One further point on this naval question may be noted, though it must not be pressed. Triremes are mentioned in connexion with the crossing of the Athenians to Aegina. This may be a mere anachronism[1591]. But there is nothing to prove that it is so. A state of things which includes fleets of triremes, but no naval actions on a large scale, suits admirably the early part of the seventh century, before the naval battle of 664 B.C. and after the invention of the trireme. The first triremes in Greece are said to have been built at Corinth, some time before 704 B.C., when Ameinokles constructed four for the Samians[1592]. Some of the Dipylon ships appear already to possess two banks of oars (fig. 45_b_)[1593]. Ships with two banks of oars appear on monuments of Sennacherib (700 B.C.)[1594]. Triremes were used by the Pharaoh Necho (610–594 B.C.)[1595]. Both Sennacherib and Necho probably relied largely on Phoenician sailors and shipwrights. “We are told that the Sidonians were the first to construct a trireme[1596].” All these statements fall in excellently with the notice of Thucydides. It is true that in the next chapter he says that Aegina and Athens possessed few triremes a little before the death of Darius (486 B.C.), and uses this fact to argue that Greek naval power only developed on a large scale from about that time. His facts are hardly to be questioned; but in his conclusions he appears to be misled by the fallacy (which he shares with so many moderns) that no development of first class importance could possibly be dated much earlier than his own age[1597]. The troubles that overtook Aegina about the time of her break with Epidaurus probably included a war with Samos[1598], in which the Samians “sent an expedition against Aegina, and did much harm to the Aeginetans, and received much from them[1599].” In such a state of affairs Aegina would be doing her utmost to turn out ships on the up-to-date pattern with which Ameinokles was supplying the enemy. The Dipylon ships are rightly associated by many modern scholars with the naukraric organization that is found existing at Athens at the end of the dark ages[1600]. The presidents of the naukraroi (or perhaps of the naukraries) are said by Herodotus to have been administering (ἔνεμον) Athens at the time of Cylon’s attempted tyranny, _i.e._ about 632 B.C.[1601]. The statement is challenged by Thucydides, who says that “at that time the nine archons conducted most of the business of the state[1602].” Herodotus however is at the worst only being inaccurate. The naukraroi were very possibly “the authorities in charge of the siege (οἱ ἐπιτετραμμένοι τὴν φυλακήν)” of Thucydides and were probably responsible for the levy _en masse_, recorded by Thucydides himself (ἐβοήθησαν πανδήμει ἐκ τῶν ἀγρῶν), that led to Cylon’s discomfiture[1603]. Herodotus may have exaggerated the authority of the naukraroi to palliate the guilt of the Alcmaeonid archon who put Cylon’s followers to death[1604].