History of the Peloponnesian War

There was, indeed, no clear proof in the possession of the Spartans, either his personal enemies or the state at large, on the strength of which they could with entire confidence proceed to punish a man who was of the royal family and held high office for the time being—for as cousin of Pleistarchus son of Leonidas, who was king and still a minor, he was acting as regent for him;

but he, by his disregard of propriety, and particularly by his aping of the Barbarians, gave them much ground for suspecting that he did not want to remain an equal in the present order of things at Sparta. And they went back into his past and scrutinized all his other acts, to see if perchance he had in his mode of life departed from established customs, and they recalled especially that he had once presumed, on his own authority, to have inscribed on the tripod at Delphi,[*](A golden tripod set upon a three-headed bronze serpent (9.81). The gold tripod was carrid off by the Phocians in the Sacred War (Paus. 10.13.5, but the bronze pillar, eighteen feet high, of three intertwined snakes, was removed by the Emperor Constantine to Constantinople and placed in the hippodrome, the modern Atmeidan, where it still is. It contains the names of thirty-one Greek states which took part in the Persian War.) which the Hellenes dedicated as first fruits of the spoils they had won fiom the Persians, the following elegiac couplet: