Such is the account given by Nicholas of Damascus. For the greater part of it we have no earlier authority. But once more we must be on our guard against too hasty scepticism. Ephorus, who is generally admitted to have been the source of this account, was not further removed from Cypselus than this age is from Cromwell. Cypselus was the foremost man of his age in all Greece. We need to be very sceptical of such scepticism as that of Busolt[995], who argues that Cypselus cannot have been polemarch before he became tyrant because if his parentage was not known he would not have been eligible, while if it was he would not have been elected[996]. As pointed out many years ago by Wilisch[997], such arguments are dangerous when applied to times of which so little is known. The aristocracy which fell in 657 B.C. may have begun to totter some time earlier. Given the requisite gaps in our knowledge, Busolt’s line of argument might be equally well used to discredit the received tradition about the Victorian age in England on the ground that it contains the highly improbable statement that the leader of the aristocratic party was an Italian Jew. Ephorus seems to have been used by Aristotle[998]. It would be rash indeed to follow Busolt[999] and agree that such a source may yet be valueless. Aristotle is not to be treated in this way. The whole character of his work forces us to start with the assumption that he had some idea of the difference between myth and historical tradition. We always know the reasons why modern scholars are sometimes inclined to discredit him. We do not always know the reasons that led Aristotle to accept as facts what he so accepts. What we do know is that the material on which he based his statements was far more ample than that which is now at our disposal. Even for a period so comparatively remote from him as the seventh century B.C. Aristotle must have been able to collect much evidence of one sort or another to confirm him alike in his doubts and his beliefs[1000]. For eighth century Corinth Aristotle and his contemporaries probably[1001] had the poems of the Corinthian Eumelos, a ποιητὴς ἱστορικός[1002] who flourished about 750 B.C. and wrote among other works an epic called Κορινθιακά. A prose history of Corinth (Κορινθία συγγραφή) was also ascribed to him. The ascription is doubted by Pausanias[1003], not without reason, but it may still have been a document of some value and antiquity. The same is true of the “didactic poem in two thousand lines” ascribed by Diogenes Laertius to Periander himself[1004]. We are learning to take our ancient records more on their face value than was done by our grandfathers in the nineteenth century. The classical historians, using the word in its widest sense, are still suffering from the reaction against the doctrine of verbal inspiration.