A military demagogue who makes himself tyrant is essentially the product of an advanced democracy threatened by invasion from without. When the tyrants of the seventh and sixth centuries secured their positions there was no foreign invader without the gates and no democracy within. Aristotle[168] calls democracy “the last word in tyranny” (ἡ τελευταία τυραννίς). From the point of view of historical development the converse comes much nearer to the truth, and tyranny is the first word in democracy. [Sidenote: and is due to false generalizations from the conditions of their own days,] The evolution of the tyrant as described in Aristotle and Plato cannot have taken place until after the reforms of Cleisthenes or precisely the period when the last of the early tyrants was finally banished from Greece. The two philosophers, and likewise Herodotus in the passage just quoted[169], must be reading into more ancient times a state of things that only became prevalent shortly before their own[170]. The words of Herodotus are put into the mouth of Darius. This means that they really hang loose and may be influenced by the careers of contemporary demagogues like Cleon. [Sidenote: and particularly from the career of Dionysius of Syracuse.] But the main source of error lies in Plato and Aristotle, and is still more obvious. The most distinguished figure in the political history of the early part of the fourth century was Dionysius of Syracuse. Dionysius is, like Plato’s tyrant in the _Republic_, the product of democracy: like Aristotle’s in the _Politics_ he begins his career as a military demagogue. The resemblances are not accidental. Dionysius made himself tyrant when Plato was just reaching manhood. Plato visited his court and few political experiments have become more famous than Plato’s attempt to turn the tyrant’s son into the ideal philosopher king[171]. Aristotle naturally shared his master’s interest in the famous Syracusan. His _Politics_ bears frequent witness to the fact. It contains only eight references each to the tyrant houses of Corinth and Athens as against twenty to those of Syracuse (eleven to the Dionysii and Dion, nine to the Deinomenidae). Of the three individuals, Theagenes, Peisistratus, Dionysius, chosen to illustrate the way a tyrant may be produced out of a military demagogue, Dionysius is the only one whose career the process fits. Other philosophers of the period wrote under the same dominant influence, notably Aeschines the Socratic, and Aristippus, both of whom had stayed with the tyrant[172]. Similarly with the fourth century historians: their notion of a tyrant was Dionysius as described by that potentate’s own historian, his fellow-citizen Philistus.