In his domestic policy Polycrates won great fame as the promoter of great public works. “I have dwelt the longer on the Samians,” says Herodotus[396], “because they have erected three works that surpass those of all the Greeks.” The works in question are the harbour breakwater already mentioned, the huge temple of Hera, and the underground aqueduct constructed by Eupalinus of Megara[397]. Herodotus himself does not say who was responsible for these works being undertaken; but the context shows that the historian is thinking of the Samos of Polycrates. The first architect of the temple is given by him as Rhoecus, the partner of Theodorus, who worked for Polycrates. Great engineering activities in Samos about this time are indicated by the fact that the engineer who shortly afterwards bridged the Bosporus for Darius was a Samian[398]. The breakwater round the harbour is naturally ascribed to the time of the Samian thalassocracy under Polycrates. There is therefore little doubt that modern scholars and archaeologists have been right in identifying these great constructions with the “Polycratean works” referred to by Aristotle[399] as typical undertakings of a typical tyrant, the more so as there are numerous instances of early tyrants undertaking these particular kinds of work[400]. One work of a similar kind that Samos owed to Polycrates deserves at least a passing notice, namely the “laura” that he erected as a rival to what is called in Sardis the Ἀγκὼν γλυκύς[401]. Etymologically “laura” is probably to be connected with “labyrinth[402].” The word has various meanings[403]. The laura at Samos appears to have been a place for buying and selling[404], possibly an early predecessor of the labyrinthine bazaars still in use in the great cities of the near East such as Smyrna, Cairo, and Constantinople[405]. If Polycrates’ laura was in fact a great bazaar, it is easy to imagine how it became a byword for luxury[406] and worse things than that. The description of it by Clearchus as a place of ill-repute is plainly from a source unfriendly to the tyrant[407]. [Sidenote: The labour employed on these works appears to have been mainly free.]