The context makes it difficult to derive ἔπρησεν from πίμπρημι. Nor can ἐπίστασις well signify “dream” (visit by night), since the analogy of κατ’ ὄναρ, κατ’ ἐνύπνιον shows that in that case κατὰ would not be followed by the article. Curtius therefore takes ἔπρησεν as Ionic for ἔπρασσεν in the common sense of “exacted,” “collected”: for the single ς he compares Τειχιούσης for Τειχιούσσης, which actually occurs on one of the figures from Branchidae. The word σύλη he explains by reference to Herodotus IV. 152, which describes how the Samians, on their return from the voyage to Tarshish, “set apart the tithe of their gains, six talents, and let make a copper cauldron after the manner of an Argive mixing bowl, and dedicated it in the Heraeum[434].” [Illustration: Fig. 10. Aiakes, father of Polycrates.] The gains from Tarshish, so Curtius suggests, may actually have been called σύλη, the idea of which word he thinks had grown to include all gains made by ventures on the sea. The name of Polycrates’ brother Syloson is almost certainly to be derived from σῦλον (= σύλη, see above) and σῶν = σαῶν from σαῶ = σῴζω (save)[435]. Curtius rightly observes that this name takes the connexion of Polycrates’ family with σύλαι, sea-spoils, sea-gains, back to the time when Syloson received his name, that is, presumably, a generation or so before he and his two brothers, Pantagnotos and Polycrates, seized the tyranny of their native city. [Sidenote: Polycrates is said by Herodotus to have owed his fall to an attempt to get money enough to rule all Greece.] The great wave of the Persian invasions of Europe, that began only a few years after Polycrates’ death, and the rise of the Athenian empire after the Persians’ final repulse, have somewhat eclipsed the glory of the Samian thalassocracy, which practically synchronized with the tyranny of Polycrates. During his reign he was unquestionably the most famous Greek in the whole Greek world, and his extraordinary series of unbroken successes was reported and discussed everywhere[436]. From the Greek point of view, according to which all excesses are to be avoided, whether of good things or of bad, he was too successful. The end could only be Nemesis or retribution. This feeling is expressed by Herodotus in the letter in which he makes the king of Egypt advise Polycrates to break the series by voluntarily giving up the thing that most he cared for[437].