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The city had been defiled by the crime which Megacles had committed, and the people felt that they would never be prosperous again until Athens had been purified; but the great question was to find a man holy enough to perform the ceremony. After much talking, they decided to send for Ep-i-men´i-des, and to ask him to purify the city.
Croesus not only let him keep all he had taken, but doubled its value by other presents, so that Alkmæon returned to Athens as one of its wealthiest men. Megacles, the son of this rich Athenian, was he who won the prize of fair Agaristé of Sicyon, in the contest which we have elsewhere described.
Alcibiades, it is supposed, was descended from Ajax, by his father's side; and by his mother's side from Alcmaeon. Dinomache, his mother, was the daughter of Megacles.
Solon's exhortations, however, proved fruitless, and Pisistratus assumed the sovereignty. His administration was more like a constitutional government than the rule of a tyrant; but before his power was firmly established, the adherents of Megacles and Lycurgus made a coalition and drove him out. This took place in the archonship of Hegesias, five years after the first establishment of his rule.
They were thus still under her protection, and any one touching them would be guilty of a great crime. When the men reached the street at the bottom of the hill where the temple stood, the cord to which they were all clinging suddenly broke. Megacles, the first to notice this, said that the goddess refused to protect the rebels any longer, and gave orders to kill the unhappy men.
What befell Pyrrhus in the battle he fought against the Consul Levinus in Italy will serve us to both purposes; for though by shrouding his person under the armour of Megacles and making him wear his own, he undoubtedly preserved his own life, yet, by that very means, he was withal very near running into the other mischief of losing the battle.
The King's exchange of armor, too, though it saved his life, yet very nearly lost him the victory: for many attacked Megacles, and the man who first struck him down, who was named Decius, snatched up his cloak and helmet, and rode with them to Lævinus, displaying them and shouting aloud that he had slain Pyrrhus.
And there can be no doubt of his unusually passionate affection for his lawful wife Isodice, the daughter of Euryptolemus, the son of Megacles; nor of his regret, even to impatience, at her death, if any conclusion may be drawn from those elegies of condolence, addressed to him upon his loss of her.
Clisthenes, the son of Megacles, who was the head of the family, secured the Delphian oracle by pecuniary presents to the Pythia, or priestess, henceforth, whenever the Spartans came to consult the oracle, the answer of the priestess was always the same, "Athens must be liberated." This order was so often repeated, that the Spartans at last resolved to obey.
By this time, Dion was come up, and appeared in the sight of the people; he marched first in a rich suit of arms, and by him on one hand his brother, Megacles, on the other, Callippus the Athenian, crowned with garlands.
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