previous next

Now on the Lacedaemonian side the descendants of Heracles were stationed as commanders of the wings, namely Cleombrotus the king and Archidamus,1 son of the King Agesilaus, while on the Boeotian side Epameinondas, by employing an unusual disposition of his own, was enabled through his own strategy to achieve his famous victory. [2] He selected from the entire army the bravest men and stationed them on one wing, intending to fight to the finish with them himself. The weakest he placed on the other wing and instructed them to avoid battle and withdraw gradually during the enemy's attack. So then, by arranging his phalanx in oblique formation, he planned to decide the issue of the battle by means of the wing in which were the elite. [3] When the trumpets on both sides sounded the charge and the armies simultaneously with the first onset raised the battle-cry, the Lacedaemonians attacked both wings with their phalanx in crescent formation, while the Boeotians retreated on one wing, but on the other engaged the enemy in double-quick time. [4] As they met in hand-to-hand combat, at first both fought ardently and the battle was evenly poised; shortly, however, as Epameinondas' men began to derive advantage from their valour and the denseness of their lines, many Peloponnesians began to fall. For they were unable to endure the weight of the courageous fighting of the elite corps; of those who had resisted some fell and others were wounded, taking all the blows in front. [5] Now as long as King Cleombrotus of the Lacedaemonians was alive and had with him many comrades-in-arms who were quite ready to die in his defence, it was uncertain which way the scales of victory inclined; but when, though he shrank from no danger, he proved unable to bear down his opponents, and perished in an heroic resistance after sustaining many wounds, then, as masses of men thronged about his body, there was piled up a great mound of corpses.

1 See note on chap. 54.6. It has been suggested that Xenophon, who fails to mention Epameinondas at Leuctra and represents Archidamus as being sent out after the battle, was attempting to belittle the part of Epameinondas as victor and to spare his best friend Agesilaus, the father of Archidamus, the disgrace of his son's defeat. There is no evidence for this view.

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1989)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (3 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: