Pausanias' description of Greece, Volume I.Pausanias, active approximately 150-175
History
Pausanias' description of Greece, Volume I.
Pausanias, active approximately 150-175
Greece -- Antiquities; Greece -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800
And near the altar of Athene Chalciœcus are erected two figures of
Pausanias the General at Platæa. His fate I shall not relate to people
who know it, for what I have written before is quite sufficient. I
shall merely therefore state what I heard from a man of Byzantium, that
Pausanias was detected plotting, and was the only one of those that
took sanctuary with Athene Chalciœcus that did not get indemnity, and
that for no other reason than that he could not clear himself of the
guilt of murder. For when he was at the Hellespont in command of the
allied fleet, he got enamoured of a Byzantian maiden called Cleonice,
and at nightfall a detachment of his men brought her to him. And
Pausanias had fallen asleep, and when this maiden came into the room
she knocked down inadvertently the light that was burning, and the
noise woke him. And Pausanias, whose conscience smote him for having
betrayed Greece, and who was therefore always in a state of nervous
alarm and panic, was beside himself and stabbed the maiden with a
scimetar. This guilt Pausanias could not clear himself from, though
he endeavoured in every way to propitiate Zeus the Acquitter, and
even went to Phigalia in Arcadia to the necromancers, but he paid to
Cleonice and the deity the fit penalty. And the Lacedæmonians at the
bidding of the oracle made brazen statues for the god Epidotes, and
otherwise honoured him, because he it was who in the case of Pausanias
turned aside the wrath of Zeus the god of Suppliants.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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