430 HISTORY OF GREECE. circumstances gave him a strong motive to bring the war to a close. He had been banished from Sparta, fourteen years before the commencement of the war, and a little before the thirty years' truce, under the charge of having taken bribes from the Athenians on occasion of invading Attica. For more than eighteen years, he lived in banishment, close to the temple of Zeus Lykasus, in Arcadia ; in such constant fear of the Lacedae- monians, that his dwelling-house was half within the consecrated ground. 1 But he never lost the hope of procuring restoration, through the medium of the Pythian priestess at Delphi, whom he and his brother Aristokles kept in their pay. To every sacred legation which went from Sparta to Delphi, she repeated the same imperative injunction : " They must bring back the seed of (Herakles) the demi-god son of Zeus, from foreign land to their own : if they did not, it would be their fate to plough with a silver ploughshare." The command of the god, thus incessantly repeated and backed by the influence of those friends who supported Pleistoanax at home, at length produced an entire change of sentiment at Sparta. In the fourth or fifth year of the Peloponnesian war, the exile was recalled ; and not merelj recalled, but welcomed with unbounded honors, received with tbr same sacrifices and choric shows as those which were said t have been offered to the primitive kings, on the first settlement of Sparta. As in the case of Kleomenes and Demaratus, however, it was not long before the previous intrigue came to be detected, or at least generally suspected and believed ; to the great discredit of Pleistoanax, though he could not be again banished. Every successive public calamity which befell the state, the miscarriage? of Alkidas, the defeat of Eurylochus in Amphilochia, and above pies even in Thucydides, in such phrases as rotavra not naptrf.qaut (i, 22, 143), TotavTtj not OTL kyyvrara TOVTUV, v, 74 ; see Poppo ; note on i, 22. 1 Thucyd. v, 17. fjfiurv r^f oiKiaf Toviepov TOTE rov Atof olKovvra 06/ty ruv Aanedaifwviw. " The reason was, that he might be in sanctuary at an instant's notice, and yet might be able to perform some of the common offices of life with- out profanation, which could not have been the case had the whole dwelling
been within the sacred precinct." (Dr. Arnold's note.)
