It would be difficult to find in the entire course of Greek history any two statesmen who, in spite of differences in character and outward conditions of life, resembled one another so greatly and were as men so truly the peers of one another as Pericles and Epaminondas. In the case of both these men the chief foundation of their authority was their lofty and varied mental culture; what secured to them their intellectual superiority was the love of knowledge which pervaded and ennobled the whole being of either. Epaminondas like Pericles directs his native city as the man in whom the civic community places supreme confidence, and whom it therefore re-elects from year to year as general. Like Pericles, Epaminondas left no successor behind him, and his death was also the close of an historical epoch. Epaminondas stood alone from the first; and while Pericles with all his superiority yet stood essentially on the basis of Attic culture, Epaminondas, on the other hand, was, so to speak, a stranger in his native city. Nor was it ever his intention to be a Theban in the sense in which Pericles was an Athenian. The object of his life was rather to be a perfect Hellene, while his efforts as a statesman were likewise simply an endeavor to introduce his fellow-citizens to that true Hellenism which consisted in civic virtue and in love of wisdom. In the very last hour of his life, when he was delighted by the preservation of his shield, he showed himself a genuine Hellene; thus again it was a genuinely Greek standpoint from which he viewed the war against Sparta and Athens as a competitive contest for the honor of the hegemony in Hellas, an honor which could only be justly won by mental and moral superiority. The conflict was inevitable; it had become a national duty, because the supremacy of Sparta had become a tyranny dishonorable to the Hellenic nation. After Epaminondas liberated the Greek cities from the Spartan yoke it became the object of his Bœotian patriotism to make his own native city worthy and capable of assuming the direction. How far Epaminondas might have succeeded in securing a permanent hegemony[5] over Greek affairs to the Thebans who shall attempt to judge? He fell in the full vigor of his manhood on the battle-field where the states, which withstood his policy, had brought their last resources to bear. Of all statesmen, therefore, he is least to be judged by the actual results of his policy. His greatness lies in this--that from his childhood he incessantly endeavored to be to his fellow-citizens a model of Hellenic virtue. Chaste and unselfish he passed, ever true to himself, through a most active life, through all the temptations of the most unexampled success in war, through the whole series of trials and disasters.