26.3
For the Thebans are said to have been really more warlike at this time than ever before, owing to the many expeditions which the Lacedaemonians made against them, by which they were virtually schooled in arms. And Lycurgus of old, in one of his three so-called rhetras, forbade his people to make frequent expeditions against the same foes, in order that those foes might not learn how to make war.Cf. the Lycurgus, xiii. 6. Moreover, the allies of the Lacedaemonians were offended at Agesilaüs, because, as they said, it was not upon any public ground of complaint, but by reason of some passionate resentment of his own, that he sought to destroy the Thebans.
26.4
Accordingly, they said they had no wish to be dragged hither and thither to destruction every year, they themselves so many, and the Lacedaemonians, with whom they followed, so few. It was at this time, we are told, that Agesilaüs, wishing to refute their argument from numbers, devised the following scheme. He ordered all the allies to sit down by themselves promiscuously, and the Lacedaemonians apart by themselves.
26.5
Then his herald called upon the potters to stand up first, and after them the smiths, next, the carpenters in their turn, and the builders, and so on through all the handicrafts. In response, almost all the allies rose up, but not a man of the Lacedaemonians; for they were forbidden to learn or practise a manual art.Cf. the Lycurgus, xxiv. 2. Then Agesilaüs said with a laugh: You see, O men, how many more soldiers than you we are sending out.
27.1
But in Megara, when he was leading his army back from Thebes,From a second incursion into Boeotia, made in 377 B.C. (Xenophon, Hell. v. 4, 47-55; 58). as he was going up to the senate-house in the acropolis, he was seized with a cramp and violent pain in his sound leg, which then swelled up, appeared to be congested, and showed signs of excessive inflammation.
