Greece before the battle of Salamis: he offered to furnish an immense auxiliary force, on condition that the supreme command should be allotted to him. “Loudly indeed would the Pelopid Agamemnôn cry out (exclaimed Syagrus in rejecting this application), if he were to learn that the Spartans had been deprived of the headship by Gelôn and the Syracusans.”[396] Nearly a century before this event, in obedience to the injunctions of the Delphian oracle, the Spartans had brought back from Tegea to Sparta the bones of “the Lacônian Orestês,” as Pindar denominates him:[397] the recovery of these bones was announced to them as the means of reversing a course of ill-fortune, and of procuring victory in their war against Tegea.[398] The value which they set upon this acquisition, and the decisive results ascribed to it, exhibit a precise analogy with the recovery of the bones of Theseus from Skyros by the Athenian Cimôn shortly after the Persian invasion.[399] The remains sought were those of a hero properly belonging to their own soil, but who had died in a foreign land, and of whose protection and assistance they were for that reason deprived. And the superhuman magnitude of the bones, which were contained in a coffin seven cubits long, is well suited to the legendary grandeur of the son of Agamemnôn. [394] See the preface of Dissen to the tenth Nem. of Pindar. [395] Clemens Alexandr. Admonit. ad Gent. p. 24. Ἀγαμέμνονα γοῦν τινα Δία ἐν Σπάρτῃ τιμᾶσθαι Στάφυλος ἱστορεῖ. See also Œnomaus ap. Euseb. Præparat. Evangel. v. 28. [396] Herodot. vii. 159. Ἦ κε μέγ᾽ οἰμώξειεν ὁ Πελοπίδης Ἀγαμέμνων, πυθόμενος Σπαρτιήτας ἀπαραιρῆσθαι τὴν ἡγεμονίαν ὑπὸ Γέλωνός τε καὶ τῶν Συρακουσίων: compare Homer, Iliad, vii. 125. See what appears to be an imitation of the same passage in Josephus, De Bello Judaico, iii. 8, 4. Ἦ μεγάλα γ᾽ ἂν στενάξειαν οἱ πάτριοι νόμοι, etc. [397] Pindar. Pyth. xi. 16. [398] Herodot. i 68. [399] Plutarch. Thêseus, c. 36, Cimôn, c. 8; Pausan. iii. 3, 6. CHAPTER VIII. LACONIAN AND MESSENIAN GENEALOGIES.