After the battle he at once recovered the cities on the seaboard.  He took AEgae, treated the inhabitants very harshly, and left a garrison of Celtic mercenary troops in the town.  These Gauls, with the insatiate greed for money for which that nation is noted, proceeded to break open the sepulchres of the Macedonian kings who were buried there, in search of plunder, and wantonly scattered their bones.  Pyrrhus seemed but little disturbed at this outrage, either because his affairs gave him no leisure to think about it, or because he thought it dangerous to punish his barbarian allies:  but the Macedonians were deeply grieved by it.  And yet, although he was far from being firmly established in his new kingdom, he was already forming new schemes of conquest.  In raillery he called Antigonus a shameless man because he had not yet laid aside the royal purple for the dress of a private man, and he eagerly accepted the invitation of Kleonymus the Spartan to go and attack Lacedaemon.  This Kleonymus was by birth the rightful heir to the throne, but being thought to be a violent and tyrannical person he was hated and distrusted by the Spartans, who had chosen his nephew Areus to be their king.  This was the reason of his having long borne a grudge against his countrymen, but besides this his feelings had been recently wounded by a family quarrel.

Kleonymus, now an elderly man, had married a beautiful wife of the royal blood, Chilonis, the daughter of Leotychides.  She fell madly in love with Akrotatus, the son of Areus, a youth in the flower of his age, and the dishonour of Kleonymus became notorious all over Sparta.  This private wrong, added to his previous exclusion from the throne, so enraged him, that he invited Pyrrhus to attack Sparta, which he did with an army of twenty-five thousand foot, two thousand horse, and twenty-four elephants, so that it was obvious that he did not mean to gain Sparta for Kleonymus, but to conquer the whole of Peloponnesus for himself, although he answered some Spartan envoys who waited on him at Megalopolis in specious language, stating that he had come with the intention of restoring to freedom the cities which were held in subjection by Antigonus, and actually going so far as to tell them that, if possible, he intended to send his younger sons to Sparta to be trained in the Laconian discipline, by which they would be able to surpass all the other kings of their age.  He put off the envoys with these stories, and made them accompany his army, but on reaching the Lacedaemonian territory he at once began to plunder and lay it waste.  When the envoys remonstrated with him for having invaded their country without a declaration of war, he answered—­“We know well that neither do you Spartans tell any one beforehand what you mean to do.”  One of the envoys, by name Mandrokleides, said in his broad Laconian speech, “If you are a god, we shall not be harmed by you, for we have done no wrong; but if you are a man, you may meet with a stronger man than yourself.”