Description of Greece

​Pleistarchus, the son of Leonidas, died recently after having succeeded to the kingdom, and Pleistoanax, the son of Pausanias who led at Plataea, held the rule; and Pausanias was the son of Pleistoanax. This Pausanias arrived in Attica, in word an enemy to Thrasybulus and the Athenians, but intending to establish the tyranny on a firm basis for those to whom the rule had been committed by Lysander. And while he conquered in battle those of the Athenians who held the Peiraeus, immediately after the battle it pleased him to lead the army back home, and not, by increasing the tyranny of impious men, to bring upon Sparta the most shameful of reproaches.

​When he returned from Athens after having fought an indecisive battle, his enemies brought him to trial. For a king of the Lacedaemonians, a court was constituted by those called elders, being twenty-eight in number, and the office of the ephors, and with them also the king of the other house. Now fourteen of the elders, and in addition to them Agis, the king of the other house, condemned Pausanias of wrongdoing;

​but the rest of the court acquitted him. Not long after this, while the Lacedaemonians were gathering an army against Thebes—the cause of which will be added to the account concerning Agesilaus—Lysander, having arrived in Phocis and taken with him the Phocians with all their forces, without delaying any longer entered Boeotia and made assaults on the wall of the Haliartians, who were unwilling to revolt from the Thebans. But some both of the Thebans and of the Athenians had already entered the city secretly, and when these marched out and drew up in front of the wall, Lysander fell there, along with others of the Lacedaemonians.

​But Pausanias was too late for the battle, as he was gathering a force from the Tegeans and the rest of Arcadia; and when he arrived in Boeotia, he learned of the defeat of those with Lysander and of the death of Lysander himself, yet he nevertheless led his army against Thebes and intended to begin battle. There the Thebans drew up opposite him, and Thrasybulus was reported to be not far off, leading the Athenians; he was waiting for the Lacedaemonians to begin battle, and if they began, he was about to fall upon them from the rear.

​Pausanias therefore feared to be caught between a double army of enemy forces, and so he made a treaty with the Thebans and recovered those who had fallen under the wall of the Haliartians. This was not to the mind of the Lacedaemonians, but I praise his decision on these grounds: since Pausanias well knew that defeats always happen to the Lacedaemonians when they are caught in the midst of enemies, and taking warning from the disaster at Thermopylae and that on the island of Sphacteria, he feared lest he himself should become the cause of a third misfortune for them.

​But at that time, as the citizens were laying blame on him for his slowness toward Boeotia, he did not endure to enter the court, and the Tegeans received him as a suppliant of Athena Alea. Now this temple was of old revered by all the Peloponnesians, and provided the greatest security to those who fled to it as suppliants; and this was demonstrated by the Lacedaemonians in the case of Pausanias, and still earlier than him Leotychides, and by the Argives in the case of Chryseis, who, when they were seated there as suppliants, did not wish even at all to demand their surrender.

​After Pausanias had fled, his children Agesipolis and Cleombrotus were still altogether young, and Aristodemus, being their nearest of kin, acted as their guardian; and the success of the Lacedaemonians at Corinth happened while Aristodemus was leading them.

​When Agesipolis had grown up and held the kingdom, he first made war upon the Argives of the Peloponnesians. When he led the army from Tegea into Argolis, the Argives sent a herald to make a treaty with Agesipolis, pleading certain ancestral treaties established from of old among the Dorians toward one another. But he did not make a treaty with the herald, and advancing with his army he devastated the land; and indeed the god shook the earth with an earthquake, but even so Agesipolis was not about to lead his force away, although to the Lacedaemonians most of all the Greeks—and likewise also to the Athenians—signs from heaven caused fear.

​And while he was already encamping under the wall of the Argives, the god did not cease from shaking the earth, and some of the soldiers perished by being struck by lightning, while the claps of thunder drove others out of their minds. Thus indeed he withdrew from Argolis against his will, and made a campaign next against the Olynthians. While he was victorious in the war and had captured most of the other cities of the Chalcidians, and was hoping to capture Olynthus itself, a sudden disease overtook him, and death resulting from it.