But had Pheidon anything to do with Aegina and its coinage? Against the statements of Ephorus and later writers must be set the silence of Herodotus, who makes no reference either to coins or to Aegina in his account of Pheidon. This omission, combined with the diversity of views as to Pheidon’s date, has led to a general distrust of Ephorus, so much so that the majority of the most competent authorities are either agnostics[831] or utter unbelievers[832]. Herodotus’ silence is not by itself a serious argument for rejecting the additions of the later historians. It should be remembered that his whole account of Pheidon in VI. 127 extends to barely four lines. He can hardly be expected to state at all completely even the main facts about so important a personality in so short a space. To assert, as has been done recently[833], that Herodotus _knew_ nothing about a coinage issued by Pheidon is to beg the question. To the fifth century Greek, for whom Herodotus wrote, the origin of the system of weights on which the Aeginetan coins were struck may have been of greater interest than the remoter question of an invention which they doubtless all took for granted. Peloponnesian weights and measures stood for the lack of standardization in all matters metrical from which Herodotus and his hearers must have suffered daily. There is no need to pursue these criticisms in further detail. They start with various assumptions as to Pheidon’s date. Some of them would be found to be mutually destructive. Nearly all of them overestimate the difficulties raised by the apparent lack of confirmation of Ephorus in earlier writers. It is by no means certain that his statements about Pheidon’s connexion with the Aeginetan coinage must be a fanciful expansion of Herodotus VI. 127. There are in fact two lines of evidence that point in quite the opposite direction. One of them rests on notices about the Argive Heraeum supplemented by recent finds on the site; the other is based on a new interpretation of a passage in the fifth book of Herodotus. It will be necessary to examine in some detail the evidence from these two sources. [Sidenote: A. Evidence from the Argive Heraeum.]