previous next

Philopoemen and Machanidas

So true it is that a single word spoken by a man of
Philopoemen's own example.
credit is often sufficient not only to turn men from the worst courses, but even to incite them to the noblest. But when such a speaker can appeal to his own life as in harmony with his words, then indeed his exhortation carries a weight which nothing can exceed. And this was above all others the case with Philopoemen. For in his dress and eating, as well as in all that concerned his bodily wants, he was plain and simple; in his manners to others without ceremony or pretence; and throughout his life he made it his chief aim to be absolutely sincere. Consequently a few unstudied words from him were sufficient to raise a firm conviction in the minds of his hearers; for as he could point to his own life as an example, they wanted little more to convince them. Thus it happened on several occasions, that the confidence he inspired, and the consciousness of his achievements, enabled him in a few words to overthrow long and, as his opponents thought, skilfully argued speeches.

So on this occasion, as soon as the council of the league separated, all returned to their cities deeply impressed both by the words and the man himself, and convinced that no harm could happen to them with him at their head. Immediately afterwards Philopoemen set out on a visitation of the cities, which he performed with great energy and speed. He then summoned a levy of citizens and began forming them into companies and drilling them; and at last, after eight months of this preparation and training, he mustered his forces at Mantinea, prepared to fight the tyrant Machanidas in behalf of the freedom of all the Peloponnesians.

War against Machanidas, tyrant of Sparta. B. C. 208-207.

Histories. Polybius. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh. translator. London, New York. Macmillan. 1889. Reprint Bloomington 1962.

Robert B. Strassler provided support for entering this text.

This text was converted to electronic form by professional data entry, Running heads in Walbank's reprint have been converted to chapter titles, and titles have been added, usually from the marginal notes, for chapters without them. Some pages have notes of the form "line X: A should read B," which I believe are Walbank's; they have "resp=fww". Summaries of missing sections are encoded as inline notes with "resp=ess." A very few unidentified quotations are marked in notes with "resp=aem" (the markup editor) Citations are marked using Perseus abbreviations. and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.

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 (Theodorus Büttner-Wobst after L. Dindorf, 1893)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

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

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Mantinea (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
207 BC (1)
hide References (2 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (1):
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: