Is it possible that we have here the clue to the Phye story? The details about her being dressed up in full armour and placed in a chariot are not the essence of the story: they all appear in Herodotus in quite a different setting, as part of the ritual of the worship of Athena in North Africa by Lake Tritonis[286]. It can hardly be doubted that one of these passages is plagiarized from the other, and it is scarcely less certain that Phye is indebted to the ritual of Lake Tritonis and not _vice versa_.
[Sidenote: Was the Athena who restored Peisistratus the lady of the coins?]
The kernel of the Phye story lies in the tradition that Peisistratus was restored by a woman, “as Herodotus says, from the deme of the Paianians, but as some say, a Thracian flower girl from the deme of Kollytos[287].” In fact Phye, the human goddess four cubits high, said by some to come from Attica, and by others from Thrace, who brought Peisistratus back to Athens for the first time, bears a suspicious likeness to the coins called sometimes girls and sometimes goddesses, derived some from Attica, and some from Thrace, with which Peisistratus secured his second return, and finally established his power.
Assume for the moment that they were indeed identical, and it is easy to see how the Phye story may have arisen. Peisistratus certainly claimed to rule by the grace of Athena. Everyone is agreed in inferring from the Phye story that he attributed his restoration to the intervention of the goddess. After the citizens had fulfilled Solon’s prophecy, and “consented to ruin their great city, induced by money[288],” what more natural than that one of the tyrant’s opponents should sarcastically agree that it was indeed Athena who had restored Peisistratus: on which another might comment that it was not the virgin goddess of Athens who had restored the tyrant, but an alien being of quite a different order, a Thracian flower girl. [Sidenote: cp. (i) details in the story that suggest a derivation from the coins,] The name of flower girl (στεφανόπωλις) is never applied to Athenian drachmae. If we accepted Head’s early dating for the Athena type, and assumed a Peisistratan date for certain Athenian coins[289] where the goddess has had her hair done by a κεροπλάστης[290] in corkscrew curls (fig. 7_a_) that suggest an early date[291], and wears the garland (στέφανος) of olive leaves (fig. 7_a_, _b_) that appears regularly on coins of the fifth century, we might find in flower girl (lit. garland seller, στεφανόπωλις) an allusion to this detail. The garland seller may often have advertised her garlands by wearing one herself[292].