Herodotus does not deny the shield incident. He confines himself to asserting that the Alkmæonidæ could not have had anything to with it. It is noticeable that he makes no charge against any one else, for the apparent reason that tradition did not accuse any one else of the treachery. The defence he gives is probably that of the Alkmæonidæ themselves. The charge against the Alkmæonidæ does not seem to have been a late interpolation into the Marathon tradition. ◆Pind. Pyth. vii. 15.◆ Pindar, in one of his odes, which bears traces of having been composed shortly after 486, hints strongly that sinister reports on this subject were existent even at that time. It is possible to fail to recognize the wide difference between the mental attitude of the European Greek to the Persian before and after the decade of 490–480. Before 490, Medism had not acquired the loathsome significance of twelve years later. Nor, again, if the Alkmæonidæ and the faction which they led did Medize on this occasion, was the act without precedent in the case of Athens herself. Between fifteen and twenty years before, Athenian ambassadors had given earth and water to Artaphernes at Sardes. Their act had, indeed, been condemned upon their return; but there is no reason to suppose that the condemnation was unanimous; and there is every reason to believe that they would never have so acted, had they not had good grounds for thinking that a majority or a party of their fellow-country-men would approve of what they had done. The sudden withdrawal of Athenian assistance from the Ionian revolt within a year of that assistance having been granted is most explicable on the assumption that within that year a philo-Medic party had once more acquired the ascendency. The punishment of Phrynichos for his drama on the capture of Miletus looks very much like the work of the same party. It seems clear that the democrats in Athens had not found that the expulsion of the tyrant Hippias had brought unmixed blessings in its train. They were thereafter face to face with a strong internal opposition, in the shape of a powerful aristocratic party; and threatened from outside by a Sparta which repented of the part it had played in Hippias’ expulsion, and was exasperated at having been fooled by Delphi at the instigation of the Alkmæonidæ. It is not, then, strange that the democrats should look abroad for help of which they saw no prospect nearer home.