Thus, even in Pindar, there is something to remind us of his Theban vulgarity; and it is, therefore, all the more wonderful, and all the more freely to be confessed, that in Epaminondas we find not a single flaw or failing, and that he stands out as far the noblest of all the great men whom Greece ever produced. It were possible to maintain that he was also the greatest, but this is a matter of opinion and of argument. Certain it is that his influence made Thebes, for the moment, not only the leader in Greek politics, but the leader in Greek society. Those of his friends whom we know seem not only patriots, but gentlemen—they cultivated with him music and eloquence, nor did they despise philosophy. So true is it, that in this wonderful peninsula genius seemed possible everywhere, and that from the least cultivated and most vulgar town might arise a man to make all the world about him admire and tremble. I will make but one more remark about this plain of Bœotia. There is no part of Greece so sadly famed for all the battles with which its soil was stained. The ancients called it Mars’s _Orchestra_, or exercising ground; and even now, when all the old life is gone, and when not a hovel remains to mark the site of once well-built towns, we may indeed ask, why were these towns celebrated? Simply because in old Greek history their names served to specify a scene of slaughter, where a campaign, or it may be an empire, was lost or won, Platæa, Leuctra, Haliartus, Coronea, Chæronea, Delium, Œnophyta, Tanagra—these are in history the landmarks of battles, and, with one exception, landmarks of nothing more. Thebes is mainly the nurse of the warriors who fought in these battles, and but little else. So, then, we cannot compare Bœotia to the rich plains of Lombardy—they, too, in their clay, ay, and in our own day, Mars’s Orchestra—for here literature and art have given fame to cities, while the battles fought around their walls have been forgotten by the world.