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:

"When as captain of the Hellenes he had destroyed the Persian host, Pausanias dedicated this memorial to Phoebus.[*](The distich was composed by Simonides.)” Now the Lacedaemonians had immediately chiselled off these verses and inscribed on the tripod by name all the cities which had had a part in overthrowing the Barbarians and had together set up this offering. The act of Pausanias, however, was felt at the time to have been a transgression, and now that he had got into this further trouble, it stood out more clearly than ever as having been but a prelude to his present designs.

They were informed also that he was intriguing with the Helots; and it was even so, for he was promising them freedom and citizenship if they would join him in a revolt and help him accomplish his whole plan.

But not even then, nor relying on certain Helots who had turned informers, did they think it best to take harsh measures against him; they adhered to their usual method in dealing with men of their own class—not to be hasty, in the case of a Spartan, in adopting an irrevocable decision unless they had indisputable proofs. But at last, as it is said, the man who was to take to Artabazus Pausanias' last letter to the King, a man of Argilus who had once been a favourite of his and had hitherto been most loyal to him, turned informer. For he took fright when he called to mind that no previous messenger had ever come back again; and so, having made a counterfeit seal, in order that his act might not be discovered, in case he should be wrong in his suspicion or in case Pausanias should ask to make some alteration in the letter, he opened the letter and in fact found written therein, as he suspected he should find something of the sort to have been directed, an order for his own death.