In his ninth and last book, having nothing left to
vent his malice on but the Lacedaemonians and their glorious action against the barbarians at Plataea, he writes,
that the Spartans at first feared lest the Athenians should
suffer themselves to be persuaded by Mardonius to forsake
the other Greeks; but that now, the Isthmus being fortified,
they, supposing all to be safe at Peloponnesus, neglected
and slighted the rest, feasting and making merry at home,
and deluding and delaying the Athenian ambassadors.1
How then did there go forth from Sparta to Plataea a thousand and five men, having every one of them with him
seven Helots? Or how came it that, exposing themselves
to so many dangers, they vanquished and overthrew so
many thousand barbarians? Hear now his probable cause
of it. ‘It happened,’ says he, ‘that there was then at
Sparta a certain stranger of Tegea, named Chileus, who
had some friends amongst the Ephori, between whom and
him there was mutual hospitality. He then persuaded
them to send forth the army, telling them that the fortification on the Isthmus, by which they had fenced in Peloponnesus, would be of no avail if the Athenians joined
themselves with Mardonius.’
2 This counsel then drew
Pausanias with his army to Plataea; but if any private
business had kept that Chileus at Tegea, Greece had never
been victorious.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.