Everything tended to confirm this view. The greatness of Dionysius naturally drew attention to that of Gelo and Hiero, his predecessors at Syracuse. Gelo and Hiero were, like Dionysius, military despots. To later generations they were the great soldiers who had saved Sicily from the Carthaginians and Etruscans. Their contemporary Pausanias had tried to raise himself from generalissimo of the Greek army to tyrant of all Greece[173]. These events were still in men’s minds. Of the earlier tyrants they had only hazy notions[174]. The best remembered were probably the Peisistratids, both from their late date and from the fact that they were Athenians. Peisistratus, as has been already noticed, chanced early in his career to have distinguished himself as a soldier. It so happened that Polycrates, the other great tyrant of the latter half of the sixth century, also engaged in war. It was forced upon him by the Persians. The evidence is all against the view that it was the basis of his power. But the warlike achievements of these two rulers, the last and perhaps the greatest of the earlier tyrants, lent colour to Aristotle’s hasty generalizations[175]. Aristotle himself, speaking of the ways of maintaining a tyranny, says that “the traditional method, in accordance with which most tyrants conduct their government, is said to have been mainly instituted by Periander of Corinth[176]?” Only a few pages later in the same work[177] we are told that Periander abandoned the policy of his father Cypselus and that he did so by becoming warlike or in other words by approximating more to Dionysius of Syracuse. Once more then the typical tyrant of Aristotle is a ruler who departs from the policy of a typical founder of an early tyranny. For an example of the victory of the Aristotelian view over the truth we may compare Herodotus, I. 59, which states that Peisistratus, who had fought against Megara, made himself tyrant by means of the faction of the Hillmen, with Justin, II. 8, according to whom “Peisistratus, as though he had conquered (the Megareans) for himself, not for his country, seized by craft the tyranny.” Justin is a perversion of a passage in Chapter 14 of the Aristotelian _Constitution of Athens_, which states that Peisistratus, “having the reputation of being a great friend of the people, and having greatly distinguished himself in the war against Megara,” secured his bodyguard and the tyranny. Aristotle misinterprets the Hillmen and exaggerates the importance of the Megarean expedition. Justin omits the former altogether and makes the latter the sole cause of Peisistratus obtaining the tyranny.