Page:Thucydides, translated into English Vol 2.djvu/122

 114 NIC/AS AXD PLEISTOANAX [v king of the Lacedaemonians, and Nicias the son of Niceratus the Athenian, who had been the most fortunate general of his day, became more eager than ever to make an end of the war. Nicias desired, whilst he was still successful and held in repute, to preserve his good fortune; he would have liked to rest from toil, and to give the people rest; and he hoped to leave behind him to other ages the name of a man who in all his life had never brought disaster on the city. He thought that the way to gain his wish was to trust as little as possible to fortune, and to keep out of danger ; and that danger would be best avoided by peace. Pleistoanax wanted peace, because his enemies were alwa3's stirring up the scruples of the Lace- daemonians against him, and insisting whenever misfortunes came that they were to be attributed to his illegal return from exile. For they accused him and Aristocles his brother of having induced the priestess at Delphi, when- ever Lacedaemonian envoys came to enquire of the oracle, constantly to repeat the same answer : ' Bring back the seed of the hero son of Zeus from a strange country to your own ; else you will plough with a silver ploughshare' : until, after a banishment of nineteen years, he persuaded the Lacedaemonians to bring him home again with dances and sacrifices and such ceremonies as they observed when they first enthroned their kings at the foundation of Lace- daemon. He had been banished on account of his retreat from Attica, when he was supposed to have been bribed". While in exile at Mount Lycaeum he had occupied a house half within the sacred precinct of Zeus, through fear of the Lacedaemonians. 17 He was vexed by these accusations, and thinking that in peace, when there would be no mishaps, and when the Lacedaemonians would have recovered the captives, Brasidas) being at the time the two great champions of the supremacy of their respective states ; Pleistoanax ' &c. " Cp. i. 114; ii. 2t ii)it.