Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/229

 It has hitherto been supposed that, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta left to Athens the control of Delos. This belief rested, partly on the Plutarchic anecdote of the Delians failing to obtain relief from Sparta, partly on the silence of ancient writers, and on the general probability of a concession at once cheap and politic. These grounds are inconclusive. And a fragmentary inscription lately found at Delos by M. Homolle makes it highly probable that the case was otherwise. The words are ... The mention of Delos indicates that this document concerned the island. Agis I. and Pausanias II. were the only two Spartan kings of those names who reigned together: the date must therefore be either 427–426 B.C. or 401–398 B.C.; since Pleistoanax, the father of Pausanias, was recalled in 426 and reigned till 408. Now, if the date was 427–426 B.C., one of the five ephors named by the inscription ought to occur in that list of eponymous ephors from 431 to 404 B.C. which is read in Xenophon But it is not so. Probably, then, the date lies between 408 and 398 B.C. The genitives at the beginning seem to depend on some lost verb with the notion of. We know from Diodorus that Athens