The expedition of Miltiadês to the Chersonese must have occurred early after the first usurpation of Peisistratus, since even his imprisonment by the Lampsakenes happened before the ruin of Crœsus, (546 B. C.). But it was not till much later,—probably during the third and most powerful period of Peisistratus,—that the latter undertook his expedition against Sigeium in the Troad. This place appears to have fallen into the hands of the Mityleneans: Peisistratus retook it,[229] and placed there his illegitimate son Hegesistratus as despot. The Mityleneans may have been enfeebled at this time (somewhere between 537-527 B. C.) not only by the strides of Persian conquest on the mainland, but also by the ruinous defeat which they suffered from Polykratês and the Samians.[230] Hegesistratus maintained the place against various hostile attempts, throughout all the reign of Hippias, so that the Athenian possessions in those regions comprehended at this period both the Chersonese and Sigeium.[231] To the former of the two, Hippias sent out Miltiadês, nephew of the first œkist, as governor, after the death of his brother Stesagoras. The new governor found much discontent in the peninsula, but succeeded in subduing it by entrapping and imprisoning the principal men in each town. He farther took into his pay a regiment of five hundred mercenaries, and married Hegesipylê, daughter of the Thracian king Olorus.[232] It appears to have been about 515 B. C. that this second Miltiadês went out to the Chersonese.[233] He seems to have been obliged to quit it for a time, after the Scythian expedition of Darius, in consequence of having incurred the hostility of the Persians; but he was there from the beginning of the Ionic revolt until about 493 B. C., or two or three years before the battle of Marathon, on which occasion we shall find him acting commander of the Athenian army. [229] Herodot. v, 94. I have already said that I conceive this as a different war from that in which the poet Alkæus was engaged. [230] Herodot. iii, 39. [231] Herodot. vi, 104, 139, 140. [232] Herodot. vi, 39-103. Cornelius Nepos, in his Life of Miltiadês, confounds in one biography the adventures of two persons,—Miltiadês son of Kypselus, the œkist,—and Miltiadês son of Kimôn, the victor of Marathon,—the uncle and the nephew. [233] There is nothing that I know to mark the date except that it was earlier than the death of Hipparchus in 514 B. C., and also earlier than the expedition of Darius against the Scythians, about 516 B. C., in which expedition Miltiadês was engaged: see Mr. Clinton’s Fasti Hellenici, and J. M. Schultz, Beitrag zu genaueren Zeitbestimmungen der Hellen. Geschichten von der 63sten bis zur 72sten Olympiade, p. 165, in the Kieler Philologische Studien 1841.