It was the Spartan custom, in the case of citizens who died in foreign countries, to pay them the last rites wherever they might be, but to take home the remains of their kings.  Consequently the Spartan counsellors enveloped the body in melted wax, as they could not obtain honey, and took it home to Lacedaemon.

Archidamus, the son of Agesilaus, succeeded him on the throne, and his posterity continued to reign until Agis, the fifth in descent from Agesilaus, was murdered by Leonidas, because he endeavoured to restore the ancient discipline of Sparta.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 174:  This passage has been admirably paraphrased by Grote, ‘History of Greece,’ Part II. ch. lxxiii.:—­

“Combined with that ability and energy in which he was never deficient, this conciliatory policy ensured him more real power than had ever fallen to the lot of any king of Sparta—­power, not merely over the military operations abroad, which usually fell to the kings, but also over the policy of the state at home.  On the increase and maintenance of that real power, his chief thoughts were concentrated; new dispositions generated by kingship, which had never shown themselves in him before.  Despising, like Lysander, both money, luxury, and all the outward show of power, he exhibited, as a king, an ultra-Spartan simplicity, carried almost to affectation in diet, clothing, and general habits.  But like Lysander, also, he delighted in the exercise of dominion through the medium of knots or factions of devoted partizans, whom he rarely scrupled to uphold in all their career of injustice and oppression.  Though an amiable man, with no disposition to tyranny and still less to plunder, for his own benefit—­Agesilaus thus made himself the willing instrument of both, for the benefit of his various coadjutors and friends, whose power and consequence he identified with his own.”  See also infra, ch. xiii. et al.]

[Footnote 175:  We see here the beginning of that tendency of the Neoplatonic school to find a sanction for all their theories in some perversion of the plain meaning of Homer’s words.]

[Footnote 176:  Compare Life of Lysander, ch. xxiii.]

[Footnote 177:  In Sintenis’s text of Plutarch this prince’s name is spelt as above.  Xenophon, however, in his Life of Agesilaus, spells it Otys; and this reading has been adopted by Grote.  It must be remembered that Xenophon was probably an eye-witness of the proceedings which he records, and that Plutarch lived several centuries later.]

[Footnote 178:  The Greek word here translated “guest” is explained by Liddell and Scott, s.v., to mean “any person in a foreign city with whom one has a treaty of hospitality for self and heirs, confirmed by mutual presents and an appeal to [Greek:  Zeus xenios].”]

[Footnote 179:  He sought to compose the dissensions and misrule which had arisen out of the Lysandrian Dekarchies, or governments of ten, in the Greco-Asiatic cities, avoiding as much as possible the infliction of death or exile.—­Grote, part ii. ch. lxxiii.]