[201] About Lygdamis, see Athenæus, viii, p. 348, and his citation from the lost work of Aristotle on the Grecian Πολιτεῖαι; also, Aristot. Politic. v, 5, 1. [202] Herodot. i, 63. On this third successful entry, he took vigorous precautions for rendering his seat permanent. The Alkmæônidæ and their immediate partisans retired into exile; but he seized the children of those who remained, and whose sentiments he suspected, as hostages for the behavior of their parents, and placed them in Naxos, under the care of Lygdamis. Moreover, he provided himself with a powerful body of Thracian mercenaries, paid by taxes levied upon the people:[203] nor did he omit to conciliate the favor of the gods by a purification of the sacred island of Delos: all the dead bodies which had been buried within sight of the temple of Apollo were exhumed and reinterred farther off. At this time the Delian festival,—attended by the Asiatic Ionians and the islanders, and with which Athens was of course peculiarly connected,—must have been beginning to decline from its pristine magnificence; for the subjugation of the continental Ionic cities by Cyrus had been already achieved, and the power of Samos, though increased under the despot Polykratês, seems to have increased at the expense and to the ruin of the smaller Ionic islands. From the same feelings, in part, which led to the purification of Delos,—partly as an act of party revenue,—Peisistratus caused the houses of the Alkmæônids to be levelled with the ground, and the bodies of the deceased members of that family to be disinterred and cast out of the country.[204] [203] Herodot. i, 64. ἐπικούροισί τε πολλοῖσι, καὶ χρημάτων συνόδοισι, τῶν μὲν αὐτόθεν, τῶν δὲ ἀπὸ Στρύμονος ποτάμου προσιόντων. [204] Isokratês, Or. xvi, De Bigis, c. 351.