Modern writers, it is true, give the word “coast” (παραλία) a conventional meaning and confine it to the Southern apex of the Attic triangle, the district of Attica that has the largest proportion of coast to interior[1514]. Their view has one fact in its favour. After the expulsion of the tyrants, when Cleisthenes set himself to break up the old local political parties, the whole of this Southern apex was included among the “coast” trittyes or (th)ridings of his new triple division of the whole country. But there are indications that the inclusion of this whole district in the coast was never anything but an artificial arrangement[1515] to prevent either of the other two divisions from overbalancing the coast[1516]. The Cleisthenic coast was of course not confined to this Southern apex. The moderns who imagine this restricted use base their assumption on a misunderstanding of their authorities. They quote Thucydides II. 55, where in reference to a Peloponnesian raid on Southern Attica he speaks of “the so-called coast land.” But the precise words of Thucydides show that the ravages were confined to the coast[1517], while inscriptions and passages in other writers prove that the name “coast” was not confined to the Southern apex of Attica but was normally applied to the whole Attic seaboard[1518]. When Thucydides uses the expression “what is called the coast land” he need not be taken as meaning that the name “coast” in Attica was used as a synonym for what Herodotus calls the Sunium Heights[1519]. Very possibly he is commenting rather on the fact that the Attic coast was called by the poetical name πάραλος γῆ, παραλία (the land of the brine) instead of the good fifth century prose word παραθαλάσσιος, ἐπιθαλάσσιος (the land by the sea). He himself uses ἐπιθαλάσσιος in the very next chapter for the coast land of the Peloponnese[1520]. Another text which has been thought[1521] to establish a Northern or North-Eastern Diakria and a Southern Paralia is a fragment of Sophocles[1522] in which the mythical king Pandion divides Attica between his three sons. Two scholia of Aristophanes[1523] and a notice in Suidas[1524] equate the North-Eastern of these divisions with the Diakria. But against this equation must be set that of Stephanus Byzantinus[1525], who says that the Diakria fell to the son who received according to Sophocles the Southern division. Appendix B (to p. 168). _The Date of the Argive-Aeginetan Embargo on Attic Pottery_ [Illustration: Fig. 43. Dipylon vase.]