Their motives, then, were personal revenge, while the result of
their conspiracy served only to rivet more tightly the chains of
servitude which bound Athens to the Peisistratid house, for
Hipparchos, whom they killed, was only the tyrant's younger
brother, and not the tyrant himself.
To prove his theory that Hippias was the elder, he appeals to the
evidence afforded by a public inscription in which his name occurs
immediately after that of his father, a point which he thinks shows
that he was the eldest, and so the heir. This view he further
corroborates by another inscription, on the altar of Apollo, which
mentions the children of Hippias and not those of his brothers;
'for it was natural for the eldest to be married first'; and
besides this, on the score of general probability he points out
that, had Hippias been the younger, he would not have so easily
obtained the tyranny on the death of Hipparchos.
Now, what is important in Thucydides, as evinced in the treatment
of legend generally, is not the results he arrived at, but the
method by which he works. The first great rationalistic historian,
he may be said to have paved the way for all those who followed
after him, though it must always be remembered that, while the
total absence in his pages of all the mystical paraphernalia of the
supernatural theory of life is an advance in the progress of
rationalism, and an era in scientific history, whose importance
could never be over-estimated, yet we find along with it a total
absence of any mention of those various social and economical
forces which form such important factors in the evolution of the
world, and to which Herodotus rightly gave great prominence in his
immortal work.
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