The Soul of Battle

1.

"The Dancing Floor of War"

Thebes—the present-day community is built right atop the ancient—is a pleasant but little-visited Greek provincial town. No one travels to Greece to experience either ancient or modern Thebes. A pity. There are indeed certain things worth seeing there. A farmer, unconcerned about the absence of good beaches, the paucity of impressive archaeological remains, or the dearth of majestic landscape, immediately feels at home among the rolling plains of the surrounding Boeotian landscape—over 250,000 acres of rich wheat fields, row crops, olive orchards, and vineyards, a larger area even than the Attic countryside that surrounds Athens. From the Theban acropolis a keen agrarian eye notices that things grow wonderfully on this good ground—both food and people.

The ancients knew that. The Theban soil, all Greeks conceded, could fuel a prosperity that would be manifested in ways other than the mere production of food. The poets Hesiod, Pindar, and Corinna were Boeotians; so was Plutarch and a host of lesser-known philosophers, artists, and politicians who inhabit the pages of Greek literature and remark on the fertility of their native ground. The Boeotian Pythagorean philosophers, Philolaus, Simmias, and Cebes, are prominent in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, suggesting that the out-of-the-way wheat fields and vineyards of Thebes may have in fact served as a refuge for an enclave of that vanishing philosophical sect. Boeotia means “cow pastures” in Greek, but despite its ancient reputation for rusticity, this rich farmland developed a peculiar rural culture all its own, one that was always inseparable from the land.

The mountains in the distance—the verdant Mts. Cithaeron and Helicon on the west flank, snow-capped Parnassus looming to the north, eastward the barren Messapion and Ptoön, and wooded Parnes separating Attica to the south—rise in all directions to provide good watershed. The summer heat—nearly unbearable for tourists—ensures bountiful vegetables and fruits; the soil is heavy and black in its fertility, the present-day population skilled and healthy.

Water, heat, soil, and independent farmers combine to create a real agrarianism, successful enough to produce food to feed other Greeks not so fortunate, both ancient and modern. Such climate, agriculture, and terrain instantly explain the prominent place of ancient Thebes in Greek history—the site of an important Mycenaean citadel (still unexcavated beneath the modern streets and shops); the seven-gated city of myth and home to Cadmus, Herakles, Oedipus, and Antigone; and the capital city of the surrounding classical Boeotian federation.

Foreigners—from the mythical Seven Against Thebes to Roman Republican generals—have always wanted this land, their megalomania usually resulting in a brutal confrontation since its tough farmers have always been just as determined not to give it up. For those Greeks in Boeotia who perished fighting the Macedonians at the battle of Chaeronea, their stark epitaph simply ended with “We died on the famed plains of Boeotia.” The Greeks, we must remember, often calibrated the quality of a region’s soil by the number and nature of the infantrymen it might produce.

Today in these famed but seldom visited plains, in the midst of tractors and spray rigs, there is still the stale scent of war. To the east of Thebes, less than twenty miles away, lie the rolling plains of Tanagra, Oinophyta, and Delium, sites of decisive and often glorious pitched hoplite battles against Thebes’s hated rival Athens—presently mere cotton and wheat fields covering the long-dead whose exploits are entirely unknown to the thousands who whizz by on the national freeway. How many Greeks, who have recently ripped the soil around the small resort of Delesi for the foundations of their imposing vacation homes, know that Socrates once, after the battle of Delium, bravely retreated through their backyards?

To the south of Thebes about ten miles distant is the countryside of Plataea, where the grand Greek alliance of 479 destroyed the Persian army of invasion. A new road has cut right through the site and nearly ruined appreciation of the ancient town and environs—right where Theban attackers for generations tried to storm the city and likewise tear down the walls of their sometimes confederate ally. Things change and do not change on the farmland of Boeotia.

On the way from Thebes to Plataea, a brief detour of a few minutes takes you to Leuctra. Out in a remote grainfield, by a small irrigation aqueduct, rises the Theban trophy of 371, a stark white marble column ringed with sculpted shields, commemorating the day Epaminondas and his Thebans demolished the Spartan elite. Not a soul will be there. Not one of the thousands of tourists who cram into Delphi each morning has visited this lonely pillar, a hallowed spot where the history of Greece was changed far more radically than by any event which occurred at that ostentatious though venerable mountain shrine thirty miles to the northwest.

The killing fields of Chaeronea—where the Theban Sacred Band in 338 went down before the cavalry charge of the murderous eighteen-year-old Alexander—lie farther to the northwest in the shadow of Mt. Helicon, near the shores of the now drained Copaic basin. A proud limestone lion, erected over the remains of those illustrious 300 warriors, after twenty-three centuries still guards the old highway. Not far away are the little-visited ancient re- mains of Haliartus. There the Thebans once overwhelmed a Spartan corps and killed their maverick general Lysander, the brilliant Spartan commoner who fancied himself king.

The little-known, hard-to-find battlefield of Tegyra also looms across the way from this northern plain of Boeotia. The Theban Pelopidas stopped cold a Spartan army there in 375 in what Plutarch called a “prelude to Leuctra.” And Coronea—“a battle like none other of our time,” the historian and eyewitness Xenophon wrote—is roughly between Chaeronea and Haliartus; in that tiny valley the Thebans slammed head-on into the phalanx of King Agesilaus and nearly killed him. Not one of these battles was brought on by the Thebans; but in nearly all of them the presence of their hoplites ensured mayhem and death for those involved. To walk the fields of Boeotia is to trample unknowingly over the bones and ashes of thousands of long-forgotten and anonymous farmers who died in their mud to keep others off of it.

In a single afternoon one can drive through the farmland to nearly every major battlefield in the history of ancient Greece—Plataea, Tanagra, Oinophyta, Coronea, Delium, Haliartus, Tegyra, Leuctra, and Chaeronea. They are all in Boeotia. Mass graves, stone lions, marble columns, and funerary inscriptions dot the Boeotian landscape and fill the museums. These battles’ uncanny proximity to each other reveals the real history and character of the Boeotians. For Persian and Macedonian autocrats marching south, and for Spartan professionals pushing north, the rich plains of Boeotia always were ahead, full of tough farmers who were eager to bar the way. It is a good place to farm, and for heavy infantry an even better place to fight—and Thebes is in the very center of it all. No wonder their general Epaminondas dubbed his flat and accessible countryside “the dancing floor of war,” a black-earthen land that only tough men “who kept a grip on their shield straps” could hold on to. The corpses of thousands of Spartans and Athenians in the muck of Boeotia proved that in fact they usually could.

Or at least die trying. That glorious millennium of the city’s existence came to an abrupt end in September 335. Alexander the Great, the “Savior of the Greeks,” simply destroyed it. Utterly. The birthplace of Herakles—the people, the buildings, the farmsteads about, everything and everybody—vanished. Gone was everything Theban in a matter of days. Alexander obliterated Epaminondas’s legacy of a democratic polis when Thebes (much of its crack infantry had been demolished or demoralized three years earlier at the Greek defeat at Chaeronea) chose not to stay in his puppet league of Greek subservient states, and instead opted for independence from Macedon on false rumors of Alexander’s demise. The agrarians of Thebes always had an unfortunate tendency to be obstinate—or rather politically inept in the baffling cosmology of shifting Greek alliance and counteralliance: fighting alongside the Persians at Plataea when the momentum had clearly swung over to the Greeks; turning on Sparta at the very conclusion of their successful joint twenty-seven-year war against Athens; parting with Alexander when the latter’s quest for Greek hegemony was nearly complete. Farmers are good fighters but poor politicians.

Our ancient sources, Arrian, Plutarch, and Diodorus, agree that nearly thirty years after the Theban general Epaminondas died, Alexander butchered over 6,000 Theban men, women, and children in the streets of the city in a few hours. The rest—over 30,000 in number—were sold into slavery, the profits invested in preparations for his own upcoming march through Asia Minor to “liberate” the Greek cities from the “oppressive” Persian yoke. Arrian editorialized that the wholesale disappearance of Thebes was a novel event in Greek history—no prior disaster had instilled such horror, as the houses and walls themselves were razed, and the land parceled out to neighboring communities who had joined in the slaughter.

To mask his own culpability in the genocide, Alexander, a current favorite now once again of modern encomiastic scholars, unloosed jealous Boeotian neighbors to run amuck in the city. Like present-day Serbians, Bosnians, and Croatians, a few fellow Boeotians had long nursed private grudges and old ethnic hatreds, and so made useful murderers for Alexander to employ once his army stormed the city and formal resistance was quashed. Diodorus adds that “Greeks were mercilessly slain by Greeks, relatives were butchered by their own relatives, houses plundered, and children and women and aged persons who fled into the temples were torn from sanctuary and subjected to outrage without limit.” He sums up: “Every corner of the city was piled high with corpses.”

Epaminondas had once instilled a love of liberty and autonomy in Thebes, and a democratic alliance among the towns of Boeotia. But by 335 he had been dead now for almost three decades. His legacy of resistance against tyranny would result in an Armageddon for the entire recalcitrant culture of Thebes. When Alexander sacked Thebes, the remains of Pelopidas’s once daunted Sacred Band were rotting in their third year under a limestone lion twenty-five miles to the north at the battlefield of Chaeronea. Few of the now slaughtered revolutionaries at Thebes had remembered Epaminondas’s final orders to his Theban comrades as he lay dying on the battlefield of Mantinea in 362—make peace, since there was no general left to lead them. And there was not. Now the grandchildren of his hoplites who had marched into the Peloponnese to give freedom to others lay dead in the streets of their own city, unable to save their own. In their defense, perhaps the brave but foolhardy who attacked the Macedonian constabulary on the Theban acropolis—causing the present retaliation of Alexander—remembered how a half century earlier a prior generation of liberators had once routed Spartan interlopers from the very same Cadmea.

So Alexander’s holocaust was an inglorious finish to a glorious people, as the history of classical Thebes came to an abrupt end in 335. Modern historians publish endlessly on the eminence of Alexander the Great, the greatest thug that the ancient world produced, a man who in his sheer propensity for killing the innocent—over a million were to die in his swath to the Indus—was a kindred spirit to Hitler. Yet, few write of the Boeotians and the democratic culture fostered by Epaminondas, by ancient accounts the most energetic statesman and champion of liberty of the classical era, about whom not a single modern biography exists in English. When he died, Epaminondas was lauded for the next century by all Greeks; in contrast, when “the Great” perished, few noticed—and then mostly to rejoice—his demise. We moderns, with different tastes, values, and aspirations from the ancients’, still fawn over the destroyer of Greek liberty, completely ignorant of or uninterested in the creator of freedom. There will never be some gaudy museum extravaganza entitled “The Search for Epaminondas”; and even the Greek government will
probably never put his head on a coin.

Pre-Epaminondan Thebes had not always been so heroic. A century and a half before its devastation it had joined the enemies of Greece, fought not to liberate Hellas from northern invaders, but to aid the Persians in the conquest of their own countrymen. Later Greeks were aware of this vast change of fortune. They told a tale that King Leonidas, who held the pass at Thermopylae in 480 against the Persians, purportedly had a dream in which Thebes was in convulsion, but at last towered above all the other Greek cities—and then disappeared abruptly. The vision was taken to mean a panorama of the Theban decline after the Persian Wars (480–479), its resurrection under Epaminondas (371–362), and its sudden destruction by Alexander (335). So to understand the achievement of Epaminondas and his great march of democratic yeoman in 370-369, we must first recall the prior checkered history of this most peculiar, often misunderstood, and usually despised region of Greece.