Such bitter jesting is quite in keeping with the Greek language; the Greeks were particularly fond of attributing appropriate life and action to types of living things that figured on their coins[299]. [Illustration: Fig. 8. Persian “archer.”] The best known instance of a play on such a nickname is that of Agesilaus of Sparta, who complained that he had been driven out of Asia by thirty thousand of the Great King’s archers, a colloquial name for the Persian gold stater or Daric (fig. 8), derived from its type[300]. In Athens itself we find Euripides, in a fragment of the _Sciron_, playing on the double meaning of “virgin,” as also on that of “pony” (πῶλος), the colloquial name of the Corinthian drachma, that bore on one side the image of the winged steed Pegasus: Some you will secure if you offer a pony, others with a pair of horses, while others are brought on four horses, all of silver; and they love the maidens from Athens when you bring plenty of them. The reverse type of the Athenian drachma is punned upon by Aristophanes, who speaks of the owls of Laurium nesting in the purses of the Athenians and hatching small change[301]. In 404 B.C., during the final operations against Athens, Gylippus, the hero of the siege of Syracuse, misappropriated a large amount of Athenian coin, and hid it under the tiles of his roof. The theft was revealed by a servant, who informed the ephors that “there were many owls nesting under the tiles[302].” These examples are enough to show that there is nothing improbable in the suggestion that the Phye story grew out of a remark made by the tyrant’s enemies about his silver drachmae. Our explanation is of course pure conjecture, and even at that it has one weak point. The statement that Phye was a Thracian, so essential to our interpretation, does not appear in Herodotus, according to whom she came from the Paianian deme in Attica[303]. Can this omission be accounted for? There is an anecdote told by Herodotus in quite another connexion[304] which suggests that it can. [Sidenote: (iii) the story of the dressed-up woman] In the days just after King Darius had made his conquests in Thrace (about 512 B.C.), there lived on the banks of the Strymon two brothers named Pigres and Mantyes, who wished to become tyrants of the land in which they lived. To carry out this aim “they went to Sardis, taking with them their sister, who was tall and handsome.” Then waiting till Darius was sitting in state before the city, having dressed up their sister as well as they possibly could, they sent her for water with a pitcher on her head and leading a horse with her hand and spinning flax. She was noticed by the king, but the result was that he sent an expedition to her country, and deported her people to Asia.