Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/73

 WAR WITH ^GINA. 4^ century of continued expiatory sacrifice had not been sufficient to wipe out.i The Athenians who were to have assisted Nikodromus arrived at ^gina one day too late. Their proceedings had been de- layed by the necessity of borrowing twenty triremes from the Corinthians, in addition to fifty of their own : with tiiese seventy sail they defeated the ^ginetans, who met them with a fleet of equal number, and then landed on the island. The ^ginetans solicited aid from Argos, but that city was either too much dis- pleased with them, or too much exhausted by the defeat sus- tained from the Spartan Kleomenes, to grant it. Nevertheless, one thousand Argeian volunteers, under a distinguished cham- pion of the pentathlon named Eurybates, came to their assistance, and a vigorous war was carried on, with varying success, against the Athenian armament. At sea, the Athenians sustained a defeat, being attacked at a moment when their fleet was in disorder, so that they lost four ships with their crews : on land they were more successful, and few of the Argeian volunteers survived to return home. The general of the latter, Eurybates, confiding in his great personal strength and skill, challenged the best of the Athenian warriors to single combat : he slew three of them in succession, but the arm of the fourth, Sophanes of Dekeleia, was victorious, and proved fatal to him.2 At length the invaders wen- obliged to leave the island without any decisive result, and the «ar seems ' Herodot. vi, 91. 'Arro rovrov 6e Kal uyoi; a<pi iyeve-a^ rb £H-^vaacr-&ac ovx oloi re eyivuvro E-jriuiJxavufisvoi, dA/l' E<pT&tiaav iK~ea6vTeg TZjjuTupov ^k Ttjc vrjdov fi a<^t Wcuv ytviG'^ai rr/v i?e6v. Compare Thucyd. ii, 27 about the final expulsion from JEgina. The Lacedaemonians assigned to these expelled ^.ginetans a new abode in the territory of ThjTea, on the eastern coast of Peloponnesus, where they were attacked, taken prisoners, and put to death by the Athenians, in the eighth year of the war (Thucyd. iv, 57). Now Herodotus, while he mentions the expulsion, does not allude to their subsequent and still more calamitous fate. Had he knov-n the fact, he could hardly have failed to notice it, as a farther consummation of the divine judgment. We may reasonably pre- sume ignorance in this case, which would tend to support the opinion .hrown out in my preceding volume (chap, xxxiii, p. 225, note) respecting the date of composition of his history, — in the earUest years of the Pelo- ponnesian war. * Herodot. ix, 75. VOL. V. 8 4oc