The memory of Epaminondas inspired a later hero who not only fought at another battle of Mantinea but was himself a son of the Arcadian soil. In the period of the Achæan League, Philopœmen, born in Megalopolis, was eight times chosen to be the general of the united forces, and in 206 B. C. he met and conquered at Mantinea the recalcitrant Spartans who had refused to join the league. The description of this battle is given to us by Polybius, his younger fellow townsman, who at the hero’s death was the youth selected to bear his ashes to the tomb. Because all such victories in the cause of freedom were but fitful gleams of the fire whose flame had been quenched at Chæronea, it is the more necessary to give heed to a character like Philopœmen, from the day of whose death, Pausanias sadly remarks, Greece ceased to be the mother of the brave. He closes the long line of Greeks who led their peoples to liberty. At one of the Olympic festivals the whole audience in the theatre rose to greet Themistocles, who had saved Greece from Persia. And centuries later a similar tribute was paid to Philopœmen. Not long after his victory over the Spartans it chanced that he was present at the competition of the minstrels at the Nemean Games. “Pylades, a native of Megalopolis, and the most famous minstrel of his time, who had gained a Pythian victory, was singing an air of Timotheus, the Milesian, called ‘The Persians.’ Scarcely had he struck up the song, ‘The glorious crown of freedom who giveth to Greece,’ when all the people turned and looked at Philopœmen, and with clapping of hands signified that the song referred to him.”