As pointed out by Grundy[1375] Myrcinus occupied a most important site on great strategic and commercial highways. But there is no reason to suspect Herodotus when he tells us that the town owed its importance first and foremost not to its geographical situation but to its minerals and forests. It is as a great mine-owner and shipbuilder and the employer of hosts of miners and shipbuilders and seamen that Histiaeus threatens to make himself a ruler sufficiently powerful to be a danger to the Great King himself[1376].
The earliest tyrant of Ephesus appears to have been Pythagoras, who overthrew the government of the Basilidae. Baton of Sinope[1377], who wrote a history of the tyrants of Ephesus[1378], states that Pythagoras lived “before Cyrus the Persian.” This seems to be rather an understatement of the tyrant’s antiquity, since we hear of two other tyrants, Melas and Pindaros, of whom the latter was son and successor of the former and was deprived of his throne by Croesus[1379], and of yet another pair, by name Athenagoras and Komas, who lived at the same time as the poet Hipponax and must therefore be assigned to about the middle of the sixth century[1380], while during part of the reign of Croesus, after the fall of Pindaros, Ephesus appears to have enjoyed a moderate democracy guided by the aesymnetes Aristarchus[1381]. All this leaves little room for Pythagoras in the period just preceding Cyrus, and since too the Basilidae were almost certainly one of the hereditary aristocracies, like the Bacchiadae of Corinth, that overthrew the hereditary monarchy in most Greek cities before the end of the dark ages, it becomes probable that Pythagoras flourished at the beginning of the sixth century or possibly even in the seventh[1382].
According to our only authority Suidas, who quotes Baton on the date of Pythagoras and very possibly used him for the rest of his notice, Pythagoras displayed an insatiable passion for money (ἔρως χρημάτων ἄμετρος) and showed himself a cruel tyrant (τύραννος πικρότατος) but “with the people and the multitude he both was and appeared to be well liked, sometimes making them hopeful by his promises, sometimes secretly distributing small gratuities[1383].” “Those however who enjoyed reputation or power he plundered and subjected to confiscations[1384].” Suidas deals only with the tyrant on the throne and draws plainly from a most unfriendly source[1385]: but as far as he goes he suggests that the power of Pythagoras was based on wealth.