this letter fell into the hands of the enemy, and the letter was taken to Thebes.  Hereupon the Thebans entrusted their city to the care of the Athenians, who had come to their aid, and themselves started early in the evening, reached Haliartus a little before Lysander, and threw a body of troops into the town.  Lysander, on discovering this, at first determined to halt his army on a hill in the neighbourhood and await the arrival of Pausanias:  but as the day went on he could remain quiet no longer, but got his men under arms, harangued the allied troops, and led them in a close column down the road directly towards the city.  Upon this those of the Thebans who had remained outside the walls, leaving the city on their left hand, marched to attack the extreme rear of the Lacedaemonians, near the fountain which is called Kissousa,[157] in which there is a legend that Dionysus was washed by his nurses after his birth; for the water is wine-coloured and clear, and very sweet-tasted.  Round the fountain is a grove of the Cretan Storax-trees,[158] which the people of Haliartus point to as a proof of Rhadamanthus having lived there.  They also show his tomb, which they call Alea.  The sepulchre of Alkmena too is close by:  for the story goes that she married Rhadamanthus here after the death of Amphitryon.  Meanwhile the Thebans in the city, together with the citizens of Haliartus themselves, remained quiet until Lysander and the first ranks of the enemy came close to the walls, and then suddenly opening the gates they charged and slew him together with his soothsayer and some few more:  for most of them fled quickly back to the main body.  However as the Thebans did not desist but pressed on, the whole mass took to flight, and escaped to the neighbouring hills with a loss of about one thousand men.  Three hundred of the Thebans also fell in an attack which they made on the enemy in rough and difficult ground.  These men had been accused of favouring the Lacedaemonians, and it was to wipe out this unjust imputation before the eyes of their fellow citizens that they showed themselves so reckless of their lives.

XXIX.  When Pausanias heard of this disaster, he was marching from Plataea towards Thespiae.  He at once put his troops in array and proceeded to Haliartus.  Here likewise arrived Thrasybulus from Thebes, with an Athenian force.  On his arrival, Pausanias proposed to apply for permission to carry away the dead.  This proposal greatly shocked the older Spartans, who could not refrain from going to the king and imploring him not to receive back Lysander’s corpse by a truce[159] which was in itself a confession of defeat, but to let them fight for his body and either bury it as victors, or else to share their general’s fate as became them.  However, in spite of these representations, Pausanias, perceiving that it would be no easy task to overcome the Thebans, flushed as they were with the victory of the day before, and that, as Lysander’s body