Some parts of Greece never passed under a tyrant. The most conspicuous of these is Sparta[141]. The Spartans never struck real coins. The iron pieces “heavy and hard to carry[142]” that formed the classical Spartan currency seem to be a survival of a premonetary medium of exchange[143]. Sparta was also practically without any urban population[144]. It may be more than an accidental coincidence that the most anti-tyrannical state in Greece was without a real coinage, and backward in trade and industry. Another region where nothing is heard of early tyrants is Thessaly. Thessaly had a large serf population called πενέσται, whose position much resembled that of the Spartan helots[145]. Both were mainly agricultural labourers, _asscripti glebae_. Such a population might serve the purpose of a would-be military despot. Pausanias, the Spartan generalissimo against the Persians, had dealings with the helots when he was trying to make himself tyrant of all Greece[146]. But for a commercial tyrant they would not be very useful material. The other important district that seems to have been immune from tyrants is Boeotia. It is natural to associate this immunity with the dominantly agricultural character of the district where Hesiod wrote his _Works and Days_[147]. [Sidenote: (_f_) steps taken to prevent a recurrence of tyranny.] When the tyrants had been suppressed or expelled, or their families became extinct, the government in most cases either reverted to an oligarchy or developed into a democracy. Oligarchs and democrats (or at least democratic governments) seem to have been equally inspired with a hatred of the tyranny. The steps that they took and the fears that they displayed under that influence may be expected to throw light on the source of the tyrant’s power. Once more however it is necessary to limit ourselves to the fifth century, when the conception of the tyrant had not yet undergone the great change that came over it in the days of Dionysius of Syracuse[148]. Of the oligarchic Greek states our knowledge is comparatively slight. History has preserved for us no oligarchic counterpart to the picture that we still possess of democratic Athens. But thanks to the _Politics_ of Aristotle, that precious storehouse of incidental statements and remarks, the fact has come down to us that[149] “in many oligarchies it is not allowed to engage in business (χρηματίζεσθαι, perhaps better construed ‘money-making’), but there are laws forbidding it.” Of the anti-tyrannical measures of democratic Athens during the century that followed the expulsion of the Peisistratids we are better informed. So are we also as to the measures taken in the early days of republican Rome to prevent a re-establishment of the kingship. The evidence supports the view that in both cases what the established government mainly feared was the rich man becoming politically powerful by means of his riches.