Histories

fortune to win a victory at the Olympic games with a four-horse chariot, wherein, as it happened, he did the same thing as his half-brother Miltiades936 had done, who had the same mother as he. Then afterwards in the next succeeding Olympic games he gained a victory with the same mares and allowed Peisistratos to be proclaimed as victor; and having resigned to him the victory he returned to his own native land under an agreement for peace. Then after he had won with the same mares at another Olympic festival, it was his hap to be slain by the sons of Peisistratos, Peisistratos himself being no longer alive. These killed him near the City Hall, having set men to lie in wait for him by night; and the burial-place of Kimon is in the outskirts of the city, on the other side of the road which is called the way through Coile, and just opposite him those mares are buried which won in three Olympic games. This same thing was done also by the mares belonging to Euagoras the Laconian, but besides these by none others. Now the elder of the sons of Kimon, Stesagoras, was at that time being brought up in the house of his father’s brother Miltiades in the Chersonese, while the younger son was being brought up at Athens with Kimon himself, having been named Miltiades after Miltiades the settler of the Chersonese. 104. This Miltiades then at the time of which we speak had come from the Chersonese and was a general of the Athenians, after escaping death in two forms; for not only did the Phoenicians, who had pursued after him as far as Imbros, endeavour earnestly to take him and bring him up to the presence of the king, but also after this, when he had escaped from these and had come to his own native land and seemed to be in safety from that time forth, his opponents, who had laid wait for him there, brought him up before a court and prosecuted him for his despotism in the Chersonese. Having escaped these also, he had then been appointed a general of the Athenians, being elected by the people.

105. First of all, while they were still in the city, the generals sent off to Sparta a herald, namely Pheidippides937 an Athenian and for the rest a runner of long day-courses and one who practised this as his profession. With this man, as Pheidippides himself said and as he made report to the Athenians, Pan chanced to meet by mount Parthenion, which is above Tegea; and calling aloud the name of Pheidippides, Pan bade him report to the Athenians and ask for what reason they had no care of him, though he was well disposed to the Athenians and had been serviceable to them on many occasions before that time, and would be so also yet again. Believing that this tale was true, the Athenians, when their affairs had been now prosperously settled, established under the Acropolis a temple of Pan; and in consequence of this message they propitiate him with sacrifice offered every year and with a torch-race. 106. However at that time, the time namely when he said that Pan appeared to him, this Pheidippides having been sent by the generals was in Sparta on the next day after that on which he left the city of the Athenians; and when he had come to the magistrates he said: “Lacedaemonians, the Athenians make request of you to come to their help and not to allow a city most anciently established among the Hellenes to fall into slavery by the means of Barbarians; for even now Eretria has been enslaved, and Hellas has become the weaker by a city of renown.” He, as I say, reported to them that with which he had been charged, and it pleased them well to come to help the Athenians; but it was impossible for them to do so at once, since they did not desire to break their law; for it was the ninth day of the month, and on the ninth day they said they would not go forth, nor until the circle of the moon should be full.938

107. These men were waiting for the full moon: and meanwhile Hippias the son of Peisistratos was guiding the Barbarians in to Marathon, after having seen on the night that was just past a vision in his sleep of this kind⁠—it seemed to Hippias that he lay with his own mother. He conjectured then from the dream that he should return to Athens and recover his rule, and then bring his life to an end in old age in his own land. From the dream, I say, he conjectured this; and after this, as he guided them in, first he disembarked the slaves from Eretria on the island belonging to the Styrians, called Aigleia;939 and then, as the ships came in to shore at Marathon, he moored them there, and after the Barbarians had come from their ships to land, he was engaged in disposing them in their places. While he was ordering these things, it came upon him to sneeze and cough more violently than was his wont. Then since he was advanced in years, most of his teeth were shaken thereby, and one of these teeth he cast forth by the violence of the cough:940 and the tooth having fallen from him upon the sand, he was very desirous to find it; since however the tooth was not to be found when he searched, he groaned aloud and said to those who were by him: “This land is not ours, nor shall we be able to make it subject to us; but so much part in it as belonged to me the tooth possesses.”

108. Hippias then conjectured that his vision had been thus