The party through which Peisistratus made himself tyrant is called by Herodotus the Ὑπεράκριοι[198]. The Aristotelian _Constitution of Athens_ calls them the Διάκριοι[199], Plutarch sometimes Διακριεῖς sometimes Ἔπακροι[200]. The English terminology is equally fluctuating. Hill, Mountain, and Upland have all been used. Modern historians have mostly explained the party as made up of small farmers, agricultural labourers, herdsmen and the like, and have generally assigned them to one special district, the mountainous region of North and North-east Attica[201]. But this view, as shown below in detail in an appendix[202], is based on a misunderstanding of the texts that are quoted in its support, and is at variance with all the ancient evidence, whether as regards the political propensities of agricultural labourers or the state of cultivation of the Attic mountains. It takes no account of the facts just brought forward as to how the tyrant regained and maintained his power. [Sidenote: were probably the miners of the Laurium district] In a paper that I published in 1906[203] these facts were made the basis of a new explanation of the Hillmen of Peisistratus. According to the view there put forward the most important section of Peisistratus’ followers were the miners who worked the famous silver mines of South Attica, and it was as leader of this mining population that Peisistratus raised himself to the tyranny. At the time this view was little more than a conjecture, topographically dubious. Of the only two places, Plotheia and Semachidai, known to have been situated in the Hill Country, Plotheia had been shown by tombstones to lie somewhere between Marathon and Kephisia[204], and as this fact seemed to confirm the theory of an exclusively Northern Hill Country, Semachidai, for the site of which as within the limits of the three trittyes of its tribe no evidence was available, was placed up in the North in the inland trittys. But that this location was wrong is made practically certain by the discovery of an inscription, published in 1910 by the Greek scholar Oikonomos, that bears directly on the point. [Sidenote: which was certainly part of the Hill Country] It dates from 349–8 B.C. and defines the position of various mining concessions. One of them is described as near Laurium and bordered on the South by the road leading past Rhagon to Laurium and the Semacheion[205].