When some Megarian in a public
meeting used considerable freedom of speech towards him, he answered,
"My friend, your words require a city[155] to back them." He asked the
Boeotians, who wished to remain neutral, whether he should pass through
their country with spears held upright or levelled. On the occasion of
the revolt of Corinth, when he brought up the Lacedaemonians to assault
their walls, he observed that they seemed unwilling to attack. At this
moment a hare was seen to leap across the ditch, upon which he said,
"Are you not ashamed to fear such enemies as these, who are so lazy as
to allow hares to sleep upon their walls?" When king Agis died,
leaving a brother, Agesilaus, and a son Leotychides who was supposed
to be his, Lysander, who was attached to Agesilaus, prevailed upon him
to lay claim to the crown as being a genuine descendant of Herakles.
For Leotychides laboured under the imputation of being the son of
Alkibiades, who carried on an intrigue with Timaea the wife of Agis,
when he was living in Sparta as an exile. It is said that Agis, after
making a calculation about the time of his wife's pregnancy treated
Leotychides with neglect and openly denied that he was his father.
When however he was brought to Heraea during his last illness, and was
at the point of death, he was induced by the entreaties of the youth
and his friends to declare in the presence of many witnesses that
Leotychides was his legitimate son, and died begging them to testify
this fact to the Lacedaemonians. They did indeed so testify in favour
of Leotychides; and although Agesilaus was a man of great distinction,
and had the powerful assistance of Lysander, yet his claims to the
crown were seriously damaged by one Diopeithes, a man deep read in
oracular lore, who quoted the following prophecy in reference to the
lameness of Agesilaus:

"Proud Sparta, resting on two equal feet,
Beware lest lameness on thy kings alight;
Lest wars unnumbered toss thee to and fro,
And thou thyself be ruined in the fight."

But when many were persuaded by this oracle and looked to Leotychides
as the true heir, Lysander said that they did not rightly understand
it; for what it meant was, he argued, not that the god forbade a lame
man to reign, but that the kingdom would be lame of one foot if
base-born men should share the crown with those who were of the true
race of Herakles. By this argument and his own great personal
influence he