XXXII. Now at this period Mnestheus, the son of Peteus, who was the son of Orneus, who was the son of Erechtheus, first of all mankind they say took to the arts of a demagogue, and to currying favour with the people. This man formed a league of the nobles, who had long borne Theseus a grudge for having destroyed the local jurisdiction and privileges of each of the Eupatrids by collecting them all together into the capital, where they were no more than his subjects and slaves; and he also excited the common people by telling them that although they were enjoying a fancied freedom they really had been deprived of their ancestral privileges and sacred rites, and made to endure the rule of one foreign despot, instead of that of many good kings of their own blood.
While he was thus busily employed, the invasion of Attica by the sons of Tyndareus greatly assisted his revolutionary scheme; so that some say that it was he who invited them to come. At first they abstained from violence, and confined themselves to asking that their sister Helen should be given up to them; but when they were told by the citizens that she was not in their hands, and that they knew not where she was, they proceeded to warlike measures. Akademus, who had by some means discovered that she was concealed at Aphidnae, now told them where she was; for which cause he was honoured by the sons of Tyndareus during his life, and also the Lacedaemonians, though they often invaded the country and ravaged it unsparingly, yet never touched the place called the Akademeia, for Akademus’s sake. Dikaearchus says that Echemus and Marathus, two Arcadians, took part in that war with the sons of Tyndareus; and that from the first the place now called Akademeia was then named Echedemia, and that from the second the township of Marathon takes its names, because he in accordance with some oracle voluntarily offered himself as a sacrifice there in the sight of the whole army.
However, the sons of Tyndareus came to Aphidnae, and took the place after a battle, in which it is said that Alykus fell, the son of Skeiron, who then was fighting on the side of the Dioskuri. In memory of this man it is said that the place in the territory of Megara where his remains lie is called Alykus. But Hereas writes that Alykus was slain by Theseus at Aphidnae, and as evidence he quotes this verse about Alykus,