e-wood of which the statues were made. Upon the refusal of the Aeginetes to continue these offerings, the Athenians endeavoured to carry away the images. Their design was miraculously frustrated – according to the Aeginetan version, the statues fell upon their knees – and only a single survivor returned to Athens, there to fall victim to the fury of his comrades' widows, who pierced him with their brooch-pins. No date is assigned by Herodotus for this old feud; recent writers, e.g. J. B. Bury and R. W. Macan, suggest the period between Solon and Peisistratus, circa 570 BC. It may be questioned, however, whether the whole episode is not mythical. A critical analysis of the narrative seems to reveal little else than a series of aetiological traditions (explanatory of cults and customs, e.g. of the kneeling posture of the images of Damia and Auxesia, of the use of native ware instead of Athenian in their worship, and of the change in women's dress at Athens from the Dorian to the Ionian style.
The account which Herodotus gives of the hostilities between the two states in the early years of the 5th century BC is to the following effect. Thebes, after the defeat by Athens about 507 BC, appealed to Aegina for assistance. The Aeginetans at first contented themselves with sending the images of the Aeacidae, the tutelary heroes of their island. Subsequently, however, they entered into an alliance, and ravaged the seaboard of Attica. The Athenians were preparing to make reprisals, in spite of the advice of the Delphic oracle that they should desist from attacking Aegina for thirty years, and content themselves meanwhile with dedicating a precinct to Aeacus, when their projects were interrupted by the Spartan intrigues for the restoration of Hippias.
In 491 BC Aegina was one of the states which gave the symbols of submission (earth and water) to Achaemenid Persia. Athens at once appealed to Sparta to punish this act of medism, and Cleomenes I, one of the
