Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/19

 SIKYON.-MEGABA, 3 conterminous with Attica at the point where the mountains called Kerata descend to Eleusis and the Thracian plain, is af- firmed to have been originally settled by the Dorians of Corinth, and to have remained for some time a dependency of that city It is farther said to have been at first merely one of five separate villages, Megara, Herrca, Peirnea, Kynosura, Tripodiskus, in- habited by a kindred population, and generally on friendly terms, yet sometimes distracted by quarrels, and on those occasions carrying on war with a degree of lenity and chivalrous confi- dence which reverses the proverbial affirmation respecting the sanguinary character of enmities between kindred. Both these two statements are transmitted to us (we know not from what primitive source) as explanatory of certain current phrases : ' the author of the latter cannot have agreed with the author of the former in considering the Corinthians as masters of the Me- garid, because he represents them as fomenting wars among these five villages for the purpose of acquiring that territory. What- ever may be the truth respecting this alleged early subjection of Megara, we know it ~ in the historical age, and that too as early as the 14th Olympiad, only as an independent Dorian city, 1 The first account seems referred to Demon (an author of about 280 B c., and a collector of Attic archaeology, or what is called 'Ardi66-/pa$of. Seo Phanodemi, Demonis, Clitodemi, atquc Istri, 'Ari?iJcji>, Fragmenta, ed. Siebelis, Prafatio, pp. viii-xi), and is given as the explanation of the locution 6 Ator Koptvdof. See Schol. ad Pindar. Nem. vii, ad finem ; Schol. Aristophan. Kan. 440 : the Corinthians seem to have represented their eponymous hero as son of Zeus, though other Greeks did not believe them (Pausan. ii. 1, 1). That the Megarians were compelled to come to Corinth for demonstration of mourning on occasion of the decease of any of the members of the Bacchiad oligarchy, is, perhaps, a story copied from the regulation at Sparta regarding the Periocki and Helots (Herod, vi, 57; Pausan. iv, 14,3; Tyrtrcus, Fragm.). Pausanias conceives the victory of the Mogarians over the Corinthians, which he saw commemorated in the Megarian tf^om'poc at Olympia. as having taken place before the 1st Olympiad, when Phorbas was life-archon at Athens : Phorbas is placed by chronologers fifth in the series from Medon, son of Codrus (Pausan. i. 3'J, 4 ; vi. 19, 9). The early enmity between Corinth and Megara is alluded to in Plutarch, De Malignitate Herodoti, p. 868, c. 35. The second story noticed in the text is given by Plutarch, Question. Gra;c. c. 17, p. 295. in illustration of the meaning of the word AoptJ^evof. 8 PuuaniftS, i, 44. 1, and the epigram upon Orsippus in Bocckli, Corjius InsiTiut. (ir. No. 1050, with Boeekh's commentary.