Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/199

 AGAMEMNON AT SPARTA. 167 the legend : we know that Zeus Agamemnon, as well as the here Menelaus, was worshipped at the Dorian Sparta, 1 and the feeling of intimate identity, as well as of patriotic pride, which had grown up in the minds of the Spartans connected with the name of Agamemnon, is forcibly evinced by the reply of the Spartan Sy- agrus to Gelon of Syracuse at the time of the Persian invasion of Greece. Gelon was solicited to lend his aid in the imminent danger of Greece before the battle of Salamis : he offered to furnish an immense auxiliary force, on condition that the supreme command should be allotted to him. " Loudly indeed would the Pelopid Agamemnon cry out (exclaimed Syagrus in rejecting this application), if he were to learn that the Spartans had been de- prived of the headship by Gelon and the Tyracusans." 2 Nearly a century before this event, in obedience to the injunctions of the Delphian oracle, the Spartans had brought back from Tegea to Sparta the bones of " the Laconian Orestes," as Pindar denomi- nates him : 3 the recovery of these bones was announced to them as the means of reversing a course of ill-fortune, and of procuring victory in their war against Tegea. 4 The value which they set upon this acquisition, and the decisive results ascribed to it, ex- hibit a precise analogy with the recovery of the bones of Theseus from Skyros by the Athenian Cimon shortly after the Persian invasion. 5 The remains sought were those of a hero properly belonging to their own soil, but who had died in a foreign land, and of whose protection and assistance they were for that reason deprived. And the superhuman magnitude of the bones, which were contained in a coffin seven cubits long, is well suited to the legendary grandeur of the son of Agamemnon. 1 Clemens Alexandr. Admonit. ad Gent. p. 24. 'Ayapefivova yovv riva Aia kv ~L-xdpTi) Tifiucrdai 2~a0u/lof iaropei. See also CEnomaus ap. Euseb. Praeparat. Evangel, v. 28. 2 Herodot. vii. 159. T H KS fiey' olfiu^cisv 6 HeTiomdrif 'A.yafie/j.vuv, *rw$- uevoe ZitapTtTfTac inrapaipTjff&m TTJV fiyefj.ovi.av v-jrb TeXuvof re Kal ruv Zvp- Kovaiuv : compare Homer, Iliad, vii. 1 25. See what appears to be an imi- tation of the same passage in Josephus, De Bello Judaico, iii. 8, 4. 'H u&ahay' uv arevu^eiav oi iruTpioi VOJJ.QI, etc. 'Plutarch. Theseus, c. 36, Cimon, c. 8; Pausan. iii. 3, 6.
 * Pindar. Pyth. xi. 16. 4 Herodot. i 68.