Only, if that view is right, why is it nowhere specifically formulated in extant records? [Sidenote: The evidence is not conclusive; but contemporary documents are meagre and no Greek writers say much about economic causes.] One set of causes has already been incidentally indicated. The state of things that could lead to a tyranny of the early type was passing away at the time of the Persian wars. The payment of jurymen rendered a recurrence of it in Athens finally impossible. Sparta had always been equally averse from making either coins or tyrants. What Athens and Sparta both disapproved of had little chance of finding a home in fifth century Greece. It was during this period that Herodotus and Thucydides, our earliest Greek historians, composed their works. Each wrote the history of a great war. But even if their themes had been more peaceful, it would be a mistake to imagine that their enquiries into economic causes would have been any more searching. Cornford in his illuminating study of Thucydides[150] complains of the general blindness of the Greeks in this direction. This is hardly fair on the Greeks. Thucydides and his successors are not unusually blind. It is the moderns who are unusual in the way they fix their eyes upon this particular aspect of history. Only in times of financial and industrial revolution does the world at large become distinctly conscious of the financial and industrial basis of its social and political organization. The revolution now proceeding has produced this effect. It has led modern historians to concentrate, perhaps unduly, upon the investigation of economic causes and conditions. From this modern point of view the Bank of England or the Standard Oil Company is as fruitful and important a subject of historical research as the policy of a prime minister or the strategy of a general. But this attitude is unusual. The financial revolution associated with the realms of Gyges and Pheidon had been accepted by the whole Greek world before the outbreak of the Persian wars. For writers of the new epoch that began with Salamis and Plataea economic conditions must have appeared a changeless and somewhat boring factor. If the early tyrants had previously been kings of finance or industry, we must not expect many statements or illustrations of the fact in the _Persian Wars_ of Herodotus, or the _Peloponnesian War_ of Thucydides. It should satisfy us if, as is the case, their allusions to the tyranny are all in complete harmony with that hypothesis. [Sidenote: The view is at variance with statements of Plato, Aristotle, and subsequent writers:] The writers of the fourth century offer a more serious difficulty. Both Plato and Aristotle deal at some length with the origin of tyranny, and both give explanations quite different from the one that is here offered. As their accounts have been the basis of all subsequent views, it is necessary to state briefly what they are.