XXIII.  Lysander now at once began to urge him to make a campaign in Asia, holding out to him hopes of conquering the Persians and making himself the greatest man in the world.  He also wrote to his friends in Asia, bidding them ask the Lacedaemonians to send them Agesilaus to act as their commander in chief in the war with the Persians.  They obeyed, and sent an embassy to demand him:  which was as great an honour to Agesilaus as his being made king, and which, like the other, he owed to Lysander alone.  However, ambitious natures, though in other respects fit for great commands, often fail in important enterprises through jealousy of their rivals; for they make those men their opponents who would otherwise have been their assistants in obtaining success.  On this occasion Agesilaus took Lysander with him, as the chief of his board of thirty counsellors, and treated him as his greatest friend; but when they reached Asia, the people there would not pay their court to Agesilaus, whom they did not know, while all Lysander’s friends flocked round him to renew their former intimacy, and all those who feared him assiduously courted his favour.  Thus, as in a play we often see that a messenger or servant engrosses all the interest of the spectators and really acts the leading part, while he who wears the crown and bears the sceptre is hardly heard to speak, so now it was the counsellor who obtained all the honours due to a commander in chief, while the king had merely the title without any influence whatever.  It was necessary, no doubt, that this excessive power of Lysander should be curtailed, and he himself forced to take the second place:  but yet to disgrace and ruin a friend and one from whom he had received great benefits, would have been unworthy of Agesilaus.  Consequently at first he did not entrust him with the conduct of matters of importance, and did not give him any separate command.  In the next place, he invariably disobliged, and refused the applications, of any persons on whose behalf he understood Lysander to be interested, and thus gradually undermined his power.  When however after many failures Lysander perceived that his interest on his friends’ behalf was a drawback rather than an advantage to them, he ceased from urging their claims, and moreover begged them not to pay their court to him, but to attach themselves to the king, and to those who were able to promote and reward their followers.  Most of them on hearing this no longer troubled him on matters of business, but continued on the most friendly terms with him, and angered Agesilaus more than ever by the manner in which they flocked round him in public places and walks, showing thereby their dislike to the king.  Agesilaus now bestowed the government of cities and the conduct of important expeditions upon various obscure soldiers, but appointed Lysander his carver, and then in an insulting manner told the Ionians to go and pay their court to his carver.  At this Lysander determined to have an