PHEIDON (8th or 7th century B.c.), king of Argos. Accord ing to tradition he flourished during the first half of the 8th cen tury B.C. He was a vigorous and energetic ruler and greatly in creased the power of Argos. He gradually regained sway over the various cities of the Argive confederacy, the members of which had become practically independent, and (in the words of Ephorus) "reunited the broken fragments of the inheritance of Temenus." His object was to secure predominance for Argos in the north of Peloponnesus. Pheidon assisted the Pisatans to expel the Elean superintendents of the Olympian games and presided at the festival himself. The Eleans, however, refused to recognize the Olympiad or to include it in the register, and shortly of ter wards, with the aid of the Spartans, who are said to have looked upon Pheidon as having ousted them from the headship of Greece, defeated Pheidon and were reinstated in the possession of Pisatis and their former privileges. Pheidon is said to have lost his life in a faction fight at Corinth, where the monarchy had recently been overthrown. He made changes in the existing system of weights and measures in the Peloponnese, and his system was in use at Athens before Solon (Arist. Ath. Pol. x. 2), but Ephorus' state
ment that he first coined silver money seems unlikely.
His date is disputed. Pausanias assigns the Olympiad at which he presided to 748, but the balance of modern authority is in favour of the first half of the 7th century.
See Herodotus vi. 127; Ephorus in Strabo viii. 358, 376; Plutarch, Amatoriae narrations, 2 ; Marmor parium, ep. 3o ; Pollux ix. 83; Nicolaus Damascenus, frag. 41 (in C. W. Milner's Frag. hist. grae corum, iii.) ; G. Grote, History of Greece, pt. ii. ch. 4; B. V. Head, Historia Numorum (1887) F. Hultsch, Griechische and romische Metrologie (1882) ; G. Rawlinson's Herodotus, appendix, bk. i., note 8. On the question of Pheidon's date, see J. B. Bury, History of Greece, ii. 468 (1902) ; J. P. Mahaffy, Problems in Greek History, ch. 3 (1892) ; J. G. Frazer's note on Pausanias vi. 22, 2 ; and especially G. Busolt, Griechische Geschichte (2nd ed., 1893), ch. iii. 12. C. Trieber, Pheidon von Argos (Hanover, 188o), and J. Beloch, in Rhein isches Museum, xlv. 595 (189o), favour a later date, about 580.