For this reason, and because he had chosen them as his friends before all the other Greeks, the Lacedaemonians accepted the alliance. So they declared themselves ready to serve him when he should require, and moreover they made a bowl of bronze, engraved around the rim outside with figures, and large enough to hold twenty-seven hundred gallons, and brought it with the intention of making a gift in return to Croesus. This bowl never reached Sardis , for which two reasons are given: the Lacedaemonians say that when the bowl was near Samos on its way to Sardis , the Samians descended upon them in warships and carried it off; but the Samians themselves say that the Lacedaemonians who were bringing the bowl, coming too late, and learning that Sardis and Croesus were taken, sold it in Samos to certain private men, who set it up in the the temple of Hera. And it may be that the sellers of the bowl, when they returned to Sparta , said that they had been robbed of it by the Samians. Such are the tales about the bowl.