Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/329

 JEECUN CONFEDERACY UNDER ATHENS. 305 corned by the people in solemn and joyous procession, as if the hero himself had come back, was deposited in the interior of the prove that which he asserts. The two passages of DIodorus have, indeed, CO bearing upon the event : and in so far as Diodorus is in this case an au- thority at all, he goes against Mr. Clinton, for he states Skyros to have been conquered in 470 n.c. (Diodor. xi, 60). Thucydides only tells us that the operations against Eion, Skyros, and Karystus, took place in the order here indicated, and at some periods between 476 and 466 B.C.: but he does not enable us to detennine positively the date of either. Upon what authority Mr. Clinton states, that " the oracle was not procured till six or seven years aftenvards." (i. e., after the conquest,) I do not know: the ac- count of Plutarch goes rather to show that it was procured si.x or seven years hrfore the conquest : and'this may stand good until some better testi- mony is produced to contradict it. As our infomiation now stands, we have no testimony as to the year of the conquest except that of Diodorus, who assigns it to 470 B.C., but as he assigns both the conquest of Eion and the expeditions of Kimon against Karia and Pamphylia with the victories of ' he Eurymcdon. all to the same year, we cannot much trust his author- itj Nevertheless, I incline to believe him as to the date of the conquest of Skyros : because it seems to me very probable that this conquest took place in the year immediately before that in which the body of Theseus was brouglit to Athens, which latter event may be referred with great con- fidence to 469 B.C., in consequence of the interesting anecdote related by Plutarch about the first prize gained by the poet Sophokles. Mr. Clinton has given in his Appendix (Nos.. vi-viii, pp. 248-253) two Dissertations respecting the chronology of the period from the Persian war do^NTi to the close of the Peloponnesian war. He has rendered much ser- vice by correcting the mistake of Dodwell, Wesseling, and Mitford (founded upon an inaccurate construction of a passage in Isokrates) in supposing, after the Persian invasion of Greece, a Spartan hegemony, lasting ten years, prior to the commencement of the Athenian hegemony. He has sho^vn that the latter must be reckoned as commencing in 477, or 476 B.C., imme- diately after the mutiny of the allies against Pausanias, — whose command, however, need not be peremptorily restricted to one year, as Mr. Clinton Cp. 252) and Dodwell maintain: for the words of Thucydides, ev ryde r^ rr/Ffinvia, imply nothing as to annual duration, and designate merely " the hegemony which preceded that of Athens." But the refutation of this mistake does not enable us to establish any good positive chronology for the period between 477 and 466 B.C. It will not do to construe YI/jutov /xev (Thuc. i, 98) in reference to the Athenian conquest of Eion, as if it must necessarily mean " the year after " 477 B.C. If we could imagine that Thucydides had told us all the military operations between 477-466 B.C., we should be compelled to admit plenty of that "interval of inaction" against which Mr. Clinton so strongly protests (p. VOL. V. 20oc