In fact, far from making such a use of his power as to strengthen his position, and establish a permanent and settled government, he so administered the affairs of state, or, rather, he so neglected them, that very soon an extended discontent and disaffection began to prevail. The Gauls, whom he had left as garrisons in the conquered cities, governed them in so arbitrary a manner, and plundered them so recklessly, as to produce extreme irritation among the people. They complained earnestly to Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus paid little attention to their representations. To fight a battle with an open enemy on the field was always a pleasure to him; but to meet and grapple with difficulties of this kind—to hear complaints, and listen to evidence, and discuss and consider remedies, was all weariness and toil to him.
Pyrrhus receives an unexpected invitation.
What he would have done, and what would have been the end of his administration in Macedon, had he been left to himself, can not now be known; for, very fortunately, as he deemed it, he was suddenly relieved of all the embarrassment in which he was gradually getting involved, as he had often been relieved in similar circumstances before, by an invitation which came to him just at this time to embark in a new military enterprise, which would draw him away from the country altogether. It is scarcely necessary to say that Pyrrhus accepted the invitation with the most eager alacrity. The circumstances of the case will be explained in the next chapter.
Chapter XI.
Sparta.
B.C. 1000-272
Sparta.
Some account of the city.
The Spartan kings.
The war in which Pyrrhus was invited to engage, at the time referred to at the close of the last chapter, arose out of a domestic quarrel in one of the royal families of Sparta. Sparta was one of the principal cities of the Peloponnesus, and the capital of a very powerful and warlike kingdom.[N] The institutions of government in this commonwealth were very peculiar, and among the most extraordinary of them all was the arrangement made in respect to the kingly power. There were two dynasties, or lines of kings, reigning conjointly. The division of power between the two incumbents who reigned at any one time may have been somewhat similar to that made in Rome between the consuls. But the system differed from that of the consular government in the fact that the Spartan kings were not elected magistrates, like the Roman consuls, but hereditary sovereigns, deriving their power from their ancestors, each in his own line.