execution of the Spartan ambassadors to Persia in 430 (VII.233; IX.73; VII.137; cf.VI.91). We know he was in Athens after 432, because he had seen the Propylaea finished. His book must have been fresh in people's memory at Athens in 425, when Aristophanes parodied the opening of Book 1 (Acharnians, 524ff.). Arguing from what he does not mention, it is probably that he was not writing after 424, when Nikias took Cythera (vii.235), and almost cerain that he did not know of the Sicilian expedition of 415 or the occupation of Dekeleia in 413. His theme was the deliverance of Greece and the rise of the Athenian Empire, and he died before that Empire began to totter.
For it is clear that he did not live to finish his work. Kirchoff argues that he meant to cary the story down to the Battle of Eurymedon, to the definite point where the liberated Ionians swore their oath of union under the hegemony of Athens. That, Kirchoff holds, is the real finish of the 'Medika'; not the siege of Sestos, which is the last event given in our narrative (Meyer, Rh. Mus. xlii.146.). And does not Herodotus himself show that he intended to go further when he promises (vii.213) to tell 'later' the cause of the feud in which the traitor Ephialtes was murdered, an event which occurred some time after 476? Kirchoff says, Yes; but the conclusion is not convincing. The cause of the feud may have come long before the murder, and it is perfectly clear from a number of passages that Herodotus regards all events later than 479-8 as not in the sphere of his history. He dismisses them with the words, "But these things happened afterwards." Thus he does, it seems, reach his last date; but he has not finished the revising and fitting. He leaves
