The acropolis at Athens, having been the primitive city inhabited, bore the name of The City even in the time of Thucydides (ii, 15), at a time when Athens and Peiræus covered so large a region around and near it.
[79] Herodot. vi, 91. χεῖρες δὲ κεῖναι ἐμπεφυκυῖαι ἦσαν τοῖσι ἐπισπαστῆρσι. The word κεῖναι for ἐκεῖναι, “those hands,” appears so little suitable in this phrase, that I rather imagine the real reading to have been κειναὶ (the Ionic dialect for κεναὶ), “the hands with nothing attached to them:” compare a phrase not very unlike, Homer, Iliad, iii, 376, κεινὴ δὲ τρυφάλεια ἅμ’ ἕσπετο, etc.
Compare the narrative of the arrest of the Spartan king Pausanias, and of the manner in which he was treated when in sanctuary at the temple of Athênê Chalkiœkos (Thucyd. i, 134).
[80] Herodot. vi, 91. Ἀπὸ τούτου δὲ καὶ ἄγος σφι ἐγένετο, τὸ ἐκθύσασθαι οὐκ οἶοί τε ἐγένοντο ἐπιμηχανώμενοι, ἀλλ’ ἔφθησαν ἐκπεσόντες πρότερον ἐκ τῆς νήσου ἤ σφι ἵλεον γενέσθαι τὴν θεόν.
Compare Thucyd. ii, 27 about the final expulsion from Ægina. The Lacedæmonians assigned to these expelled Æginetans a new abode in the territory of Thyrea, on the eastern coast of Peloponnesus, where they were attacked, taken prisoners, and put to death by the Athenians, in the eighth year of the war (Thucyd. iv, 57). Now Herodotus, while he mentions the expulsion, does not allude to their subsequent and still more calamitous fate. Had he known the fact, he could hardly have failed to notice it, as a farther consummation of the divine judgment. We may reasonably presume ignorance in this case, which would tend to support the opinion thrown out in my preceding volume (chap. xxxiii, p. 225, note) respecting the date of composition of his history,—in the earliest years of the Peloponnesian war.
[81] Herodot. ix, 75.
[82] Herodot. vi, 90-93. Thucyd. i, 41. About Sôphanês, comp. ix, 75.
How much damage was done by such a privateering war, between countries so near as Ægina and Attica, may be seen by the more detailed description of a later war of the same kind in 388 B. C. (Xenophon, Hellenic. v. 1.)
[83] Plutarch, Themist. c. 19.
[84] See Mr. Galt’s interesting account of the Hydriot sailors, Voyages and Travels in the Mediterranean, pp. 376-378 (London, 1802).