Page:History of Greece Vol IX.djvu/267

AGESILAUS PREFERRED AS KING. 243 adviser of high reputation, advocated the cause of Leotychides. He produced an ancient oracle, telling Sparta, that " with all her pride she must not suffer a lame reign to impair her stable footing ; J for if she did so, unexampled suffering and ruinous wars would long beset her." This prophecy had already been once invoked, about eighty years earlier, 2 but with a very different interpretation. To Grecian leaders, like Themistokles or Lysander, it was an accomplishment of no small value to be able to elude inconvenient texts or intractable religious feelings, by expository ingenuity. And Lysander here raised his voice (as Themistokles had done on the momentous occasion before the battle of Salamis), 3 to com- bat the professional expositors ; contending that by " a lame reign," the god meant, not a bodily defect in the king, which might not even be congenital, but might arise from some positive hurt, 4 but the reign of any king who was not a genuine descendant of Herakles. The influence of Lysander,^ combined doubtless with a prepon- derance of sentiment already tending towards Agesilaus, caused this effort of interpretative subtlety to be welcomed as convincing, and led to the nomination of the lame candidate as king. There was, however, a considerable minority, to whom this decision ap- peared a sin against the gods and a mockery of the oracle And though the murmurs of such dissentients were kept down by the ability and success of Agesilaus during the first years of his reign ; yet when, in his ten last years, calamity and humiliation were poured thickly upon this proud city, the public sentiment came decidedly round to their view. Many a pious Spartan then 1 Plutarch, Lys&nd. c. 22 ; Plutarch, Agesil. c. 3 ; Pausanias, iii, 8, 5. 2 Diodor. xi, 50. 3 Herodot. vii, 143. 4 Xen. Hellen. iii, 3, 3. u; OVK OIOITO, rbv &sbv TOVTO Kehevetv <j>vliu.aa- &ai, firi irpooKTai era? rtf ^w/ieiffy, <i/U., firj OVK uv row Congenital lameness would be regarded as a mark of divine displeasure, and therefore a disqualification from the throne, as in the case of Battus of Kyrene above noticed. But the words x u ^ paoiheia were general enough to cover both the cases, superinduced as well as congenital lame- ness. It is upon this that Lysander founds his inference that the god did not mean to allude to bodily lameness at all. 6 Pausanias, iii, 8, 5; Plutarch, Agesil. c. 3; Plutarch, Lysand. c. 22, Justin, ri, 2.