Chapter 18
Introduction
Aseldom-visited upland plain in Arcadia saw more than its fair share of slaughter in antiquity. The ground in front of Mantinea looks as if it was designed for hoplite battle: broad and flat enough for thousands of men to kill each other, yet hemmed in by mountains so armies could protect their flanks. Aside from its tactically amenable features, the plain also lies upon the only good route from the heart of the Peloponnese, Sparta’s home of Laconia, to points north including the Isthmus of Corinth and everything beyond. Like Chaeronea, therefore, Mantinea was one of the killing fields of the ancient world. No fewer than three pitched battles were fought here between the fifth and third centuries BCE, of which this chapter will cover the first two. In 418 BCE, during a lull in the Peloponnesian War, the Spartan phalanx reasserted itself as the dominant infantry force in the world when it crushed an Argive- and Athenian-led coalition arrayed against it in the First Battle of Mantinea. In an afternoon, Sparta regained the prestige it had lost with the capture of its soldiers at Pylos in 425. In The Second Battle of Mantinea, fought in 362, the Spartans and their allies struggled to a stalemate against the Thebans and their brilliant leader Epameinondas. Although the Thebans achieved a tactical victory, Epameinondas was killed in the battle, which effectively ended Thebes’ brief period of ascendancy. At the very end of his Hellenica, Xenophon laments that the Second Battle of Mantinea solved nothing, and left Greece more chaotic and anarchic than ever.
Directions to the Site
The plain of Mantinea is rarely on the typical tourist itinerary, but don’t let that be a deterrent. The plain is easily reached and offers the sort of experience that makes walking ancient battlefields worthwhile. Aside from the city of Tripoli at the plain’s southern end, few people live here aside from farmers, and the visitor is left in peace to contemplate the topography – and the soldiers who died here – with little other than the chirping of birds and the ring of goat bells to distract. Mantinea itself is about an hour and three-quarters from Athens, along the main National Highway between Corinth and Tripoli. The site is only twenty minutes from Tripoli itself, a city which offers few aesthetic charms aside from a lovely archaeological museum. From Athens and points north, exit the National Highway at Nestani, about 60km past Corinth. Head due west for about 4km, before turning north and following signs for Mantinea, which you will reach after another 3km. You will know that you have arrived at the site when you see a wildly eccentric modern church, containing a hodgepodge of architectural styles from Minoan to neo-classical, to the left of the road. To reach Mantinea from Tripoli, head north on the main road towards Olympia for about 10km.
Historical Outline of the Battle – 418 BCE
Though a defeat for Athens and its allies in the Peloponnese, the First Battle of Mantinea came within an inch of ending the Peloponnesian War in an afternoon – in Athens’ favour. The grand strategy that led to the battle was a stroke of diplomatic genius from Alcibiades, the notoriously arrogant and flagrantly wealthy up-andcomer in Athens, and foreshadowed the strategy of the Thebans in the fourth century BCE that really did break Sparta’s power. But in the end, Spartan victory at Mantinea brought the best-laid plans to naught, and Alcibiades would have to wait for another shot at political and military glory. For its part, the Greek world waited another fourteen years for the war’s end.
By 421, ten years into the Peloponnesian War, Athens and Sparta had fought to a stalemate. Both sides had suffered embarrassing defeats at the hands of the other, and were ready for the truce that came in the form of the Peace of Nicias, named after the leading Athenian statesman who had negotiated it. In 425, Athens had shocked the world by capturing 300 Lacedaemonians on the island of Sphacteria near Pylos (covered in the previous chapter). The Spartans answered by sending their general Brasidas to take the vital colony Amphipolis away from Athenian control in 424, and Brasidas defended this gain against the Athenian general Cleon two years later (also discussed in this book). Battered and bruised, the Athenians and Spartans came to an agreement in 421. Each side would have what it had possessed at the beginning of the war, which included the return of the prisoners to Sparta and supposedly the surrender of Amphipolis back to Athens. In the end, the people of Amphipolis had no intention of submitting again to Athenian power, but open hostilities between Athens and Sparta ceased nonetheless.
The Peace of Nicias should have been a victory for Athens. According to Pericles, the Athenian statesman and architect of the Peloponnesian War, Athens only needed to prove to the rest of Greece that it deserved to have control over an empire. The Spartans, upset that another Greek state threatened Sparta’s traditional position of supremacy, needed to break Athenian power in order to bring things back to the old status quo. Therefore, the peace treaty was a clear triumph for Athens. Pericles’ conditions had been met, and Sparta would hereafter have to recognize that Athens was a power to be reckoned with. By 421, however, Pericles had been dead for several years, and his plan had not taken into account the ambitions of the young man he himself had helped to raise: Alcibiades, the son of Clinias.
Alcibiades hardly needs an introduction. Rich and famous, an Olympic victor in the four-horse chariot race – the ancient games’ marquee event – and a ward of Pericles and thus a member of Athens’ most influential circle, Alcibiades casts a long shadow over the late fifth century. He is a main character in Thucydides’ history, in which he champions Athens’ disastrous invasion of Sicily in 415 before falling under the suspicion of aiming at tyrannical power following a scandalous act of vandalism on the eve of the expedition. Instead of facing trial, Alcibiades defected to Sparta, where he encouraged the Spartans to help the Sicilians against Athens and set up a permanent base in Attica, with disastrous consequences for Athens. After allegedly sleeping with a Spartan queen, Alcibiades defected again to the Persians, whom he influenced to enter the war before he was welcomed back to a desperate Athens – only to be thrown out again. Xenophon records one of the final episodes in Alcibiades’ checkered career. Coming down from his own private stronghold in Thrace, where he led a private army of mercenaries, Alcibiades warned the Athenians to be on their guard against the Spartan fleet at Aegospotami. The Athenians ignored his advice and lost the battle and ultimately the war. Alcibiades died not long after, murdered within the Persian Empire. A student of Socrates, Alcibiades is also a central character in several dialogues of Plato, including the Symposium in which he shows up late to a dinner party, drunk and rowdy, complaining that Socrates has never yielded to Alcibiades’ quite considerable sexual charms. It seems likely that one of the reasons Socrates was put on trial and executed in 399 was his association with Alcibiades. Alcibiades would have been a prime piece of evidence to support the charge of corrupting the youth that was levelled against Socrates. In 418, Alcibiades was only at the beginning of his wild career, and he was eager to make his mark. As many an ambitious figure has lamented over the centuries, it is much easier to make one’s mark in a time of war than one of peace.
Alcibiades was an inveterate political enemy of Nicias, and was incensed that the Peace of Nicias had been enacted without affording Alcibiades himself enough of a role. Despite the awkward fact that the peace technically meant that Athens and Sparta were no longer at war, Alcibiades took matters into his own hands and began to seek an alliance of states that could crush Sparta for good, going well beyond Pericles’ initial strategy and opening up an avenue for much greater personal glory. Whatever Alcibiades’ motives – and in every action, Alcibiades looked out first and foremost for Alcibiades – the plan he conceived was a good one, and had the
potential to break Spartan power at the root.
After the death of Pericles, several new Athenian leaders took the war well beyond the bounds Pericles had set at the war’s beginning. The Battle of Pylos of 425 took place not so the Athenians could capture some 300 Lacedaemonians, which was just a fortunate byproduct of the campaign, but rather because the Athenian general Demosthenes wanted to establish a forward operating base in Spartan territory, particularly that inhabited by the Messenians, whom the Spartans had oppressed for centuries. Sparta’s great military might was achieved because the full Spartiates could train continually for warfare since subject peoples, principally the Messenian helots, took care of all other necessary tasks such as farming. Without the helots and other oppressed peoples in the Peloponnese, Sparta would lose its military edge. It would also have too few citizens to pose a real threat or challenge to the rest of Greece. The key to breaking Spartan power, therefore, lay in stripping Sparta of its subject peoples, including its Peloponnesian allies who supplied the army with much-needed numbers. Pylos had been a step in this strategic direction. The Battle of Mantinea was potentially a much greater step.
In 418, Sparta already had one major rival in the Peloponnese: Argos. Commanding the same fertile plain in the north-east Peloponnese that had been dominated by Mycenae in ages past, Argos had fought many wars with Sparta, including the fabled Battle of the Champions in which 300 picked soldiers from both Argos and Sparta fought it out to the death. Alcibiades reached out personally to his friends in Argos and suggested an alliance. In addition to the Argives, the Athenians forged an alliance with other Peloponnesian rivals of Sparta, principally Elis, the state that administered the Olympic Games – and barred Sparta from participating in 420 – and Mantinea, a polis in the region of Arcadia that had long been dominated by Sparta. Alcibiades also enticed into the alliance the Achaeans, inhabitants of the north-central Peloponnese who had also been virtual subjects of Sparta. These Peloponnesian states, especially those in Arcadia and Messenia, later became the central elements in the Theban general Epameinondas’ largely successful campaign to humble Sparta in the fourth century. Alcibiades, then, was ahead of his time.
Following the formation of this alliance, Argos quickly made trouble in the Peloponnese by going to war with nearby Epidaurus, an ally of Sparta. Tensions escalated between all sides during the course of this campaign, which included dramatic events such as the Spartans eluding an Athenian naval blockade to install 300 soldiers as a garrison at Epidaurus to protect against the Argives. The Spartans soon realized that if they failed to take decisive action against Argos, the alliance arrayed against them would gain strength and other states would fall away from Spartan control. Accordingly, they prepared a massive expedition against Argos in 418. Under the command of King Agis, the Spartans sent out their entire army, surprisingly including even the helots, along with allies from Tegea and Arcadia. They were joined by several thousand hoplites and light-armed troops from Boeotia and a couple of thousand soldiers from Corinth. This massive force made for Argive territory.
After several preliminary actions and skirmishes, the Spartan army met the Argives, supplemented with troops from Mantinea and Elis, in the Argive plain. As Thucydides says, this was the most impressive army ever gathered among the Greeks. The Spartans and their allies could have easily defeated not only the Argive League, but another league in addition, according to Thucydides. Perplexingly, however, no battle took place. Two Argives went forward to parlay with Agis – Thrasylus, one of the Argive generals, and Alciphron, the Argive proxenos of Sparta who looked out for Sparta’s interests in Argos – and convinced the Spartan king to leave without fighting a battle. The Argives, these two insisted, would willingly submit to arbitration regarding any complaints the Spartans might have. Satisfied with this promise, Agis ordered his army to withdraw, eliciting no small amount of grumbling from the allies, and the Spartans too, who thought that they had the Argives right where they wanted them. Ironically, the Argives were also unhappy, thinking that they had stood a chance of beating the Spartan alliance. They therefore began to stone Thrasylus; the disgraced general escaped with his life, but his property in Argos was confiscated.
After this near-battle, 1,000 hoplites and 300 cavalry arrived at Argos from Athens, under the command of Laches and Nicostratus. Though Alcibiades was present at this time in Argos as an Athenian ambassador, seeking to convince Argos to remain in the alliance and stick with Athens, he did not serve as a general in the coming Mantinea campaign. Thus, Alcibiades did not take part in the battle he helped to engineer. By sending only 1,000 hoplites, the Athenians signalled that they did not wholly back Alcibiades’ plans for the alliance. Nicias and other conservative elements were in favour of keeping the peace with Sparta, and this side seems to have largely prevailed in Athens in 418. With the benefit of hindsight, scholars now speculate that if Athens had sent its full complement of hoplites and given its full support to the alliance, the Battle of Mantinea might have turned out very differently.
Goaded by the newly arrived Athenians and their Elean and Mantinean allies, the Argives eventually consented to invading Arcadian Orchomenos, a Spartan ally just north of Mantinea. This invasion was the last straw for the Spartans. At Sparta, the people were already outraged that Agis had not crushed Argos when he had the chance, and the news from Orchomenos only angered them further. Many wanted to tear down Agis’ house and levy against him an enormous fine, but the embattled king persuaded the Spartans to give him a second chance. The Spartans, however, did take the unprecedented step of appointing ten Spartiates to serve as overseers of the campaign. Without the consent of these ten, Agis, a king of Sparta, would be unable to do anything in the field. Determined to restore his good name, and to demonstrate his military acumen, Agis headed out with the largest levy of Spartans ever assembled, or so Thucydides says, and made his way to Tegea in Arcadia, the next target in the crosshairs of the Argive alliance.
Agis gathered allies at Tegea, including the Tegeans themselves and other Arcadians who were still on the Spartan side. He also sent word to Corinth and Boeotia, but could not wait for those troops to arrive. Agis invaded the territory of Mantinea, to the north of Tegea, and began to ravage the countryside. The soldiers of the Argive alliance took up a defensive position on a hill to the south-east of Mantinea, against which Agis began to advance. The two sides nearly came to blows, within a javelin throw according to Thucydides, when Agis pulled back his troops. One of the older soldiers in the Spartan army warned Agis against trying to right a previous wrong by attacking too strong a position and thus risking outright defeat. Agis yielded for now, and withdrew to Tegean territory, where he began to divert water into Mantinea’s fields in order to draw his enemies down into the plain. Water was a perennial problem for both Mantinea and Tegea, and even today the fields are waterlogged and home to many sink-holes. The Argives began to look down on the Spartans after yet another withdrawal, and blamed their generals for not attacking. The Argives and their allies accordingly came down into the plain to meet the enemy. On the following day, Agis and the Spartans returned to their old position near Mantinea, close to a shrine of Heracles, a good omen considering that Heracles was closely tied to Sparta. As they advanced, the Spartans were astonished to come suddenly upon the enemy in battle array; they had up to the last moment been obscured by the thick woods. Once again face-to-face, both sides were now determined to fight.
Thucydides offers a detailed description of how the two armies were arrayed, but his numerical totals are notoriously difficult to understand. Most scholars think that the Argive alliance had around 11,000 hoplites, and in his description of the battle, Thucydides says that the Spartan army was slightly larger. However, Thucydides also seems to say that there were only 3,072 Spartans, plus 600 Sciritae, who were allies from Laconia. Various solutions have been proposed, such as doubling Thucydides’ numbers for the Spartans, and including helots and other troops that Thucydides might have neglected to mention. Also, the Tegeans would have contributed significant numbers. In any case, despite the frustrating nature of Thucydides’ account here, some 10,000-11,000 soldiers likely fought on either side.
Mantinea Map 1: Satellite image courtesy of the USGS.
We can speak more confidently about how the armies lined up for battle. Unusually, only a few Spartans held the traditional Spartan position of honour on the right wing. Instead, most of the right was taken up by Tegeans, since they were the Arcadian rivals of the Mantineans and were fighting close to their homes. The ancient sources also tell us that whenever the Tegeans and Spartans marched out together, the Tegeans traditionally held one of the wings. Next to the Tegeans were the Spartans’ Arcadian allies, followed by the Spartans themselves. On the left wing were contingents of helots who had been freed because of exemplary service, a remarkable fact that shows how seriously Sparta took the threat from the Argive alliance. Following the helots were the battle-hardened troops who had served with Brasidas in Thrace. The extreme left was filled by the Sciritae, Laconian neighbours of the Spartans who Thucydides tells us always took the left wing. On the Argive side, the Mantineans held the place of honour on the right wing, since the battle was being fought in their territory. Next to them were some Arcadian allies, followed by 1,000 elite Argive troops who had been trained for war at state expense. The remainder of the Argives followed them, and further left still were more Arcadian contingents. The extreme left was occupied by the 1,000 Athenian hoplites supplemented by the 300 Athenian cavalry. Conspicuously absent was Alcibiades – and several thousand more Athenian troops, who in the event were sorely needed.
Thucydides offers a vivid portrait of the two armies advancing into battle. The Argives and their allies in the coalition charged forward with great violence, with blood-curdling war-cries and the clanging of weapons and armour. The Spartans, on the other hand, advanced slowly and deliberately, keeping time to the music of flute-players within their ranks. The mark of professional soldiers is the ability to maintain formation and keep calm even in the face of violent death. Thus, Spartan calm must have been far more unsettling to the enemy than Argive fury. But despite being so cool under pressure, the advance did not go well for the Spartans. Thucydides takes the opportunity here to describe an axiom of hoplite battle, which many scholars have considered to be good evidence for the dense formation and interdependence of the soldiers making up the shield wall of a phalanx. Phalanx armies tend to move to the right as each man tries to find shelter for his unshielded right side behind the shield of the man to his right. At the extreme right of the line, the most exposed soldier tries to extend beyond the enemy’s left wing in order to avoid being too vulnerable on his unshielded side. Thus, as armies approach one another, each right wing tends to overlap the corresponding left wing of the enemy. This is precisely what began to happen as the armies approached each other at Mantinea, since the Mantineans stretched well beyond the Sciritae, while the Tegeans and Spartans were far past the Athenians. Afraid of being outflanked by the tough Mantinean troops, Agis tried a desperate manoeuvre to compensate. When this move failed, all the Spartan professionalism exhibited by their slow and steady march seemed to have been for nothing.
Mantinea Map 2: Routes to the battle, 418 BCE. Satellite image courtesy of the USGS.
Agis ordered the Sciritae and Brasidas’ veterans on the left to move further to the left to match the Mantineans. This naturally caused a large gap to form in the Spartan army, a critical weakness for a hoplite phalanx. To plug this gap, Agis told two Spartan commanders from the right portion of the main Spartan force to withdraw two regiments from this part of the line and march them to where the Sciritae and Brasideans had been. These two commanders, Hipponoidas and Aristocles, were none too pleased with this order. The height of Spartan courage is to stand fast in the line and refuse to yield one’s place, a maxim the Spartans had demonstrated to a legendary level at Thermopylae and Plataea. The two Spartans refused to change their positions as the armies were already advancing, leaving Agis in the lurch and a large gap still in the Spartan lines. Thucydides tells us that these two commanders were afterward tried for cowardice and exiled from Sparta, but it is more likely that they thought at the time that following Agis’ orders would have been more cowardly than remaining at their posts. In a panic, Agis ordered the Sciritae to return to their original positions, but it was too late: the Mantineans slammed into the disordered Spartan line.
At this point in the narrative, Thucydides provides his readers with another paradigmatic truth about ancient Greek battle. Even where the Spartans had been bested in terms of tactical manoeuvring and skill, they still had courage to spare. This courage saved the day for Agis. As could have been predicted, the Mantineans, fighting in front of their city, ploughed through the Sciritae and Brasidas’ veterans. Then, along with some allies and the 1,000 elite Argives, the Mantineans stormed into the Spartan gap and outflanked that portion of the Spartan line, surrounding many Spartan troops and killing a great number. The Spartan left wing, what remained of it, was driven back all the way to the Spartan baggage train, where some of the older Spartans who were guarding the supplies were killed too. It was not unusual, however, for even the Spartan left wing to be defeated in battle. As most hoplite battles transpired, very often the left wing of each side was defeated by the superior right wing of the enemy, and the battle was decided when the two victorious right wings regrouped to fight each other. The Spartan centre and right, despite everything going wrong up to this point, demonstrated that it was still home to the best soldiers in Greece.
In the centre and right, Agis, bolstered by 300 elite troops called the hippeis, or ‘knights’ (despite not being mounted), slammed into contingents of older Argives and their Arcadian allies, as well as the Athenians, and put them all to flight before much contact was even made between the two lines. The two wings of the Argive army were thus driven apart, and all contact between them was lost. The Athenians, on the far left of their line, being completely surrounded by Spartan and Tegean troops, were spared from utter annihilation for two reasons. Firstly, the Athenian cavalry provided cover for their comrades in the infantry; and secondly, Agis broke off the attack when he saw the peril in which his own left wing found itself against the Mantineans and picked Argives. He therefore let the Athenian survivors retreat past the Spartan troops, while he wheeled his own line to the left and began to close on the coalition right wing from the flank and rear. Seeing the Spartans, despite all that had gone wrong, bearing down on them with resolve and now in good order, the Mantineans and Argive elite troops broke off their attack against the Spartan left and tried to run away. The Spartans managed to kill many of them in what became a rout all over the field. But, as Thucydides says, once the battle had been clearly decided, the Spartans broke off the pursuit before long, as was their custom. The Spartans then set up a trophy and despoiled the enemy dead, whose bodies they gave back under a truce. Of the Argives and their Arcadian allies, 700 lay dead. The Mantineans lost 200 and the Athenians 200, including both their generals. The Athenians got off relatively lightly. Had Agis not gone to the relief of his left wing and let the retreating Athenians escape, far more of the 1,000 Athenians in the battle would have died. On their side, the Spartans are said to have lost about 300 men.
If the Spartans had lost at Mantinea, which looked tantalizingly possible at the outset of the battle when a large gap had opened in the Spartan line, the Peloponnesian War would have been over. Sparta would have been humbled in a straightforward hoplite battle, the field in which it was supposed to be invincible, and would have been surrounded by hostile states and thus stripped of its leading position in the Peloponnese and valuable sources of manpower. Ally after ally would have defected from the Spartan sphere of influence, leaving Sparta a shell of its former self. Instead, Sparta’s hoplites did what they do best, namely fight it out despite all obstacles, including insubordination within the Spartan ranks themselves. Far from losing the war, in a single afternoon the Spartans righted what had gone wrong at Pylos. Phalanx warfare was not yet obsolete, and the Spartans were not cowards eager to surrender at the slightest opportunity. These men were still the same soldiers that had withstood the hordes of Xerxes a generation earlier, and the rest of Greece would do well to think twice about engaging them in a fair fight. Alcibiades’ gamble had failed, and his grand alliance disintegrated. For its part, Argos suffered an oligarchic coup against those who had crafted the alliance. Argos would no longer entertain fantasies of supplanting its rival in the Peloponnese, and came to terms with Sparta.
Though often a frustrating source for military historians, Thucydides offers one of his fullest combat descriptions for the Battle of Mantinea. A historian fond of paradigms to describe human behaviour, Thucydides draws out several universal military lessons from this battle. Firstly, he describes the rightward movement of the phalanx, along with the density of the phalanx formation. Secondly, he portrays the Spartans as the most courageous and resolute soldiers in Greece, even in the face of great obstacles, including their own tactical blunders and insubordination within their ranks. Finally, he remarks on the Spartan practice of fighting with relentless violence, but only until the enemy lines break. The Spartans did not, as a habit, pursue the vanquished for long. The First Battle of Mantinea, as recalled by ancient Greece’s foremost historian, is thus a treasure-trove for military historians.
Mantinea Map 3: First phase of the battle, 418 BCE. Satellite image courtesy of the USGS.
Mantinea Map 4: Second Phase of the battle, 418 BCE. Satellite image courtesy of the USGS.
Historical Outline of the Battle – 362 BCE
If the First Battle of Mantinea re-established the Spartans’ reputation as Greece’s best soldiers, the Second Battle of Mantinea was a key event in Sparta’s slow yet inexorable decline. More than that, the battle of 362 BCE was a sign of the general decline in the Greek polis system itself. Within the two or three decades that followed the later battle, the warlord Philip of Macedonia rose to unprecedented heights of power, all because a Greece weakened from generations of vicious infighting was unable to stop him. Seemingly seeing the future, Xenophon ends his Hellenica with the Second Battle of Mantinea, lamenting that the battle solved nothing and revealed no clear winner among the Greeks. Instead, Greece was left more chaotic and disunited than ever.
At the Battle of Leuctra in 371 (also covered in this book), Thebes, under the leadership of the visionary general and statesman Epameinondas, crushed the Spartan phalanx and put an end once and for all to the myth of Spartan invincibility. More crucially, the Thebans killed several hundred full Spartiates, the elite class of Spartan citizens who by then were increasingly scarce. Sparta probably would have declined without the Battle of Leuctra having been fought, but Epameinondas and the Thebans certainly hastened that decline. Beyond winning a great battlefield victory, Epameinondas exploited his success by invading the Peloponnese and breaking Sparta’s power at its source, much like Alcibiades had planned decades earlier. At the head of the Theban army, now the pre-eminent fighting force in Greece, Epameinondas marched south and began to free the Peloponnesians who had long laboured under Spartan domination. Epameinondas gathered the Arcadians, inhabitants of the upland areas of the central Peloponnese, into a federal league, founding a new capital at Megalopolis to house the federal assembly. If individual Arcadian states like Tegea and Mantinea couldn’t stand up to Sparta, all Arcadia together could. Epameinondas also re-founded the city of Messene to serve as a capital for the Messenians who had for centuries been oppressed as helots. Fortified with some of the finest stone walls in the entire Greek world – still visible today – Messene stripped Sparta of its most important source of power, the helots and the labour they provided. Known to history as a peerless tactician, Epameinondas also enjoys a reputation as one of the world’s foremost liberators.
While in the Peloponnese, Epameinondas also did the unthinkable. He invaded Laconia itself, Sparta’s home territory. He came within a hair’s breadth of seizing Sparta, defended by only those few Spartans who were still left. Fortunately for Sparta, the Eurotas River was flooded, so Epameinondas was unable to take the famously unwalled and hitherto invulnerable city. We are told that the Spartan women, who had never before even seen an enemy since they had spent their lives safe in their mountain-ringed city, could not bear to see the campfires of the Theban army. For most Greeks, the Battle of Leuctra had seemed rather anti-climactic, far from the truly decisive battle it really had been. Epameinondas’ invasion of the Peloponnese and Laconia removed all doubt that Sparta had fallen precipitously, and Thebes was now the dominant power in Greece.
Alas for the Thebans, their state of supremacy was bound to be short-lived, less than a decade in fact. The Greeks being as they were, sentiments and alliance soon shifted against Thebes as the rest of Greece worried that Epameinondas and his countrymen were growing too powerful, threatening to become harsh masters as Sparta and Athens had been before them. Athens, supposedly the mortal enemy of Sparta, decided to align with Sparta to check Thebes’ power. Even more troublesome to the Thebans, the Arcadians whom Epameinondas had liberated began to conceive of themselves as powerful enough on their own not to need Thebes any more. Thebes, one leading Arcadian agitator claimed, would dominate the Arcadians just as Sparta had done, unless Arcadia asserted its independence. And, of course, Sparta and its aging King Agesilaus were far from ready to accept their new position of weakness lying down.
Traditional allies in the Peloponnese were also at each other’s throats. The Arcadians and Eleans, who had joined forces during the first Battle of Mantinea, and on many occasions had sought help from one another to counterbalance Sparta’s power, came to blows. They fought a series of battles within the holy sanctuary of Olympia itself, which Elis traditionally administered, killing one another in the shadow of the Temple of Zeus and other famous landmarks. More sacrilegious still, many Arcadians wanted to use the sacred funds of the sanctuary to fund these military activities. When some objected to such a flagrant violation of religious custom and law, others appealed to Thebes to cover their sacrilegious outrage. The guilty party, according to Xenophon, urged Epameinondas and the Thebans to march an army once again into the Peloponnese, or else Arcadia might formally go over to the Spartan side. In the event, the Arcadians and Eleans agreed on peace terms, but things had already been set in motion. The Thebans made plans to invade the Peloponnese, and lines were quickly drawn between those Arcadians and others who would remain formally loyal to Thebes, their liberators, and those who would join again with Sparta. Every great power in Greece, it seems, took one side or the other. The scene was set for a decisive clash of arms that would determine once and for all whether Thebes really was the leader of Greece.
Mantinea Map 5: Third Phase of the battle, 418 BCE. Satellite image courtesy of the USGS.
While marching to Arcadia, Epameinondas, with a large coalition of allies, waited at Nemea, near the Isthmus of Corinth. His plan was to catch the Athenians as they marched south to help Thebes’ enemies, thinking that by getting the Athenians alone, he would defeat them and weaken the anti-Theban forces considerably. Epameinondas, however, fell victim to bad intelligence. He was told that the Athenians were sailing round the Peloponnese to land in Laconia and march north from there. This turned out to be a lie, but it enticed Epameinondas to abandon Nemea and therefore his hopes of dividing the enemy forces. He went straight to Tegea in the southern part of the figure-eight Arcadian plain, since Theban and pro-Theban forces still held power there. From Tegea he learned that the enemy soldiers were gathering at Mantinea, and that the Spartans with King Agesilaus were on their way to join them.
Rather than face all of his enemies together at Mantinea, Epameinondas decided on a bold course of action. With Agesilaus and the Spartan army taking the field, Sparta was left virtually undefended. At more than 50km to the north, Tegea was much further than a typical day’s march away from Sparta. Epameinondas, however, decided to go for it. Leaving Tegea with much of his force at night, he made straight for Sparta at great speed, hoping to get there in the morning before the Spartans figured out what was happening. Unlike his first attempt at taking the city, at this time of year, early summer, the Eurotas would not be flooded, leaving the unwalled Sparta ripe for the taking. It was a bold plan, but a good one. Fortune, though, seemed to be against the great Theban during this campaign of 362. An unnamed Cretan soldier informed Agesilaus of the Theban movements while the Spartans were on the march and still closer to Sparta than Epameinondas was. Agesilaus was thus able to get back to Sparta before the Thebans arrived, and set about mounting a defence by putting the old and young on the tops of buildings to hurl tiles at the attackers, and filling the streets with Spartans in their prime.
When Epameinondas realized that he had been found out and that he would have to face the Spartans ready to defend their homes, he decided to attack anyway, thinking that his chances were still good given that the Spartans were on their own. Three Spartan regiments, or lochoi, most of the Spartan cavalry and mercenaries, and the rest of the anti-Theban forces were still at Mantinea. Epameinondas circled the city until he found advantageous high ground from which to attack. At this point, Xenophon tells us that Archidamus, the son of Agesilaus, led a mere 100 Spartiates in a charge uphill against much greater Theban numbers, and succeeded in driving the Thebans back and killing several in the front ranks. Xenophon, the great friend of Sparta, takes this opportunity to mock the Thebans, who, despite boasting of their victory at Leuctra and invasions of the Peloponnese, were still unable to withstand but a few Spartans fighting in defence of their city. Archidamus pressed the attack too far and lost some of his men before retreating and setting up a trophy where he had beaten back the Thebans. By now, Epameinondas reckoned that the Arcadians would be coming to Sparta’s relief, and not wanting to fight all of his enemies together at Sparta, he withdrew to Tegea.
While the Theban infantry rested at Tegea, Epameinondas sent out his cavalry straight to Mantinea, where he figured they could do quite a bit of damage to the crops and livestock outside the city’s imposing defensive walls. Once again, like his attack on Sparta, this move was a well calculated and bold attack that, all things being equal, should have succeeded. But once again, fortune, as the ancient sources believe, was against Epameinondas despite his prodigious skill and daring. As the Theban cavalry were seen galloping towards Mantinea, much to the horror of the people in the city, the Athenian cavalry – who had not, it turned out, sailed around the Peloponnese at all – were just about to arrive after riding for the whole day. The Mantineans begged the Athenian horse to do something to stop the Thebans, who threatened to wreak havoc on the countryside. Despite being tired and hungry, the Athenians agreed to help and gallantly rode against their Theban counterparts. The Athenians succeeded in driving the Thebans away, but not without the loss of good soldiers on both sides. One of those soldiers, a horseman for Athens, was Gryllus, Xenophon’s own son, who was buried at public expense and given a memorial at Mantinea. Polybius, a Greek writing during the period of Roman conquest, sees in the Mantinean campaign many similarities between Hannibal and Epameinondas, two supremely talented generals who were nevertheless foiled by chance – or the gods.
The time had come for an all-out pitched battle. Epameinondas had failed in his several attempts at gaining the upper-hand through boldness and sound planning. The Athenians had evaded him at the isthmus, the Spartans had defended their city against his cunning attack and the Athenian cavalry had driven away his own horsemen. Far from solidifying his position in the Peloponnese, Epameinondas had encountered setback after setback, gaining no allies in the process. As Xenophon claims, the Theban invasion of the Peloponnese had so far managed only to forge a strong coalition of former enemies who had gathered to oppose Thebes. Only a battle, a victory on the scale of Leuctra, would convince the Greeks that the Thebans were in charge. Accordingly, Epameinondas led his army in the direction of Mantinea, where his enemies had come together and were now making ready to fight.
Mantinea Map 6: The battle, 362 BCE. Satellite image courtesy of the USGS.
Mantinea Map 7: Map 6. The battle, 362 BCE. Satellite image courtesy of the USGS.
The sources, especially Xenophon, are frustratingly vague about the size, composition and position of the armies that fought in the coming battle. Diodorus, a later source utilizing the now-lost work of the contemporary historian Ephorus, gives us the best indication of how the two sides were organized. He tells us that on the Theban side, the Thebans themselves, probably bolstered by the Sacred Band, were stationed on the left, just as they had been at Leuctra. Next to them were the still-loyal Arcadians, led by the troops from Tegea. The right wing was manned by troops from Argos, while assorted allies – from many parts of Greece, including Thessaly – filled in the centre. Light-armed troops and cavalry played a major role in the battle, especially on the Theban side. Xenophon tells us that these troops were arranged on the Theban right wing to oppose the Athenian cavalry on the enemy left. On the side of the anti-Theban coalition, next to the Athenians were posted the various smaller allies, while the centre and right wing consisted of Eleans, Achaeans, the Lacedaemonians and the Mantineans and other Arcadians on the extreme end of the line. Xenophon’s account makes it seem as though the main force of the Spartans did not actually fight in the battle, despite what later sources say. Perhaps only three regiments, or lochoi, of Spartans took part, numbering around 1,800 soldiers. These were the soldiers that were already in Arcadia when Epameinondas attacked Sparta, and it doesn’t seem from Xenophon’s account that Agesilaus made it back from Sparta to the battle site in time. Therefore, the Spartan advanced troops were probably all that fought in the Second Battle of Mantinea, and they bore the brunt of the Theban assault. Diodorus tells us that the numbers involved in the battle were 30,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry on the Theban side, while the anti-Theban coalition had 20,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry. If we include the sizeable contingents of light-armed troops, Diodorus’ figures do not seem to be wildly exaggerated.
The battle itself is one of the stranger ones covered by this book. It seems as though the anti-Theban coalition arrayed itself in traditional battle order at the narrow point of the figure-eight plain dominated by Mantinea in the north and Tegea in the south. At the waist of the figure-eight, there is a gap between mountains that is about 2km wide, perfect for lining up a large hoplite army in a proper depth of at least eight ranks while having the flanks protected. Epameinondas began to march across the large southern part of the figure-eight arrayed in battle order himself. But as he approached the enemy, instead of marching right against them he moved his forces diagonally across the plain, opposite Tegea to a position near the mountains to the west, as Xenophon says. This position was likely near modern Skopi. By marching in this way, Epameinondas appeared to his foes as if he were making for a campsite, planning to rest his army after a good day’s march of 15km, just short of where the enemy had lined up. But Epameinondas had one more bold and surprising trick up his sleeve. As Xenophon describes it, Epameinondas realized that this battle would decide all. Either he would be the pre-eminent man in the pre-eminent state in Greece, or he would die a glorious death on the field of battle. As George Cawkwell points out, there is no way that Xenophon could have known Epameinondas’ thoughts on the eve of battle. Never mind: it makes for compelling reading in any case.
When Epameinondas’ left wing reached the supposed site for a camp, his army still stretched across the plain at an angle. That is, his left wing was much closer to the enemy than the right. He then secretly began to move forces from other parts of the line to the left wing, moving them behind other soldiers so the enemy would not see. He did this in order to stack his left wing in a deep formation, just as at Leuctra. It is reasonable to guess that at Mantinea, Epameinondas used a phalanx of fifty ranks on the left, just as he had nine years earlier when he first humiliated the Spartans. Once his preparations were complete, Epameinondas charged forward with his left wing, prow-first like a trireme, in Xenophon’s description. Just as at Leuctra, the right wing hung back. The great Theban reckoned that if he punched through the enemy line anywhere, the entire enemy army would break. He decided to punch through on the enemy’s right, where their best troops were, including whatever Spartans did happen to fight in the battle. Along the rest of his line, he made good use of his cavalry and light troops, arraying the cavalry in wedge formations and supplementing it with light infantry. The enemy cavalry, by contrast, were lined up just like infantrymen in the phalanx, with no infantry support. Epameinondas took special care to position good horsemen on the hills at the other side of the gap, that is, on his right wing, against the enemy’s left where the Athenians were stationed. By doing so, he reckoned that the Athenians, especially their cavalry, would feel trapped, fearing that the Theban horse would attack them in the flank and rear if they moved to help the other wing of their army that was being pushed back by the Theban phalanx. It was a bold and innovative tactical plan, making use of surprise, shock and combined-arms forces that prefigured those used by the Macedonians in the coming decades.
At first, Epameinondas’ attack worked just as he had hoped. His enemy was caught completely off guard. Most of the soldiers in the anti-Theban coalition were readying themselves to camp for the night and had to rush back into position, still putting back on their armour as word spread that the Thebans were charging. As at Leuctra, the heavy Theban left wing, stacked with Thebes’ tough hoplites and the 300 elite warriors of the Sacred Band, drove back the enemy in front of them. However it worked on the field, as soldier came face-to-face with soldier, the dense Theban phalanx once again proved that deeper formations are effective.
The coalition’s line soon broke on the right, and the rest of the line seemed about to flee the field. But as happened so often during this campaign, fortune struck a decisive blow against Epameinondas and the Thebans. Epameinondas, bravely fighting in the thick of things with his men, was dealt a mortal blow, either by a javelin or sword. His soldiers heroically rescued him from the field, but he was barely clinging to life. Placed high above the action at a place called Skopi, literally ‘lookout point’, he watched the battle unfold with what little time he had left. Epameinondas’ great maxim had been to ‘crush the head of the serpent’ of the enemy army, which was the whole point behind the shock tactics he used in battle. It turned out that Epameinondas was the head of the Theban serpent, and when he fell, the rest of the army fell apart.
Xenophon tells of utter chaos enveloping the battlefield. Though the Thebans had broken the enemy right, when Epameinondas died they failed to press home the victory. The Thebans didn’t even advance beyond the point where they first put the enemy to rout. Likewise, the Theban cavalry, in effective formation and working along with light-armed infantry, turned the enemy cavalry and drove them from the field. But once things went awry, the Theban horse did not pursue their beaten foe. The only soldiers that did try to exploit their success were the Theban light-armed troops, who turned to attack the enemy left wing, only to be killed in great numbers by the Athenians. Thus, although Epameinondas had won a clear tactical victory in the field, especially on the left wing and in the cavalry battle, because he fell his army was incapable of securing the strategic victory that was demanded of the Thebans in this campaign.
According to Xenophon, who sombrely ends his history with this battle, nobody won and everybody lost. Both sides set up trophies, and both sides asked for their dead back under truce, respectively a sign of victory and defeat. Nobody won or lost any significant territory, and nobody could claim to be the clear great power in Greece. The Second Battle of Mantinea was decisive only insofar as it put an end to any notion that the Greeks would unite behind a single Greek power. Athens failed in such a mission during the late fifth century, and Sparta had failed in the early fourth. Thebes was the latest in this line of Panhellenic failures. So it goes among the ancient Greeks. The power that eventually did unite all the Greeks was the half-Greek kingdom of Macedonia, led by the visionary Philip II, father of Alexander the Great. Perhaps Thebes’ most enduring legacy is that Philip lived for many years in his youth as a hostage in Thebes, where he carefully studied the innovative tactics of Epameinondas and the expertise and skill of the Theban Sacred Band. Philip wielded such weapons with a terrifying effectiveness. He is said to have wept at the sight of the dead soldiers of the Sacred Band at Chaeronea in 338, killed by the unrelenting Macedonian military machine.
The Battle Site Today
Mantinea lies in the northern part of a figure-eight-shaped plain in upland Arcadia that is some 25km end to end. Mantinea’s rival, Tegea, dominated the southern, or lower part, of the figure-eight. Today, Tripoli, the principal modern city of Arcadia, is the main feature of the southern part. The ‘waist’ of the figure-eight is formed by the pass, about 2km wide, between Mt Mytika to the west and Mt Kapnistra to the east, through which runs the direct route between Laconia and the northern Peloponnese. The plain’s topographical and geographical situation ensured two things: one, that Mantinea and Tegea were frequently at loggerheads over the control of the region’s arable land, parts of which were often flooded and thus presented farmers with a challenge; and two, that several battles would be fought here since it was a natural place for a hoplite clash given the flat-yet-confined nature of the plain and its position on a strategically vital route.
Ancient Mantinea itself is as good a place as any to begin a tour (N37° 37.082"; E022° 23.331"). The site is easily recognizable because it is located across the road from the region’s most conspicuous landmark, Agia Fotini, a strange modern church built by an eccentric in the twentieth century partly with ancient elements found scattered about the area. Though not set up for archaeological tourists, ancient Mantinea is still impressive. Its circuit walls, forming an oval some 1.3 x 1.1km, are easily visible on maps and satellite images, and many stones of the wall can be seen on the ground. Wandering through the often marshy and overgrown ruins rewards the visitor with many glimpses of architectural blocks and other elements of a once-prosperous polis. Neither of the two battles, however, took place right at Mantinea.
For the first battle, we recommend that you stand on the site where the Argiveled anti-Spartan coalition had gathered on the day before the battle, on the southern slopes of what is now called Mt Alesion or Barberi. Drive south from Ag. Fotini at Mantinea about 1.2km, then head east for another 1.2km to arrive at the tiny village of Milea. There is a modern church, Ag. Nikolaos, on the slopes overlooking the town, which can be reached easily by car (N37° 36.363"; E022° 24.443"). This vantage point gives a great view of both battle sites. The battle of 418 BCE took place in the broad part of the plain just below the church, while that of 362 was fought just beyond the narrow point in the plain which can be seen to the south, some 5.5km away. The coalition of 418 was initially lined up on the slopes just behind the church, which was the strong position that Agis was advised against attacking directly. The battle itself took place just a little below these slopes near an ancient shrine to Heracles, the location for which Pritchett has plausibly identified after the remains of what appear to have been a gymnasium were found in the 1960s. In antiquity, this area was thickly wooded, which meant that the two sides didn’t see each other until they were very close. During the advance into combat, the Argive army was facing roughly south by south-west, while the Spartans faced north by north-east.
Fig. 18.1: The battlefield of 418 BCE, looking southwest from the church behind Milea. Authors’ photo.
Fig. 18.2: View of the battlefield of 362 BCE, looking north from near Tripoli. Skpoi is on the hill in the middleground. Authors’ photo.
Fig. 18.3: The remains of the Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea. Authors’ photo.
Going back to the main road south from Mantinea, continue in a southerly direction to the narrow point in the plain. On the slopes of Mt Mytika forming the western side of the gap, there is a village called Skopi. In 362, Epameinondas’ forces were likely based just below Skopi, while Epameinondas was carried to the slopes above this village (N37° 33.417"; E022° 23.638") to watch the battle after he had been mortally wounded in combat. In antiquity, a monument to Epameinondas would have been located near here. Take the winding roads extending above the village, following the signs for Prof. Ilias, to reach this point, which offers a tremendous view of the southern part of the plain, stretching all the way to Tegea. From here you can see the plain across which Epameinondas moved his army diagonally from his original camp in Tegea to his new position below Skopi. To bring his army into its final battle formation, Epameinondas would have crossed over the land now covered by the modern air force base. The battle itself took place in the gap stretching to the east from Skopi. At about 2km in width, the gap was ideally suited to a hoplite battle, since both lines could stretch to cover the entire gap, while the mountains protected the flanks. The Thebans were facing north, with their left wing, stacked fifty-deep, near Skopi, and the rest of the army hanging back at an oblique angle and refusing battle. The anti-Theban forces were facing south, with the Athenians on their own left wing situated against the slopes of Mt Kapnistra on the other side of the gap.
Tegea was an important site for both battles, since the Spartans used it as a base in 418, while Epameinondas did the same in 362. Head towards Tripoli, and then continue south past the city, taking the main road between Tripoli and Sparta. Tegea is about 6km south-east of Tripoli. You can find the ancient site, dominated by the extensive remains of the Temple of Athena Alea, by following the brown Ministry of Culture signs for ancient Tegea (N37° 27.354"; E022° 25.220").
Further Reading
Ancient Sources
–Thucydides 5.63-74
A contemporary of the 418 battle, this pre-eminent Greek historian provides one of his most detailed battle narratives for Mantinea, including important insights into the mechanics and behaviour of hoplite phalanxes.
–Xenophon, Hellenica 7.5
Xenophon ends his magnum opus, the Hellenica, with a description of the 362 battle. Though a contemporary of the events, and though his own son, Gryllus, died in the battle fighting on the side of the Spartans, Xenophon’s account needs to be supplemented since his details regarding troop arrangements and the like are sparse.
–Diodorus of Sicily 12.78-80 (for 418); 15.82-89 (for 362)
Not particularly useful for the battle of 418 (except perhaps for troops numbers), this first-century BCE historian does give some additional information for 362, including the two sides’ order of battle.
–Pausanias 8.11.5-9
This second-century CE travel writer offers many details about the 362 campaign that our other sources pass over, including where Epameinondas was brought after he was mortally wounded, and the fact that Xenophon’s son was given a public burial by the Mantineans.
–Polybius 9.8.1-13; 11.11-18 (for later, third battle)
This second-century BCE Greek historian is one of our best and most reliable sources for ancient battles. He treats the battle of 362 as a means to compare Epameinondas with Hannibal, and the Spartans with the Romans. He also offers a topographically important account of a later, Third Battle of Mantinea, fought in the late third century BCE by the great Greek general Philopoemen.
–Nepos, Epameinondas 9
A first-century BCE Roman biographer of great Greek generals, Nepos offers some stirring details about Epameinondas’ death at Mantinea. His entire biography of the brilliant Theban is worth reading.
–Polyaenus 2.3
Compiling an account of legendary stratagems undertaken by famous generals, Polyaenus provided his second-century CE readers with many examples of Epameinondas’ brilliance, including during the Mantinea campaign.
Modern Sources
Books
–Anderson, J.K., Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon (Berkeley, 1970).
A scholarly classic on fourth-century warfare, this book provides a clear yet brief narrative of the battle of 362, placing it in its military historical context by first covering the 371 Battle of Leuctra.
–Hanson, V.D., A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (New York, 2005).
One of the foremost scholars of hoplite warfare, Hanson offers a gripping account of the battle of 418, aimed at general readers.
–Hornblower, S., A Commentary on Thucydides, Vol. 3 (Oxford, 2008).
The indispensible companion to Thucydides’ History, this English commentary of the Greek text gives a relatively recent and extraordinarily detailed treatment of the battle of 418, the broader Mantinea campaign and Thucydides’ account of the events.
–Lazenby, J.F., The Spartan Army (Warminster, 1985).
A prominent military historian’s discussion of many of Sparta’s major land battles, including the first battle.
–Lazenby, J.F., The Peloponnesian War: A Military Study (London, 2004).
A concise and readable account of the military issues at play during the Peloponnesian War, including a good treatment of the first battle.
–Pritchett, W.K., Studies in Ancient Greek Topography, Part II (Berkeley, 1969).
As is typical, Pritchett’s is the landmark work on the topography of Mantinea and its environs, influencing all subsequent scholarly treatments of the battle. His study is particularly important for the identification of now-lost ancient landmarks that are mentioned in the primary sources.
–Walbank, F.W., A Historical Commentary on Polybius, Vol. 2 (Oxford, 1967).
This comprehensive commentary on Polybius’ Histories offers a full discussion of Polybius’ use of the battle of 362 as a device to compare Epameinondas with Hannibal, and the Spartans with the Romans.