched out from behind their walls to meet the Spartans in open battle, ready to fight for their new gift of freedom.
The Spartans turned around and went home.
But Messene was not the only city to be built with the help of the Boeotians of the north. A new city called Megalopolis, across the mountains north of Sparta, was built as another refuge for freed Helots along with any other oppressed man under the tyranny of Sparta. Mantinea was yet a third city to be enhanced with new protective walls and towers. In effect, Epaminondas had created a concentric ring of new states to hem in Sparta and remain free of her conquest. Furthermore, the freeing of Sparta’s slaves meant that the men of Sparta’s army were no longer free to live in the barracks training for war, but were now to return to their farms and do the work for which they had enslaved others to complete.
It should be noted that Epaminondas did not force any of the new Peloponnesian free city-states into an alliance or treaty with the Theban-led confederacy, nor did he force them to create democracies based on his own confederacy’s constitution, nor did he require any tribute to be paid for the work he and his army had done for their freedom. Indeed, when Epaminondas returned from his work in the Peloponnese, he came home empty handed and was almost executed for acting in part without the full permission of the confederate governing council. On this note, Hanson tells us that every good general must be willing to risk his career in order to press his men on and accomplish what is right and just. “Would that the American generals Schwarzkopf and Powell,” Hanson writes, “had risked resigning for insisting that American troops march unto Baghdad to liquidate the Hussein regime!”
Ironically, Epaminondas also returned home to find a young Phillip II of Macedon held hostage but eager to hear of Epaminondas’ exploits in the Peloponnese and the new tactics he used for victory. Phillip would one day use these same tactics to conquer all of Greece a few decades later in 338 BC. While our school textbooks sing the praises of Athens, Sparta, and the megalomaniac Alexander, we must never forget that the first truly Greek nation existed for a short time in the farm lands of Boeotia. These farmers, led by Epaminondas, knew that a nation at arms could unseat tyrants and enable the oppressed to form new and free governments, protected by high walls and the mutual protection of free nations.
The real strength of Thebes relied on the leadership of Epaminondas, and with his death in 362 BC the confederacy began to deteriorate. The Boeotian Confederacy was the greatest step forward the Greeks would take, but former British colonist-farmers would one day learn that a confederacy does not always make the strongest nation. It takes more than a military agreement between men on foriegn battlefields to build a nation - the statesmen must also gather to forge a political agreement built upon the sacrifice of its men, farming and fighting in the field.