1. No mention is made of Hippias, who yet, if the event had happened in 519 B. C., must have been the person to determine whether the Athenians should assist Platæa or not. The Platæan envoys present themselves at a public sacrifice in the attitude of suppliants, so as to touch the feelings of the Athenian citizens generally: had Hippias been then despot, he would have been the person to be propitiated and to determine for or against assistance.
2. We know no cause which should have brought Kleomenês with a Lacedæmonian force near to Platæa in the year 519 B. C.: we know from the statement of Herodotus (v, 76) that no Lacedæmonian expedition against Attica took place at that time. But in the year to which I have referred the event, Kleomenês is on his march near the spot upon a known and assignable object. From the very tenor of the narrative, it is plain that Kleomenês and his army were not designedly in Bœotia, nor meddling with Bœotian affairs, at the time when the Platæans solicited his aid; he declines to interpose in the matter, pleading the great distance between Sparta and Platæa as a reason.
3. Again, Kleomenês, in advising the Platæans to solicit Athens, does not give the advice through good-will towards them, but through a desire to harass and perplex the Athenians, by entangling them in a quarrel with the Bœotians. At the point of time to which I have referred the incident, this was a very natural desire: he was angry, and perhaps alarmed, at the recent events which had brought about his expulsion from Athens. But what was there to make him conceive such a feeling against Athens during the reign of Hippias? That despot was on terms of the closest intimacy with Sparta: the Peisistratids were (ξείνους—ξεινίους ταμάλιστα—Herod. v, 63, 90, 91) “the particular guests” of the Spartans, who were only induced to take part against Hippias from a reluctant obedience to the oracles procured, one after another, by Kleisthenês. The motive, therefore, assigned by Herodotus, for the advice given by Kleomenês to the Platæans, can have no application to the time when Hippias was still despot.
4. That Herodotus did not conceive the victory gained by the Athenians over Thebes as having taken place before the expulsion of Hippias, is evident from his emphatic contrast between their warlike spirit and success when liberated from the despots, and their timidity or backwardness while under Hippias (Ἀθηναῖοι τυραννευόμενοι μὲν, οὐδαμῶν τῶν σφέας περιοικεόντων ἔσαν τὰ πολέμια ἀμείνους, ἀπαλλαχθέντες δὲ τυράννων, μακρῷ πρῶτοι ἐγένοντο· δηλοῖ ὦν ταῦτα, ὅτι κατεχόμενοι μὲν, ἐθελοκάκεον, etc. v, 78). The man who wrote thus cannot have believed that, in the year 519 B. C., while Hippias was in full sway, the Athenians gained an important victory over the Thebans, cut off a considerable portion of the Theban territory for the purpose of joining it to that of the Platæans, and showed from that time forward their constant superiority over Thebes by protecting her inferior neighbor against her.
These different reasons, taking them altogether, appear to me to show that the first alliance between Athens and Platæa, as Herodotus conceives and describes it, cannot have taken place before the expulsion of Hippias, in 510 B. C.; and induce me to believe, either that Thucydidês was mistaken in the date of that event, or that Herodotus has not correctly described the facts. Not seeing any reason to suspect the description given by the latter, I have departed, though unwillingly, from the date of Thucydidês.
The application of the Platæans to Kleomenês, and his advice grounded thereupon, may be connected more suitably with his first expedition to Athens, after the expulsion of Hippias, than with his second.
[297] Herodot. v, 75.
[298] Compare Kortüm, Zur Geschichte Hellenischer Staats-Verfassungen, p. 35 (Heidelberg, 1821).
I doubt, however, his interpretation of the words in Herodotus (v, 63)—εἴτε ἰδίῳ στόλῳ, εἴτε δημοσίῳ χρησόμενοι.
[299] Herodot. v, 77; Ælian, V. H. vi, 1; Pausan. i, 28, 2.