Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/171

V had to dig in fetters the whole circle of the foss around his city-wall at Samos."

Nothing can show more clearly than these graphic sentences that Polycrates had passed the boundary of "the ideas in which he had been trained." He is not only the master of a, but the founder of a naval empire in the Ægean. He knows no law, civil or moral; he respects neither property nor person, but appropriates the one and binds the other in chains. And yet, while the end of all his actions was his own glory, he made his city famous in Greece; for even if the three wonders of Samos, — the great tunnel, the mole in the harbour, and the magnificent temple, — were not all of them projected or even completed by him, he left behind him a name as a great employer of labour, and as a munificent patron of artists. Theodorus, the engraver of the tyrant's famous ring, and Rhœcus, the architect of the temple, were natives of Samos in his age. We know, too, that poets were welcome at his court, and that Ibycus and Anakreon lived and sang there; and the greatest physician of that age, Democedes of Croton, was glad to obtain his patronage.

In two other points Polycrates is typical as a tyrant. First, he held out a friendly hand to the empires beyond Hellas. When Amasis repudiated his alliance, he offered help to Cambyses in his attack