Note 436 — Chapter LXXVIII · BATTLE OF LEUKTRA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

Xen. Hellen. vi, 5, 4, 5.

Pausanias (viii, 8, 6: ix, 14, 2) states that the Thebans reëstablished the city of Mantinea. The act emanated from the spontaneous impulse of the Mantineans and other Arcadians, before the Thebans had yet begun to interfere actively in Peloponnesus, which we shall presently find them doing. But it was doubtless done in reliance upon Theban support, and was in all probability made known to, and encouraged by, Epaminondas. It formed the first step to that series of anti-Spartan measures in Arcadia, which I shall presently relate.

Either the city of Mantinea now built was not exactly in the same situation as the one dismantled in 385 B.C., since the river Ophis did not run through it, as it had run through the former,—or else the course of the Ophis has altered. If the former, there would be three successive sites, the oldest of them being on the hill called Ptolis, somewhat north of Gurzuli. Ptolis was perhaps the larger of the primary constituent villages. Ernst Curtius (Peloponnesos, p. 242) makes the hill Gurzuli to be the same as the hill called Ptolis; Colonel Leake distinguishes the two, and places Ptolis on his map northward of Gurzuli (Peloponnesiaca, p. 378-381). The summit of Gurzuli is about one mile distant from the centre of Mantinea (Leake, Peloponnes. p. 383).

The walls of Mantinea, as rebuilt in 370 B.C., form an ellipse of about eighteen stadia, or a little more than two miles in circumference. The greater axis of the ellipse points north and south. It was surrounded with a wet ditch, whose waters join into one course at the west of the town, and form a brook which Sir William Gell calls the Ophis (Itinerary of the Morea, p. 142). The face of the wall is composed of regularly cut square stones; it is about ten feet thick in all,—four feet for an outer wall, two feet for an inner wall, and an intermediate space of four feet filled up with rubbish. There were eight principal double gates, each with a narrow winding approach, defended by a round tower on each side. There were quadrangular towers, eighty feet apart, all around the circumference of the walls (Ernst Curtius, Peloponnesos, p. 236, 237).

These are instructive remains, indicating the ideas of the Greeks respecting fortification in the time of Epaminondas. It appears that Mantinea was not so large as Tegea, to which last Curtius assigns a circumference of more than three miles (p. 253).