Lysandros, who was the son of a poor descendant of an ancient family, and whose mother was a slave, cherished an ambition to rise above the hereditary kings of Sparta and all the other high-born Lakedaimonians, who scorned him for his poverty and his want of thorough breed. His one idea was to gain his ends by success in war, untouched by pity, and unmoved by any sense of honour, or by any of the nobler feelings of humanity. The fox, he said, can often gain his object where the lion fails. Oaths, he once declared, were made to deceive mankind. He had studied the career of Alkibiades, and tried to learn the secret of his success. Without the genius or generosity of the latter, and a stranger to his higher qualities, he was also without his weaknesses, or, if he had any of them, he carefully concealed them, that he might the better gain the ends to which he devoted all his life, and to which he sacrificed everything worth living for. While the one man renounced despotic power that he might the better serve his country, the other formed designs by which he might gain such power, even at the cost of his country’s ruin. The Fates ordained that at the time when Lysandros came to take up his command, the instrument by which he was endeavouring to work out his plan was coming from far off to meet him. Kyros, the younger son of Dareios, King of Persia, a prince of high ambition, careless as to the means by which he might obtain his objects, and moved by an inveterate hatred of everything Athenian, had been appointed by his father to the supreme military command of Lydia, over the head of Tissaphernes. On the way to take up his command he met Mantitheos, and the other Athenian legates, who were travelling with Pharnabazos to his father’s court to negociate the terms of peace. If they once got there they might, with the help of Pharnabazos, who now inclined towards Alkibiades and an Athenian alliance, persuade the king to alter his policy, and to recall the powers with which Kyros had been invested, and so destroy the hopes and schemes which filled his head. The prince ordered the ambassadors to be given up to him. Pharnabazos protested in vain that they were sacred envoys. Kyros cared nothing for all that, and ordered them to be imprisoned, so that they should neither proceed to Susa nor return to Athens to report the failure of their mission.