Page:History of Greece Vol IX.djvu/366

 344 HIM OKI OF GREECE. laus, they immediately retired to the city by the road to Ken chreae, leaving their sacrifices half-finished. Not thinking fit to disturb their retreat, Agesilaus proceeded first to offer sacrifice himself, and then took a position close at hand, in the sacred ground of Poseidon, while the Corinthian exiles went through the solemnities in due form, and distributed the parsley wreaths to the victors. After remaining three days, Agesilaus marched away to attack Peiraeum. He had no sooner departed, than the Corinthi- ans from the city came forth, celebrated the festival and distributed the wreaths a second tune. Peiraeum was occupied by so numerous a guard, comprising Iphi- krates and his peltasts, that Agesilaus, instead of directly attack- ing it, resorted to the stratagem of making a sudden retrograde march directly towards Corinth. Probably, many of the citizens were at that moment absent for the second celebration of the festi- val ; so that those remaining within, on hearing of the approach of Agesilaus, apprehended a plot to betray the city to him, and sent in haste to Peiraeum to summon back Iphikrates with his pel- tasts. Having learned that these troops had passed by in the also) to protect the Corinthians of the city in the exercise of their usual privilege ; just as Agesilaus, immediately afterwards, stood by to protect the Corinthian exiles while they were doing the same thing. The Isthmian games were trietlric, that is, celebrated in every alternate year ; in one of the spring months, about April or perhaps the beginning of May (the Greek months being lunar, no one of them would coincide regu- larly with any one of our calendar months, year after year) ; and in the second and fourth Olympic years. From Thucydides, viii, 9, 10, we know that this festival was celebrated in April 412 B. c. ; that is, towards the end of the fourth year of Olympiad 91, about two or three months before the festival of Olympiad 92. Dodwell (De Cyclis Diss. vi, 2, just cited), Corsini, (Diss. Agonistic, iv, 3), aad Schneider in his note to this passage of Xenophon, all state the Isthmian games to have been celebrated in the first and third Olympic years ; which is, in my judgment, a mistake. Dodwell erroneously states the Isthmian games mentioned in Thucydides, viii, 9, to have been celebrated at the beginning of Olympiad 92, instead of the fourth quarter of the fourth year of Olympiad 91 ; a mistake pointed out by Kriiger (adloc.) as well as by Poppo and Dr. Arnold ; although the argumentation of the latter, founded upon the time of the Lacedaemonian festival of the Hyakinthia, is extremely uncertain. It is a still more strange idea of Dodwell, that the Isthmian games were celebrated at the same time as the Olrmpic games (Anral Xenoph ad ann. 392)