Andokidês is a useful authority for the politics of Athens in his own time (between 420-390 B. C.), but in regard to the previous history of Athens between 510-480 B. C., his assertions are so loose, confused, and unscrupulous, that he is a witness of no value. The mere circumstance noted by Valckenaer, that he has confounded together Marathon and Salamis, would be sufficient to show this; but when we add to such genuine ignorance his mention of his two great-grandfathers in prominent and victorious leadership, which it is hardly credible that they could ever have occupied,—when we recollect that the facts which he alleges to have preceded and accompanied the expulsion of the Peisistratids are not only at variance with those stated by Herodotus, but so contrived as to found a factitious analogy for the cause which he is himself pleading,—we shall hardly be able to acquit him of something worse than ignorance in his deposition. CHAPTER XXXI. GRECIAN AFFAIRS AFTER THE EXPULSION OF THE PEISISTRATIDS. — REVOLUTION OF KLEISTHENES AND ESTABLISHMENT OF DEMOCRACY AT ATHENS. With Hippias disappeared the mercenary Thracian garrison, upon which he and his father before him had leaned for defence as well as for enforcement of authority; and Kleomenês with his Lacedæmonian forces retired also, after staying only long enough to establish a personal friendship, productive subsequently of important consequences, between the Spartan king and the Athenian Isagoras. The Athenians were thus left to themselves, without any foreign interference to constrain them in their political arrangements. It has been mentioned in the preceding chapter, that the Peisistratids had for the most part respected the forms of the Solonian constitution: the nine archons, and the probouleutic or preconsidering Senate of Four Hundred (both annually changed), still continued to subsist, together with occasional meetings of the people,—or rather of such portion of the people as was comprised in the gentes, phratries, and four Ionic tribes. The timocratic classification of Solon (or quadruple scale of income and admeasurement of political franchises according to it) also continued to subsist,—but all within the tether and subservient to the purposes of the ruling family, who always kept one of their number as real master, among the chief administrators, and always retained possession of the acropolis as well as of the mercenary force.