THE treasury of the people of Acanthus at Delphi bears this inscription: ‘The spoils which Brasidas and the Acanthians took from the Athenians.’ For this reason many people suppose that the marble figure standing inside just by the door represents Brasidas. But in fact, it is a statue of Lysander, wearing his hair and beard long in the ancient fashion. It is not true, as some writers have stated, that when the Argives shaved off their hair in mourning after their great defeat,1 the Spartans by contrast let theirs grow long in triumph for their victory. Nor again was it the fact that the Bacchiad family2 looked mean and unsightly through having shaved their heads (when they fled from Corinth and took refuge in Sparta), which gave the Spartans the desire to wear their hair long. The truth is that this is another custom which originated with Lycurgus. He is reported to have said that a fine head of hair makes handsome men look more handsome and ugly men more terrifying.
2. Lysander’s father, Aristocleitus, is said to have been descended from the sons of Heracles, although he did not belong to the Spartan royal family. Lysander himself was brought up in poverty and showed himself as amenable as any Spartan to the customs of his country. He proved, too, that he possessed a manly spirit and was indifferent to all forms of pleasure, except for the kind which honoured and successful men earn by their own exploits – and this, indeed, is the only kind to which it is no disgrace for the young Spartan to yield. The Spartans expect their boys from the very first to be intensely conscious of public opinion, to take any censure deeply to heart as well as to exult in praise, and anyone who remains indifferent or fails to respond to these sentiments is despised as a spiritless clod, utterly lacking in any desire to excel. This kind of ambition and competitive spirit, then, had been firmly implanted in Lysander by his Spartan training, and it would be unfair to blame his natural disposition too much in this respect. On the other hand he seems to have displayed an inborn obsequiousness to the great such as one would not expect to find in a Spartan, and to have been willing to bear the arrogance of those in authority for the sake of achieving his own ends, a quality which some people regard as a great part of political capacity. Aristotle,1 when he observes that great natures, such as those of Socrates, Plato, and Heracle, are especially prone to melancholy, notes that Lysander also became a prey to melancholy, not at first, but in his later years.
The most peculiar fact about his character, however, is that although he himself endured poverty honourably, and was never enslaved or even momentarily corrupted by money, he nevertheless filled his own country not merely with riches but with the craving for them, and he deprived Sparta of the admiration she had always enjoyed for her indifference to wealth. This came about because he brought immense quantities of gold and silver into Sparta after the war with Athens, although he did not keep a single drachma for himself. On another occasion, when Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, sent Lysander’s daughters some luxurious Sicilian tunics, he refused them, saying that he was afraid they would make his daughters look uglier. However, a little later he was sent as ambassador to the same ruler, who presented him with two dresses and told him to choose whichever he preferred and take it back to his daughter. This time he answered that she could choose better herself and took both dresses away with him.
3. The Peloponnesian War had now dragged on for many years, and after the disaster the Athenians had suffered in Sicily it seemed inevitable that they would at once lose command of the sea, and only a matter of time before they abandoned the struggle altogether. But the return of Alcibiades from exile and his resumption of the command quite transformed the situation and made the Athenian fleet once more a match for its opponents. It was then the Spartans’ turn to become alarmed and they summoned up fresh spirit for the struggle. They decided that the war demanded a leader of exceptional ability as well as larger forces, and so they appointed Lysander to take command of the Peloponnesian fleet.1 When he arrived in Ephesus, he found the city well disposed towards him personally and enthusiastic for the Spartan cause, but in a state of great poverty and also in danger of losing its Greek character and becoming barbarized by adopting Persian customs. The reason for this was that it was encircled by Lydian territory, and the Persian generals were in the habit of using it as their headquarters. Lysander decided to make it his own base, ordered merchant shipping from every quarter to land their cargoes there, and arranged for warships to be built in the port. In this way he filled the Ephesian harbours once again with traffic, revived the activity of the market, and brought profits to every house and workshop, so that from that moment, thanks to his efforts, the city began to entertain hopes of attaining that degree of stateliness and grandeur which it now enjoys.
4. When Lysander learned that Cyrus, the king’s son, had arrived in Sardis, he went there to confer with him and also to lodge complaints against Tissaphernes. The satrap had been ordered to help the Spartans drive the Athenians from Persian waters, but it was felt that because of Alcibiades’ influence his support had been no more than lukewarm, and that he was undermining the efficiency of the fleet by the miserably inadequate pay he provided. As Tissaphernes was a dishonest man and was personally on bad terms with him, Cyrus was not at all unwilling to hear him blamed and maligned. Consequently, Lysander was able to find favour on this score as well as through his behaviour at their daily meetings, but it was above all through the respect and deference he showed in his conversations with Cyrus that he finally won over the young prince and prevailed on him to carry on the war more vigorously. When the Spartan commander was about to leave, Cyrus gave a banquet for him and insisted that Lysander should accept a token of his friendship: he could ask whatever he pleased and nothing would be refused him. Lysander answered: ‘Since you are so kind to me, Cyrus, I beg of you to increase my sailors’ pay by an obol, and give them four obols a day instead of three.’
Cyrus was delighted with his public spirit and presented him with ten thousand darics, out of which Lysander raised his seamen’s pay by an obol. In a short while he had earned such prestige by this action that he all but emptied the Athenians’ ships. Most of their seamen flocked to the more generous paymaster, and those who remained grew disheartened and mutinous and gave continual trouble to their officers. But in spite of having demoralized and weakened the enemy in this way, Lysander still shrank from risking a naval battle: he knew that Alcibiades was an energetic commander, was superior to him in numbers and possessed up to that time an unbroken record of victories by land and sea.
5. Not long after this1 Alcibiades sailed over from Samos to Phocaea, leaving his pilot Antiochus in command of the fleet. Antiochus was evidently resolved to make a gesture which would at once show off his own courage and insult Lysander. He put into the harbour of Ephesus with two triremes and ostentatiously rowed past the Peloponnesian fleet as it lay drawn up on the shore, making a great commotion and uttering shouts of laughter. Lysander was enraged and gave chase at first with only a few of his triremes: then, when he saw the Athenians coming to the rescue, he manned more of his ships, until, finally, a major battle developed. Lysander defeated the Athenians, captured fifteen triremes, and set up a trophy, whereupon there was an outburst of fury against Alcibiades at Athens and the people relieved him of his command. He found himself insulted and abused by the troops at Samos, and he therefore left the camp and sailed for the Chersonese. This battle, then, although of no great importance in itself, became famous because of its effect on Alcibiades’ fortunes.
Lysander now invited to Ephesus from the various Ionian cities all those Greeks whom he had observed to be outstanding in courage and enterprise, and he planted in their minds the idea of the aristocratic councils of ten and other counter-revolutionary bodies which he later set up. He encouraged them to form political clubs in their various cities and to apply themselves to public affairs, impressing on them that as soon as the Athenians had been subdued they could throw off the forms of democratic government and become absolute rulers in their own countries, and he went on to strengthen their confidence in him by his actions. All those who were associated with him already through friendship or the ties of hospitality were promoted to important enterprises, honours, or commands, and he made himself a partner in their acts of injustice and oppression to satisfy their greed. The result was that everyone looked up to him, courted his favour and fixed their hopes upon him, believing that so long as he remained in authority all their most extravagant ambitions would be fulfilled. For the same reason they were not at all well disposed to Callicratidas, when he first appeared on the scene1 to succeed Lysander in command of the fleet; and even after he had proved himself as brave and as just as a man could be, they still disliked the character of his leadership, which had a certain Doric simplicity and candour about it. They admired his virtue, much as they might do the beauty of some hero’s statue, but they missed Lysander’s whole-hearted support and looked in vain for the latter’s keen partiality for the interests of his own friends, so much so that when he sailed away, they wept for sheer despair.
6. Lysander himself did what he could to make these men even more discontented with Callicratidas. He also returned to Sardis the balance of the money which Cyrus had given him to pay the fleet, telling Callicratidas that he must ask for it himself if he wanted it and must make his own arrangements to pay his men. Finally, when he was on the point of sailing, he called Callicratidas to witness that the fleet he was handing over was mistress of the seas. Callicratidas wanted to prove that this was an empty and insolent boast, and he retorted: ‘If that is so, you can sail to Miletus, keeping Samos on your left, and hand over the fleet to me there. If we are masters of the sea, we need have no fear about sailing past the enemy at Samos.’ Lysander answered that it was not he but Callicratidas who was in command, and then sailed off to the Peloponnese, leaving Callicratidas in an awkward dilemma. He had brought no money with him from home, and he could not bring himself to wring money out of the Greek cities on the coast at a time when they were already suffering great hardship. The only alternative left him was to hang about the doors of the king’s generals, as Lysander had done, and beg for money there. It would have been difficult to find anybody less suited for this task than Callicratidas: he was a generous man of high ideals and he regarded any form of defeat, so long as it was at the hands of Greeks, as more honourable than being obliged to flatter and dance attendance on the barbarians, who had nothing to recommend them but their gold.
However, sheer necessity at length forced him to travel to Lydia, where he immediately called at Cyrus’s house and sent in word that Callicratidas the admiral had arrived and wished to speak to him. One of the doorkeepers told him: ‘Cyrus is busy just now, stranger: he is drinking,’ to which Callicratidas replied quite innocently, ‘Very well, I shall stand here and wait until he has finished.’ This time, then, after being taken for a simpleton and laughed at by the Persians, he merely went away. But when he came to the door a second time and was again refused admittance, he was furious and returned to Ephesus, calling down curses on the men who had first invited humiliation from the barbarians and taught them to be insolent because of their wealth. He vowed to everyone present that as soon as he was back in Sparta he would do everything in his power to reconcile the Greek states, so that they should strike terror into the Persians and stop trying to enlist the barbarians’ power against one another.
7. However, Callicratidas, whose ideals were so well worthy of Sparta, and who had shown himself fit to be compared for uprightness, magnanimity, and courage with the finest spirits of all Greece, was defeated not long after at the sea battle of Arginusae1 and lost his life. This was a serious reverse, and the allies accordingly sent an embassy to Sparta to ask for Lysander to be made admiral: they declared that they could carry on the war far more vigorously if he was their commander, and Cyrus also sent a message to the same effect. Now the Spartans had a law which prohibited the same man from serving as admiral twice, but at the same time they were anxious to meet their allies’ wishes. So they gave the title of admiral to a man named Aracus and sent out Lysander2nominally to be his deputy, but in reality to take command. Most of the men who possessed power and influence in the Greek cities had long been eagerly awaiting his arrival, for they were counting on his help to strengthen their position still further as soon as the democratic governments had been overthrown. On the other hand to those who valued straightforward and generous conduct in their leaders, Lysander by comparison with Callicratidas seemed an equivocal and unprincipled character, and a man who disguised most of his actions in war with various forms of deceit. He would make a great parade of justice, for example, if it suited his purpose, but otherwise would make out that whatever was most profitable was best: he did not believe truth in itself to be any better than falsehood, but valued each of them according to the needs of the moment. He laughed at those who insisted that the descendants of Heracles should not stoop to trickery in warfare and remarked, ‘Where the lion’s skin will not reach, we must patch it out with the fox’s.’
8. This is borne out by what he is reported to have done at Miletus. In that city his own friends and allies, whom he had promised to help by overthrowing the democracy and driving out their opponents, changed their minds and came to an agreement with their enemies. Lysander pretended in public that he was delighted at this reconciliation and was promoting an understanding between the two sides, but in private he showed his anger to his own partisans and urged them to attack the popular party again. Then as soon as he learned the uprising had started, he immediately came up and marched into the city, denounced the first conspirators he met, and handled them roughly as if he were going to punish them; at the same time he told the popular party to take heart and not to be afraid of anything, now that he was on the scene. He acted out all this pretence so as to make sure that the leading men of the popular party should not escape but should remain in the city and be killed, and this was exactly what happened, for all those who had taken Lysander at his word were massacred.
Androcleides reports a saying of Lysander’s which reveals his utter indifference to the value of an oath. It was a principle of his, so Androcleides says, to cheat boys with dice, but men with oaths. In this he was imitating Polycrates of Samos, although we may think that it ill becomes a general to follow the example of a tyrant, or a Spartan to treat the gods as badly as his enemies. Indeed, the offence against heaven is the worse of the two, for the man who overreaches his opponent by breaking his oath reveals that he is afraid of his enemy, but despises the god he has invoked.
9. At any rate Cyrus sent for Lysander to Sardis, gave him a sum of money, and promised him still more. Indeed, to show his regard he undertook, with a young man’s impulsiveness, to lavish his whole fortune on him if his father refused him money for the Spartans, and he declared that if all else failed he would break up the throne of gold and silver on which he sat when he gave audiences. Finally, when he set off to visit his father in Media, he made over the tribute from the cities to Lysander and placed his own authority in the Spartan’s hands. He embraced Lysander, begged him not to fight the Athenians at sea until he himself had returned, and promised to bring back with him a strong naval force from Phoenicia and Cilicia: then he set off to join the king.
For his part Lysander was not strong enough to fight a naval battle with the Athenians on equal terms, but on the other hand he could not remain idle with so large a fleet under his command. So he put to sea and reduced some of the islands and later touched at Aegina and Salamis and overran them.1 He also landed in Attica and greeted Agis, who came down from Decelea in person to meet him and demonstrated to the land forces the strength of his fleet, with the air of one who could sail wherever he chose and possessed complete control of the sea. In spite of this, when he discovered that the Athenians were pursuing him, he withdrew by another route through the islands and returned to Asia Minor.
He found the Hellespont undefended and there he launched a combined operation from Lampsacus, he himself attacking from the sea with the fleet, while Thorax assaulted the walls with the land forces. The city was stormed and Lysander gave it up to his soldiers to plunder. Meanwhile, the Athenian fleet of 180 triremes had just arrived at Elaeus in the Chersonese, and as soon as they learned that Lampsacus was lost, they at once put in at Sestos. There they revictualled and then sailed along the coast to Aegospotami, which lay opposite their enemies, who were still stationed at Lampsacus. The Athenians were commanded by a number of generals, among whom was Philocles, who had recently persuaded the people to pass a decree that all prisoners of war should have their right thumbs cut off to prevent their holding a spear, although they could still handle an oar.
10. Both sides rested for the moment, expecting that there would be a sea-battle next day. Lysander in fact had different plans, but he still ordered his sailors and pilots to man their ships at first light, as though they would be going into action in the morning: they were to take up their stations in order and in strict silence and wait for the word of command, and in the same way the land forces were to stand to and remain quiet along the sea-shore. The sun rose and the Athenians sailed up with their whole fleet in line and offered battle. But although the Peloponnesian fleet had been manned while it was still dark and was drawn up in line facing the enemy, Lysander did not put out to meet them: instead he sent out cutters to the ships in the forward positions, with orders that they should stay quiet and remain in line and not sail out against the enemy. And on the same principle, when the Athenians sailed back around mid-day, he did not allow his men off their ships until two or three triremes, which he had sent out to reconnoitre, had returned and reported that the enemy had gone ashore. The following day the same manoeuvres were repeated and similarly on the third and fourth days, until the Athenians began to grow over-confident and to despise their opponents, believing that it was nothing but sheer cowardice which kept the enemy huddled together in close formation.
At this point Alcibiades, who was living in a castle of his own in the Chersonese, rode over to the Athenian army. He criticized the generals first of all for having sited their camp on an exposed beach, where there was no anchorage, in a position which was not merely inconvenient but positively dangerous; and, secondly, for their mistake in bringing their supplies all the way from Sestos. They ought to sail a little way along the coast to the harbour and city of Sestos, and there they would be farther away from their enemies, who were watching their opportunity closely and were commanded by a single general, who inspired such fear that all his orders were promptly carried out. This was Alcibiades’ advice, but the Athenian generals paid no attention and one of them, Tydeus, retorted insolently, ‘It is we who are in command now, not you.’
11. Alcibiades suspected that there might even be treachery afoot in the Athenian camp and so he made himself scarce. Finally, on the fifth day, the Athenians once more sailed over to the enemy and back again in a contemptuous and careless fashion, as had now become their habit. But this time Lysander gave orders to his reconnoitring vessels that as soon as they saw the Athenians had disembarked, they were to put about and row back at top speed: then, when they reached the middle of the straits, they were to hoist a bronze shield at the prow as the signal to attack. Lysander himself sailed round the fleet encouraging the pilots and ships’ captains, and he impressed on them that they must keep all their crews standing to, sailors and soldiers alike, and then the moment the signal was given, row with all their might against the enemy. So when the shield was hoisted on the lookout vessels and the trumpet on the admiral’s flagship sounded the attack, the ships moved forward, while at the same time the land forces raced along the shore to seize the headland. At this point on the Hellespont the two continents are less than two miles apart, and the rowers pulled with such a will that they fairly ate up the distance. Conon, the Athenian general, was the first to notice Lysander’s fleet bearing down upon them. He instantly shouted out orders to embark and, in an agony of distress at the impending disaster, commanded, implored, and drove his crews to man their ships. But the men were scattered and his desperate efforts were in vain. They had never expected an attack and, as soon as they had disembarked, some went off to market, others strolled about in the country, or lay down to sleep in their tents, or began to prepare the evening meal, and all of them because of their commanders’ inexperience were utterly unaware of what was about to happen. The shouts and the splashing oars of the oncoming fleet were already in their ears when Conon slipped out with eight ships, eluded the enemy and made his way to king Evagoras in Cyprus. The Peloponnesians pounced on the rest of the ships, capturing some of them completely unmanned and ramming others while their crews were still getting aboard. The men, as they ran up unarmed and in straggling order, were slaughtered in a vain attempt to rescue their ships, or else, if they retreated inland, the enemy disembarked and cut them down as they fled. Lysander took 3,000 prisoners, including the generals, and captured the entire fleet, with the exception of the state galley, the Paralus, and the ships which escaped with Conon. After plundering the Athenian camp and taking their ships in tow, he sailed back to Lampsacus, accompanied by the triumphal music of flutes and hymns of victory. He had performed a prodigious exploit with the minimum of effort. In the space of a single hour he had put an end to a war which, for its length and for the variety of its incidents and the uncertainty of its fortunes, eclipsed any that had gone before. The various conflicts and issues at stake had taken on innumerable different forms and witnessed many changes of circumstance, and the war had cost Greece more generals than all her previous contests put together, yet now it was concluded by the foresight and skill of one man. For this reason some people believed that the gods must certainly have taken a hand in the result.
12. There were reports that the brothers Castor and Pollux appeared as twin stars on either side of Lysander’s ship and shone out over the rudders just as he started out of the harbour against the enemy. Others say that this disaster was foreshadowed when the great stone fell, for there was a popular belief that a colossal stone had fallen from the sky at Aegospotami,1 and the people of the Chersonese revere it and point it out to this day. Anaxagoras is said to have predicted that if those bodies which are fixed in the vault of heaven should become loosened by some slip or convulsion of the whole system, one of them might be torn away and plunge to earth. He also asserted that none of the stars was now in its original positon. According to his theory, they are heavenly bodies composed of stone, whose light is generated by the friction of the ether which whirls round them, and they are propelled in fixed orbits by the gyratory force which first set them in motion; it was this force which originally prevented them from falling to earth at the period when cold and heavy bodies became detached from universal matter.
However, there is a more convincing theory than this. Those who hold it reject the explanation that shooting stars are caused by a sudden rush or diffusion of burning ether, which is no sooner ignited than the lower air extinguishes it, or by the combustion caused by this lower air escaping to a higher altitude. They maintain that shooting stars are heavenly bodies, which because of some momentary suspension of the centripetal force which governs them are carried out of their orbit and fall, not on the inhabited regions of the earth, but in most cases outside it or into the surrounding ocean, and for this reason their impact passes unnoticed.
On the other hand Daimachus in his treatise On Piety supports Anaxagoras’s theory. He states that a fiery body of enormous size was observed in the sky for seventy-five days continuously before the stone fell. It resembled a flaming cloud and it did not remain atrest, but was propelled along with intricate and irregular movements, so that burning fragments, splintered off in its plunging and erratic course, were showered in all directions and flared up brilliantly in the sky, just as shooting stars do. But when it had fallen in that spot and the inhabitants had recovered from their terror and astonishment and gathered round it, they could find not the least trace of the effects of fire: there was nothing but a stone, certainly of a large size, but by no means to be compared to the fiery mass they had observed in the heavens.
It is clear, of course, that Daïmachus’s account requires a good deal of indulgence from his readers. But if what he says is true, it entirely disposes of the theory that some rock, dislodged by wind and storm from a mountain-peak, was snatched high into the air and carried along like a spinning-top, and that it plunged to earth at the place where its spinning motion first slackened and stopped. The alternative is that the phenomenon which was witnessed for so many days in the heavens really did consist of fire, and that when this was extinguished, a change in the atmosphere followed which produced disturbances and violent winds, and that these in turn tore the stone from its position. However, a full investigation of such problems belongs to another kind of writing.
13. After the 3,000 Athenians taken prisoner by Lysander had been sentenced to death by the special council of the allies, he sent for Philocles, their general, and asked him what sort of punishment he thought he deserved for having advised his fellow-countrymen to treat other Greeks so outrageously.1 Philocles, far from being crushed by his misfortunes, told him not to play the prosecutor in a case where there was no judge, but to deal out as victor exactly the same punishment as he would have suffered had he been defeated. Then he bathed, put on a splendid cloak, and led his fellow-countrymen to execution, offering himself as the first victim, as Theophrastus tells us.
After this Lysander sailed to the various cities in the neighbourhood and ordered all the Athenians he found to return to Athens, and he proclaimed that anybody caught outside the city would be put to death without exception. This step, which drove all the Athenians into the capital at once, was deliberately taken so as to produce intense scarcity and famine in Athens as soon as possible, and to forestall the necessity for a siege, against which the Athenians might otherwise have been well provided.
He also suppressed both the democratic and other forms of government in the Greek cities of Asia Minor and left one Spartan administrator in each, and under him ten magistrates chosen from the political clubs which he had established everywhere. He followed this procedure just as thoroughly in the cities which had become his allies as in those which had opposed him, and cruising around at his leisure, he laid the foundations, in a sense, of a personal supremacy throughout Greece. In appointing these magistrates, he was not influenced by considerations of birth or wealth, but simply handed over control of affairs to his own associates and partisans, and gave them absolute powers to deal out rewards and punishments. He lent his presence to a number of massacres, and helped to drive out his friends’ adversaries and in this way provided the Greeks with a very unwelcome demonstration of Spartan rule. In fact, the comic poet Theopompus chose a particularly inept illustration when he compared the Spartans to tavern-women, because they gave the Greeks an appetising sip of freedom and then mixed vinegar with it. The truth was that the taste was harsh and bitter from the very beginning, since Lysander not only refused to allow the people to be masters of their own affairs, but actually delivered the cities into the hands of the most aggressive and fanatical members of the oligarchic faction.
14. After he had spent some time arranging these affairs and had sent word to Sparta that he was sailing over with 200 ships, he joined forces in Attica with the two Spartan kings, Agis and Pausanias, confidently expecting that he would soon capture Athens. But as the Athenians continued to hold out, he took his ships and returned once more to Asia. Here he overthrew the constitutions of all the remaining cities as he had done elsewhere, and set up councils of ten, putting many citizens to death in each place and driving large numbers into exile. Not long after he expelled all the inhabitants of Samos and handed over the towns on the island to the men they had banished. He also took Sestos out of the Athenians’ hands and forbade the native citizens to live there: instead he divided up the city and its surrounding territory among the men who had served as pilots and boatswains in his fleet. This turned out to be the first action of his which was resisted by the Spartans, who proceeded to restore the country to its inhabitants. Still, there were other measures of Lysander’s which won the approval of the whole of Greece, as when, for example, the people of Aegina were given back their city after many years,1 and in the same way the peoples of Melos and Scione were reinstated by him after the Athenians had handed over these cities and been expelled.
By this time he learned that the people of Athens were suffering terribly from famine, and so he sailed into the Piraeus and reduced the city, which was forced to accept the terms he laid down.2 One sometimes hears it said by Spartans that Lysander sent a dispatch to the ephors with the words ‘Athens is taken’, and that they wrote back, “Taken” would have been enough.’ However, this story was invented simply for its neatness. The ephors’ actual decree was worded as follows: ‘The Spartans have come to these decisions. Demolish the Piraeus and the Long Walls: withdraw from all other cities and keep to your own territory: if you comply with these conditions and recall your exiles, you may have peace, if you want it. As regards the number of your ships, whatever is decided by those on the spot, comply with it.’
The Athenians accepted these terms on the advice of Theramenes, the son of Hagnon. It is said that he was asked on this occasion by Cleomenes, one of the younger orators, whether he dared either by word or action to undo what Themistocles had done, by surrendering to the Spartans the very walls which that statesman had built in defiance of them. Theramenes’ reply was: ‘I am doing nothing, young man, that runs counter to Themistocles’ policy: the very same walls that he put up for Athens’ security, we shall pull down for her security. If walls ever made cities prosperous, then Sparta would be the worst provided of all, for she has none.’
15. So Lysander received the surrender of the entire fleet, except for twelve ships, and also of the walls of Athens. Then on the sixteenth day of the month Munychion,3 which was also the anniversary of the victory over the barbarians at Salamis, he set about changing the form of government. When the Athenians showed their bitter resentment and opposed his measures, he informed the people that he had caught the city violating the terms of its capitulation, since the walls were still standing, although the time within which they should have been pulled down had expired. He declared that as they had broken the articles of the treaty, he would submit their case to the allies to be completely reconsidered. Indeed, some people say that a proposal was actually laid before the congress of the allies to sell the whole Athenian people into slavery, and that on this occasion Erianthus the Theban went so far as to move that Athens should be razed to the ground and the country around it made a pasture for sheep. But later, so the story goes, when the principal delegates met for a banquet, a man from Phocis sang the opening chorus from Euripides’ Electra, which begins with the lines:
Daughter of Agamemnon
I have come, Electra, to your rustic court.1
At this the whole company was moved to pity and felt that it would be an outrage to destroy so glorious a city which had produced such great men.
After the Athenians had finally given way to all Lysander’s demands, he sent for a great company of flute girls from the city and collected all those who were in his camp. Then to the sound of their music, he pulled down the walls and burned the ships, while the allies garlanded themselves with flowers, rejoiced together, and hailed that day as the beginning of freedom for Greece. Next, without any delay, Lysander set about making changes in the constitution, and established a council of thirty in Athens and ten in the Piraeus. He also posted a garrison in the Acropolis and appointed Callibius, a Spartan, to be its military governor. It was Callibius who once raised his staff to strike Autolycus the wrestler, the man whom Xenophon makes the principal character in hisSymposium.When Autolycus gripped him by the legs and threw him to the ground, Lysander showed no sympathy with Callibius’s rage, but actually reprimanded him and told him that he did not know how to govern free men. However, the Thirty soon afterwards put Autolycus to death, to please Callibius.
16. After settling these affairs Lysander sailed for Thrace, but he sent home to Sparta what remained of the Athenian public funds and all the gifts and crowns he had received himself. He entrusted all this treasure to Gylippus, who had been the Spartan commander in Sicily. This amount was a large one, as many people had naturally given presents to a man of such great power, who was in a sense the master of all Greece. Gylippus is said to have cut open the sacks at the bottom, taken a large quantity of silver from each, and then had them sewn up again, not knowing that each sack had in it a note stating the value of the contents. When he arrived in Sparta, Gylippus hid the money he had stolen under the tiles of his house, handed over the sacks to the ephors and showed the seals that were on them. However, when the ephors opened the sacks and counted the money, the amount failed to tally with the written accounts, and they were mystified until one of Gylippus’s servants revealed the truth to them through the cryptic remark that there were a great many owls roosting under his master’s tiles, for apparently most of the coinage of that time bore the emblem of an owl on account of the supremacy of Athens.
17. Having tarnished his brilliant reputation by this mean and ignoble action, Gylippus left Sparta in disgrace. The most far-sighted of the Spartans, on the other hand, saw in this episode a disturbing proof of the corrupting power of money for the very reason that it was the prominent rather than the ordinary citizens who were exposed to it. They reproached Lysander and called upon the ephors to purify the country by eliminating all gold and silver, which represented, they were convinced, so much imported ruin. The ephors then pondered the problem. It was Sciraphidas, according to Theopompus, or Phlogidas, according to Ephorus, who declared that they ought not to admit gold or silver coinage into the city, but should continue to use the currency of their forefathers. Now the traditional currency consisted of iron that had been dipped in vinegar while it was red-hot: this was done to prevent its being worked, the dipping making it brittle and unpliable. Besides this it was extremely heavy and difficult to transport, and even a great quantity and weight of it represented very little in value. It seems likely that all money was originally of this kind, and that instead of coins, men used spits made of iron or bronze. For this reason many small coins are known to this day as obols (spits), and six obols are called a drachma, since this was the largest number that could be grasped in the hand.
Lysander’s friends, however, opposed this advice and insisted that the money should be kept in Sparta. Finally, it was decided that currency could be imported for public use, but that any private person found in possession of it should be put to death. This was as if to say that Lycurgus had been afraid of money itself, and not of the greed that it engenders; and indeed, as events turned out, so far from eliminating this vice by forbidding private individuals to own money, the law tended to encourage them by permitting such ownership to the state, so that in this way its use acquired a certain dignity and honour. It was hardly possible for men who saw money valued in public to despise it in private, or to regard what was evidently prized and cherished by the community as something worthless or useless to the individual. On the contrary, public practices tend to impress themselves far more swiftly upon the habits of private life than individual faults or failings ever do upon the community. When the whole deteriorates, it is only natural that the parts should become corrupt with it, but those diseases which travel from the part to the whole encounter plenty of correctives and antidotes in the parts which remain sound. Thus the Spartans set terror and the law to guard their citizens’ houses and prevent money from finding a way in, but they did nothing to make their spirits impervious or superior to its power: instead they implanted in their people a lively ambition to acquire wealth by setting it up as an exalted and noble object. However, I have already criticized the Spartans’ conduct in this respect in another essay.1
18. Out of the plunder he had taken, Lysander set up bronze statues of himself and each of his two admirals at Delphi, and he also dedicated two golden stars2 representing Castor and Pollux, which vanished just before the battle of Leuctra. Besides this, in the treasury dedicated by Brasidas and the Acanthians there was kept a trireme of gold and ivory three feet long, which Cyrus sent Lysander as a present to commemorate his victory. Anaxandrides of Delphi also tells us that Lysander deposited there a talent of silver, fifty-two minae, and eleven staters, a statement which can hardly be reconciled with the accounts of his poverty which we have from other authors. At any rate Lysander at this time wielded a greater power than any Greek had ever done before him, and he gave the impression that his ambition and sense of his own superiority even exceeded his power. He was the first Greek, so Duris tells us, in whose honour Greek cities erected altars and offered sacrifices as though he were a god, or for whom songs of triumph were sung. One of these has been handed down and begins as follows:
Let us sing the praise
Of sacred Hellas’ commander
Who came from Sparta of the broad plains
O, Io, Paean!
Besides this, the people of Samos decreed that their festival in honour of Hera should be called Lysandreia. Lysander always kept the poet Choerilus with him to celebrate his achievements in verse, and he was so delighted with Antilochus, who wrote some respectable lines in his praise, that he filled his cap with silver and made him a present of it. When Antimachus of Colophon and a certain Niceratus of Heracleia competed at the Lysandreia with poems about him, he gave the prize to Niceratus, which so infuriated Antimachus that he suppressed his poem. Plato, who was a young man at that time and was a warm admirer of Antimachus’s verse, tried to console the poet’s annoyance at this defeat by pointing out that it is the ignorant who suffer from their ignorance, just as the blind do from their lack of sight. However, when the harper Aristonous, who had been champion six times at the Pythian games, told Lysander as a piece of amiable flattery that if he won again he intended to have his victory announced by the herald under Lysander’s name, and the latter asked, ‘Does he mean as my slave?’
19. To those in authority and of equal rank with himself this ambitious temper of Lysander’s was merely annoying. But side by side with his ambition, an extreme arrogance and severity began to show themselves in his character, fostered by the flattery which was constantly paid him. Neither in the rewards nor in the punishments which he dealt out was there any attempt at the restraint which a democratic leader might have observed. The prizes which he distributed to his friends and allies took the form of unquestioned authority and complete autocracy over cities, while nothing short of the death of his enemies could satisfy his anger; not even exile was permitted. An example of this occurred at a later date in Miletus. Lysander was afraid that those leaders of the democratic party there who were still active might escape into exile, and there were others who had gone into hiding whom he wanted to lure into the open, and so he took an oath that he would do them no harm. When the first took him at his word and the second came forward, he handed them all over to the aristocratic party for execution, to the number of no less than 800. In the other cities, too, untold numbers of the democratic parties were massacred, for Lysander had men put to death not only to settle his personal scores but to gratify the greed and hatred of his friends in each city, and he made himself their partner in these crimes. For this reason, Eteocles the Spartan was felt to have spoken for everybody when he declared that Greece could not have stood two Lysanders. These were the very words which Archestratus used of Alcibiades, as Theophrastus tells us. In his case it was a combination of insolence, luxury, and self-will that gave such offence: in Lysander’s it was the harshness of his disposition which made his power feared and hated.
At first the Spartans paid little attention to his accusers: but when Pharnabazus became indignant at the marauding raids which Lysander had carried out in his territory, and sent men to Sparta to denounce him, the ephors were finally roused. They caught Thorax, one of Lysander’s friends and fellow-generals, with money in his possession and put him to death, and they sent a dispatch scroll to Lysander to recall him.
These scrolls are made up in the following way. When the ephors send out a general or admiral, they prepare two cylindrical pieces of wood of exactly the same length and thickness, each corresponding to the other in its dimensions. One of these they keep themselves, the other being given to the departing officer, and these pieces of wood are known as scytalae. Then whenever they want to send some important message secretly, they make a long narrow strip of parchment, like a leather strap, and wind it round the cylinder with the edges touching, so that there is no space between the folds and the entire surface of the scytale is covered. Having done this, they write their message on the parchment in the position in which it was wrapped round the cylinder, and then they unwind the parchment and send it without the cylinder to the commander. When it reaches him he has no means of deciphering it, as the letters have no connexion and appear to be all broken up, and he has to take his own cylinder and wind the strip of parchment round it. The spiral is then arranged in the correct sequence, the letters fall into their proper order, and he can read round the cylinder and understand the message as a continuous whole. The parchment, like the cylinder, is called a scytale, just as the thing that is measured often has the same name as the measure.
20. When the scroll reached Lysander at the Hellespont, he was seriously alarmed. As he was more afraid of Pharnabazus’s accusations than of anyone else’s, he hastened to arrange a meeting with him, hoping that he could settle their differences. When they met, he appealed to Pharnabazus to write another letter about him to the ephors, explaining that he had not suffered any injury and had no complaints to make. However, Lysander failed to understand that this was a case of playing Cretan against Cretan, as the proverb has it, or of diamond cut diamond. Pharnabazus promised to do everything Lysander proposed and openly wrote a letter of the kind he had asked for, but kept another by him which he had written privately. Then, when the moment came to affix the seals, he changed over the letters, which looked exactly alike, and handed Lysander the one he had written in secret. Lysander duly arrived in Sparta, proceeded to the senate-house, as was the custom, and gave the ephors Pharnabazus’s letter. He felt-confident that the most serious charge against him had been withdrawn, for Pharnabazus, it must be explained, was in high favour with the Spartans, as he had played a more active part in the war on their side than any of the Persian generals. But when the ephors read the letter and showed it to him, Lysander understood that:
Others besides Odysseus can be cunning,
and for the moment he had to retire in utter confusion. A few days afterwards he met the ephors and told them that he owed it to the god to visit the temple of Zeus Ammon, and offer up there the sacrifices he had vowed before his battles. Some people say that when he was besieging the city of Aphytae, in Thrace, the god appeared and stood by him in his sleep, and that on this account he raised the siege, since it was the god’s will, and ordered the people of Aphytae to sacrifice to Zeus Ammon; and this, they conclude, was the reason which made him anxious to travel to Libya and propitiate the god. However, the general opinion was that Lysander was using the god as a pretext, because he was really afraid of the ephors and could not endure the harsh discipline of life at home, or the authority of others. He longed, they believed, to roam and travel about in foreign countries, just as a horse longs for freedom when it has ranged the open pastures and is then brought back to the stable for his usual work. Ephorus, it is true, offers yet another explanation for this absence abroad, which I shall mention presently.
21. After he had obtained leave with great difficulty from the ephors, he sailed away. Once he had left, however, the two kings discovered that he held the cities completely in his power and was virtually the master of Greece through the device of the political clubs which he had formed, and so they took steps to depose his friends everywhere and restore the control of affairs to the democratic parties. But these changes were followed by fresh disturbances. First of all the Athenians,1 setting out from the fortress of Phyle, attacked the Thirty and overpowered them. Lysander therefore hurried home and persuaded the Spartans to take the side of the oligarchies and punish the democratic parties. They decided to help the Thirty first of all, and so they sent them a hundred talents for the expenses of the war and appointed Lysander as general. The Spartan kings, however, were jealous of him and were afraid that he might capture Athens a second time and, accordingly, they decided that one of them should accompany the expedition. So Pausanias went out, nominally to help the Thirty against the people, but really to put an end to the war and prevent Lysander from making himself master of Athens again with the help of his friends. This he achieved easily enough, and by reconciling the Athenians and putting a stop to the civil war he frustrated Lysander’s ambitions. But when the Athenians not long afterwards again rose in revolt, it was Pausanias’s turn to be blamed for having taken the curb of the oligarchy out of the people’s mouth and allowed them to become arrogant and insolent again. Lysander, on the other hand, increased his reputation as a man who had used his authority in downright fashion, not to please other people or to win applause, but for the solid advantage of Sparta.
22. Lysander was also brutal and aggressive in his speech and inclined to intimidate anyone who opposed him. The Argives, for example, had a dispute about their frontiers with the Spartans and considered that they had made out a better case than their opponents. Lysander then laid his hand on his sword and remarked, ‘The man who is master of this possesses the best arguments about frontiers.’ On another occasion at a conference, where some Megarian had been taking liberties in the way he addressed him, Lysander retorted: ‘These words, stranger, need a city to back them up.’ When the Boeotians were trying to play a double game with him, he asked them whether he should take his army through their territory with spears upright or levelled. Again, at the time when the Corinthians revolted and Lysander marched up to their walls, he saw that the Spartans were hesitating to begin the assault. At this moment a hare was seen leaping across the moat, whereupon Lysander asked, ‘Are you not ashamed to be afraid of enemies who are so lazy that hares can sleep on their walls?’
When king Agis died1 and left a brother, Agesilaus, and a boy, Leotychides, who was supposed to be his son, Lysander, who had been a lover of Agesilaus, persuaded him to claim the crown, on the ground that he was a true descendant of Heracles. Leotychides, I should explain, was accused of being a son of Alcibiades, who had secretly carried on a liaison with Timaea, Agis’s wife, while he was living in exile in Sparta. Agis, they say, had calculated the dates and come to the conclusion that his wife could not have conceived the child by him, and so he ignored Leotychides and openly disowned him to the last. But when he was brought to Heraea during his final illness and was on his death-bed, he was persuaded by the entreaties of the young man and his friends to declare in the presence of many witnesses that Leotychides was his legitimate son, and he died begging them to testify to this fact before the Spartans. This testimony was duly given in Leotychides’ favour. As for Agesilaus, although he had the powerful support of Lysander and enjoyed great prestige in other respects, his claim was seriously damaged by Diopeithes. This man was famous for his skill in interpreting oracles, and he quoted the following prophecy which referred to Agesilaus’s lameness:
Though you are sound of limb, proud Sparta, look to your ruler, Lest from your stock a disabled prince should succeed to the kingdom: For then unlooked-for ordeals and unnumbered trials shall oppress you And the stormy billows of man-killing war shall roll down upon you.
Many people were swayed by this oracle and looked to Leotychides as the true successor, but Lysander declared that Diopeithes’ interpretation of the oracle was quite wrong. He contended that the meaning was not that the god would be displeased if a lame man were to rule over the Spartans, but that the kingdom would be a lame one if bastards and men of low birth were to share the crown with the true descendants of Heracles. Partly through this argument and partly because his personal influence was very strong, he got his way and Agesilaus became king.
23. No sooner had he done so than Lysander set out to rouse him to lead an expedition into Asia, and held out the hope that he would subdue the Persians and make himself the greatest of mankind. He also wrote to his friends in Asia Minor asking them to invite the Spartans to send Agesilaus as commander-in-chief in their war against the barbarians. They complied and sent an embassy to Sparta with this request, which was indeed as great an honour for Agesilaus as that of being made king, and one which he owed no less to Lysander’s efforts. And yet ambitious spirits, who are otherwise well enough fitted to command, often fail to achieve great exploits through sheer jealousy of their equals in reputation, because they turn the very men who might have helped them into their rivals in virtue. On this occasion Agesilaus did indeed include Lysander among the thirty counsellors who accompanied him, intending to treat him with especial favour as his most intimate friend. But when they arrived in Asia Minor the Greeks there scarcely consulted Agesilaus at all, since they knew nothing of him. Lysander, on the other hand, because of their previous close association with him, was constantly beset with people at his door or following him about, for his friends came to pay court to him, and those who were under suspicion came out of fear. And just as in a tragedy it may easily happen that the actor who plays some messenger or servant assumes the leading role and becomes the centre of interest, while the man who actually wears the crown and wields the sceptre is not even listened to when he speaks, so in this case the whole prestige of the command came to be centred upon the counsellor, while the king was left with nothing but the empty name of authority. No doubt these extravagant ambitions should have been discouraged and Lysander compelled to take second place, yet it was unworthy of Agesilaus to cast off and humiliate a friend and a man who had done him great service, merely for the sake of his own prestige.
In the first place, then, the king gave Lysander no opportunities to distinguish himself and did not even appoint him to a command. Secondly, whenever he noticed anybody on whose behalf Lysander was especially exerting himself, he invariably refused the request and sent him away with less than any ordinary petitioner could obtain, and in this way he unobtrusively undermined and weakened Lysander’s influence. Finally, when Lysander failed to achieve any of his objects, he understood that any effort he might make on behalf of his friends merely served to obstruct their interests. So he not only ceased to urge their claims, but begged them not to apply or pay their court in any way to himself, but to address themselves to the king and to the men who were better placed than he was at present to reward those who did them honour. Most of the Greeks, when they heard this, ceased to trouble him with their affairs, but they continued to treat him with great deference, and in fact by waiting upon him in public walks and places of exercise, they caused Agesilaus, who envied Lysander this honour, more annoyance than ever. The result was that while the king gave most of the Spartans commands in the field and governorships of cities, he appointed Lysander to be the carver at his table, and added by way of insult to the Ionians that they could now come and pay their homage to his carver of meats. At this Lysander determined to have an interview with him, at which a brief and truly Laconian exchange took place. Lysander remarked: ‘You understand very well, Agesilaus, how to humiliate your friends.’ The king replied: ‘Certainly, if they want to be greater than I am. But it is only fair that those who advance my power should also share in it.’ ‘It may be, Agesilaus,’ Lysander rejoined, ‘that you have spoken more wisely than I have acted. Still, let me appeal to you, if only because of the foreigners who have their eyes on us, to give me a post under your command, wherever you think I may be of more use to you and cause you less annoyance than at present.’
24. After this he was sent on a special mission to the Hellespont. Here, although his feud with Agesilaus still rankled, he did not neglect his duty. He persuaded Spithridates the Persian, a man of noble birth who was in command of an army, to revolt from Pharnabazus with whom he had fallen out, and brought him to Agesilaus. After this Lysander was not employed in any other capacity in the war, and when his period of service had expired, he sailed back to Sparta in disgrace. He was not merely enraged with Agesilaus, but more resentful than ever of the whole Spartan system of government, and he determined to put into action without delay the plans for bringing about a revolutionary change in the constitution, which he had evidently elaborated some time before.
This was his scheme. The descendants of Heracles, who had originally joined the Dorians and come down into the Peloponnese, continued to flourish in Sparta as a large tribe with glorious traditions; but not every family which belonged to it could qualify for succession to the throne, in fact, the kings were chosen from no more than two houses, which were known as the Eurypontidae and the Agiadae. The others enjoyed no special advantages in public life on account of their noble birth, for the honours which could be earned by merit lay open to all who had the necessary ability to win them. It was one of the latter Heraclid families to which Lysander belonged, and once he had earned a great reputation for his achievements and acquired many friends and a large measure of influence, it angered him that the city, after being raised to such heights of power through his own efforts, should continue to be ruled by men of no better family than himself. His plan, therefore, was to abolish these two houses’ exclusive claim to the throne and throw it open to the whole Heraclid tribe, or according to some accounts not merely to them, but to the Spartans in general. In this way the high prerogatives of the crown would not be confined only to the descendants of Heracles, but to those who, like him, had been singled out for their prowess, since it was that fact which had raised him to divine honours. Lysander hoped that if the throne were to be disposed of on this principle, no Spartan would be chosen before himself.
25. First of all, then, he prepared to try to win over his countrymen by his own powers of persuasion, and he studied carefully a speech written on the subject by Cleon of Halicarnassus. He soon saw, however, that any scheme of reform so far-reaching and so unexpected as this called for more daring measures to carry it through. And so, just as in a tragedy, where human resource is not enough, he brought supernatural machinery to bear upon his fellow-countrymen, by collecting and arranging various oracular prophecies and responses of Apollo. He felt that Cleon’s skilful rhetoric would be of little use, unless he could first alarm and overwhelm the Spartans’ minds with religious awe and superstitious terror before trying to influence them with his arguments.
According to Ephorus, then, he tried first to bribe the Pythian priestess at Delphi; after which he made an unsuccessful attempt through Pherecles to win over the priestesses of Dodona, and then he visited the temple of Ammon, met the priests of the oracle there and offered them a large sum of money. They refused his proposal indignantly and sent messengers to Sparta to denounce him. Lysander was acquitted of these charges, whereupon, so Ephorus tells us, the Libyans as they were leaving, remarked, ‘Well, at least we shall use our judgement better than you, men of Sparta, when you come to live among us in Libya,’ for they knew that there was an ancient oracle which had commanded the Spartans to settle in Libya. The whole design and mechanism of Lysander’s plot, I should explain, was far from being a trivial affair, nor was it set in motion without a great deal of preparation; it was founded upon a number of important assumptions, like a mathematical proposition, and it progressed to its conclusion through a series of steps, which were intricate and difficult to ensure, and in describing it I propose to follow the account of one1 who was both a historian and a philosopher.
26. There was a woman in Pontus who claimed to be pregnant by Apollo. Most people disbelieved her, as was natural, but her story was also quite widely accepted, so that when she gave birth to a male child, many persons of consequence took an interest in the care and upbringing of the boy, who, for some reason or other, was given the name of Silenus. Lysander took these facts as a foundation and wove the rest of the story out of his own imagination. He made use of a number of reputable people, who lent substance to the tale of the boy’s birth without exciting any suspicion. They also brought back another report from Delphi and carefully spread it abroad in Sparta, to the effect that certain oracles of great antiquity had been inscribed on secret tablets and were guarded by the Delphic priests there. These were not to be touched, nor was it lawful even to look at them, until at the appointed time someone born of Apollo should appear, give the custodians authoritative proof of his birth, and take away the tab lets containing the oracles. With the way thus prepared, Silenus was then to present himself as Apollo’s son and demand to be shown the oracles, while those of the priests who were in the plot were to question him about his birth and check his answers minutely, and finally they would profess themselves convinced that he was the son of Apollo and show him the writings. Thereupon Silenus, in the presence of many witnesses, was to read out the prophecies aloud and in particular the one relating to the Spartan succession, for the sake of which the whole scheme had been contrived, and which declared that Sparta’s interests would best be served if her kings were chosen from among the most distinguished of the citizens.
At length the time came when Silenus had grown to be a youth and was almost ready to play his part. But then Lysander’s drama was wrecked by the cowardice of one of his actors or accomplices, whose courage failed and who backed out when the moment for action arrived. However, none of all this came to light until after Lysander was dead.
27. He met his death before Agesilaus returned from Asia, after he himself had plunged, or rather plunged much of Greece, into a war with Thebes.1 There are various accounts of this, some putting the blame on Lysander, others on the Thebans and others on both together. The charge made against the Thebans is that when Agesilaus was offering sacrifice at Aulis,2 following the example of Agamemnon before he set out for Asia, the Thebans intervened and scattered the sacrifice; also that Androcleides and Amphitheus of Thebes had received bribes from the Persians to stir up a war in Greece against Sparta and that the Thebans thereupon attacked Phocis and ravaged its territory. The other side of the story is that Lysander was provoked in the first place because Thebes was the only state to demand a tenth part of the spoils captured from the Athenians at Decelea, while the rest of the allies made no claim, and secondly because the Thebans had protested against Lysander’s action in taking sums of money from Athens and sending them to Sparta. But what enraged him most was the fact that the Thebans were the first to give the Athenians the opportunity to free themselves from the Thirty Tyrants he had set up. The Spartans, on the other hand, had given their support to the Thirty’s reign of terror by decreeing that all Athenian fugitives should be sent back to Attica in whatever country they were found, and that any state which hindered their return should be declared an enemy of Sparta. In reply to this the Thebans passed counter-measures which deserve to be compared to the great acts of Heracles and Dionysus, the benefactors of mankind. These decrees laid it down that every house and city in Boeotia should be open to Athenians who needed shelter; that whoever refused to help an Athenian refugee against anyone attempting to carry him off by force should be fined a talent, and that if any armed men should march through Boeotia against the Thirty Tyrants at Athens, no Theban should either see or hear about it. They did not stop at voting such truly Hellenic and humane decrees, but they acted up to the spirit of them. Thus, when Thrasybulus and his supporters seized the fortress of Phyle, they set out from Thebes and the Thebans provided them not only with arms and money and a suitable base for operations, but also kept their movements secret. These were the charges which Lysander brought against the Thebans.
28. He had now developed a thoroughly harsh disposition, because of the melancholy which had grown upon him with advancing years, and so he goaded the ephors into declaring war, assumed command himself, and set off for the campaign. Afterwards the ephors also sent out king Pausanias with an army. The plan was that Pausanias should march by a roundabout route and enter Boeotia by way of Mount Cithaeron, while Lysander with a large force should advance through Phocis to meet him. He seized the city of Orchomenus, which came over to him of its own accord, and attacked and plundered Lebadeia. Then he sent a dispatch to Pausanias, telling him to march from Plataea and join forces with him at Haliartus, and promising that he himself would be before the walls of Haliartus at daybreak. The messenger carrying this letter fell into the hands of some scouts and it was brought to Thebes. The Thebans accordingly entrusted the defence of their capital to a force of Athenians who had come to help them. They themselves started out early in the evening and succeeded in reaching Haliartus a little before Lysander and throwing a part of their force into the city. Lysander decided at first to post his army on a neighbouring hill and wait for Pausanias. However, as the day advanced, he could not remain inactive any longer, but got his men under arms, exhorted the allied troops and led them along the road in column towards the city wall. Meanwhile the rest of the Theban force, which had remained outside, advanced to attack the Spartan rear-guard near the spring called Cissusa, leaving the city on their left hand. This is the place where the infant Dionysus, according to the legend, was washed by his nurses after his birth; at any rate the water has something of the colour and sparkle of wine and is clean and very sweet to drink. The Cretan storax plant grows thickly in this neighbourhood and the people of Haliartus accept this as a proof that Rhadamanthus once lived there, and they show his tomb which they call Alea. Close by there is also a tomb of Alcmene, for the story goes that she was buried there, having married Rhadamanthus after the death of her first husband, Amphitryon.
The Thebans inside the city, who were drawn up in battle order with the Haliartians, made no move for some time, but as soon as they saw Lysander coming up to the wall at the head of the leading troops, they suddenly flung open the gates and charged them. They killed Lysander and his soothsayer and a few of his companions, but the greater part of the advance guard quickly fell back on the main body. The Thebans did not pause for a moment but pressed them hard, and finally the whole Spartan force took to flight and escaped into the hills, losing a thousand of their number. Three hundred of the Thebans were also killed in their advance, because they pursued the enemy over this rough and dangerous ground. These were men who had been accused of supporting the Spartans and because of their eagerness to clear themselves of this charge in the eyes of their fellow citizens, they did not spare themselves in the pursuit and sacrificed their lives.
29. Pausanias learned of the disaster while he was on the march from Plataea to Thespiae. He at once put his army into battle order and proceeded to Haliartus, while Thrasybulus also moved up from Thebes at the head of his Athenians. Pausanias’s intention was then to ask permission to take up the dead under a truce, but the very suggestion caused an uproar among the older Spartans. They thought this intolerable and came to the king to protest that they must on no account resort to a truce to recover Lysander’s body. Sheer force of arms was the only way to get it back, and if they won they could bury it as victors: if not, it would be a glorious thing to lie in the same place as their general. This was the attitude of the older men, but Pausanias saw clearly that not only would it be a difficult task to defeat the Thebans, who by this time were triumphant at their victory, but also that Lysander’s body lay near the walls, which made it difficult to recover without a truce, even if the Spartans won the battle. He therefore sent out a herald, concluded a truce, and withdrew his forces. As soon as they had carried Lysander’s body across the Boeotian frontier, they buried it in the friendly territory of their ally Panope, and here his monument now stands, beside the road which leads from Delphi to Chaeronea.
Here the army encamped, and the story goes that one of the Phocians was describing the battle to another who had not been present, and mentioned that the Thebans attacked them just after Lysander had crossed the river Hoplites. Then a Spartan, who was a friend of Lysander and was puzzled by this word, asked what was meant by Hoplites, as he did not know the name. ‘It was just where the enemy cut down our leading ranks,’ the Phocian answered; ‘they call the stream which flows past the city the Hoplites.’ When the Spartan heard this, he burst into tears and exclaimed that no man could escape his destiny, for Lysander had apparently been given an oracle which ran as follows:
I warn you, beware above all the sound of the rushing Hoplites,
And of an earth-born dragon, which cunningly strikes from behind you.
However, some people maintain that the Hoplites does not flow in front of Haliartus, but that it is the name of a winter torrent near Coronea, which runs into the Philarus and then flows past that city. In earlier times it was called the Hoplias, but is now the Isomantus. The man who killed Lysander was a citizen of Haliartus named Neochorus, who had a dragon as an emblem on his shield, and this, it was supposed, was the meaning of the oracle. It is said, too, that at the time of the Peloponnesian war, the Thebans were given an oracle from the Apollonian shrine of Ismenus, which foretold not only the battle of Delium,1 but also this battle of Haliartus twenty-nine years later. The text was as follows: When you go hunting the wolf with the spear, keep your eye on the frontier
And the hill Orchalides, which the foxes never abandon.
By ‘the frontier’ the oracle meant the country near Delium, where Boeotia adjoins Attica, while the hill of Orchalides, which is now called Alopecus, or ‘hill of foxes’, is situated in the territory of Haliartus on the side nearest Mount Helicon.
30. The death of Lysander in these circumstances caused such an outcry that the Spartans put their king on trial for his life, but Pausanias did not dare to await the issue and fled to Tegea, where he spent the rest of his life as a suppliant in the shrine of Athena. One reason for this was that Lysander’s poverty, which came to light after his death, served to bring his best qualities into prominence. Although he had held immense wealth and power in his hands, and although his favour had been coveted by the Greek cities and even by the king of Persia, yet he had not sought to improve his family’s fortunes in the smallest degree, so far as money was concerned. This is what Theopompus tells us, and he is generally more reliable in his praise than in his censure, since it gives him more pleasure to find fault with a man than to speak well of him.
However, some time later, according to Ephorus, a dispute arose at Sparta among the allies, which made it necessary to refer to the records which Lysander had kept by him, and Agesilaus went to his house for this purpose. There he found the scroll containing the speech on the constitution, arguing that the monarchy should be taken out of the hands of the Eurypontid and Agiad families and thrown open to all Spartans alike, and that the choice should be made from the best citizens. Agesilaus was anxious to make this speech public and bring it home to every Spartan just what kind of a citizen Lysander had really been. However, Lacratidas, a level-headed man, who was at that time the senior ephor in office, restrained him and argued that the best course was not to disturb Lysander in his grave, but rather to make sure that such a persuasive and pernicious composition should be buried with him.
At any rate the Spartans paid him many honours at his death. In particular they fined the men who had been betrothed to his daughters and who, as soon as Lysander had been found after his death to be a poor man, refused to marry them. The reason given for the fine was that they had courted the marriage so long as they thought Lysander was rich, but deserted him as soon as his poverty proved him to have been just and honourable. It appears that there were penalties in Sparta not only for failure to marry, or for a late marriage, but also for a bad marriage, and they made a point of inflicting the latter on men who sought a rich wife instead of a good one, who belonged to their own social level. This, then, is what we have found to tell about Lysander.