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 168 HISTORY OF GREECE. productive only of burden to the one party, yet insufficient as a protection to the other. Meanwhile Kleomenes had returned to Sparta full of resent- ment against the Athenians, and resolved on punishing them, as well as on establishing his friend Isagoras as despot over them. Having been taught, however, by humiliating experience, that this was no easy achievement, he would not make the attempt, without having assembled a considerable force ; he summoned allies from all the various states of Peloponnesus, yet without venturing to inform them what he was about to undertake. He at the same time concerted measures with the Boeotians, and with the Chalkidians of Eubosa, for a simultaneous invasion of Attica on all sides. It appears that he had greater confidence in their hostile dispositions towards Athens than in those of the Peloponnesians, for he was not afraid to acquaint them with hia oracles procured, one after another, by Kleisthenes. The motive, therefore assigned by Herodotus, for the advice given by Kleomenes to the Plataeans, can have no application to the time when Hippias was still despot. 4. That Herodotus did not conceive the victory gained by the Athenians over Thebes as having taken place before the expulsion of Hippias, is evi dent from his emphatic contrast between their warlike spirit and success when liberated from the despots, and their timidity or backwardness while under Hippias ('Ai9j?vatoi rvpavvevofievoi /J.EV, ovfiafitiv TUV atyiaq KCOVTUV iaav TO. TroTiefiia u/nelvovf, uirah'Xax'&EVTee tie rupuvvuv, irpiJTOi kyivovro' 6r]^.ol uv ravra, on Karexopevot. fisv, edehoKuneov, etc. v, 78). The man who wrote thus cannot have believed that, in the year 519 B.C., while Hippias was in full sway, the Athenians gained an important victory over the Thebans, cut off a considerable portion of the Theban territory for the purpose of joining it to that of the Plata:ans, and showed from that time forward their constant superiority over Thebes by protecting her inferior neighbor against her. These different reasons, taking them altogether, appear to me to show that the first alliance between Athens and Plata:a, as Herodotus conceives Rnd describes it. cannot have taken place before the expulsion of Hippias, 'in 510 B.C.; and induce me to believe, either that Thucydides was mistaken
 * .n the date of that event, or that Herodotus has not correctly described the

facts. Not seeing any reason to suspect the description given by the latter, 1 have departed, though unwillingly, from the date of Thucydides. The application of the Platseans to Kleomenes, and his advice grounded thereupon, may be connected more suitably with his first expedition to A-thens. ai^cr the expulsion of Hippias, than with his second-