. XXVI.--PHILIP OF MACEDON. B.C. 364.

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Peace was made as Epaminondas desired, and Boeotia never produced another
great man, as, indeed, the inhabitants had always been slow and dull, so
that a Boeotian was a by-word for stupidity. The only other great
Boeotian was the poet Pindar, who was living at this time.

The fifteen years of Theban power had weakened Sparta; but Agesilaus
persuaded the Ephors to send him to assist Tachos, who had revolted from
the Persians and made himself king of Egypt, and who promised to pay the
Spartans well for their aid. When he sent his officers to receive the
Spartan king who had achieved the greatest fame of any man then living,
they absolutely burst out laughing at the sight of the little, lame man,
now more than eighty years old, and as simply clad as ever; and he was
much vexed and angered that he was not made commander of the army, but
only of the foreign allies; and when Tachos went against his advice, and
chose to march into Phoenicia, he went over to the cause of another
Egyptian prince, a cousin to Tachos, named Nectanebes, whom he helped to
gain the crown of Egypt, thus breaking his promises in a way which we are
sorry should have been the last action of his long life. The next winter
he embarked to return home, but he was driven by contrary winds to a
place in Egypt called the port of Menelaus, because that king of Sparta
had been so long weather-bound there. The storm had been too much for
the tough old frame of Agesilaus, who died there. His body was embalmed
in wax, and carried home to be buried at Sparta, whose greatest man he
certainly was.

The great Persian Empire was growing weak, and her subject cities were
revolting from her. Caria, in Asia Minor, became free under its king,
Mausolus, who reigned twenty-four years, but who is chiefly famous for
the magnificent monument which his widow Artemisia raised to his memory,
and which consisted of several stages of pillars, supported by tablets so
exquisitely sculptured that the Mausoleum, as it was called, was taken
into the number of the seven wonders of the world. After all, its
splendour did not comfort the heart of Artemisia, and she had the ashes
of her husband taken from his urn and carried them about her in a casket,
until finally she put them in water and drank them, so as to be for ever
one with them. She was herself buried in the Mausoleum, the rem