During the three years covered by these gifts Protogenes was financial director of the city’s affairs, a position which he had reached after a wide experience of public business (πλεῖστα δὲ χειρίσας τῶν κοινῶν, τρία δὲ ἔτη συνεχῶς πάντα διῴκησεν ὀρθῶς καὶ δικαίως). To see in this financial direction of the city’s affairs an instance of a commercial tyranny would be a pure hypothesis. It is not even certain that Protogenes made all his gifts quite voluntarily. One of his contributions for the purchase of corn was made after the demos had passed a resolution that the wealthy ought to advance money for this purpose[1447]. On one of the occasions when he paid for repairs to the town walls he did so at the invitation of the people[1448]. “Advance” and “invitation” may be euphemisms for “tax paying” and “compulsion,” and the payments made by Protogenes may have had affinity to the liturgies paid to the state by rich Athenians in the fifth century rather than to the benevolences that Lucius Tarquinius is said to have paid voluntarily for his own ends to the people of Rome. But this latter hypothesis is not better founded than the other. “Advance” and “request” may after all mean what they say. We do not know what became of Protogenes after his three years as financial director. The financial directorship may correspond to the magistracy that is said to have frequently led directly to the tyranny, _e.g._ at Corinth and Miletus. Protogenes is of course much later in date, but the Greek cities of South Russia were the home of many curious survivals. At Olbia itself for instance we find a style of pottery that in Greece proper was typical of the fifth and fourth centuries persisting apparently into the first[1449]. There are even hints that Olbia had once at least and perhaps comparatively recently gone through a social and economic revolution something like those that so often convulsed the cities of the seventh and sixth centuries just before they fell under tyrants, _e.g._ Athens before the tyranny of Peisistratus, or Miletus before that of Histiaeus. While the city was being besieged by a certain Zopyrion the Olbiopolitans had “set slaves free, given foreigners citizenship, and cancelled all debts[1450].” If this Zopyrion is the governor left by Alexander in Thrace[1451] this revolution must be dated at least a century earlier than Protogenes. If, with Grote, we refuse to accept this identification, the revolution is left dateless. In any case it shows that such upheavals did happen in Olbia, and serves to remind us how very incomplete is the material with which we are dealing. But the value for our enquiry of the Protogenes enscription does not depend on any speculations of this kind. What it does is to give us a detailed picture of an exceptionally wealthy man in an ancient Greek city state who for a considerable period largely financed his city. If Protogenes could do this in Olbia there can be nothing inherently improbable in the