Agesilaus

For this was the way in which Agesilaüs always spoke about the trial, in his desire to gratify his son, so that Cleonymus was at once aware of the zealous efforts of Archidamus in his behalf, and the friends of Sphodrias had courage at last to come to his help. It is a fact also that Agesilaüs was excessively fond of his children, and a story is told of his joining in their childish play. Once, when they were very small, he bestrode a stick, and was playing horse with them in the house, and when he was spied doing this by one of his friends, he entreated him not to tell any one, until he himself should be a father of children.

But after Sphodrias was acquitted,[*](Cf. Xenophon, Hell. v. 4, 24-34. ) and the Athenians, on learning of it, were inclined to go to war, Agesilaüs was very harshly criticized. It was thought that, to gratify an absurd and childish desire, he had opposed the course of justice in a trial, and made the city accessory to great crimes against the Greeks.

Besides, when he saw that his colleague Cleombrotus was little inclined to make war upon the Thebans, he waived the exemption by law which he had formerly claimed in the matter of the expedition, and presently led an incursion into Boeotia himself,[*](According to Xenophon (Hell. v. 4, 35 ), he was asked to do so by the Lacedaemonians, who preferred him to Cleombrotus as a leader. This was in 378 B.C.) where he inflicted damage upon the Thebans, and in his turn met with reverses, so that one day when he was wounded, Antalcidas said to him: Indeed, this is a fine tuition-fee which thou art getting from the Thebans, for teaching them how to fight when they did not wish to do it, and did not even know how.

For the Thebans are said to have been really more warlike at this time than ever before, owing to the many expeditions which the Lacedaemonians made against them, by which they were virtually schooled in arms. And Lycurgus of old, in one of his three so-called rhetras, forbade his people to make frequent expeditions against the same foes, in order that those foes might not learn how to make war.[*](Cf. the Lycurgus, xiii. 6. ) Moreover, the allies of the Lacedaemonians were offended at Agesilaüs, because, as they said, it was not upon any public ground of complaint, but by reason of some passionate resentment of his own, that he sought to destroy the Thebans.

Accordingly, they said they had no wish to be dragged hither and thither to destruction every year, they themselves so many, and the Lacedaemonians, with whom they followed, so few. It was at this time, we are told, that Agesilaüs, wishing to refute their argument from numbers, devised the following scheme. He ordered all the allies to sit down by themselves promiscuously, and the Lacedaemonians apart by themselves.

Then his herald called upon the potters to stand up first, and after them the smiths, next, the carpenters in their turn, and the builders, and so on through all the handicrafts. In response, almost all the allies rose up, but not a man of the Lacedaemonians; for they were forbidden to learn or practise a manual art.[*](Cf. the Lycurgus, xxiv. 2. ) Then Agesilaüs said with a laugh: You see, O men, how many more soldiers than you we are sending out.

But in Megara, when he was leading his army back from Thebes,[*](From a second incursion into Boeotia, made in 377 B.C. (Xenophon, Hell. v. 4, 47-55; 58).) as he was going up to the senate-house in the acropolis, he was seized with a cramp and violent pain in his sound leg, which then swelled up, appeared to be congested, and showed signs of excessive inflammation.

As soon as a certain Syracusan physician had opened a vein below the ankle, the pains relaxed, but much blood flowed and could not be checked, so that Agesilaüs was very faint from its loss, and in dire peril of his life. At last, however, the flow of blood was stopped, and Agesilaüs was carried to Sparta, where he remained for a long time in a weak condition and unable to take the field.