Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/463

 BONES OF OUESTES. 447 of binding their expected prisoners. But the result was disap- pointment and defeat. They were repulsed with loss, and the prisoners whom they left behind, bound in the very chains which their own army had brought, were constrained to servile labor on the plain of Tegea, the words of the oracle being thus literally fulfilled, though in a sense different from that in which the Lacedemonians had first understood them. 1 For one whole generation, we are told, they were constantly unsuccessful in their campaigns against the Tegeans, and this strenuous resistance probably prevented them from extending their conquests farther among the petty states of Arcadia. At length, in the reign of Anaxandrides and Aristo, the suc- cessors of Leon and Hegesikles (about 5 GO B. c.), the Delphian oracle, in reply to a question from the Spartans, which of the gods they ought to propitiate in order to become victorious, enjoined them to find and carry to Sparta the bones of Orestes, son of Agamemnon. After a vain search, since they did 'not know where the body of Orestes was to be found, they applied to the oracle for more specific directions, and were told that the son of Agamemnon was buried at Tegea itself, in a place " where two blasts were blowing under powerful constraint, where there was stroke and counter-stroke, and destruction upon destruction." These mysterious words were elucidated by a lucky accident. During a truce with Tegea, Lichas, one of the chiefs of the three hundred Spartan chosen youth, who acted as the movable police of the country under the ephors, visited the place, and entered the forge of a blacksmith, who mentioned to him, in the course of conversation, that, in sinking a well in his outer court, he had recently discovered a coffin containing a body seven cubits long ; astounded at the sight, he had left it there undisturbed. It struck Lichas that the gigantic relic of afore- time could be nothing else but the corpse of Orestes, and he felt assured of this, when he reflected how accurately the indications of the oracle were verified ; for there were the " two blasts blow- ing by constraint," in the two bellows of the blacksmith : there 1 Herod, i. 67 ; Pausan. iii. 3, 5 ; viii. 45, 2. Herodotus saw the identical chains suspended in the temple of AthenS Alea at Tegea.