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The leader of them was Leonidas, who had newly become one of the two kings of Sparta, the city that above all in Greece trained its sons to be hardy soldiers, dreading death infinitely less than shame.
What said you to the Ionian officers?" "I said that Athens held there was no difference between to command and to obey, except so far as was best for the interests of Greece; that as on the field of Plataea, when the Tegeans asserted precedence over the Athenians, we, the Athenian army, at once exclaimed, through your voice, Aristides, 'We come here to fight the Barbarian, not to dispute amongst ourselves; place us where you will' : even so now, while the allies give the command to Sparta, Sparta we will obey.
Through this valley flows the river Euro'tas, on whose banks, about twenty miles from the sea, stood the capital city, Lacedae'mon, or Sparta, which was unwalled and unfortified during its most flourishing period, as the Spartans held that the real defence of a town consists solely in the valor of its citizens.
Sometimes a principle of internal agitation and dissension, resulting from the very frame of the government, has been productive of the effect. Sparta flourished for more than seven hundred years under the civil institutions of Lycurgus; which guarded against the selfish principle, by prohibiting commerce, and imposing universal poverty and hardship.
The two states were always rivals, and never made common cause, except when the Persian enemy was before them. In the year 464 there was a terrible earthquake in Laconia, which left only five houses standing in Sparta, and buried great numbers in the ruins.
Pausanias knew that these officers were in correspondence with Sparta, and he now exerted all his powers to remove from their minds any suspicion which the disappearance of the prisoners might have left in them. In this interview he displayed all those great natural powers which, rightly trained and guided, might have made him not less great in council than in war.
Then I will fly, for I cannot overcome more than thirty. My queen! farewell! I have thought better of Sparta. This would never have happened in Athens. Now I go to the Persian King; there they understand better what is fitting, and there I shall not be obliged to eat black broth!" Alcibiades sat with the Persian satrap Tissaphernes, and Alcibiades the eloquent spoke.
If the unfaithful stewards of these puny and shameful bodies had again, as in Sparta, to strip and stand before stern judges and render them account, and be smitten with a conviction of their weakness, guilty deformity, and arrest of growth; if they were brought to realize how they are fallen beings, as weak as stern theologians once deemed them depraved, and how great their need of physical salvation, we might hope again for a physical renaissance.
As for myself, being a rich man, I sign my name for a thousand drachmae, and beg that my gift may be publicly announced at the next Pythian games. To that rude fellow, Aristomachus of Sparta, express my thanks for the effectual manner in which he fulfilled my intention in coming to Egypt.
The Persian gold coins bore the device of an archer: and Agesilaus as he broke up his camp observed that he was being driven out of Asia by ten thousand archers, meaning that so many of these coins had been distributed among the statesmen of Athens and Thebes, to bribe them into forcing those countries to go to war with Sparta. XVI. He now crossed the Hellespont and proceeded through Thrace.
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