The agricultural or pastoral explanation of the party that supported Peisistratus has no inherent probability[1485]. Of course if it was specifically stated on good authority that in his days people of either of these two classes played the decisive part in politics, objections would be silenced. But the ancient evidence points all the other way. Aristotle repeatedly states that of all people farmers and herdsmen are least prone to support revolutions[1486], and definitely pictures these two classes as having played an entirely passive part both under the regime of the early tyrants and during its establishment[1487]. When on the throne Peisistratus gave financial help to impoverished farmers[1488], a fact that is brought by Grundy[1489] into connexion with his supposed agricultural Diakrioi. But in doing so Grundy disregards some of the words that he himself quotes, which show that the tyrant is dealing not with his supporters but with a body of men who were not interested in politics but threatened to become so if driven off the land. Geographically there is nothing to connect with the Diakria the men whom Peisistratus thus relieved. In his earlier days the most distressed and discontented part of the agricultural population were the pelatai and hektemoroi[1490] who worked the lands of the rich[1491] and therefore presumably lived in the Plain. According to the _Constitution of Athens_ the hill men were made up largely of people not of pure race, whose claim to citizenship was more than doubtful[1492]. Such a description is singularly inapplicable to the people on the land in Attica, where in the fifth century they still prided themselves on having an undisturbed autochthonous population. Plutarch speaks of the hill men as a “mob of hirelings[1493].” In the days just after Solon shepherds and small farmers of the hektemor class may have been hirelings, but they can hardly have ever been a mob. There is therefore little to be said for the attempt to identify the hill men with the shepherds and hypothetical farmers of Mount Parnes. We cannot even be certain that the latter ever existed. The soil of Attica was notoriously poor, abounding in stony districts (φελλεῖς) useful only for pasture[1494]. Attica claimed to be the land not of corn but of the olive. Demeter had her seat not in the great plain of Attica, but in the small and much more fertile plain of Eleusis. [Sidenote: and lived but little on the mountains,] None of the champions of an agricultural hill party dwelling on Mount Parnes seems to have seriously enquired into the upper limit of cultivation with wheat on the mountains of Attica. The only ancient writers who talk of agriculture being carried on there are the writer of the Aristotelian _Constitution of Athens_ and Statius.