Upon his return from Laconia he was put on trial for his life, together with his fellow-generals, for having added, contrary to the law, four months to his term of office as Governor of Boeotia. 1 He bade his fellow-officers to put the responsibility on him, as if their action had been dictated by him, and said that he himself had not any words to speak better than his deeds; but if he absolutely must make a statement to the judges, he required from them as his just due, if they put him to death, to inscribe their sentence upon his tombstone, so that the Greeks might know that Epameinondas had compelled the Thebans against their will to lay waste Laconia with fire and sword, which for five hundred years 2 had been unravaged; and that he had repopulated Messene after a space of two hundred and thirty years, and had organized the Arcadians and united them in a league, and had restored selfgovernment to the Greeks. As a matter of fact, all these things had been accomplished in that campaign. [p. 151] Thereupon the judges left the court-room with hearty laughter, and did not even take up their ballots to cast against him. 3
1 WHen the Thebans invaded the Peloponnesus, 370-369 B.C.
2 Plutarch in his Life of Agesilaus, chap. xxxi. (613 B), says ‘not less than six hundred’; one is probably as correct as the other.
3 There are many references to this story, and it was even used as a corpus vile for argumentation in the schools, to judge from Cicero, De inventione, i. 33 (55-56) and 38 (69). The story is repeated in Moralia, 540 D and 799 E; Aelian, Varia Historia, xiii. 42; Pausanias, ix. 14. 5-7; Cornelius Nepos, Epaminondas, xv. 7. 3-8, 5. Appian, Roman History, Syrian Wars, 40-41, compares the action of Epameinondas with the similar action of Scipio Africanus Major (Moralia, 196 F); and this suggests the probability that Appian had before him Plutarch's Parallel Lives of Epameinondas and Scipio, now lost.
Plutarch. Moralia. with an English Translation by. Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1931. 3.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
