Greek Texts & Translations

3.2.26Thereupon he went to Olympia and offered sacrifices ^note to Olympian Zeus, and this time no one undertook to prevent him. After his sacrifices he marched upon the city of Elis, laying the land waste with axe and fire as he went, and vast numbers of cattle and vast numbers of slaves were captured in the country; insomuch that many more of the Arcadians and Achaeans, on hearing the news, came of their own accord to join the expedition and shared in the plunder. In fact this campaign proved to be a harvest, as it were, for Peloponnesus. 3.2.27When Agis reached the city he did some harm to the suburbs and the gymnasia, which were beautiful, but as for the city itself (for it was unwalled) the Lacedaemonians thought that he was unwilling, rather than unable, to capture it. Now while the country was being ravaged and ^note the Lacedaemonian army was in the neighbourhood of Cyllene, the party of Xenias—the man of whom it was said that he measured out with a bushel measure the money he received from his father—wishing to have their city go over to the Lacedaemonians and to receive the credit for this, rushed out of a house, armed with swords, and began a slaughter; and having killed, among others, a man who resembled Thrasydaeus, the leader of the commons, they supposed that they had killed Thrasydaeus himself, so that the commons lost heart entirely and kept quiet, 3.2.28while the men engaged in the slaughter supposed that everything was already accomplished and their sympathizers gathered under arms in the market-place. But it chanced that Thrasydaeus was still asleep at the very place where he had become drunk. And when the commons learned that he was not dead, they gathered round his house on all sides, as a swarm of bees around its leader. 3.2.29And when Thrasydaeus put himself at their head and led the way, a battle took place in which the commons were victorious, and those who had undertaken the slaughter were forced to flee to the Lacedaemonians. As for Agis, when he departed and crossed the Alpheus again, after leaving a garrison in Epitalium near the Alpheus, with Lysippus as governor, and also leaving there the exiles from Elis, he disbanded his army and returned home himself.

3.2.30During the rest of the summer and the ensuing winter the country of the Eleans was plundered by Lysippus and the men with him. But in the course ^note of the following summer Thrasydaeus sent to Lacedaemon and agreed to tear down the walls of Phea and Cyllene, to leave the Triphylian towns of Phrixa ^note and Epitalium independent, likewise the Letrinians, Amphidolians, and Marganians, and besides these the Acrorians and the town of Lasion, which was claimed by the Arcadians. The Eleans, however, claimed the right to hold Epeum, the town between Heraea and Macistus; for they said that they had bought the whole territory for thirty talents from the people to whom the town at that time belonged, and had paid the money. 3.2.31But the Lacedaemonians, deciding that it was no more just to get property from the weaker by a forced purchase than by a forcible seizure, compelled them to leave this town also independent; they did not, however, dispossess them of the presidency of the shrine of Olympian Zeus, even though it did not belong to the Eleans in ancient times, for they thought that the rival claimants ^note were country people and not competent to hold the presidency. When these things had been agreed upon, a peace and an alliance were concluded between the Eleans and the Lacedaemonians. And so the war between the Lacedaemonians and the Eleans ended.