and the crimes--the grasping ambition and the luxurious ostentation--
of the bold Spartan who first scorned and then imitated the
effeminacies of the Persian he subdued.

VIII. Amid the documents of which the ephors possessed themselves
after the death of Pausanias was a correspondence with Themistocles,
then residing in the rival and inimical state of Argos. Yet
vindictive against that hero, the Spartan government despatched
ambassadors to Athens, accusing him of a share in the conspiracy of
Pausanias with the Medes. It seems that Themistocles did not disavow
a correspondence with Pausanias, nor affect an absolute ignorance of
his schemes; but he firmly denied by letter, his only mode of defence,
all approval and all participation of the latter. Nor is there any
proof, nor any just ground of suspicion, that he was a party to the
betrayal of Greece. It was consistent, indeed, with his astute
character, to plot, to manoeuvre, to intrigue, but for great and not
paltry ends. By possessing himself of the secret, he possessed
himself of the power of Pausanias; and that intelligence might perhaps
have enabled him to frustrate the Spartan's treason in the hour of
actual danger to Greece. It is possible that, so far as Sparta alone
was concerned, the Athenian felt little repugnance to any revolution
or any peril confined to a state whose councils it had been the object
of his life to baffle, and whose power it was the manifest interest of
his native city to impair. He might have looked with complacency on
the intrigues which the regent was carrying on against the Spartan
government, and which threatened to shake that Doric constitution to
its centre. But nothing, either in the witness of history or in the
character or conduct of a man profoundly patriotic, even in his vices,
favours the notion that he connived at the schemes which implicated,
with the Grecian, the Athenian welfare. Pausanias, far less able, was