But granted that the various items of evidence that we have so far collected have all a real historical value, and granted too that they lend one another a considerable amount of mutual support, there is a further line of criticism that deserves a careful consideration. The evidence may all be true and yet the inferences that have been drawn from it be false, or at least ill-balanced and misleading. Kings and tyrants have in all ages tended to be extremely rich. In most ages great riches have been indispensable for anyone aiming at great political power, and the greater the power aimed at naturally enough the greater the riches required to secure it. Admittedly the tyrants lived in a commercial age, and the influence of wealth was particularly strong. Does the evidence that has just been presented prove in reality very much more than that? Some of the statements about the men who became tyrants are indeed sufficiently explicit, as for example that about the trading of the young Psammetichus, or the wealth and workmen of the young Lucius Tarquinius, but apart from the question of their trustworthiness they are all so brief and meagre that it is impossible to be sure that we see them in the right perspective. They are not very adequate for forming any picture of the men they refer to or even of their financial position. In short the early tyrants may have all been rich and all men of business and yet their riches and business activities may have been neither the basis nor the distinguishing feature of their rule. They arose in a many-sided age, and there were many other developments that might have conceivably brought them to the top. The doctrine of the divine right of kings had lost its hold. The struggles between the kings and the nobles had doubtless led both parties to appeal to the people, and from that it might well be no far step to the people’s appointing its own rulers. Then again there had been a revolution in the art of war. The Homeric days were over when the heavy-armed chieftain was everything and his followers a more or less useless rabble. In the new kind of warfare large bodies of trained men-at-arms counted for everything[1456]. Such a change might easily encourage a whole series of military officers to seize the supreme power. Furthermore in the case at any rate of the outlying Greek cities, and particularly those of Asia Minor[1457], the constant danger from barbarian neighbours might readily suggest the appointment of a military dictator. And we do in fact find the early tyrants described as having been previously demagogues or soldiers.