Note 50 — Chapter IX · CORINTH, SIKYON, AND MEGARA. — AGE OF THE GRECIAN DESPOTS.

The chronology of Orthagoras and his dynasty is perplexing. The commemorative offering of Myron at Olympia is marked for 648 B. C., and this must throw back the beginning of Orthagoras to a period between 680-670. Then we are told by Aristotle that the entire dynasty lasted one hundred years; but it must have lasted, probably, somewhat longer, for the death of Kleisthenês can hardly be placed earlier than 560 B. C. The war against Kirrha (595 B. C.) and the Pythian victory (582 B. C.) fall within his reign: but the marriage of his daughter Agaristê with Megaklês can hardly be put earlier than 570 B. C., if so high; for Kleisthenês the Athenian, the son of that marriage, effected the democratical revolution at Athens in 509 or 508 B. C.: whether the daughter, whom Megaklês gave in marriage to Peisistratus about 554 B. C., was also the offspring of that marriage, as Larcher contends, we do not know.

Megaklês was the son of that Alkmæon who had assisted the deputies sent by Crœsus of Lydia into Greece to consult the different oracles, and whom Crœsus rewarded so liberally as to make his fortune (compare Herod. i, 46; vi, 125): and the marriage of Megaklês was in the next generation after this enrichment of Alkmæon,—μετὰ δὲ, γενεῇ δευτέρῃ ὕστερον (Herod. vi, 126). Now the reign of Crœsus extended from 560-546 B. C. and his deputation to the oracles in Greece appears to have taken place about 556 B. C.; and if this chronology be admitted, the marriage of Megaklês with the daughter of the Sikyonian Kleisthenês cannot have taken place until considerably after 556 B. C. See the long, but not very satisfactory, note of Larcher, ad Herodot. v, 66.

But I shall show grounds for believing, when I recount the interview between Solon and Crœsus, that Herodotus in his conception of events misdates very considerably the reign and proceedings of Crœsus as well as of Peisistratus: this is a conjecture of Niebuhr which I think very just, and which is rendered still more probable by what we find here stated about the succession of the Alkmæonidæ. For it is evident that Herodotus here conceives the adventure between Alkmæon and Crœsus as having occurred one generation (about twenty-five or thirty years) anterior to the marriage between Megaklês and the daughter of Kleisthenês. That adventure will thus stand about 590-585 B. C., which would be about the time of the supposed interview (if real) between Solon and Crœsus, describing the maximum of the power and prosperity of the latter.