[72]
What do you think it is,
Athenians, that makes cities vary between good and evil fortunes? You will find
only one cause: the counsellors and leaders. Take Thebes. It was a city; it
became supreme. Under what leaders and generals? All the older men, on whose
authority I shall give you the story, would admit that it was when
Pelopidas,1 so they have it,
1 Pelopidas and Epaminondas were the chief Theban generals during their city's period of greatness （371-362 B.C.）. In 371 they defeated Sparta at Leuctra and, in response to an appeal from the Arcadians who then rose against Sparta, entered the Peloponnese in 370. Here they refounded the town of Messene which the Spartans had destroyed at the end of the 8th century B.C. （Dio. Sic. 15.56 and Dio. Sic. 15.62-66）. Epaminondas conducted three further invasions of the Peloponnese, penetrating Laconia, but never actually taking Sparta. It was probably during the second of these that he founded Megalopolis, the new capital of Arcadia; in the third he was killed at Mantinea （362 B.C.）.
Dinarchus. Minor Attic Orators in two volumes, 2, with an English translation by J. O. Burtt, M.A. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1962.
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