Agesilaus

And when the enemy sent to him and asked permission to take up their dead, he made a truce with them, and having thus assured to himself the victory, proceeded to Delphi,[*](Leaving the army in command of Gylis the polemarch (Xenophon, Hell. iv. 3, 21).) where the Pythian games were in progress. There he celebrated the customary procession in honour of the god, and offered up the tenth of the spoils which he had brought from Asia, amounting to a hundred talents.

Then he went back home, where his life and conduct brought him at once the affection and admiration of his fellow-citizens. For, unlike most of their generals, he came back from foreign parts unchanged and unaffected by alien customs; he showed no dislike towards home fashions, nor was he restive under them, but honoured and loved what he found there just as much as those did who had never crossed the Eurotas; he made no change in his table, or his baths, or the attendance on his wife,

or the decoration of his armour, or the furniture of his house, nay, he actually let its doors remain although they were very old,—one might say they were the very doors which Aristodemus[*](The great-great-grandson of Heracles; cf. Xenophon, Agesilaüs, viii. 7. ) had set up. His daughter’s kannathron, as Xenophon tells us, was no more elaborate than that of any other maid (kannathra is the name they give to the wooden figures of griffins or goat-stags in which their young girls are carried at the sacred processions).[*](These figures of animals were on wheels, and served as carriages (cf. Athenaeus, p. 139 f.).)

Xenophon, it is true, has not recorded the name of the daughter of Agesilaüs, and Dicacarchus expressed great indignation that neither her name nor that of the mother of Epaminondas was known to us; but we have found in the Lacedaemonian records that the wife of Agesilaüs was named Cleora, and his daughters Eupolia and Proauga. And one can see his spear also, which is still preserved at Sparta, and which is not at all different from that of other men.

However, on seeing that some of the citizens esteemed themselves highly and were greatly lifted up because they bred racing horses, he persuaded his sister Cynisca to enter a chariot in the contests at Olympia, wishing to show the Greeks that the victory there was not a mark of any great excellence, but simply of wealth and lavish outlay.