Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/467

 PROPOSITION OF A SIMILAR COMBAT. 45) rous pugnacity which is noticed among the attributes of the early Greeks, 1 and also with various legendary exploits, such as the single combat of Echemus and Hyllus, of Melanthus and Xan- thus, of Menelaus and Paris, etc. Moreover, the heroism of Othryades and his countrymen was a popular theme for poets, not only at the Spartan gymnopasdia, 2 but also elsewhere, and appears to have been frequently celebrated. The absurdity at- tached to this proposition, then, during the Peloponnesian war, - in the minds even of the Spartans, the most old-fashioned and unchanging people in Greece, is to be ascribed to a change in the Grecian political mind, at and after the Persian war. The habit of political calculation had made such decided progress among them, that the leading states especially had become familiarized with something like a statesmanlike view of their resources, their dangers, and their obligations. How lamentably deficient this sort of sagacity was during the Persian invasion, will appear when we come to describe that imminent crisis of Grecian independence : but the events of those days were well calculated to sharpen it for the future, and the Greeks of ihe Peloponnesian war had become far more refined political schemers than their forefathers. And thus it happened that the proposition to settle a territorial dispute by a duel of chosen champions, admissible and even becoming a century before, came afterwards to be derided as childish. The inhabitants of Kynuria are stated by Herodotus to have been lonians, but completely Dorized through their long sub- jection to Argos, by whom they were governed as Periceki. Pausanias gives a different account of their race, which he traces to the eponymous hero Kynurus, son of Perseus : but he does not connect them with the Kynurians whom he mentions in another place as a portion of the inhabitants of Arcadia. 3 It is evident that, even in the time of Herodotus, the traces of their primitive descent were nearly effaced. He says they were " Omeates and Periceki " to Argos ; and it appears that the 1 Hcrodot. vii. 9. Compare the challenge which Herodotus alleges to have been proclaimed to the Spartans by Mardonius, through a herald Just before the battle of Plataea (ix. 48). 3 Herod, viii. 73 ; Pausan. iii. 2, 2 ; viii. 27, 3.
 * Athenae. xv. p. 678.