century tyranny broke out everywhere in Sicily. In 560 Athens followed suit with the tyranny of Peisistratus. Polycrates of Samos comes about thirty years later. Thus many states in Greece went through the tyrannical phase about this time.

Although the Greeks, to their eternal honour, ever afterwards detested the name of tyrant, and although they tried to expunge the benefits they owed to them from the tablets of their history, yet we can see that tyranny was a valuable, almost a necessary, stage in the progress of the Greek state. Anything is better than aristocracy of the Bacchiad type: even

Plate 27.—Corinthian Vases.

a tyrant has the merit of possessing a single throat. As a matter of fact, most of the Greek tyrants, with the exception of Phalaris of Acragas, who had a habit of roasting his subjects in a brazen bull, were intelligent and not oppressive rulers. They were able to form a