The fact, and the criticism upon it, now before us are remarkably illustrated by an analogous case recounted in a previous chapter, (vol. ii, p. 421, chap. viii.) Nearly at the same period as this stratagem of Peisistratus, the Lacedæmonians and the Argeians agreed to decide, by a combat of three hundred select champions, the dispute between them as to the territory of Kynuria. The combat actually took place, and the heroism of Othryades, sole Spartan survivor, has been already recounted. In the eleventh year of the Peloponnesian war, shortly after or near upon the period when we may conceive the history of Herodotus to have been finished, the Argeians concluded a treaty with Lacedæmon, and introduced as a clause into it the liberty of reviving their pretensions to Kynuria, and of again deciding the dispute by a combat of select champions. To the Lacedæmonians of that time this appeared extreme folly,—the very proceeding which had been actually resorted to a century before. Here is another case, in which the change in the point of view, and the increased positive tendencies in the Greek mind, are brought to our notice not less forcibly than by the criticism of Herodotus upon Phyê-Athênê. Istrus (one of the Atthido-graphers of the third century B. C.) and Antiklês published books respecting the personal manifestations or epiphanies of the gods,—Ἀπόλλωνος ἐπιφανεῖαι: see Istri Fragment. 33-37, ed. Didot. If Peisistratus and Megaklês had never quarrelled, their joint stratagem might have continued to pass for a genuine epiphany, and might have been included as such in the work of Istrus. I will add, that the real presence of the gods, at the festivals celebrated in their honor, was an idea continually brought before the minds of the Greeks. The Athenians fully believed the epiphany of the god Pan to Pheidippidês the courier, on his march to Sparta, a little before the battle of Marathôn (Herodot. vi, 105, καὶ ταῦτα Ἀθηναῖοι πιστεύσαντες εἶναι ἀληθέα), and even Herodotus himself does not controvert it, though he relaxes the positive character of history so far as to add—“as Pheidippidês himself said and recounted publicly to the Athenians.” His informants in this case were doubtless sincere believers; whereas, in the case of Phyê, the story was told to him at first as a fabrication.