6. To these important changes in the political history of that time we may annex the subordinate events in the interior of Peloponnesus. Sparta, by the conquest of Cynuria, had obtained the key of the Argive territory. Soon after this, Cleomenes, the eldest son of Anaxandridas the Eurysthenid, succeeded to the throne, a man of great boldness and strength of mind, sagacious, enterprising, accustomed, after the manner of his age and country, to express himself in a concise and emphatic language, only too much inflated by family and personal pride, and in disposition more nearly resembling his contemporaries the tyrants than beseemed a king of Sparta. The first exploit of this prince(739) was the expedition against Argos. He landed in some vessels of Sicyon and Ægina on the coast of Tiryns, overcame the Argives at the wood of Argos,(740) slew the greater part of the men able to bear arms, and would have succeeded in capturing their city, had he not, from an inconceivable superstition, dismissed the allied army without making any further use of the victory, and contented himself with sacrificing in the temple of Here.(741) At the same time Argos, in consequence of this defeat, remained for a long time crippled, and it was even necessary that a complete change in her political condition should take place, in order to renovate the feeble and disordered state into which she had fallen. 7. For after the bond-slaves or _gymnesii_(742) of Argos had for a time governed the state thus deprived of its free inhabitants, until the young men who had in the mean time arisen to manhood overcame and expelled them, the Argives, as Aristotle(743) relates, saw themselves compelled, in order to restore the numbers of their free population, to collect about them the surrounding subjects of their city, the Periœci, and to distribute them in the immediate neighbourhood.(744) The completion of this plan took place one generation after the fatal battle with Cleomenes, at the time of the Persian war, in which Argos, whose attention was wholly occupied with strengthening her affairs at home, took no part. At that time the Argives, in order to increase their own numbers, dispeopled nearly all the large cities in the surrounding country, and transplanted the inhabitants to Argos;(745) particularly Tiryns, Mycenæ, Hyseæ, Orneæ, and Midea.(746) Tiryns and Mycenæ were in the time of the Persian war free, and even independent communities, which followed the command of Sparta without the consent of Argos; the latter town indeed contested with Argos the right to the administration of the temple of Here, and the presidency at the Nemean games.(747) The destruction of their city, which the Argives undertook in concert with the Cleonæans and Tegeates,(748) was effected in the year 464 B.C. (Olymp. 79. 1). But of the Mycenæans, a few only followed the Argives, as the larger number either took refuge at Cleonæ (which city was