The attitude of Argos is not so easy to account for. She had, indeed, suffered terribly by the loss of six thousand of her citizens in the battle with the Lacedæmonians under Kleomenes. Delphi, in consistency with its policy at the time, counselled against interference; but the Argive tale was that, even so, they were ready to take part in the defence, provided Sparta granted them a thirty years’ truce, and provided she shared the supreme command of the allied forces with them. ◆H. vii. 149.◆ The proposal of a truce was entertained, if not actually accepted; but Sparta refused to let Argos have more than one-third of the command. The old question of the hegemony of Sparta and Argos in the Peloponnese lay at the bottom of the refusal; but there is manifestly a certain amount of improbability in the Argive account of the affair as given by Herodotus. ◆H. vii. 151, _ad init._◆ He tells another tale, which seems to have been of Athenian origin. It is to the effect that Xerxes had been in direct communication with Argos, and had practically ensured its neutrality, and that the terms demanded by Argos from the other Greeks were proposed with a full knowledge that they would be refused. This tale was supported, so the historian says, by information obtained at Susa by that mysterious embassy of Kallias; nevertheless, Herodotus believes the Argive account, and rejects the tale current in the rest of Greece. If an author in the fifth century B.C. could not satisfactorily discover the truth with regard to the matter, it is not likely that it should be possible to do so at the present day. It may be that Argos, from genuine conviction, followed the lead of Delphi, but provided for a possible error in that policy by entering into some kind of arrangement with the Persian. The answer which the Greek Council sent to the Argives, as reported by Diodorus, may be an invention of later times, but is so peculiarly apt as to be worthy of quotation:— “If,” it ran, “you think it a more dreadful thing to have a Greek commander than a barbarian master, you are right in biding quiet; but if you are ambitious to get the hegemony of Greece, you must earn a position so splendid by doing something worthy of it.”