When once established Peisistratus certainly set himself to secure control of a large amount of labour by the public works that he promoted. Kallirrhoe (the Fair Spring), the best source of the Athenian water supply, was improved by him into Enneakrounos (the Nine Fountains)[323]. The building that shelters the actual jets is depicted on a black figure vase[324]. Like Polycrates and the seventh century tyrants, he was a great builder; the group of Athena slaying a giant, excavated on the Acropolis in the eighties of the last century[325], probably belongs to the temple that he built to Athena[326]; his temple of the Olympian Zeus was not completed till the time of Hadrian. Like Periander of Corinth, he severely repressed idleness[327]. To Aristophanes, writing just a century after the fall of the tyranny, the Athens of Hippias appeared as a city of labourers[328]. Beloch well insists on the acute commercial instinct of Peisistratus in getting a footing on the coast of the Hellespont by the seizure of Sigeium[329]. Hippias not only kept his hold on the town to the last, and eventually retired there, but actively developed his father’s line of policy by forming a close personal connexion with the tyrants of Lampsacus[330], and effecting a reconciliation with the Philaids, his rivals on the European side of the strait[331]. [Sidenote: Financial troubles of the tyranny before its overthrow.] According to the pseudo-Aristotelian _Oeconomica_, Hippias on one occasion called in the Attic coinage at a fixed valuation, and then reissued the same money[332]. Some scholars have tried to explain away this last statement, and assume a change in the type[333]. But if, as is natural to suppose, χαρακτήρ in this passage means type, then the Greek implies that no such change was made. The other actions of Hippias recorded in the same passage are confiscations of property (front doors, projecting top stories of houses, etc.), sold again, with no alteration whatever, to the original owners. Six and Babelon[334] maintain that χαρακτήρ means denomination, and that Hippias proceeded to give the name of didrachm to a piece that had been previously a drachm. They quote with some effect the statement of the Aristotelian _Constitution of Athens_[335], ἦν ὁ ἀρχαῖος χαρακτὴρ δίδραχμον. Their arguments, though plausible, are not decisive: but whatever the explanation of these particular words, the whole passage makes it fairly certain that the step was an attempt to avert a financial crisis by some desperate manipulation of the coinage. It points to a serious threat of approaching insolvency, such as must have been the inevitable result of the loss of the Thracian mines[336]. [Sidenote: The Alcmaeonid opposition to the house of Peisistratus.]