Agesilaus

And yet otherwise he had such power and valour and fame that they not only continued to employ him as king and general in matters pertaining to war, but also as physician and arbiter in their civil perplexities. For instance, upon those who had shown cowardice in the battle, whom they themselves call tresantes, or run-aways, they hesitated to inflict the disabilities required by the laws, since the men were numerous and powerful, for fear that they might stir up a revolution.

For such men are not only debarred from every office, but intermarriage with any of them is a disgrace, and any one who meets them may strike them if he pleases. Moreover, they are obliged to go about unkempt and squalid, wearing cloaks that are patched with dyed stuffs, half of their beards shaven, and half left to grow.

It was a serious matter, therefore, to allow many such men in the city, when she lacked not a few soldiers. So they chose Agesilaüs as a law-giver for the occasion. And he, without adding to or subtracting from or changing the laws in any way, came into the assembly of the Lacedaemonians and said that the laws must be allowed to sleep for that day, but from that day on must be in sovereign force. By this means he at once saved the laws for the city and the men from infamy.

Then, wishing to remove the discouragement and dejection which prevailed among the young men, he made an incursion into Arcadia,[*](In 370 B.C. (Xenophon, Hell. vi. 5, 10-21).) and though he studiously avoided joining battle with the enemy, he took a small town of the Mantineans and overran their territory, and thus lightened and gladdened the expectations of his city, which felt that its case was not wholly desperate.

After this,[*](In the same year, after Agesilaüs had returned and disbanded his forces.) Epaminondas entered Laconia with his allies, having no fewer than forty thousand men-at-arms. Many light armed and unarmed troops also followed him for the sake of plunder, so that a horde of seventy thousand, all told, made this incursion into Laconia.

For a period of no less than six hundred years the Dorians had been living in Lacedaemon, and this was the first time in all that period that enemies had been seen in the country; before this, none had ventured there. But now they burst into an unravaged and inviolate land, and burned and plundered as far as the river and the city, and no one came out against them.