There is no certainty as to either the etymological or the historical meaning of these names. Plutarch seems to identify the Ploutis (?) faction with a body called Aeinautai (always on shipboard)[1360] and the reading Plontis, connected with πλοῖον (ship), has been proposed by Plass[1361]. Cheiromache again means not hand-workers but hand-fighters, a name that need not have any industrial implication. Hand-fighters might be just people who did not wear swords, the lower classes generally. But Cheiromache is said by Eustathius to have been a synonym for χειρώναξ, a common word for artizan[1362], and Suidas speaks of rival parties in Miletus composed of the wealthy (πλούσιοι) and the manual labourers (Γέργηθες, s.v., explained as χειρώνακτες), and though the period to which he is referring is quite uncertain, he still lends some support to the Capital and Labour interpretation of Plutarch’s Ploutis (?) and Cheiromache[1363]. The latter name would have been given to the party by its opponents, much as though enemies of a modern labour party should call them the Strikers or Down-Toolers. The other name for labour (Γέργιθες or Γέργηθες) is said by Heraclides Ponticus[1364] to have been given to it by the faction of the wealthy, a statement quite compatible with the explanation of the name as derived from a place and denoting the poor subject Carians, the descendants of the pre-Hellenic population of the Milesian territory[1365]. Perhaps we may see a hint that Gergethes and Cheiromache were alternative names both given to labour by its rich opponents in the reply given by the oracle to the party of the rich after they had been brutally massacring the party of the poor. “I too” says the god “take heed of the murder of the unwarlike Gergithes[1366].” The rebuke gains in point if the Gergithes had been also called Cheiromachoi, the manual _fighters_[1367]. Of the early careers of the Milesian tyrants we know practically nothing. Aristotle indeed[1368] refers to Miletus as a place where tyranny arose from the great power possessed by the magistrate called prytanis. But as argued already in discussing the office of polemarch held before his tyranny by Cypselus, a position of this kind does not by itself explain a tyrant’s rise to supreme power. Moreover in the case of Miletus there is nothing to show which tyrant Aristotle is referring to. When on the throne Thrasybulus pursued the policy of “cutting off the heads of those ears of corn which he saw higher than the rest” or in other words of “putting to death those who were eminent among his subjects[1369].” It is fairly certain that a ruler who pursued this policy did not rest his power on the support of the upper classes. One of the few anecdotes about the tyrant tells how he outwitted the king of Lydia by a misleading display of corn in the Milesian market-place[1370].