History of The Peloponnesian War - Book I   

gained a new significance, and seemed to be quite in keeping with
his present schemes. Besides, they were informed that he was even
intriguing with the Helots; and such indeed was the fact, for he
promised them freedom and citizenship if they would join him in
insurrection and would help him to carry out his plans to the end.
Even now, mistrusting the evidence even of the Helots themselves,
the ephors would not consent to take any decided step against him;
in accordance with their regular custom towards themselves, namely, to
be slow in taking any irrevocable resolve in the matter of a Spartan
citizen without indisputable proof. At last, it is said, the person
who was going to carry to Artabazus the last letter for the King, a
man of Argilus, once the favourite and most trusty servant of
Pausanias, turned informer. Alarmed by the reflection that none of the
previous messengers had ever returned, having counterfeited the
seal, in order that, if he found himself mistaken in his surmises,
or if Pausanias should ask to make some correction, he might not be
discovered, he undid the letter, and found the postscript that he
had suspected, viz., an order to put him to death.
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.
To return to the Medism of Pausanias. Matter was found in the course
of the inquiry to implicate Themistocles; and the Lacedaemonians
accordingly sent envoys to the Athenians and required them to punish
him as they had punished Pausanias. The Athenians consented to do