prevailed, and Agesilaus became king of Sparta.

XXIII. Lysander now at once began to urge him to make a campaign in
Asia, holding out to him hopes of conquering the Persians and making
himself the greatest man in the world. He also wrote to his friends in
Asia, bidding them ask the Lacedaemonians to send them Agesilaus to act
as their commander in chief in the war with the Persians. They obeyed,
and sent an embassy to demand him: which was as great an honour to
Agesilaus as his being made king, and which, like the other, he owed
to Lysander alone. However, ambitious natures, though in other
respects fit for great commands, often fail in important enterprises
through jealousy of their rivals; for they make those men their
opponents who would otherwise have been their assistants in obtaining
success. On this occasion Agesilaus took Lysander with him, as the
chief of his board of thirty counsellors, and treated him as his
greatest friend; but when they reached Asia, the people there would
not pay their court to Agesilaus, whom they did not know, while all
Lysander's friends flocked round him to renew their former intimacy,
and all those who feared him assiduously courted his favour. Thus, as
in a play we often see that a messenger or servant engrosses all the
interest of the spectators and really acts the leading part, while he
who wears the crown and bears the sceptre is hardly heard to speak, so
now it was the counsellor who obtained all the honours due to a
commander in chief, while the king had merely the title without any
influence whatever. It was necessary, no doubt, that this excessive
power of Lysander should be curtailed, and he himself forced to take
the second place: but yet to disgrace and ruin a friend and one from
whom he had received great benefits, would have been unworthy of
Agesilaus. Consequently at first he did not entrust him with the
conduct of matters of importance, and did not give him any separate
command. In the next place, he invariably disobliged, and refused the
applications, of any persons on whose behalf he understood Lysander to
be interested, and thus gradually undermined his power. When however
after many failures Lysander perceived that his interest on his
friends' behalf was a drawback rather than an advantage to them, he
ceased from urging their claims, and moreover begged them not to pay
their court to him, but to attach themselves to the king, and to those
who were able to promote