[Footnote 174: This passage has been admirably paraphrased by Grote,
'History of Greece,' Part II. ch. lxxiii.:--
"Combined with that ability and energy in which he was never
deficient, this conciliatory policy ensured him more real power than
had ever fallen to the lot of any king of Sparta--power, not merely
over the military operations abroad, which usually fell to the kings,
but also over the policy of the state at home. On the increase and
maintenance of that real power, his chief thoughts were concentrated;
new dispositions generated by kingship, which had never shown
themselves in him before. Despising, like Lysander, both money,
luxury, and all the outward show of power, he exhibited, as a king, an
ultra-Spartan simplicity, carried almost to affectation in diet,
clothing, and general habits. But like Lysander, also, he delighted in
the exercise of dominion through the medium of knots or factions of
devoted partizans, whom he rarely scrupled to uphold in all their
career of injustice and oppression. Though an amiable man, with no
disposition to tyranny and still less to plunder, for his own
benefit--Agesilaus thus made himself the willing instrument of both,
for the benefit of his various coadjutors and friends, whose power and
consequence he identified with his own." See also infra, ch. xiii. et
al.]
[Footnote 175: We see here the beginning of that tendency of the
Neoplatonic school to find a sanction for all their theories in some
perversion of the plain meaning of Homer's words.]
[Footnote 176: Compare Life of Lysander, ch. xxiii.]
[Footnote 177: In Sintenis's text of Plutarch this prince's name is
spelt as above. Xenophon, however, in his Life of Agesilaus, spells it
Otys; and this reading has been adopted by Grote. It must be
remembered that Xenophon was probably an eye-witness of the
proceedings which he records, and that Plutarch lived several
centuries later.]
[Footnote 178: The Greek word here translated "guest" is explained by
Liddell and Scott, s.v., to mean "any person in a foreign city with
whom one has a treaty of hospitality for self and heirs, confirmed by
mutual presents and an appeal to [Greek: Zeus xenios] Ζεὺς ξένιος."]
[Footnote 179: He sought to compose the dissensions and misrule which
had arisen out of the Lysandrian Dekarchies, or governments of ten, in
the Greco-Asiatic cities, avoiding as much as possible the infliction
of death or exile.--Grote, part ii. ch. lxxiii.]
[Footnote 180: Nothing is known of this tribe. There is a city,
Tralles, in Asia Minor, which Clough conjectures may possibly have
been connected with them. Liddell and Scott speak of "Trallians" as
"Thracian barbarians employed in Asia as mercenaries, torturers, and
executioners."]
[Footnote 181: The people living about Pharsalia.]
[Footnote 182: Mora, a Spartan regiment of infantry. The number of men
in each varied from 400 to 900, according as the men above 45, 50,
&c., years were called out.]
[Footnote 183: The most aristocratic city in Bœotia, now allied with
the Spartans. During the Theban supremacy it was utterly destroyed.]
[Footnote 184: That is, the aristocratic or pro-Laconian party, who
had been driven out by the other side.]
[Footnote 185: To Medise was a phrase originally used during the great
Persian invasion of Greece under Xerxes, B.C. 480, when those Greek
cities who sided with the Persians, were said to Medise, that is, to
take the side of the Medes. See Life of Artaxerxes, vol. iv. ch. 22,
and Grote's 'History of Greece,' part ii. ch. lxxvi.]
[Footnote 186: See _ante_, ch. xiii., _note_.]
[Footnote 187: This name is spelt Leontiades by most writers.]
[Footnote 188: I extract the following note from Grote's 'History of
Greece.' "Plutarch gives this interchange of brief questions, between
Agesilaus and Epameinondas, which is in substance the same as that
given by Pausanias, and has every appearance of being true. But he
introduces it in a very bold and abrupt way, such as cannot be
conformable to the reality. To raise a question about the right of
Sparta to govern Laconia was a most daring novelty. A courageous and
patriotic Theban might venture upon it as a retort against those
Spartans who questioned the right of Thebes to her presidency of
Bœotia; but he would never do so without assigning his reasons to
justify an assertion so startling to a large portion of his hearers.
The reasons which I here ascribe to Epameinondas are such as we know
to have formed the Theban creed, in reference to the Bœotian cities;
such as were actually urged by the Theban orator in 427 B.C., when the
fate of the Platæan captives was under discussion. After Epameinondas
had once laid out the reasons in support of his assertion, he might
then, if the same brief question were angrily put to him a second
time, meet it with another equally brief counter-question or retort.
It is this final interchange of thrusts which Plutarch has given,
omitting the arguments previously stated by Epameinondas, and
necessary to warrant the seeming paradox which he advances. We must
recollect that Epameinondas does not contend that Thebes was entitled
to _as much power_ in Bœotia as Sparta in Laconia. He only contends
that Bœotia, under the presidency of Thebes, was as much an integral
political aggregate, as Laconia under Sparta--in reference to the
Grecian world."--Grote's 'History of Greece,' part ii. ch. lxvii.]