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He attached himself to the cause and person of Xerxes, and is even said to have furnished the young prince with new arguments, founded on the usages of Sparta an assertion not to be wholly disregarded, since Demaratus appeared before the court in the character of a monarch, if in the destitution of an exile, and his suggestions fell upon the ear of an arbiter willing to seize every excuse to justify the resolution to which he had already arrived.
It cannot be there are many more who can fight like this left in Hellas, though Demaratus, the Spartan outlaw, says there are. Drive away, Pitiramphes—and you, Mardonius, ride beside me. I cannot abide those corpses. Where is my handkerchief? The one with the Sabæan nard on it. I will hold it to my nose. Most refreshing! And I had a question to ask—I have forgotten what.”
It is related that the first time he sat on the royal throne of Persia, under the canopy of gold, Demaratus, the Corinthian, who was much attached to him and had been one of his father's friends, wept, in an old man's manner, and deplored the misfortune of those Creeks whom death had deprived of the satisfaction of seeing Alexander seated on the throne of Darius.
The king was much amused at hearing such an account from his messenger. He sent for Demaratus, the Spartan refugee, with whom, the reader will recollect, he held a long conversation in respect to the Greeks at the close of the great review at Doriscus. When Demaratus came, Xerxes related to him what the messenger had reported.
These men have come to fight you for the Pass, and for that battle they are making ready, for it is our country fashion to comb and tend our hair when we are about to put our heads in peril. Xerxes would not believe Demaratus. He waited four days, and then, in a rage, bade his best warriors, the Medes and Cissians, bring the Greeks into his presence.
The refugee princes of the family of Pisistratus hoped to be reinstated under Persian influence as dependent despots of Athens. Demaratus of Sparta probably cherished a similar expectation with regard to that capital.
Nor can we wonder at the esteem which a Hippias or a Demaratus found in the Persian councils, when, in addition to the general reputation of Greeks, they were invested with the dignity of princely rank for, above all nations , the Persians most venerated the name and the attributes of a king; nor could their Oriental notions have accurately distinguished between a legitimate monarch and a Greek tyrant.
Demaratus had not only prevented the marriage of Leotychides with a maiden named Percalos, but, by a mixture of violence and artifice, married her himself. Thus, even among the sober and unloving Spartans, woman could still be the author of revolutions.
But our ancestors extended their care beyond their own city to the whole of Greece." An Aristides is formed by the respect paid to integrity, which society tries in vain a Demaratus, an Eurybiades, and, as we shall see, a Pausanias, by the laws which, affecting to exclude the influence of the passions, render their temptations novel, and their effects irresistible.
In the Attic War Cleomenes and Demaratus, Kings of Lacedaemon, being thus coupled, tugged one against another; and while they should have joined against the Persian, were the cause of the common calamity, whereupon that commonwealth took better counsel, and made a law whereby from henceforth there went at once but one of her kings to battle.
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