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3i8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE 396 came a general of a better sort, the Spartan king Agesilaus, commissioned to wage a more decisive war against Artaxerxes. Xenophon joined his staff, and the two became warm friends. But fortune was capricious. In 395 Athens made an alliance with Artaxerxes ; in 394 she declared war on Sparta, and condemned Xenophon for * Laconism,' an offence like the old ' Medism/ involv- ing banishment and confiscation of goods. If Xenophon had drifted before, he had now no choice. He formally entered the Spartan service, returned to Greece with Agesilaus, and was actually with him, though perhaps as a non-combatant, when he defeated the Thebo-Athenian alliance at Coronea. Xenophon was now barely forty-one, but his active life was over. The Spartans gave him an estate at Skillus, near Elis, and perhaps employed him as their political agent. He spent the next twenty years in retirement, a cultured country gentleman ; writing a good deal, hunting zealously, and training his two brilliant sons, Gryllus and Diodorus — the ' Dioscuri,' as they were called — to be like their father, patterns of the chivalry of the day. The main object of Xenophon's later life was probably to get the sentence of banishment removed, and save these sons from growing up without a country. He was successful at last. When Athens re- joined the Spartan alliaaice the ' Laconist ' ceased to be a traitor, and his sons were admitted into his old regiment ; and when Gryllus fell at Mantinea,all Greece poured poems and epitaphs upon him. At that time Xenophon was no longer in the Spartan service. He had been expelled from Skillus by an Elean rising in 370, and fled to spend the rest of his life in the safe neutrality of Corinth. Of the literary fruits of his retirement, the most im-