Note 174 — LIFE OF AGESILAUS.

This passage has been admirably paraphrased by Grote, 'History of Greece,' Part II. ch. lxxiii.:—

"Combined with that ability and energy in which he was never deficient, this conciliatory policy ensured him more real power than had ever fallen to the lot of any king of Sparta—power, not merely over the military operations abroad, which usually fell to the kings, but also over the policy of the state at home. On the increase and maintenance of that real power, his chief thoughts were concentrated; new dispositions generated by kingship, which had never shown themselves in him before. Despising, like Lysander, both money, luxury, and all the outward show of power, he exhibited, as a king, an ultra-Spartan simplicity, carried almost to affectation in diet, clothing, and general habits. But like Lysander, also, he delighted in the exercise of dominion through the medium of knots or factions of devoted partizans, whom he rarely scrupled to uphold in all their career of injustice and oppression. Though an amiable man, with no disposition to tyranny and still less to plunder, for his own benefit—Agesilaus thus made himself the willing instrument of both, for the benefit of his various coadjutors and friends, whose power and consequence he identified with his own." See also infra, ch. xiii. et al.