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Nepos · Pausanias

Nepos, Pausanias 2

Pausanias writes to Xerxes

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1After that battle they sent the same Pausanias with the allied fleet to Cyprus and the Hellespont, to drive the barbarians' garrisons out of those regions. 2Having enjoyed equal success in that venture, he began to behave more arrogantly and to aim at greater things. 2For when, after storming Byzantium, he had captured several Persian nobles, and among them some relatives of the king, he secretly sent them back to Xerxes, pretending that they had escaped from the public prison, and with them Gongylus of Eretria, to deliver a letter to the king, in which, as Thucydides has recorded, these words were written: 'Pausanias, the commander of Sparta, having learned that those he had captured at Byzantium were your relatives, has sent them to you as a gift, and desires to be joined to you by marriage: therefore, if you approve, give him your daughter as his wife.

4If you do this, he promises that with your help he will bring both Sparta and the rest of Greece under your power. 4If you wish to take any action in these matters, see that you send him a reliable man with whom he may confer.' 5The king, greatly delighted at the safety of so many men so closely related to him, at once sends Artabazus to Pausanias with a letter in which he praises him warmly and asks him to spare nothing in accomplishing what he promised: if he achieved it, he would meet with refusal from him in nothing. 6When Pausanias learned the king's wishes, he became more eager to carry out the plan and fell under the suspicion of the Spartans.

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6As a result he was recalled home, tried on a capital charge and acquitted, but fined; and for this reason he was not sent back to the fleet.

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Nepos, Pausanias. Latin text: A. Fleckeisen, Cornelii Nepotis Vitae (Teubner, 1886), public domain; digital text from the Perseus Digital Library, CC BY-SA. Word analysis: drafted by our own tagger (trained on the hand-checked texts on this site), with every doubtful word checked by hand. English translation and section titles: written for this app, each checked against the Latin by a second reader.