hero, and by his return now and again in other writings to a contemplation of the character of Epaminondas. Out of slight sketches like these and out of the second-rate histories we must fashion our portrait. Epaminondas was a great soldier and a leader of men. These facts need not be obscured by the other fact that he did not, probably could not, establish a national unity strong enough to live on after him. With him died the hopes of Thebes. His fear of this must have been his heaviest burden. Patriotism with him not only excluded satisfaction in his own power, but included patience under attack. To us, familiarized with magnanimous patriotism in many nations, this seems more admirable than strange. But against the background of Greek history the statesmen are conspicuous who could have entirely understood the obedient spirit in which Socrates accepted condemnation from the city he had tried to serve. In Epaminondas also appear some of those qualities which his contemporary Plato thought essential to a wise king. He loved philosophy more than power, and his early training had been intellectual and moral rather than martial. Like Pindar, he belonged to the oldest nobility of Thebes, tracing his pedigree to Cadmus, but his family had long lived modestly, dissociated from the more vulgar aristocracy, and devoted to the intellectual life. Philosophers exiled from Southern Italy came to Thebes as well as Athens, and among them Lysis of Tarentum exercised a great influence upon the young Epaminondas. The boy’s gentle nature and hardy will furnished an ideal soil for the seeds of the Pythagorean doctrine, which, before the days of St. Francis of Assisi, taught the beauty of poverty, of temperance, and of humility, and insisted upon a moral earnestness and devotion to duty. Epaminondas, the conqueror and liberator, was at all times a “practical” follower of the religion in which he had been nurtured. And with something of his own fervour he inflamed the Sacred Band, that company of “friends” like Epaminondas and Pelopidas, who inspired each other to valour and to virtue and were united in the cause of patriotism. In this appeal to the chivalric gallantry of youth Epaminondas was thoroughly Greek. In the unmarred consistency of his own life he was unapproached even by his closest followers. As Pindar in his generation was “heavy at heart” over Thebes, so the martial leader must often have brooded in lonely impotence over the same city. To travellers he may appear, as dusk comes on, in the guise in which men found him on an ancient holiday, walking aloof, ungarlanded and thoughtful. “I am keeping guard,” he said, “that all of you may be drunk and revel securely.”