reached high rank in the army and to have lived in intimate relations with some of the Syracusan nobility[1084]. The tyrant’s father was banished from Rhegium in the days when that city was under Dionysius of Syracuse, from which fact Beloch[1085] reasonably infers that he was a distinguished personality. Beloch supposes that Agathocles inherited a big pottery business. If this view is right, then the pottery does not seem to have greatly helped the future tyrant in his public career, which from first to last was essentially military. Still, though the capitalist tyrant was already a thing of the past in Greece Proper, Sicily was in some ways younger than the mother country, and it is not impossible that Agathocles possessed a pottery, and that it played a part, though not the leading one, in helping him on to the throne. Agathocles was the contemporary of the Roman Appius whose suspected attempt at a financial despotism is discussed in the chapter on Rome. Before his accession he is described as having become very rich: but his riches are attributed to his marriage[1086]. The evidence about Agathocles’ early career is not decisive. But on any interpretation it lends plausibility to the view that Cypselus started life as a potter. [Sidenote: Cypselus as a common noun.] In the whole of this long discussion as to how Cypselus acquired his name it has been assumed that Herodotus was right in declaring that he derived it direct from cypsele. The fact that there is a common noun cypselus hardly affects this assumption. It is true that the cypselus is a bird, but the bird in question is shown by Aristotle’s account of it[1087] to be either the house-martin[1088] or some similar species[1089] that derives its name from its clay-built nest. The cypselus is in fact the potter-bird. [Sidenote: King Cypselus of Arcadia.] But are we right in our main assumption? There is of course an alternative possibility. The story of the infant Cypselus may have been attached to him solely to explain his unusual name. Schubring’s instances of stories that he thinks to have arisen in this way are neither convincing in themselves nor altogether analogous[1090]. But there is one fact that offers more solid grounds for not accepting Cypselus as a name that the tyrant derived from his occupation. An early king Cypselus of Arcadia is mentioned by Pausanias[1091]. This is a genuine difficulty. But there are several ways of meeting it. It is for instance quite conceivable that two different individuals should have independently earned the same nickname. The name need not have been used in the same sense on both occasions. The cypselus is not only the potter-bird. It is also one of the most conspicuous of migrants[1092]. It may have been from this latter point of view that the name was thought appropriate for a king of the period of the great migrations.