It has indeed been maintained that the whole Herodotean account of the early relations of Argos, Aegina, and Athens is unhistorical[890]. The arguments brought forward to support this destructive view are: (i) that the episode is timeless and its timelessness must be due to its unhistorical character, (ii) that it must be unhistorical because it cannot, as alleged by Herodotus, have been the cause of the war of 487 B.C., which must have been due to the natural rivalry of the two neighbouring states. As regards the first of these two arguments, the preceding pages have, it is hoped, shown that the episode is not timeless: as regards the second, it is enough to point out that it assumes that war cannot breed war, that no war can be due to two causes, and that an incident cannot be historical if it is alleged as leading to results that it cannot have in fact produced. The fact that arguments such as these were accepted for publication in a periodical of high repute less than a generation back shows how much the whole world of scholarship was infected by the spirit of uncritical scepticism that has left its mark in some quarters on that of the present age. Others again like Wilamowitz[891] regard the narrative of Herodotus V. 82–88 as simply a reflexion backwards of the state of affairs existing in 487 B.C.[892], when Athens attacked Aegina, and the Aeginetans “called to their aid the same people as before, the Argives[893].” They argue that (i) the story is our only evidence for hatred between Athens and Aegina much before 506 B.C., (ii) the Argive-Aeginetan brooches as compared with the broochless Athenian costume[894], the embargo on Attic pottery at the Aeginetan temple, and the posture of the kneeling statues (pleading before the Athenian invaders) may all have been referred in Herodotus’ days to the existing hatred and recent wars between Athens and Aegina, (iii) Herodotus puts back the Athenian disaster into the timeless period because the miracle and the change of costume required an early date, and the story does not fit the war of 487 B.C., since the famous Sophanes[895], who fought in it, lived till 464. Herodotus, they say, gives no account of a disaster to the Athenian fleet in 487 because he had used it up for this early reflexion. Of these points (i) is answered by the whole of this chapter, (ii) and (iii) fall with (i), besides which (ii) contains many improbabilities, _e.g._ that the pottery in an Aeginetan temple should without historic reason have suggested to any fifth century Greek an early war with Athens, while (iii) assumes an Athenian disaster in 487 B.C., whereas Thucydides declares that Athens was successful in that war[896].