At the right hand of the entrance to Y was a passage, e-f, leading down by steps into a large elliptical chamber, r⁶. This chamber, presumably a cistern, was paved in Roman days with marble slabs, but below the marble pavement is a stucco pavement of Greek date. From this cistern leads a channel, i, which may have led to the well-house of Peisistratos, or, as suggested in the restoration (Fig. 43), to a smaller subordinate fountain. The supply of water at Kallirrhoë was slender. We have seen that efforts were made to reinforce it by well-sinking, by conduits, by cisterns. But, though the Athenians found the water of Kallirrhoë adequate for their ritual baths, they had other needs, and, as the city grew and grew, the effort to cope locally with the increasing demand proved futile. There was a crying need for water from a distance, a great popular need such as the despots loved to supply. Water was needed, and water was brought in a supply practically inexhaustible, from the district of the upper Ilissos. * * * * * By a happy chance in the history of excavations, long before the search for the aqueduct of the despots began, another aqueduct, the work of another despot, had been brought to light—the aqueduct that Polycrates made for the Samians. At the close of his account of Polycrates, Herodotus[267] tells us he had lingered long over the affairs of the Samians ‘because they possessed three of the most wonderful works ever accomplished by the Greeks.’ The first and the only one of these wonders that concerns us was a great aqueduct bored through a mountain 150 fathoms high. The length of the tunnel, he goes on to say, was seven stadia, the height and the breadth eight feet each way. Through this tunnel there went a second passage, 20 cubits deep by three feet wide, through which the water is carried along in tiled pipes from a great spring to the city of Samos. The architect of this tunnel was a Megarean, Eupalinos, son of Naustrophos. Possibly, _pace_ Herodotus, even if the Samians had had no aqueduct he would anyhow have told us the story of the ring; be that as it may, his account of the first wonder, the aqueduct, is invaluable, and has been fully substantiated. Never was a town by nature worse off for its water-supply than Samos, and rarely has one been supplied by a more astonishing piece of engineering. The ‘great spring’ Hagniades has been found[268], the tunnel with its double channel, even the very earthenware pipes laid down by Eupalinos. We know perfectly well what to expect in an aqueduct made by the despots.