But Delphi recalls yet another field of Alcmaeonid activities. According to the official Delphic records not Solon[346], but Alcmaeon, the paternal grandfather of the Athenian Cleisthenes, was the Athenian general in the “sacred” war which early in the sixth century was waged by the Amphictyons, and particularly Athens and Sicyon, against the people of the Delphic port of Krisa. The significance of this war is discussed below in the chapter where Sicyon is dealt with in detail. Here it is enough to notice that Cleisthenes of Athens was, through his mother, the grandson of his namesake the tyrant of Sicyon who took so prominent a part in this “sacred” war. He was probably also his heir[347]. In the days of Hippias Sicyon seems to have been still under a tyrant, but not of the house to which Cleisthenes belonged. His name was Aeschines. Evidence has been adduced by De Gubernatis[348] for believing that this Aeschines was an ally of Hippias of Athens. As we shall see below when dealing with Sicyon, his attitude towards Delphi was a pivotal point in the policy of the Sicyonian Cleisthenes, and in his later years Sicyon and Delphi became deadly rivals. Athens can hardly have kept out of the feud. We know little of the course of events, and the history of recent years shows how idle it would be to assume that internal revolutions are always reflected in foreign politics. But we may be sure that both in Athens and Sicyon an anti-Delphic policy would have its opponents as well as its supporters[349]. It is quite conceivable that the Athenian Cleisthenes had once aimed at a union of central Greece with Athens, Sicyon, and Delphi as the three chief states of the union and Cleisthenes himself as the chief statesman, controlling the immense treasure of the oracle and basing on it a tyranny over the two other cities, with Sicyon controlling the trade of the Peloponnesus and the far West while Athens did the like for the Northern trade and developed with the Persian empire those friendly relations which the Alcmaeonidae were still suspected of favouring at the time of the battle of Marathon. If this is all speculation it at least recalls the fact that the received accounts of Cleisthenes are all centred on what he did in Athens in the few years following the fall of Hippias. That indeed is practically all that is known about the second founder of the Athenian democracy; but considering his varied antecedents and his remarkable ancestry it is well to consider how small a chapter this must have been in what was probably a long[350] as well as an eventful life. But to return to the short chapter about which something is known we find that the way Cleisthenes secured his position against the banished tyrant was by outbidding him. “He enfranchised many foreigners and slaves and metics[351].” The Peisistratids had ruled Athens as masters. Cleisthenes, by the stroke of genius so excellently epitomized by Herodotus, “took the people into partnership[352].”