It was no accident that the invention was made precisely at this time. Industry and commerce were simultaneously making enormous strides. About the beginning of the seventh century the new Lydian Dynasty of the Mermnadae made Sardis one of the most important trading centres that have arisen in the world’s history. The Lydian merchants became middlemen between Greece and the Far East. Egypt recovered its prosperity and began rapidly to develop commercial and other relations with its neighbours, including the Greeks. Greek traders were pushing their goods by sea in all directions from Spain to the Crimea. Concrete evidence of this activity is still to be seen in the Corinthian and Milesian pottery of the period that has been so abundantly unearthed as far afield as Northern Italy and Southern Russia. It was a time of extraordinary intellectual alertness. Thales and the numerous other philosophers of the Ionian School were in close touch with the merchants and manufacturers of their age. They were in fact men of science rather than philosophers in the narrow modern sense of the latter word, and most of them were ready to apply their science to practical and commercial ends, as for example Thales, who is said to have made a fortune by buying up all the oil presses in advance when his agricultural observations had led him to expect a particularly plentiful harvest[1]. A corner in oil sounds very modern, and in fact the whole of the evidence shows that in many ways this ancient epoch curiously anticipated the present age. [Sidenote: and (_b_) of the first rulers to be called tyrants.] Politically these two centuries are generally known as the age of tyrants. The view that the prevalence of tyranny was in some way connected with the invention of coinage has been occasionally expressed[2]. Radet has even gone so far as to suggest that the first tyrant was also the first coiner[3]. He does not however go further than to suggest that the tyrant started a mint and coinage when already on the throne. [Sidenote: The new form of government was, I believe, based on the new form of capital.] The evidence appears to me to point to conclusions of a more wide-reaching character. Briefly stated they are these: that the seventh and sixth century Greek tyrants were the first men in their various cities to realize the political possibilities of the new conditions created by the introduction of the new coinage, and that to a large extent they owed their position as tyrants to a financial or commercial supremacy which they had already established before they attained to supreme political power in their several states.