The greater number, however, when their allies were falling away from them and it was expected that Epaminondas, in all the pride of a conqueror, would invade Peloponnesus, fell to thinking of the oracles, 1 in view of the lameness of Agesilaüs, and were full of dejection and consternation in respect to the divine powers, believing that their city was in an evil plight because they had dethroned the sound-footed king and chosen instead a lame and halting one,—the very thing which the deity was trying to teach them carefully to avoid.
Edition :
Plutarch Lives V: Agesilaus and Pompey, Pelopidas and Marcellus, Ed. Jeffrey Henderson, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (The Loeb Classical Library 87), Harvard University Press: Cambridge/MA - London 1961 (first ed. 1917).
