Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/185

ATHENS AND PLAT^A. 167 the two. By such success, however, the Athenians gained nothing, except the enmity of Bceotia, as Kleomenes hud fore- seen. Their alliance with Plataea, long continued, and present- ing in the course of this history several incidents touching to our sympathies, will be found, if we except one splendid occasion, 1 1 Hcrodot. vi, 108. Thucydides (iii, 58), when recounting the capture of Plataca by the Laccdtemonians in the third year of the Pcloponncsian war, states that the alliance between Flattca and Athens was then in its 93d year of date : according to which reckoning it would begin in the year 519 B.C.. where Mr. Clinton and other chronologcrs place it. I venture to think that the immediate circumstances, as recounted in the text from Herodotus (whether Thucydides conceived them in the same way, cannot be determined), which brought about the junction of Plataea with Athens, cannot have taken place in 519 B.C., but must have happened after the expulsion of Hippias from Athens in 510 B.C., for the following reasons : 1. No mention is made of Hippias, who yet, if the event had happened in 519 B.C., must have been the person to determine whether the Athenians should assist Plataea or not. The Plataean envoys present themselves at a public sacrifice in the attitude of suppliants, so as to touch the feelings of the Athenian citizens generally : had Hippias been then despot, he would have been the person to be propitiated and to determine for or against assistance. 2. We know no cause which should have brought Kleomenes with a Lacedaemonian force near to Plataea in the year 51 9 B.C. : we know from the statement of Herodotus (v, 76) that no Lacedaemonian expedition against Attica took place at that time. But in the year to which I have referred the event, Kleomenes is on his march near the spot upon a known and assignable object. From the veiy tenor of the narrative, it is plain that Kleomenes and his army were not designedly in Bceotia, nor meddling with Boeotian affairs, at the time when the Plataeans solicited his aid ; he declines to interpose in the matter, pleading the great distance between Sparta and Plataea as a reason. 3. Again, Kleomenes, in advising the Platacans to solicit Athens, does not give the advice through good-will towards them, but through a desire to harass and perplex the Athenians, by entangling them in a quarrel with tha Boeotians. At the point of time to which I have referred the incident, this was a very natural desire : he was angiy, and perhaps alarmed, at tho recent events which had brought about his expulsion from Athens. But what was there to make him conceive such a feeling against Athens during the reign of Hippias ? That despot was on terms of the closest intimacy with Sparta: the Peisistratids were (!;E'I.VOV<; ^eiviov^ rafj.u2.iaTa Herod v, 63, 90, 91 ) " the particular guests " of the Spartans, who were onlj induced to take part against Hippias from a reluctant obedience to the