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While this was going on, Solon sailed up with the ship he had captured. The Megarians, thinking it to be their own ship, permitted it to enter the port, and the city was taken by surprise. Salamis, thus won, continued to belong to Athens till those late days when Philip of Macedon conquered Greece.

Other Greeks soon followed in the paths which those of Asia Minor had opened up; lonians from Naxos and from Chalcis in Euboea, Achaeans, Locrians, Rhodians, Corinthians, Megarians, Messenians, Spartans.

Other Greeks soon followed in the paths which those of Asia Minor had opened up; lonians from Naxos and from Chalcis in Euboea, Achaeans, Locrians, Rhodians, Corinthians, Megarians, Messenians, Spartans.

Immediately after them the Corinthians and the Thracian Chalcidians became allies of Argos. Meanwhile the Boeotians and Megarians, who acted together, remained quiet, being left to do as they pleased by Lacedaemon, and thinking that the Argive democracy would not suit so well with their aristocratic government as the Lacedaemonian constitution.

XIV. After this, Mardonius made trial of Grecian courage, by sending the whole of his cavalry, in which he was much the stronger, to attack them where they were, all except the Megarians, encamped at the foot of Mount Kithæron, in an easily-defended rocky country.

Now, when the Athenians were tired with a tedious and difficult war that they conducted against the Megarians for the island Salamis, and made a law that it should be death for any man, by writing or speaking, to assert that the city ought to endeavor to recover it, Solon, vexed at the disgrace, and perceiving thousands of the youth wished for somebody to begin, but did not dare to stir first for fear of the law, counterfeited a distraction, and by his own family it was spread about the city that he was mad.

The Athenians seized willingly on the alliance thus offered to them, and the Megarians had the weakness to yield both Megara and Pegae to Athenian garrisons, while the Athenians fortified their position by long walls that united Megara with its harbour at Nisaea.

Byzantium was originally colonized by the Megarians, a Dorian race kindred with that of Sparta; and the old features of the pure and antique Hellas were still preserved in the dialect, as well as in the forms of the descendants of the colonists; in their favourite deities, and rites, and traditions; even in the names of places, transferred from the sterile Megara to that fertile coast; in the rigid and helot-like slavery to which the native Bithynians were subjected, and in the attachment of their masters to the oligarchic principles of government.

The Megarians, who had never relinquished their designs on Salamis, had taken an opportunity, apparently before the travels, and, according to Plutarch, even before the legislation of Solon, to repossess themselves of the island.

Not long after it became necessary to introduce other reforms at the advice of Solon, one of "the seven wise men of Greece." He had acquired popularity by recovering Salamis from the Megarians, and in a sacred war against towns which had robbed the temple of Apollo at Delphi.