Greece -- History -- Peloponnesian War, 431-404 B.C.
On being shown the letter, the ephors now felt more certain. Still,
they wished to hear Pausanias commit himself with their own ears.
Accordingly the man went by appointment to Taenarus as a suppliant, and
there built himself a hut divided into two by a partition; within which
he concealed some of the ephors and let them hear the whole matter
plainly. For Pausanias came to him and asked him the reason of his
suppliant position; and the man reproached him with the order that he
had written concerning him, and one by one declared all the rest of the
circumstances, how he who had never yet brought him into any danger,
while employed as agent between him and the King, was yet just like the
mass of his servants to be rewarded with death. Admitting all this, and
telling him not to be angry about the matter, Pausanias gave him the
pledge of raising him up from the temple, and begged him to set off as
quickly as possible, and not to hinder the business in hand.
The ephors listened carefully, and then departed, taking no action for
the moment, but, having at last attained to certainty, were preparing
to arrest him in the city. It is reported that, as he was about to be
arrested in the street, he saw from the face of one of the ephors what
he was coming for; another, too, made him a secret signal, and betrayed
it to him from kindness. Setting off with a run for the temple of the
goddess of the Brazen House, the enclosure of which was near at hand,
he succeeded in taking sanctuary before they took him, and entering
into a small chamber, which formed part of the temple, to avoid being
exposed to the weather, lay still there. The ephors, for the moment
distanced in the pursuit, afterwards took off the roof of the chamber,
and having made sure that he was inside, shut him in, barricaded the
doors, and staying before the place, reduced him by starvation. When
they found that he was on the point of expiring, just as he was, in the
chamber, they brought him out of the temple, while the breath was still
in him, and as soon as he was brought out he died. They were going to
throw him into the Kaiadas, where they cast criminals, but finally
decided to inter him somewhere near. But the god at Delphi afterwards
ordered the Lacedaemonians to remove the tomb to the place of his
death—where he now lies in the consecrated ground, as an inscription on
a monument declares—and, as what had been done was a curse to them, to
give back two bodies instead of one to the goddess of the Brazen House.
So they had two brazen statues made, and dedicated them as a substitute
for Pausanias. The Athenians retorted by telling the Lacedaemonians to
drive out what the god himself had pronounced to be a curse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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