This then was the _political_ value of the early tyrants, and a feature in them which is generally overlooked. Their services to the _artistic_ progress of Greece in art and literature are more manifest, and therefore less ignored. The day of great architectural works, such as the castles and tombs of Argolis, the draining of Lake Copais, had passed away with the absolute rulers of pre-historic times. Even Agamemnon and his fellows, who probably represent a later stage in Greek society, would not have dared to set their subjects to such task-work. So long as there were many masters in each city and State, all such achievements were impossible. With the tyrants began again the building of large temples, the organizing of fleets, the sending out of colonies, the patronage of clever handicrafts, the promoting of all the arts. It was the care of Peisistratus for the study of Homer, and no doubt for other old literature, which prepared the Athenian people to understand Æschylus. Nay, this tyrant is said to have specially favoured the nascent drama, and so to have led the way to the splendid results that come upon us, with apparent suddenness, in liberated Athens. The Orthagorids, the Cypselids, and single tyrants such as Polycrates of Samos and Pheidon of Argos, did similar services for Greek art: they organized fleets and promoted commerce; they had personal intercourse of a more definite and intimate kind with one another than States as such can possibly have; they increased the knowledge and wealth of the lower classes, as well as their relative position in the State; and so out of apparent evil came real good[86:1]. [Sidenote: Verdict of the Greek theorists.] Even after all the full experience of Greek democracies, of the complete liberty of the free citizen, of the value of public discussion, and of the responsibility of magistrates to the people, we find all the later theorists deliberately asserting that if you could secure the right man, a single-headed State was the most perfect. All the abuses of tyranny, therefore, so carefully pictured by literary men, had not seemed to them equal to the abuses of mob-rule,--the violence and the vacillation of an incompetent or needy public. I cannot but repeat, that if we regard the world at large, and the general fitness of men for democratic liberties, we shall hesitate to pronounce the majority of races even now fit for government by discussion and by vote of the majority. [Sidenote: Peisistratus and Solon.]