According to an idea deeply seated in the Greek mind, the destruction of a great prince or of a great power is usually signified to him by the gods beforehand, though either through hardness of heart or inadvertence, no heed is taken of the warning. In reference to Kypselus and the Bacchiadæ, we are informed that Melas, the ancestor of the former, was one of the original settlers at Corinth who accompanied the first Dorian chief Alêtês, and that Alêtês was in vain warned by an oracle not to admit him;[54] again, too, immediately before Kypselus was born, the Bacchiadæ 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 Bacchiadæ; but she was lame, and none of the gens would consent to marry her with that deformity. Eetion, son of Echekratês, who became her husband, belonged to a different, yet hardly less distinguished heroic genealogy: he was of the Lapithæ, descended from Kæneus, and dwelling 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 overthrew and expelled the Bacchiadæ, continuing as despot at Corinth for thirty years until his death (B. C. 655-625). According to Aristotle, he maintained throughout life the same conciliatory behavior by which his power had first been acquired; and his popularity was so effectually sustained that he had never any occasion 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 envoy Sosiklês[55] to the Spartans,—gave a very different description, and depicted Kypselus as a cruel ruler, who banished, robbed, and murdered by wholesale. [54] Pausan. ii, 4, 9. [55] Aristot. Polit. v, 9, 22; Herodot. v, 92. The tale respecting Kypselus, and his wholesale exaction from the people, contained in the spurious second book of the Œconomica of Aristotle, coincides with the general view of Herodotus (Aristot. Œconom. ii, 2); but I do not trust the statements of this treatise for facts of the sixth or seventh centuries B. C.