It was the year 467 BC when an enraged woman approached the door of the Temple of Athena Chalkioikos in Sparta and placed a brick with an inscription that read: Unworthy of being a Spartan, you are not my son. That harsh message, according to Diodorus of Sicily, was directed at her son, who had taken refuge inside the building to escape justice and remained trapped there when other Spartans walled up the entrance, preventing him not only from leaving but also from receiving food and water. He was no ordinary fugitive but none other than Pausanias, who had been regent of Laconia and the victor of the famous Battle of Plataea. Let us see how he came to such a dire situation.

The relentless mother was named Theano, and she was the wife of Cleombrotus, the brother of the famous Leonidas, who died defending the pass at Thermopylae. Cleombrotus succeeded him as regent of Sparta due to the minority of his heir, Pleistarchus. Cleombrotus ruled for only a short time, as he died suddenly the following year. Since Pleistarchus was still a child, Pausanias assumed power. He did not do so alone, as the Spartan monarchy was dual, divided between a representative of the Agiad dynasty and another from the Eurypontid dynasty. In this case, it was Leotychidas II, who had been on the throne since 491 BC.

Pausanias (who should not be confused with the traveler and geographer of the same name) had to face difficult times from the start. Although the Persians had been defeated at Salamis and Xerxes had retreated to his country, he had left behind a land army in Greece under the command of Mardonius, which remained a pressing threat. The Spartan regent took command of the military forces and, leading five thousand men, set out accompanied by Eurianax, the son of his brother Dorieus and therefore his nephew. They joined the troops of the Hellenic League, a symmachy (alliance) formed by Sparta, Athens, Corinth, and Megara, which, according to Herodotus, totaled around one hundred and ten thousand troops (modern historians estimate about forty thousand).

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Bust of Pausanias. Credit: Jona Lendering / Wikimedia Commons

They marched toward Boeotia to meet the enemy and found them at the Asopus River, near the city of Plataea. Since the Persians outnumbered them three to one, the Greeks avoided direct confrontation and built a fortified camp. However, when Mardonius ordered the contamination of the river’s water to deprive them of drinking water, they chose to withdraw toward Plataea, where they would have a better supply. They did so in two columns that took different routes, a movement that the Persians interpreted as a retreat and launched their attack—against the Spartans and Tegeans, while their Theban allies engaged the rest of the League.

Pausanias sent messengers to the Athenians requesting help, but after receiving no response, he halted his retreat, ordered his men to form a phalanx, and engaged the enemy. Although the battle turned somewhat chaotic, Pausanias’ skill in using the terrain and the traditional discipline of the Spartan phalanxes allowed them to overcome their numerical disadvantage, earning the Spartan general “the most glorious victory of any known to us,” in Herodotus’ words. That same day, simultaneously, Leotychidas defeated the Persians at Mycale, and with both victories, the Second Persian War came to an end.

With the Persian threat eliminated, the focus of Athens and Sparta shifted to their rivalry for dominance over Greece, culminating in the Peloponnesian War. However, that conflict would not break out until 431 BC. In the meantime, Pausanias would become the subject of unimaginable suspicions, considering he was one of the greatest heroes of the time. He was criticized for behaving with despotism and arrogance, accumulating too much personal power. Among the grievances raised against him, especially by the Athenians, was, for example, having engraved self-laudatory verses on the golden tripod that the Greeks had erected in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi to commemorate the victory at Plataea.

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Remains of the Spartan fortifications on the battlefield of Plataea. Credit: George E. Koronaios / Wikimedia Commons

That tripod crowned the Trikarenos Ophis or Serpent Column, an eight-meter-high work formed by three intertwined serpents. According to Herodotus, it was made from the melted-down bronze of weapons captured from the enemy and was placed beside the god’s altar on a stone base. In 324 AD, Constantine I the Great moved it to Constantinople—modern-day Istanbul—to place it at the center of his Hippodrome, next to the Obelisk of Theodosius. It remained mostly intact until the 17th century when it lost the heads of the serpents.

In contrast, the tripod was lost much earlier, looted by Phocian general Philomelos in 355 BC to pay his mercenaries. This led Philip II of Macedon to expel Phocis from the Amphictyonic League (a religious league of central Greek tribes) and fine them four hundred talents. It was a monument dedicated to Apollo by the thirty-one city-states that made up the Hellenic League, but it appears that Pausanias was dissatisfied with the lack of recognition for his role in the battle, which is why he sought to glorify himself. The verses read as follows:

That Greek captain named Pausanias, since he defeated the Medes with great toil and effort, suffering greatly in war, for the honor of the god Apollo, placed this memorial here, attributing his victory solely to the favor of that god.

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Artistic reconstruction of the tripod of Platea made by the German archaeologist Ernst Fabricius in 1886. Credit: Ernst Fabricius / Wikimedia Commons

There are other versions of what was inscribed on the tripod. Thucydides and the pseudo-Demosthenes suggest a simpler one in which the work was offered to Phoebus (“Radiant”), the epithet for Apollo in classical mythology:

After defeating the army of the Medes, Pausanias, commander-in-chief of the Greeks, erected this monument to Phoebus.

Unfortunately, more serious accusations were made against Pausanias. After recapturing Thebes, he was given command of a squadron of five triremes with which he recovered Cyprus and Byzantium. In the latter, he granted freedom to some high-ranking prisoners, including nobles and even some relatives of Xerxes. He claimed they had actually escaped, but it was also alleged—according to Thucydides—that he had established contact with the Persian king through Gongylos of Eretria, a Euboean statesman who had fled and settled in Persia. Xerxes had granted him the governance of Pergamum as a reward for his collaboration. Diodorus of Sicily, however, states that the mediator was another figure—Artabazus I of Phrygia, one of Mardonius’ commanders.

Whoever it was, the important thing was what Pausanias intended with that relationship, and the rumors did not place him in a good light: he aspired to marry a daughter of the Achaemenid satrap Megabates, a cousin of the late Darius I and an advisor to his son Xerxes. In fact, the other party had allegedly accepted the proposal because, in exchange, he was offered assistance in facilitating another invasion. That is why Pausanias began dressing in the Eastern style and adopting Persian customs—something so offensive in Greek eyes that he was put on trial. He was acquitted due to a lack of evidence, but the mistrust remained, and for the time being, he was prohibited from leading new military campaigns.

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What remains of the Serpent Column, in Sultan Ahmet Square in Istanbul. Recovered parts of the heads are displayed in the Archaeological Museum. Credit: Jorge Láscar / Wikimedia Commons

This infuriated him so much that he disobeyed the order and, with the triremes he still had, sailed toward Argolis and from there to the Troad (the region of Asia Minor where ancient Troy was located) to seize the city of Colonae. When he returned to Sparta, he was not welcomed with applause—quite the opposite: the ephors decreed his arrest and prosecution. However, once again, despite the fact that Greeks from other poleis claimed that he had tried to bribe them into rebelling in favor of Persia and insisted on a conviction, no one could present any proof of disloyalty against him. Without evidence, a Spartan king could not be imprisoned, so once more, he was acquitted.

The situation seemed settled. However, for Athens, it was important to get rid of this man who could hinder its rise to hegemony in Greece, while in Sparta, rumors spread that Pausanias was planning the unthinkable: freeing the helots. Therefore, it was only a matter of time before some evidence of his betrayal—real or not—came to light. That was how the ephors received yet another denunciation, this time through a messenger from Argilus (a Macedonian city) known for his presumed loyalty to Pausanias, to whom the latter had allegedly entrusted a letter for the aforementioned Artabazus.

In this document, the same offer was reiterated, along with a warning to the satrap to kill the messenger after reading it to erase any trace of the communication. The supposed victim must have grown suspicious and did not deliver the missive, choosing instead to hand it over to the ephors. They were not entirely convinced and suspected it might be a setup, so they decided to stage their own test to determine the truth: they ordered the messenger to meet Pausanias at the Temple of Poseidon in Taenarum and to accuse him of ordering his death while they listened to the conversation from hiding. Pausanias, unsuspecting, showed up and apologized, offering the man a bribe to keep silent.

At last, they had something tangible against him, but he evaded imminent arrest by taking refuge in the Temple of Athena Chalkioikos, which was located on the Spartan acropolis—Athena was the city’s patron goddess—and where, according to tradition, punitive actions could not be carried out. The soldiers surrounded the perimeter and decided to wall up the entrance to make the fugitive die from heat, hunger, and thirst—that is, in a natural way—so that no sacrilege would be committed. As we saw, Theano, his own mother, laid the first brick.

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The death of Pausanias, as seen by an anonymous illustrator in 1882. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Pausanias’ body was handed over to his family for burial, which was carried out not far from there, near the tomb of Leonidas. The verses he had inscribed on that tripod were erased by order of the Amphictyonic Council (the body that managed the Oracle and organized the Pythian Games), which also condemned the Lacedaemonians to pay a fine of a thousand talents. This, incidentally, offended Sparta and added to the various causes that, as Thucydides explains, accumulated over five decades and ultimately led to the Peloponnesian War.

According to Diodorus, Pausanias’ controversial inscription was replaced with a distich (a classical stanza composed of a hexameter followed by a pentameter) written by the lyric poet Simonides. The new verses removed the deceased monarch’s prominence in favor of a more general praise of all Greeks. They read:

The saviors of Greece in general dedicated this offering, after having rescued their cities from hateful slavery.

After this story, a curious epilogue followed: despite the efforts of the ephors and all the Spartiate citizens to prevent the desecration of the sanctuary, the priestess of the Oracle of Delphi declared that the goddess Athena was displeased because one of her supplicants had been killed, and therefore, she demanded that the deceased be brought back to life. Since that was impossible, Sparta placed two bronze statues of Pausanias in the temple—thus, in the end, he was honored despite everything.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on March 7, 2025: Pausanias, el rey espartano que venció a los persas en Platea y murió emparedado por sus propios conciudadanos

SOURCES

Heródoto, Los nueve libros de la Historia

Tucídides, Historia de la Guerra del Peloponeso

Diodoro de Sicilia, Biblioteca histórica

Cornelio Nepote, Vidas

Wikipedia, Pausanias (general)

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