A date not much before Cylon is argued for by Schoemann[1622], who can find no earlier occasion for their institution than the seventh century struggle with Megara, by Duncker[1623], who similarly explains them as instituted out of rivalry to the seventh century navies of Athens’ neighbours, by Philippi[1624] who dates them 683 B.C. (institution of annual archons), and by Busolt[1625], on account of their connexion with the financial classification and organization of the seventh century. As regards Schoemann and Duncker it has been shown above in Chapter VI how very unlikely it is that Athens started an elaborate naval organization in the seventh century. Busolt’s connexion of the naukraries with seventh century financial organization shows only that they then existed: it does not follow that they were then created. Whether or no Glotz is right in tracing them back to Homeric times[1626], the balance of probabilities indicates that they go back to the period of the Dipylon pottery[1627], and were organized for protection or reprisals against the raiders that then infested the Attic coasts, much as in England the Danegeld was instituted to deal with the pirates of a corresponding period in our own history. There may be something in the view that equates the naukraric organization with the council of Theseus[1628], if by Theseus is meant the head of the Athenian state who established some sort of order on the waters and coasts of the Saronic Gulf after the overthrow of the Cretan civilization[1629]. To quote the words of two particularly sober writers[1630]: After the breakdown of the Minoan thalassocracy Athens certainly took her part in policing the Saronic Gulf.... Her men of war are frequently depicted on Dipylon vases of the ninth and eighth centuries. In later times need of this protecting squadron may have grown less, when the navies of Megara, Aegina, Chalcis, and Eretria cleared the Aegean of corsairs. We may suppose that the naukraroi of the seventh century seldom saw active naval service[1631].