In truth, the position that youth is necessary to success in war is not sustained by military history.  It may he no drawback to a soldier’s excellence that he is young, but it is equally true that an old man may possess every quality that is necessary in a soldier who would serve his country well and win immortal fame for himself.  The best of the Greek commanders were men in advanced life, with a few exceptions.  The precise age of Miltiades at Marathon is unproven; but as he had become a noted character almost thirty years before the date of that most memorable of battles, he must have been old when he fought and won it.  Even Alcibiades, with whom is associated the idea of youth through his whole career, as if Time had stood still in his behalf, did not have a great command until he was approaching to middle age; and it was not until some years more had expired that he won victories for the Athenians.  The date of the birth of Epaminondas—­the best public man of all antiquity, 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.