After this Agesilaus led
forth his army into the Plain of Cayster and the country around Sipylus and ravaged the
possessions of the inhabitants. Tissaphernes, gathering ten thousand cavalry and fifty thousand
infantry, followed close on the Lacedaemonians and cut down any who became separated from the
main body while plundering. Agesilaus formed his soldiers in a square and clung to the
foothills of Mt. Sipylus, awaiting a favourable opportunity to attack the enemy.
[
2]
He overran the countryside as far as Sardis and ravaged the orchards and
the pleasure-park belonging to Tissaphernes, which had been artistically laid out at great
expense with plants and all other things that contribute to luxury and the enjoyment in peace
of the good things of life. He then turned back, and when he was midway between Sardis and
Thybarnae, he dispatched by night the Spartan Xenocles with fourteen hundred soldiers to a
thickly wooded place to set an ambush for the barbarians.
[
3]
Then
Agesilaus himself moved at daybreak along the way with his army. And when he had passed the
place of ambush and the barbarians were advancing upon him without battle order and harassing
his rearguard, to their surprise he suddenly turned about on the Persians. When a sharp battle
followed, he raised the signal to the soldiers in ambush and they, chanting the battle song,
charged the enemy. The Persians, seeing that they were caught between the forces, were struck
with dismay and turned at once in flight.
[
4]
Pursuing them for
some distance, Agesilaus slew over six thousand of them, gathered a great multitude of
prisoners, and pillaged their camp which was stored with goods of many sorts.
[
5]
Tissaphernes, thunderstruck at the daring of the Lacedaemonians,
withdrew from the battle to Sardis, and Agesilaus was about to attack the satrapies farther
inland, but led his army back to the sea when he could not obtain favourable omens from the
sacrifices.
[
6]
When Artaxerxes,
the King of Asia, learned of the defeats, being alarmed by the war with the Greeks, he was
angry at Tissaphernes, since he considered him to be responsible for the war. He had also been
asked by his mother, Parysatis, to grant her revenge upon Tissaphernes, for she hated him for
denouncing her son Cyrus, when he made his attack upon his brother.
1
[
7]
Accordingly Artaxerxes appointed Tithraustes commander with
orders to arrest Tissaphernes and sent letters to the cities and the satraps that all should
perform whatever he commanded.
[
8]
Tithraustes, on arriving at
Colossae in Phrygia, with the aid of Ariaeus, a satrap, arrested Tissaphernes while he was in
the bath, cut off his head, and sent it to the King. Then he persuaded Agesilaus to enter into
negotiations and concluded with him a truce of six months.