The acropolis at Athens, having been the primitive city
inhabited, bore the name of _The City_ even in the time of
Thucydides (ii, 15), at a time when Athens and Peiræus covered so
large a region around and near it.
[79] Herodot. vi, 91. χεῖρες δὲ κεῖναι ἐμπεφυκυῖαι ἦσαν τοῖσι
ἐπισπαστῆρσι. The word κεῖναι for ἐκεῖναι, “those hands,” appears
so little suitable in this phrase, that I rather imagine the real
reading to have been κειναὶ (the Ionic dialect for κεναὶ), “the
hands with nothing attached to them:” compare a phrase not very
unlike, Homer, Iliad, iii, 376, κεινὴ δὲ τρυφάλεια ἅμ’ ἕσπετο,
etc.
Compare the narrative of the arrest of the Spartan king
Pausanias, and of the manner in which he was treated when in
sanctuary at the temple of Athênê Chalkiœkos (Thucyd. i, 134).
[80] Herodot. vi, 91. Ἀπὸ τούτου δὲ καὶ ἄγος σφι ἐγένετο, τὸ
ἐκθύσασθαι οὐκ οἶοί τε ἐγένοντο ἐπιμηχανώμενοι, ἀλλ’ ἔφθησαν
ἐκπεσόντες πρότερον ἐκ τῆς νήσου ἤ σφι ἵλεον γενέσθαι τὴν θεόν.
Compare Thucyd. ii, 27 about the final expulsion from Ægina. The
Lacedæmonians assigned to these expelled Æginetans a new abode in
the territory of Thyrea, on the eastern coast of Peloponnesus,
where they were attacked, taken prisoners, and put to death by
the Athenians, in the eighth year of the war (Thucyd. iv, 57).
Now Herodotus, while he mentions the expulsion, does not allude
to their subsequent and still more calamitous fate. Had he
known the fact, he could hardly have failed to notice it, as a
farther consummation of the divine judgment. We may reasonably
presume ignorance in this case, which would tend to support the
opinion thrown out in my preceding volume (chap. xxxiii, p. 225,
note) respecting the date of composition of his history,—in the
earliest years of the Peloponnesian war.
The Athenians who were to have assisted Nikodromus arrived at Ægina
one day too late. Their proceedings had been delayed by the necessity
of borrowing twenty triremes from the Corinthians, in addition
to fifty of their own: with these seventy sail they defeated the
Æginetans, who met them with a fleet of equal number, and then landed
on the island. The Æginetans solicited aid from Argos, but that city
was either too much displeased with them, or too much exhausted
by the defeat sustained from the Spartan Kleomenês, to grant it.
Nevertheless, one thousand Argeian volunteers, under a distinguished
champion of the pentathlon named Eurybatês, came to their assistance,
and a vigorous war was carried on, with varying success, against the
Athenian armament.
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