Serpent Column - in Ancient Writers - Thucydides and Demosthenes

Thucydides and Demosthenes

An insight into the political squabbles of the victorious Greeks over this monument is given in the following passages. Full of arrogance over his victory at Plataea and the subsequent ease with which he punished the Theban leaders for their support of the Persians, Pausanias ordered a dedication on the column ascribing victory to himself alone. Subsequent events revealed his overweening ambition. He was in negotiation with the Persians and the Helots of Sparta to stage a rebellion, and set himself up as Tyrant, with Persian support. Although his treachery was, at first, disbelieved in Sparta, it was eventually discovered by the Ephors at Sparta through his personal slave, and he was killed. Thucydides, describes the suspicions of the Spartans that Pausanias, the commander-in chief of the Greek forces at Plataea, was on the point of treason and going over to the Persians, citing the affair of the Serpentine column as a ground for such suspicion:” “ He Pausanias provided many grounds for suspicion by his disregard of the laws, his admiration of the Barbarians, and his dissatisfaction with things as they were. They examined the rest of his behaviour to see if he had in any way departed from established norms. They then remembered that in the matter of the tripod at Delphi, which the Greeks set up from the first fruits of the victory over the Persians, he had thought fit, on his own account, to have a diptych engraved upon it:

‘Pausanias, commander-in-chief of the Greeks, when he had destroyed the army of the Medes, dedicated this memorial to Phoebus (Apollo).’

At the time, the Lacedaemonians at once deleted the diptych from this tripod and engraved the names of the cities, who had joined together against the barbarian and set up the offering.”

Demosthenes, gives a significantly different account of the train of events. In a speech, “Against Neiara”, the orator recalls the conduct of Pausanias after the defeat of the Persians in the battle of Plataea over the Serpentine column: “Pausanias, King of the Lacedaemonians, caused a diptych to be inscribed on the tripod at Delphi, as follows: ‘Pausanias, commander-in-chief of the Greeks, when he had destroyed the army of the Medes dedicated this memorial to Phoebus (Apollo)’, as if the work and the offering were his alone, and not from the allies together. The Greeks were enraged and the Plataeans obtained leave to bring a suit, on behalf of the allies, against the Lacedaemonians for 1,000 talents at the Amphictyonic council; and they compelled the Lacedaemonians to erase the inscription and inscribe the names of those cities which had shared in the work”.

The orator goes on to argue that this action rankled with the Lacedaemonians and was a strong motive, 50 years later, in their influencing the Theban night attack on Plataea in 431 BC, which was the first action in the Peloponnesian war described in Thucydides book 2.