on Egypt, doing a black deed in despatching to the Persian's aid a fleet of forty triremes, manned by all the high-born Samians whom he most feared and hated, in order to bring them to an evil end. And secondly, his power is short-lived; for while negotiating with a Persian satrap for the acquisition of wealth which would have made him master of Hellas, he fell into a trap, little recking that he was in the way of the Persian power, and died a cruel and disgraceful death.[1] Nemesis, so the Greeks thought, must assuredly lay her avenging hand on all who overstepped those limits of power and fortune within which the State, and not the Individual, was the true end of life.
One more word before we leave the tyrants. The love of gain, of power and position above the laws and conventionalities of the State, was a common phenomenon in Greek history, and is seen not only in tyrants like Polycrates, but in kings and even ordinary citizens of the best ordered πόλεις, such as Cleomenes and Pausanias of Sparta, and Themistocles and Alcibiades of Athens. And the explanation is surely to be found in the very nature of the City-State itself. In its normal type it was too small, too narrow, too much bound down by fixed traditions, and by a single rule of life, to give the individual free play, or even always fair play. To its model he must conform, or overstep the limits of "the ideas in which he has grown up." Human nature is everywhere such that there will always be found rebels against the drill of a social-
- ↑ Herod. iii. 43, 44, 120-126.
