49. But after his banishment, having made the Athenians masters of the Hellespont, and having taken more than five thousand Peloponnesians prisoners, he sent them to Athens; and after this, returning to his country, he crowned the Attic triremes with branches, and mitres, and fillets. And fastening to his own vessels a quantity of ships which he had taken, with their beaks broken off, to the number of two hundred, and conveying also transports full of Lacedæmonian and Peloponnesian spoils and arms, he sailed into the Piræus: and the trireme in which he himself was, ran up to the very bars of the Piræus with purple sails; and when it got inside the harbour, and when the rowers took their oars, Chrysogonus played on a flute the trieric air, clad in a Persian robe, and Callippides the tragedian, clad in a theatrical dress, gave the word to the rowers. On account of which some one said with great wit—"Sparta could never have endured two Lysanders, nor Athens two Alcibiadeses." But Alcibiades was imitating the Medism of Pausanias, and when he was staying with Pharnabazus, he put on a Persian robe, and learnt the Persian language, as Themistocles had done.
50. And Duris says, in the twenty-second book of his History,—"Pausanias, the king of Lacedæmon, having laid aside the national cloak of Lacedæmon, adopted the Persian dress. And Dionysius, the tyrant of Sicily, adopted a theatrical robe and a golden tragic crown with a clasp. And Alexander, when he became master of Asia, also adopted the Persian dress. But Demetrius outdid them all; for the very shoes which he wore he had made in a most costly manner; for in its form it was a kind of buskin, made of most expensive purple wool; and on this the makers wove a great deal of golden embroidery, both before and behind; and his cloak was of a brilliant tawny colour; and, in short, a representation of the heavens was woven into it, having the stars and twelve signs of the Zodiac all wrought in gold; and his head-band was spangled all over with gold, binding on a purple broad-brimmed hat in such a manner that the outer fringes hung down the back. And when the Demetrian festival was celebrated at Athens, Demetrius himself was painted on the proscenium, sitting on the world." And Nymphis of Heraclea, in the sixth book of his treatise on his Country, says—"Pausanias, who defeated Mardonius at Platæa, having transgressed the laws of Sparta, and given himself up to pride, when staying near Byzantium, dared to put an inscription on the brazen goblet which is there consecrated to the gods, whose temple is at the entrance of the strait, (and the goblet is in existence to this day,) as if he had dedicated it himself; putting this inscription on it, forgetting himself through his luxury and arrogance—
Pausanias, the general of broad Greece,
Offered this goblet to the royal Neptune,
A fit memorial of his deathless valour,
Here in the Euxine sea. He was by birth
A Spartan, and Cleombrotus's son,
Sprung from the ancient race of Hercules."
51. "Pharax the Lacedæmonian also indulged himself in luxury," as Theopompus tells us in the fourteenth book of his History, "and he abandoned himself to pleasure in so dissolute and unrestrained a manner, that by reason of his intemperance he was much oftener taken for a Sicilian, than for a Spartan by reason of his country." And in his fifty-second book he says that "Archidamus the Lacedæmonian, having abandoned his national customs, adopted foreign and effeminate habits; so that he could not endure the way of life which existed in his own country, but was always, by reason of his intemperance, anxious to live in foreign countries. And when the Tarentines sent an embassy about an alliance, he was anxious to go out with them as an ally; and being there, and having been slain in the wars, he was not thought worthy even of a burial, although the Tarentines offered a great deal of money to the enemy to be allowed to take up his body."
And Phylarchus, in the tenth book of his Histories, says that Isanthes was the king of that tribe of Thracians called Crobyzi, and that he surpassed all the men of his time in luxury; and he was a rich man, and very handsome. And the same historian tells us, in his twenty-second book, that Ptolemy the Second, king of Egypt, the most admirable of all princes, and the most learned and accomplished of men, was so beguiled and debased in his mind by his unseasonable luxury, that he actually dreamed that he should live for ever, and said that he alone had found out how to become immortal. And once, after he had been afflicted by the gout for many days, when at last he got a little better, and saw through his window-blinds some Egyptians dining by the river side, and eating whatever it might be that they had, and lying at random on the sand, "O wretched man that I am," said he, "that I am not one of those men!"