Note 1329 — Chapter IX · Sicyon, Megara, Miletus, Ephesus, Leontini, Agrigentum, Cumae

The Cretan sculptors Dipoenus and Scyllis came about 580 B.C. to Sicyon, “which was long the home of all such crafts. The Sicyonians contracted with them for statues of the gods, but before they were completed the artists complained that they were ill used and departed to Aetolia” (Pliny, N.H. XXXVI. 4). Gardner suggests that the artists left Sicyon on the death of Cleisthenes (Gk. Sculp.2 p. 103). The wild and half civilized Aetolia seems an odd refuge for such highly skilled craftsmen. Beyond Aetolia from Sicyon lay the city of Ambracia, which Pliny declares to have been crammed with works of Dipoenus (N.H. XXXVI. 4). On the strength presumably of this statement, Gardner (ibid.) makes the artists retire to Ambracia from Sicyon. Ambracia was a Corinthian colony and appears to have continued under a tyrant of the house of Cypselus after the fall of the great tyrant houses in the isthmus states. The Sicyonians were ordered by Apollo to recall the artists and let them finish their work, and this was done though it cost the Sicyonians dear (magnis mercedibus impetratum est, Pliny, N.H. XXXVI. 4). It may be noted that tyranny too was revived at Sicyon. A tyrant Aeschines was expelled by the Spartans, presumably towards the end of the sixth century, Plut. de Hdt. Malig. 21 (Moral. 859). The wanderings of Dipoenus and Scyllis thus point to a possible connexion between the tyrannical form of government and good conditions for skilled labour.