His actions and enterprises were invariably inconsistent and vague.

He enters Athens to restore her liberties-- joins with Isagoras to destroy them; engages in an attempt to revolutionize that energetic state without any adequate preparation-- seizes the citadel to-day to quit it disgracefully to-morrow; invades Eleusis with an army he cannot keep together, and, in the ludicrous cunning common to the insane, disguises from his allies the very enemy against whom they are to fight, in order, as common sense might have expected, to be deserted by them in the instant of battle.

And now, prosecuting still further the contradictory tenour of his conduct, he who had driven Hippias from Athens persuades the Spartan assembly to restore the very tyrant the Spartan arms had expelled.

In order to stimulate the fears of his countrymen, Cleomenes [259] asserted, that he had discovered in the Athenian citadel certain oracular predictions, till then unknown, foreboding to the Spartans many dark and strange calamities from the hands of the Athenians [260].

The astute people whom the king addressed were more moved by political interests than religious warnings.