There is another 'tenth Temenid,' specially connected in the legends with Pheidon as a contemporary and opponent, Archias of Corinth, who is said to have led the first colony to Sicily. I have no doubt that the same chronography which placed Pheidon in the eighth Olympiad (747 B.C.) placed Archias there, and, allowing for a few years of domestic struggles, sent him to Sicily in 735 B.C.[62:1]
To my mind this legend is quite unhistorical, nay, it may possibly have falsified real history; for though it may have suited the national vanity of Antiochus of Syracuse and other old historians to magnify their own city by putting it first, or practically first, in the list, the whole situation points to a different course of events.
associated with legends of Corcyra and Croton.
Thucydides counts downward from this imaginary date.
Archias, when on his way, is said to have left a party to settle at Corcyra; he is also said to have helped the founder of Croton. It is surely improbable that Greek adventurers in search of good land and convenient harbours should fix on Sicily, passing by the sites of Tarentum, Sybaris, Croton, and Locri. That these sites were fully appreciated is shown by the flourishing cities which the legend asserts to have been founded in the generation succeeding the origin of Syracuse. Will any unprejudiced man believe all this most improbable history? The one fact which the old chronologers of Syracuse could not get over was this: from time immemorial Greek ships arriving in Sicily offered sacrifices at the temple of Apollo Archegetes at
Naxos. Hence Naxos must have been the first settlement. In the following year, says Thucydides, Syracuse was founded; and then all the dates which he copies from his authority—most likely Antiochus—are, as usual, downward from the date of Syracuse, and almost all in numbers divisible by five.
I will pause a moment, and give the reader a summary of the conclusions to which critical scholars in general have given their assent. It is conceded that Thucydides must have used Antiochus of Syracuse as his principal source in narrating the archæology of Sicily. This opinion, first stated by Niebuhr, has been argued out fully by Wölfflin, and accepted with some reluctance by Holm, Classen (the best editor of Thucydides), and Busolt[64:1].
Antiochus of Syracuse
not trustworthy;
his dates illusory,