The Historians' History of the World 04

The conduct of the war was such as we have so often seen in Greece. When plunder no longer remained to employ the Lacedæmonian army profitably, Agis marched home, leaving only a garrison in Epitalium on the Alpheus, where he established the Elean fugitives. Hence rapine was occasionally prosecuted through the autumn and winter. Elis could not, like Athens, support itself under the continual ravage of its territory. In spring therefore Thrasydæus opened a negotiation with Lacedæmon, and at once offered the independency of all the towns over which the Eleans claimed sovereignty by right of conquest; proposing only to keep Epium, whose territory they had purchased from the inhabitants for thirty talents fairly paid. The Lacedæmonians however, considering, or affecting to consider, the purchase as forced, required that Epium should be free like the rest. The disposition thus apparent in the Lacedæmonians to depress Elis encouraged the villagers of the Pisan territory to assert their claim to the superintendency of the Olympian temple, violently taken from their ancestors, as they contended, by the Eleans, when their city was destroyed. But, whatever might have been the ancient right, the Lacedæmonian administration, thinking those uneducated pretenders unfit for an office of much solemnity and dignity in the eyes of all Greece, would not interfere. Upon the condition therefore that every town of Elea should be, as a free republic, a separate member of the Lacedæmonian confederacy, which was, in effect, to be subjects of Lacedæmon, peace was made; and Elis, according to the Lacedæmonian decree preceding the war, humbled and chastened, was itself also restored to its place in that confederacy.

The Shores of Elis

The imputation of impiety, under which the Lacedæmonians began the war, perhaps urged them to a more ostentatious display of respect for the gods at the end of it. Agis himself was deputed to offer, at Delphi, the tenth of the spoil. On his return, he was taken ill at Heræa, and he died soon after his arrival at Lacedæmon. In the magnificence of his funeral the Lacedæmonians probably meant also to exhibit their own piety, as well as to testify their opinion of the deceased prince’s merit. They failed however in their estimate of the prevailing prejudices of the Grecian people. Honour to the gods indeed was supposed to be best shown, and religion principally to consist, in pompous processions and expensive spectacles; but general opinion condemned the splendour of the funeral of Agis, as greater than could become the most illustrious mortal.b

When the days for the funeral solemnities were past and it was necessary for another king to be appointed, Leotychides, who said that he was the son of Agis, and Agesilaus his brother, stood forward as competitors for the throne. Leotychides saying, “The law, Agesilaus, directs, not that the brother, but that the son of the king is to reign; though if there happen to be no son, the brother may in that case become king.” Agesilaus rejoined, “Then I must be king.” “How,” said Leotychides, “when I am alive?” “Because,” returned Agesilaus, “he whom you call your father, said that you were not his son.”[8] “But my mother, who knows much better than he, still declares that I am.” “Neptune, however,” said Agesilaus, “showed that what you assert is false, as he drove your father abroad by an earthquake from her chamber; and time, which is said to be the truest of witnesses, gives testimony with him to the same effect; for you were born in the tenth month after he fled from her, and was never after seen in her chamber.” In this manner they disputed. But Diopithes, a man who paid great attention to oracles, supported Leotychides, and said that there was an oracle of Apollo enjoining them “to beware of a halting reign.” Lysander however said in reply to him, on behalf of Agesilaus, that “he did not think the god desired them to beware lest their king should stumble and halt, but rather lest one who was not of the royal family should reign; for that the royal power would assuredly be lame whenever men not descended from Hercules should rule the state.” The people, after hearing such arguments from both sides, chose Agesilaus for their king.

CINADON’S PLOT

[398-397 B.C.]