The Spartan troops were mostly indigent young men, who elate with their freedom from the bonds of usury, and big with the hopes of a share in the lands at their return, followed Agis with the greatest vigour and alacrity, and behaved so well in their march, that they reminded the admiring Greeks of the excellent discipline and decorum for which the Spartans were formerly so famous under the most renowned of their ancient leaders. But whilst Agis was in the field, affairs at home took a very unhappy turn in his disfavour. The tyrannical behaviour of Agesilaus, who fleeced the people with insupportable exactions, and stuck at no measure, however infamous or criminal, which would bring in money, produced another revolution in favour of Leonidas. For the people, enraged at being tricked out of the promised partition of the lands, which they imputed to Agis and Cleombrotus, and detesting the rapaciousness of Agesilaus, readily joined that party which conspired to restore Leonidas. Agis finding affairs in this desperate situation at his return, gave up all for lost, and took sanctuary in the temple of Minerva, as Cleombrotus had done in the temple of Neptune. Though Cleombrotus was the chief object of Leonidas’s resentment, yet he spared his life at the intercession of his daughter Chelonis, the wife of Cleombrotus; but condemned him to perpetual exile. The generous Chelonis gave a signal instance, upon this occasion, of that heroick virtue, for which the Spartan ladies were once so remarkably eminent. When her father was expelled by the intrigues of Lysander, she followed him into exile, and refused to share his crown with Cleombrotus. In this calamitous reverse of fortune, she was deaf to all entreaties, and rather chose to partake of the miseries of banishment with her husband, than all the pleasures and grandeur of Sparta with her father. Plutarch pays the ladies a fine compliment, upon this occasion, when he says, “that unless Cleombrotus should have been wholly corrupted by false ambition, he must have deemed himself more truly happy in a state of banishment with such a wife, than he could have been upon a throne without her.”[33]