According to the story Peisistratus persuaded the Athenians to take him back by dressing up a stately woman named Phye to personate Athena and order his recall[268]. It is generally agreed that this story will not do as it stands. Various attempts have been made to explain it away[269], but all of them are equally unconvincing. Perhaps the reason is that all alike are based on some single unessential detail of the story. None of them interprets it in the light of the better known parts of the tyrant’s career, and more particularly of the matter of fact accounts of his second restoration. Beloch indeed, like the Russian Hirschensohn, believes that there was only one restoration, with which the Phye story and the account of Peisistratus’ return from the Thracian mining district are both to be connected[270]. He notes that the cause of banishment is the same in both cases; that the chronology is suspiciously symmetrical; that Polyaenus combines incidents from the two restorations; and that Eusebius[271] and Jerome[272] both make Peisistratus begin his second reign about the time that Herodotus begins his third, while neither of them mentions a third reign at all. Note too that corresponding to Phye in the first restoration we have in the second a “sacred procession” from the temple of Athena Pallenis conducted by an Acarnanian soothsayer[273]. These points are not convincing. Similar improbabilities, and repetitions and chronological symmetries can often be discovered in narratives of the most unquestionable authenticity[274]. The fact that Polyaenus combines the two accounts proves nothing, unless we assume him to be incapable of confusing two similar events. Further, Beloch is forced to make the marriage of Peisistratus with Megacles’ daughter precede his first exile, since he sees that the childlessness of the marriage led to the breach with the Coast[275]. In this he goes dead against the tradition on a point where there is no reason to suspect it.