and the best soldier of Greece--cannot be fixed; but we find him a
middle-aged man when first he appears on that stage on which he
performed so pure and brilliant a part through seventeen eventful years.
Eight years after he first came forward he won the Battle of Leuctra,
which shattered the Spartan supremacy forever, and was the most perfect
specimen of scientific fighting that is to be found in classical
history, and which some of the greatest of modern commanders have been
proud merely to imitate. After that action, but not immediately after
it, he invaded the Peloponnesus, and led his forces to the vicinity of
Sparta, and then effected a revolution that bridled that power
perpetually. Nine years after Leuctra he won the Battle of Mantinea,
dying on the field. He must then have been an old man, but the last of
his campaigns was a miracle of military skill in all respects; and the
effect of his death was the greatest that ever followed the fall of a
general on a victorious field, actually turning victory into defeat. The
Spartan king, Agesilaus II., who was a not unworthy antagonist of the
great Theban, was an old man, and was over seventy when he saved Sparta
solely through his skill as a soldier and his energy as a statesman. As
a rule, the Greeks, the most intellectual of all races, were averse to
the employment of young men in high offices. The Spartan Brasidas, if it
be true that he fell in the flower of his age, as the historian asserts,
may have been a young man at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, in
which he was eminently distinguished; but it was his good fortune to be
singularly favored by circumstances on more than one occasion, and his
whole career was eminently exceptional to the general current of
Hellenic life.

The Romans, though not braver than the Greeks, were more fortunate in
their military career than the stayers of the march of Persia. Like the
Greeks, they had but few young generals of much reputation. Most of