Note 180 — Chapter II · Athens

Beloch, Gr. G.2 I. ii. p. 295, is surely underestimating the value of Thucydides’ express statements about the Peisistratids when he calls them “merely oral traditions about the relations of a family that had been expelled from Athens 100 years before.” This way of putting it hardly suggests that less than 20 years may have separated the death of Hippias from the birth of Thucydides, and that the tyrant’s family was still sufficiently flourishing at the end of the Peloponnesian war to be excluded from the amnesty that restored Thucydides to Athens (Didymus ap. Marcellin. Vit. Thuc. 32).