The recovery of ancestral domains is a favourite euphemism among military conquerors for their policy of annexation. The chronology, both relative and absolute, of Strabo’s summary of Pheidon’s career has every appearance of authenticity. Pheidon first recovers the lot of Temenos, then “invents” his measures and coinage, and after that attempts to expand eastwards and southwards to secure the whole inheritance of Heracles, or in other words aims at the suzerainty of the whole Peloponnese, and to that end celebrates the Olympian games. This last event is probably to be dated 668 B.C. The coinage must be put indefinitely earlier in his reign, a perfectly reasonable date on numismatic and historical grounds, and the recovery of the lot of Temenos a few years earlier still. The date thus reached is confirmed by the histories of the two other leading cities of this part of the Peloponnese, Sicyon and Corinth. [Sidenote: Pheidon and other parts of the lot of Temenos: (i) Sicyon.] Sicyon formed part of the lot of Temenos, and was held by his son Phalkes[918]. About 670 B.C. the city fell under the tyranny of the able and powerful family of Orthagoras, whose policy was marked by extreme hostility to Argos[919]. Pheidon plainly can have had no footing in Sicyon during the rule of the Orthagorids. But the unusual stability and popularity of the tyranny at Sicyon have often been explained, not without reason, as due to its popular anti-Dorian policy. During the second Messenian war, which Pausanias dates 686–668 B.C.[920], so that the rise of Orthagoras coincides with its conclusion, the Sicyonians appear to have acted in close co-operation with the Argives[921]. The position and policy of the Sicyonian tyrants becomes particularly comprehensible if they had risen to power as leaders of a racial uprising that put an end in the city to a Dorian ascendancy that dated originally from the days of Temenos[922] and had been revived by Pheidon[923]. [Sidenote: (ii) Corinth.] Whether Corinth formed part of the lot of Temenos is uncertain. Probably it did. Strabo and Ptolemy exclude the city from the Argolid[924]. But on the other hand Homer speaks of it as being “in a corner of horse rearing Argos[925],” and Pausanias states that “the district of Corinth is part of Argolis[926],” and that he believes it to have been so in Homeric times[927]. The conflicting statements of these excellent authorities are best reconciled by supposing them to be referring to different periods. If this is so, and if, as well might be, all the domains of Homeric Argos passed to its first Dorian lord, then Corinth formed part of the lot of Temenos. A Temenid Corinth is perhaps implied in Apollodorus[928], where Temenos, the two sons of Aristodemus, and Kresphontes “when they had conquered the Peloponnese, set up three altars of Zeus Patroos and sacrificed on them and drew lots for the cities. The first lot was Argos, the second Sparta, the third Messene.”