150 HISTOEY OF GREECE. seeking to strengthen himself by oracles, and laying his plans for establishing a separate peace and alliance with Athens against the Peloponnesians, some persons in his interest circulated pre- dictions, that the day was approaching when the Persians and the Athenians jointly would expel the Dorians from Pelopon- nesus.' The way was thus paved for him to send an envoy to Athens, — Alexander, king of Macedon ; who was instructed to make the most seductive offers, to promise reparation of all the damage done in Attica, as well as the active future friendship of the Great King, and to hold out to the Athenians a large acquisi- tion of new territory as the price of their consent to form with him an equal and independent alliance.^ The Macedonian prince added warm expressions of his own interest in the welfare of the Athenians, recommending them, as a sincere friend, to embrace propositions so advantageous as well as so honorable : especially as the Persian power must in the end prove too much for them, and Attica lay exposed to Mardonius and his Grecian allies, without being covered by any common defence as Peloponnesus was protected by its isthmus.3 This offer, despatched in the spring, found the Athenians re- established wholly or partially in their half-ruined city. A simple tender of mercy and tolerable treatment, if despatched
- Herodot. viii. 141. AoKedaifiovidL de dva/ii'7?(Ti?evrff tuv loyiuv,
wf ci>eag XP^°'^ ^'^"' "A"i rolcfi uXkoiai Auptevac tTcrnVreiv ek 'n.e?^07Tovvfiaov vjrb MTjduv te koL 'A-&Tivaiuv, Kupra re edeiaav jirj biioXoyrjauai tg) IlepCTT? 'A&jjvaiot, etc. Such oracles must have been generated by the hopes of the medizing party in Greece at this particular moment : there is no other point of time to which they could be at all adapted, — no other, in which expulsion of all the Dorians from Peloponnesus, by united Persians and Athenians, could be even dreamed of. The Lacedaemonians are indeed said here, " to call to mind the prophecies," — as if these latter were old, and not now produced for the first time. But we must recollect that a fabricator of prophecies, such as Onomakritus, would in all probability at once circulate them as old ; that is, as forming part of some old collection like that of Bakis or Musseus. And Herodotus doubtless, himself, believed them to be old, so that he would naturally give credit to the Lacedaemonians for tho same knowledge, and suppose them to be alarmed by " calling these prophe- cies to mind." " Herodot. ix. 7. ^ Herodot. iii, 142.
