We may suppose with what pride the ambassador of Sparta answered Gelon the tyrant of Syracuse (however brilliant and beneficial his reign may have been), when he required the command in the Persian war: “Truly the Pelopid Agamemnon would lament, if he heard that the supremacy was taken from the Spartans by Gelon and the Syracusans!”(738)
6. To these important changes in the political history of that time we may annex the subordinate events in the interior of Peloponnesus.
Sparta, by the conquest of Cynuria, had obtained the key of the Argive territory. Soon after this, Cleomenes, the eldest son of Anaxandridas the Eurysthenid, succeeded to the throne, a man of great boldness and strength of mind, sagacious, enterprising, accustomed, after the manner of his age and country, to express himself in a concise and emphatic language, only too much inflated by family and personal pride, and in disposition more nearly resembling his contemporaries the tyrants than beseemed a king of Sparta. The first exploit of this prince(739) was the expedition against Argos. He landed in some vessels of Sicyon and Ægina on the coast of Tiryns, overcame the Argives at the wood of Argos,(740) slew the greater part of the men able to bear arms, and would have succeeded in capturing their city, had he not, from an inconceivable superstition, dismissed the allied army without making any further use of the victory, and contented himself with sacrificing in the temple of Here.(741) At the same time Argos, in consequence of this defeat, remained for a long time crippled, and it was even necessary that a complete change in her political condition should take place, in order to renovate the feeble and disordered state into which she had fallen.