page_title: Pelopidas
section_title: Athlete and warrior
hierarchical_section_title: Pelopidas / Biography / Athlete and warrior
context_page_description: Pelopidas was an important Theban statesman and general in Greece, instrumental in establishing the mid-fourth century Theban hegemony.
context_section_description: Pelopidas was a member of a distinguished family, and possessed great wealth, which he expended on his friends and on public service, while content to lead the rough life of an athlete. In 384 BC he served in a Theban contingent sent to the support of the Spartans during the Siege of Mantinea, where he was saved, when dangerously wounded by the Arcadians, by Epaminondas and Agesipolis. 
  Pelopidas, after receiving seven wounds in front, sank down upon a great heap of friends and enemies who lay dead together; but Epaminondas, although he thought him lifeless, stood forth to defend his body and his arms, and fought desperately, single-handed against many, determined to die rather than leave Pelopidas lying there. And now he too was in a sorry plight, having been wounded in the breast with a spear and in the arm with a sword, when Agesipolis the Spartan king came to his aid from the other wing, and when all hope was lost, saved them both.
  
  Plutarch says that this incident firmly cemented their friendship, and Pelopidas would be Epaminondas's partner in politics for the next 20 years.
  According to Plutarch's Life of Pelopidas (from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives in which Pelopidas‘s life was paired with the life of Marcellus), he lessened his inherited estate by showing constant care for the deserving poor of Thebes, taking pleasure in simple clothing, a sparse diet, and the constant hardships of military life. People said that he was ashamed to spend more on himself than the lowest of the Thebans spent on himself. Once, when friends argued that he needed to care for his finances since he had a wife and children, and that money was a necessary thing, Pelopidas pointed to a blind, crippled pauper named Nicodemus and said, "Yes, necessary for Nicodemus." 
  Upon the seizure of the Theban citadel by the Spartans (382 BC), he fled to Athens and took the lead in a conspiracy to liberate Thebes. Spartans had kingship in their home and were supportive of oligarchic governments in other cities in pursuit of the Spartan hegemony: (contrariwise, cities with oligarchic and not democratic political system tended to support Sparta). In 379 BC, his party (the democratic) surprised and killed their chief political opponents in Thebes (members of the aristocratic party that supported the Spartans), and roused the people against the Spartan garrison, which surrendered to an army gathered by Pelopidas.
caption: Epaminondas defending Pelopidas at the Siege of Mantinea (385 BC).
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