[439] Xen. Hellen. iii, 3, 2. This statement contradicts the talk imputed to Timæa by Duris (Plutarch, Agesil. c. 3; Plutarch, Alkibiad. c. 23). There was, however, one circumstance which stood much in the way of Agesilaus,—his personal deformity. A lame king of Sparta had never yet been known. And if we turn back more than a century to the occurrence of a similar deformity in one of the Battiad princes at Kyrênê,[440] we see the Kyrenians taking it so deeply to heart, that they sent to ask advice from Delphi, and invited over the Mantineian reformer Demônax. Over and above this sentiment of repugnance, too, the gods had specially forewarned Sparta to beware of “a lame reign.” Deiopeithes, a prophet and religious 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;[441] 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,[442] 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),[443] to combat 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,[444]—but the reign of any king who was not a genuine descendant of Hêraklês. [440] Herodot. iv, 161. Διεδέξατο δὲ τὴν βασιληΐην τοῦ Ἀρκεσίλεω ὁ παῖς Βάττος, χωλός τε ἐὼν καὶ οὐκ ἀρτίπους. Οἱ δὲ Κυρηναῖοι ~πρὸς τὴν καταλαβοῦσαν συμφορὴν~ ἔπεμπον ἐς Δελφοὺς, ἐπειρησομένους ὅντινα τρόπον καταστησάμενοι κάλλιστα ἂν οἰκέοιεν. [441] Plutarch, Lysand. c. 22; Plutarch, Agesil. c. 3; Pausanias, iii, 8, 5. [442] Diodor. xi, 50. [443] Herodot. vii, 143. [444] Xen. Hellen. iii, 3, 3. ὡς οὐκ οἴοιτο τὸν θεὸν τοῦτο κελεύειν φυλάξασθαι, ~μὴ προσπταίσας τις χωλεύσῃ~, ἀλλὰ μᾶλλον, μὴ οὐκ ὢν τοῦ γένους βασιλεύσῃ. 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 Kyrênê above noticed. But the words χωλὴ βασίλεια were general enough to cover both the cases,—superinduced as well as congenital lameness. It is upon this that Lysander founds his inference—that the god did not mean to allude to bodily lameness at all.