But though Cleombrotus escaped death, yet nothing but the blood of Agis could satisfy the vindictive rage of the ungrateful Leonidas, who, in the former revolution, owed his life to that unfortunate prince’s generosity. After many ineffectual attempts to entice Agis from his asylum, three of his intimate friends in whom he most confided, who used to accompany and guard him to the baths and back again to the temple, betrayed him to his enemies. Amphares, the chief of these, and the contriver of the plot, was one of the new ephori created after the deposition of Agesilaus. This wretch had lately borrowed a quantity of valuable plate, and a number of magnificent vestments, of Agis’s mother Agesistrata, and determined to make them his own by the destruction of Agis and his family; at their return therefore in their usual friendly manner from the baths, he first attacked Agis by virtue of his office, whilst Demochares and Arcesilaus, the other two, seized and dragged him to the publick prison. Agis supported all these indignities with the utmost magnanimity: and when the ephori questioned him, whether Agesilaus and Lysander did not constrain him to do what he had done, and whether he did not repent of the steps he had taken; he undauntedly took the whole upon himself, and told them that he gloried in his scheme, which was the result of his emulation to follow the example of the great Lycurgus. Stung with this answer, the ephori condemned him to die by their own authority, and ordered the officers to carry him to the place in the prison where the malefactors were strangled. But when the officers and even the mercenary soldiers of Leonidas refused to be concerned in so infamous and unprecedented an action as laying hands upon their king, Demochares threatening and abusing them greatly for their disobedience, seized Agis with his own hands, and dragged him to the execution room, where he was ordered to be dispatched immediately. Agis submitted to his fate with equal intrepidity and resignation, reproving one of the executioners who deplored his calamities, and declaring himself infinitely happier than his murderers. The unfeeling and treacherous Amphares attended the execution, and as soon as Agis was dead, he admitted his mother and grandmother into the prison, who came to intercede that Agis might be allowed to make his defence before the people. The wretch assured the mother, with an insulting sneer, that her son should suffer no heavier punishment than he had done already; and immediately ordered her mother Archidamia, who was extremely old, to execution. As soon as she was dead, he bid Agesistrata enter the room, where, at the sight of the dead bodies, she could not refrain from kissing her son, and crying out, that his too great lenity and good-nature had been their ruin. The savage Amphares, laying hold of those words, told her, that as she approved of her son’s actions she should share his fate. Agesistrata met death with the resolution of an