Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/56

 40 HISTORY OF GUEKCK. various religious prognostics and oracles, foreshadowing the rise, the harsh rule, and the dethronement, after two generations, of these powerful despots. According to an idea deeply seated in the Greek mind, th* destruction of a great prince or of a great power is usually signj lied to him by the gods beforehand, though either through hard- ness of heart or inadvertence, no heed is taken of the warning. In reference to Kypselus and the Bacchiadte, we are informed that Melas, the ancestor of the former, was one of the original settlers at Corinth who accompanied the first Dorian chief Ale- tes, and that Aletes was in vain warned by an oracle not to admit him ;' again, too, immediately before Kypselus was born, the Bacchiadce received notice that his mother was about to give birth to one who would prove their ruin : the dangerous infant escaped destruction only by a hair's breadth, being preserved from the intent of his destroyers by lucky concealment in a chest. Labba, the mother of Kypselus, was daughter of Amphion, who belonged to the gens, or sept, of the Bacchiadae ; but she was lame, and none of the gens would consent to marry her with that deformity. Eetion, son of Echekrates, who became her husband, belonged to a different, yet hardly less distinguished heroic gene- alogy : he was of the Lapithac, descended from Krcneus, and dwell- ing in the Corinthian deme called Petra. We see thus that Kypselus was not only a high-born man in the city, but a Bacchiad by half-birth ; both of these circumstances were likely to make exclusion from the government intolerable to him. He rendered himself highly popular with the people, and by their aid over- threw and expelled the Bacchiadaa, continuing as despot at Cor inth for thirty years until his death (B. c. Go5-62o). According to Aristotle, he maintained throughout life the same conciliatory behavior by which his power had first been acquired ; and hi* popularity was so effectually sustained that he had never any oc casion for a body-guard. But the Corinthian oligarchy of the century of Herodotus, whose tale that historian has embodied in the oration of the Corinthian 3nvoy Sosikles' 3 to the Spartans, 1 Paiisan. ii, 4, 9. and his wholesale exaction from the people, contained in the spurious second
 * Aristot. Polit. v, 9, 22 ; Herodot. v, 92. The talc respecting Kypselus,