Polycrates is perhaps best known for his piracies, but it seems not unlikely that these piracies were in fact an elaborate commercial blockade of Persia that proved almost as unpopular among Greek neutrals as among the subjects of the Great King against whom it was mainly directed. As tyrant Polycrates is found controlling the commercial and industrial activities of his state, building ships, harbour works, and waterworks, and very possibly a great bazaar, and probably employing much free labour on these works. Before he became tyrant he already had an interest in the chief Samian industries, the working of metal and the manufacture of woollen goods. Aiakes the father of Polycrates is probably the Aiakes whom a recently discovered Samian inscription appears to connect with the sea-borne trade of the island. The tyrant is said to have owed his fall to an attempt to get money enough to rule all Greece, a statement of particular value considering the tendency to administer poetic justice that is so frequently displayed by Herodotus, who is our authority for this statement. [Sidenote: Egypt.] The great developments of trade and industry that just preceded the age of tyranny in Greece had their parallel if not their origin in Egypt. At the height of this development in Egypt a new and powerful dynasty arises which bases its power on commerce and on the commercial and industrial classes. Already towards the end of the eighth century we find King Bocchoris (somewhat after the manner of the Argive Pheidon) devoting special attention to commercial legislation. His successor Sethon is said by Herodotus to have based his power on “hucksters and artizans and tradespeople.” During these reigns the country was always being occupied or threatened by foreign invaders from Ethiopia or Assyria. The first Egyptian king of this period to rule all Egypt in normal conditions of peace and quietness was Psammetichus I, who rose to power about the same time as Cypselus in Corinth and Orthagoras in Sicyon. Psammetichus according to Diodorus converted his position from that of a petty Delta chieftain (one of twelve who shared the rule of the part of the country not in foreign occupation) into that of supreme ruler of the whole country as a result of the wealth and influence that he won by trading with Phoenicians and Greeks. This last statement if true establishes Psammetichus as a commercial tyrant. It occurs only in Diodorus, and receives no direct confirmation in earlier writers, but it is in entire harmony with all that is known about events and conditions in Egypt at this period, and more particularly with the notices just quoted as to Bocchoris and Sethon, with the history of Amasis and the other later Saites as recorded in Herodotus, and with the conclusions to be drawn from the excavation of Naukratis and the other Greek settlements that played so important a part in Saite Egypt. [Sidenote: Lydia.]