Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/386

864 HISTORY OF GREECE. a soldier, and the abilities of a commander, combined with strenu- ous personal will and decision, in such measure as to ensure for Agesilaus constant ascendency'over the minds of others far beyond what was naturally incident to his station ; and that, too, in spite of conspicuous bodily deformity, amidst a nation eminently sensitive on that point. Of the merits which Xenophon ascribes to him, some are the fair results of a Spartan education ; his courage, simplicity of life, and indifference to indulgences, his cheerful endurance of hardship under every form. But his fidelity to en- gagements, his uniform superiority to pecuniary corruption, and those winning and hearty manners which attached to him all around were virtues not Spartan but personal to himself. "We find in him, however, more analogy to Lysander a man equally above reproach on the score of pecuniary gain than to Brasidas or Kal- likratidas. Agesilaus succeeded to the throne, with a disputed title, under the auspices and through the intrigues of Lysander ; whose influence, at that time predominant both at Sparta and in Greece, had planted everywhere dekarchies and hannosts as instruments of ascendency for imperial Sparta and under the name of Sparta, for himself. Agesilaus, too high-spirited to comport himself as sec- ond to any one, speedily broke through so much of the system as had been constructed to promote the personal dominion of Lysan- der ; yet without following out the same selfish aspirations, or seek- ing to build up the like individual dictatorship, on his own account. His ambition was indeed unbounded, but it was for Sparta in the first place, and for himself only in the second. The misfortune was, that in his measures for upholding and administering the im- perial authority of Sparta, he still continued that mixture of do- mestic and foreign coercion (represented by the dekarchy and the harmost) which had been introduced by Lysander ; a sad contrast with the dignified equality, and emphatic repudiation of partisan interference, proclaimed by Brasidas, as the watchword of Sparta, at Akanthus and Torone and with the still nobler Pan-hellenic aims of Kallikratidas. The most glorious portion of the life of Agesilaus was that spent in his three Asiatic campaigns, when acting under the miso-Per- sian impulse for which his panegyrist gives him so much credit 1 1 Xenoph. Encom. Ages, vii, 7. E< 6' av KaTibv nal (tiaoirepauv eivac, etc