that the Lacedæmonians had a city and a regular market at Sparta, he exclaimed: “I have never yet been afraid of men like these, who have a set place in the middle of their city, where they meet to cheat one another and forswear themselves. If I live, they shall have troubles of their own to talk about, apart from the Ionians.” To buy or sell, appeared to the Persians a contemptible practice; for they carried out consistently, one step farther, the principle upon which even many able Greeks condemned the lending of money on interest; and the speech of Cyrus was intended as a covert reproach of Grecian habits generally.[351] [348] This important date depends upon the evidence of Solinus (Polyhistor, i, 112) and Sosikratês (ap. Diog. Laërt. i, 95): see Mr. Clinton’s Fasti Hellen. ad ann. 546, and his Appendix, ch. 17, upon the Lydian kings. Mr. Clinton and most of the chronologists accept the date without hesitation, but Volney (Recherches sur l’Histoire Ancienne, vol. i, pp. 306-308; Chronologie des Rois Lydiens) rejects it altogether; considering the capture of Sardis to have occurred in 557 B. C., and the reign of Crœsus to have begun in 571 B. C. He treats very contemptuously the authority of Solinus and Sosikratês, and has an elaborate argumentation to prove that the date which he adopts is borne out by Herodotus. This latter does not appear to me at all satisfactory: I adopt the date of Solinus and Sosikratês, though agreeing with Volney that such positive authority is not very considerable, because there is nothing to contradict them, and because the date which they give seems in consonance with the stream of the history. Volney’s arguments suppose in the mind of Herodotus a degree of chronological precision altogether unreasonable, in reference to events anterior to contemporary records. He, like other chronologists, exhausts his ingenuity to find a proper point of historical time for the supposed conversation between Solon and Crœsus (p. 320). [349] Herodot. i, 141. [350] Herodot. i, 152. The purple garment, so attractive a spectacle amid the plain clothing universal at Sparta, marks the contrast between Asiatic and European Greece. [351] Herodot. i, 153. ταῦτα ἐς τοὺς πάντας Ἕλληνας ἀπέῤῥιψε ὁ Κῦρος τὰ ἔπεα, etc.