At a later date cornering became less easy. In fifth century Athens there were statutes and magistrates (σιτοφύλακες) to prevent corners in corn, and we still have a speech of Lysias directed against some speculators who had bought beyond the legal limit. The context of a passage in this speech suggests that the general controllers of the market (ἀγορανόμοι) were expected to be on their guard against corners in other articles[61]. The detailed evidence in favour of this view is given in the chapters that follow. It will be found however that these men who made themselves tyrants through their riches were not all of them mere speculators. Some at least had acquired their wealth from trade or industry. This means that they were large employers of labour. There are reasons for thinking that from this point of view they would be politically far more influential than their successors in business in the days of the Athenian democracy. The big merchants and manufacturers of the fifth and fourth centuries relied largely, and more and more as time went on, on servile labour. The thousand miners whose services Nikias commanded were all slaves. Six hundred slave miners were owned by his contemporary Hipponikos and three hundred by Philemonides[62]. The hundred and twenty hands in the shield factory of the orator Lysias were all slaves[63]. So too were the fifty-two in the knife and bedstead factories inherited by Demosthenes[64], and the nine or ten in the boot-making establishment of Timarchus[65], as also those in the flute-making establishment from which the father of Isocrates made his living[66], and the sail-makers and drug-pounders who appear in Demosthenes _contra Olympiodorum_[67]. These instances might be multiplied[68]. Slaves were of course only a form of wealth[69]. As human beings they were entirely without influence on politics. It would have been another matter if Nikias had had a big constituency of miner citizens at his entire disposal. That I believe was one of the great differences between Nikias and Peisistratus and generally speaking between the captains of industry in the fifth and fourth centuries and their predecessors in the seventh and sixth. The evidence is not decisive, but as far as it goes it all points in this direction.