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Pausanias, the king of the Lacedaemonians, puffed up by this, inscribed a distich upon the tripod at Delphi, which the Greeks who had jointly fought in the battle at Plataea and in the sea-fight at Salamis had made in common from the spoils taken from the barbarians, and had set up in honor of Apollo as a memorial of their valor. The distichThis distich, said by Paus. 3.8.1, to be the work of Simonides, is quoted also in Thuc. 1.132. According to Hdt. 9.81.4 the monument in question was a golden tripod, set upon a three-headed serpent of bronze. The gold tripod was carried off by the Phocians in the Sacred War (Paus. 10.13.6), and the supporting pillar, three intertwined serpents of bronze, was taken away by Constantine and set up in the Hippodrome of his new capital at Byzantium (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Chap. 17, note 48), where it was rediscovered in 1856. The names of the Greek states which took part in the war are inscribed on the coils of the serpents (see Hicks, Greek Historical Inscriptions, pp. 11-13 and Dittenberger, Syllogê, 1 p. 31). was as follows: Pausanias, supreme commander of the Greeks, when he had destroyed the host of the Medes, dedicated to Phoebus this memorial.
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He wrote thus, as if the achievement and the offering had been his own and not the common work of the allies;
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and the Greeks were incensed at this, and the Plataeans brought suit on behalf of the allies against the Lacedaemonians before the AmphictyonsThese were the members of the council of Greek states meeting at Delphi. for one thousand talents, and compelled them to erase the distich and to inscribe the names of all the states which had had a part in the work. This act more than any other drew upon the Plataeans the hatred of the Lacedaemonians and their royal house.
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For the moment the Lacedaemonians had no means of dealing with them, but about fifty years later Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians, undertook in time of peace to seize their city.
