The reference is to a time considerably[845] previous to 500 B.C. Macan thinks that the most probable date for the expedition to Aegina is somewhere in the lifetime of Solon or Peisistratus[846]. [Sidenote: generally ascribed to the first half of the sixth century,] He points to various circumstances that certainly might well have led to a collision between Athens and Aegina during that period[847]. All the same it is difficult to accept a date within those limits. The Aeginetans are not likely[848] to have been dependent on Epidaurus after it was conquered by Periander, about 600 B.C.[849] If therefore the revolt from Epidaurus and the Athenian invasion are incidents in one and the same struggle, both must go into the seventh century. Macan prefers to assume a long interval between these two events. But Herodotus gives no hint of one. On the contrary, his narrative hangs excellently together as a description of successive and correlated incidents in a single struggle. Not only so, but even if the invasion be separated from the revolt, it is difficult to believe that it occurred after 590. So crushing a defeat for the Athenians, who themselves admitted that only one of their number got back to Attica[850], could hardly have taken place in the time of Solon or Peisistratus without being associated with their names. After all, a fair amount is known about sixth century Athens. There are no traces of any such overwhelming disaster, or of the inevitable set back that would have followed it. The relations of Athens to Argos during the period seem to have been friendly rather than the reverse. Peisistratus had Argive mercenaries, not to speak of an Argive wife[851]. Argive support of Peisistratus is of course quite consistent with hostility to the government that Peisistratus overthrew. It has indeed been suggested[852] that the Aeginetan expedition took place while Peisistratus was in exile. But, apart from the entire absence of evidence, and all the other difficulties involved by a sixth century date, this suggestion means that Peisistratus sought a bodyguard and wife in the most unpopular quarter imaginable, hardly a probable proceeding on the part of a ruler so tactful and popular as Peisistratus must have been. A date late in the seventh century is rendered unlikely by what is known of Procles of Epidaurus[853], the father-in-law of Periander, who ruled Epidaurus during the last part of the seventh century[854], apparently as a dependent of the Corinthian tyrant, by whom he was eventually deposed. C. Mueller indeed[855] claims Aegina for Procles, but only on the more than dubious evidence of a more than dubious story of Plutarch’s, which tells how Procles once used an “Aeginetan stranger” to get rid of the corpse of a man whom he had murdered for his money[856]. [Sidenote: but more probably to be dated early in the seventh, as shown by archaeological evidence on allusions in the narrative to:]