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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.

1 Cp. chaps. 19 ff.

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

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