his need of them was over, he dismissed them without
any pay at all, and Xenophon was so poor that he was forced to sell the
good horse that had carried him all the way from Armenia.

However, there was a spirited young king at Sparta, named Agesilaus, who
was just old enough to come forward and take the command, and he was
persuading his fellow-citizens, that now they had become the leading
state in Greece, they ought to go and deliver the remaining Greek
colonies in Asia Minor from the yoke of Persia, as Athens had done by the
Ionians. They therefore decided on taking the remains of the 10,000--now
only 6000--into their pay, and the messengers who came to engage them
bought Xenophon's horse and restored it to him. Xenophon would not,
however, continue with the band after he had conducted it to Pergamus,
where they were to meet the Spartan general who was to take charge of
them. On their way they plundered the house of a rich Persian, and gave
a large share of the spoil to him as a token of gratitude for the wisdom
and constancy that had carried them through so many trials.

It had been his strong sense of religion and trust in the care of the
gods which had borne him up; and the first thing he did was to go and
dedicate his armour and an offering of silver at the temple of Diana at
Ephesus. This temple had grown up round a black stone image, very ugly,
but which was said to have fallen from the sky, and was perhaps a
meteoric stone. A white marble quarry near the city had furnished the
materials for a temple so grand and beautiful that it was esteemed one of
the seven wonders of the world.

After thus paying his vows, Xenophon returned to Athens, whence he had
been absent two years and a-half. He not only wrote the history of this
expedition, but a life of the first great Cyrus of Persia, which was
meant not so much as real history, as a pattern of how kings ought to be
bred up.

[Picture: Greek Armour]

CHAP. XXIII.--THE DEATH OF SOCRATES. B.C. 399.

[Picture: Decorative chapter heading]

[Picture: Of] the men who sought after God in the darkness, "if haply
they might feel after Him," none had come so near the truth as Socrates,
a sculptor by trade, and yet a great philosopher, and, so far as we can
see, the wisest and best man who ever grew up without any guide but
nature and conscience. Even the oracle at Delphi declared that he was
the wisest of men