Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/54

 38 HISTORY OF GREECE. Hermann,, O. Miiller, and Dr. Thirhvall suppose, 1 can be hardly admitted consistently with the narrative of Herodotus, who men- tions the continuance of the insulting names imposed by him upon the Dorian tribes for many years after his death. Now, had the Spartans forcibly interfered for the suppression of his dynasty, we may reasonably presume that, even if they did not restore the decided preponderance of the Dorians in Sikyon, they would at least have rescued the Dorian tribes from this obvious igno- miny. But it seems doubtful whether Kleisthenes had any son : and the extraordinary importance attached to the marriage of his daughter, Agariste, whom he bestowed upon the Athenian Me- gakles of the great family of Alkmaeonidae, seems rather to evince that she was an heiress, not to his power, but to his wealth. There can be no doubt as to the fact of that marriage, from which was born the Athenian leader Kleisthenes, afterwards the author of the great democratical revolution at Athens after the expul- sion of the Peisistratidte ; but the lively and amusing details A'ith which Herodotus has surrounded it, bear much more the stamp of romance than of reality. Dressed up, apparently, by some ingenious Athenian, as a compliment to the Alknia;onid lineage of his city, which comprised both Kleisthenes and Peri- kles, the narrative commemorates a marriage-rivalry between that lineage and another noble Athenian house, and at the same the daughter of the Sikyonian Kleisthenes cannot have taken place until considerably after 556 B. c. See the long, but not very satisfactory, note of Larcher, ad Herodot. v, 66. But I shall show grounds for believing, when I recount the interview between Solon and Croesus, that Herodotus in his conception of events mis- dates very considerably the reign and proceedings of Croesus as well as of Peisistratus : this is a conjecture of Niebuhr which I think very just, and which is rendered still more probable by what we find here stated about the succession of the Alkmaeonidae. For it is evident that Herodotus here con- ceives the adventure between Alkmaeon and Croesus as having occurred one generation (about twenty-five or thirty years) anterior to the marriage be- tween Megakles and the daughter of Kleisthenus. That adventure will thus stand about 590-585 u. c., which would be about the time of the supposed inttrvkw (if real) between Solon and Croesus, describing the maximum of Ac power and prosperity of the latter. 1 Miiller, Dofians, book i, 8, 2 ; Thirlwall, Hist, of Greece, vol. i, ch. x, o. 486, 3d ed.