Whether this person was Gyges is another question. His claim to the ring is not beyond dispute. We have seen already that it is sometimes attributed to Midas. Even in the story as told by Plato the MSS. make the hero “the ancestor of Gyges,” not Gyges himself, and the fact that in other writers and elsewhere in the _Republic_[789] the ring is called the ring of Gyges is not in itself decisive. Both the ring and its magic powers may have passed from hand to hand. But if the evidence and opinions that have been adduced in this chapter have any value, our interpretation of the ring story does not depend on establishing Gyges as the original owner. Let us now revert for a moment to the illuminating theory of Babelon that the striking of coins was at first a private undertaking of merchants or miners or bankers, and that the final step in the evolution of a gold and silver coinage was reached only when this business of stamping and issuing the pieces was taken over by the state. We are entirely without record of the actual transference that the theory implies. Babelon assumes that the government created the monopoly. This chapter suggests a modification of Babelon’s view in one important point, namely that it was not the government that made the monopoly, but the monopoly that made the government. As in the case of Babelon’s own main thesis, we are forced to trust largely to analogies. But the analogies are striking, and they strike in two directions. We have first the commercial or financial antecedents of the rulers of this period both in Lydia and in various Greek states: and secondly we have the history of later Lydian rulers and aspirants to the throne, notably Croesus and Sadyattes, Cyrus and Pactyes, Xerxes and Pythes. The moral of their stories is that no ruler could feel safe at Sardis until he had secured some sort of financial supremacy. When we further consider that Gyges was famous for his gold[790], and that his gold and his tyranny are spoken of by Archilochus, probably in the same breath, then apart from speculative interpretations of the story of the ring, there is at least a clear possibility that the monopolist policy of Croesus and his successors goes back at least to Gyges and perhaps even a generation or so earlier, to some such ruler as Ardys or Spermos, and that it was the monopoly in stamped pieces of electrum that brought the first tyrant to the king’s palace and placed him on the throne[791]. Chapter VI. _Argos_ τὰν ἀρετὰν καὶ τὰν σοφίαν νικῶντι χελῶναι. [Illustration: Fig. 20. Early Aeginetan “tortoises.”] [Sidenote: “Tyranny” of Pheidon the legitimate sovereign “who created for the Peloponnesians their measures” (Herodotus),]