Tyrant. The word definitely has a negative connotation these days. “Sic semper tyranniis” is what you say after you’ve killed one. The evil Count Dooku was also known as Darth Tyrannus. Nobody wants to be a tyrant—“king,” quite possibly, and you might even be able to talk them into “dictator,” but not tyrant.
This was not always so. Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, protested that he did not wish to become a tyrant, despite all the wealth and prestige that accrued to one with such a title. Alcaeus the Lesbian also decried tyranny, as did Herodotus the historian, though they never aspired to the position. Some of the most memorable condemnations of the tyrant’s life come from Plato and Xenophon, Socrates’ greatest pupils. These men wrote so harshly against tyranny because it was generally considered a very nice position to hold. You didn’t want to live under a tyrant—at least, probably not—but to be a tyrant was in a sense the apex of all earthly ambitions.
The word τύραννος is not of Greek origin—it seems to come from somewhere in Asia Minor, Lydia being the most popular candidate. Herodotus uses it to refer to kings of Lydia like Candaules and Croesus, but it basically serves as a synonym for king. The use of a foreign word to label the tyrants was part of an anti-tyrannical ideology. Barbarians lived quietly under tyrants, but Greeks, they knew how to govern themselves.
Before the tyrants, the Greek city-states were in their infancy. Through a process that Thucydides calls συνοικισμός, the scattered villages of the various regions in Greece transferred much of their government and even population to cities. Attica was the most extreme example, with the single city of Athens dominating the entire region, while other larger and more fertile regions had multiple power centers.
Within these city-states, aristocratic republics held sway. There were annually elected officials, small councils of nobles, and citizen assemblies that could vote yea or nay on major issues (outcomes being decided based on how loudly each side shouted). Public offices were open exclusively to aristocrats, much to the chagrin of wealthy commoners. In addition, aristocrats owned the bulk of the farmland and held much of the populace in the chains of debt. The whole system was heavily slanted in favor of the aristocrats and so reform movements sprouted up. The reformers’ demands were increased access to public office, written law codes, cancellation of debts, redistribution of land, and (probably) relaxation of marriage restrictions. These reform movements achieved occasional successes—we have records of law codes like the Spartan Great Rhetra, and Dracon’s laws are another example—but in general they failed, opening the door for the tyrants.
Kings had ruled before the city-states, though with the advice and consent of local nobles. The king of a particular region performed sacrifices on behalf of the community, received guests, dispensed justice, and led the army in war. The position of king was not necessarily heredity, but it was the wealthiest nobleman in the region who generally became king, and wealth was hereditary, so hereditary kingship was de facto if not de jure. However, with increasing populations and especially increasing population densities, it became clear that one man simply couldn’t handle all the work that governing entailed, so the aristocratic republics were established. The office of king did not go away—indeed, even under the democracy in Athens there was an ἄρχων βασιλεύς who conducted public sacrifices—but the monarchies were replaced.
One of these kings, Pheidon of Argos, is credited by Aristotle as the first tyrant. Myth and legend claim that Argos held sway over much of the Peloponnese during the Dark Age, but the early-to-mid 7th century is the best estimate for the beginning of Argive hegemony. In 668 B.C. Pheidon defeated Sparta at the battle of Hysiae and went on to conquer the much of the peninsula. His most lasting legacy is the system of weights and measures he established. Late in his reign, Pheidon used his popularity and control over the military to establish himself as a monarchical ruler.
The archetypal tyrant, however, was a man who was initially a political outsider but seized power purely by force of arms. The first tyrant in this mold was Cypselus of Corinth. Before Cypselus, Corinth was ruled by a particularly close-knit aristocracy, a single clan called the Bacchiadai that forbad marriage outside the clan. Cypselus’ mother Labda (whose name means “lame”) was rejected by all the eligible Bacchiad males and so was allowed to marry a wealthy commoner named Eëtion. As an adult, Cypselus was elected polemarch (“war-leader”) and used his command of the army to overthrown and expel the Bacchiadai, confiscating and redistributing their property. Cypselus was extremely popular as tyrant, ruling for thirty years and without the use of a mercenary bodyguard.
The rise of a tyrant was almost invariably accompanied by murders and exiles as the new tyrant purged his political enemies. Once they were in power, however, the tyrants proved quite restrained. They granted reforms to the commoners to assure their popularity and maintained a standing army lest anyone else have designs on their position, but the systems of offices from the aristocratic republics remained intact and continued to function as before. The tyrant simply substituted for the king, conducting public sacrifices, receiving foreign visitors, dispensing justice, and commanding the army in war.
Indeed, tyrants even worked to eliminate corruption and improve government services for the common people. In Athens, for instance, Peisistratus established country judges so that farmers could settle disputes without having to travel all the way to the city and meet with an aristocratic judge (whom the wealthier party would simply bribe). Extensive public works were common as well. The tyranny was still a state, of course, and so still predatory, but it was privately-owned, with all the relative advantages such government accrues.
In foreign affairs, the tyrants were remarkably placid. No great wars rocked the Greek world during this period, just relatively small-scale actions. To go to war was a great risk for a tyrant: in addition to being quite expensive, mobilizing a large group of armed men, losing in battle, or simply being absent from the city for an extended period of time could all precipitate a coup attempt. The tyrants did occasionally intervene in neighboring states—Periander of Corinth had persistent difficulties with the colony at Corcyra, and Peisistratus intervened in affairs on Euboea—but these were limited actions, a very far cry from the titanic conflicts of the Classical period.
This does not mean that the tyrants were isolationists. They supported commerce and established trading and diplomatic ties with foreign nations as far afield as Egypt and Persia. They created a system of marriage and mutual support alliances between city-states. Polycrates of Samos built a powerful navy and freed the Eastern Aegean of pirates. To deal with population growth, the tyrants sponsored colonies all across the Aegean, in Sicily and Italy, and even at the mouth of the Nile. Peace and prosperity reigned alongside the tyrants.
All this would be impressive enough, but the tyrants were also great patrons of the arts. Hiero of Syracuse famously employed the services of Pindar. Peisistratus established the dramatic festivals of the Dionysia and created an authoritative version of the Homeric epics—indeed, the version of Homer that we still use to this day comes from Peisistratus. Periander, probably the greatest of the Archaic tyrants, was counted among the Seven Sages of ancient Greece and was the patron the great poet Arion. By all measures, then, life was quite good under the tyrants.
So why did the tyrants fall, as they all eventually did? In general, the tyrants were not destroyed from without but from within. The wealthy, both old aristocrats and newly exalted commoners, resented the power and wealth of the tyrants as well as the limitations they placed on political advancement. The tyrannies were established to benefit the tyrants and their families and supporters; some men wanted more, and they justified their rebellions with a new ideology.
The problem with the old republics, they argued, was that the old aristocrats had too little restriction on their power: they could do as they pleased and there was no law that restrained them. The tyrants were simply the perfection of that principle of lawless rule. Sure, your life is on the up-and-up, but at any moment the tyrant can snatch that all away and there is nothing you can do about it. To be truly secure in our persons and property, we need to establish a government of laws, not of men.
The tyrants had never really worked out any kind of ideological justification for their position. They took whatever excuses they could get their hands on, but at bottom, they held power simply because they held it. A tyrant ruled prudently because they had to do so simply to maintain his tyranny; when he erred, he fell.
On top of the ideological factor, there was an important geopolitical element to the tyrants’ downfall: the rise of Sparta. Sparta experienced the same reform movement as all the other cities in the Archaic period. Though they liked to say in the Classical period that their constitution was unchanged through the centuries, handed down by their lawgiver Lycurgus, most scholars today place the Lycurgian reforms in the late 7th and 6th centuries.
What was striking about Sparta was that it managed to reform successfully and without tyranny. In that sense, the constitution was centuries old. It also meant that the Spartans could ride the anti-tyranny ideological wave to create their own hegemony, as well as a reputation as liberators and champions of freedom.
The Spartans’ policy is associated with the ephor Chilon, another of the Seven Sages, and had three major components. Ideologically, Sparta set itself in opposition to the tyrants and supported anti-tyrannical uprisings as far away as Samos. Geopolitically, Sparta offered protection from Argos, whose shadow still lay across the Peloponnese. Diplomatically, Sparta concluded binary agreements with other cities whereby the Spartans agreed to defend the cities from attack while they agreed to send troops on Spartan campaigns.
Chilon’s vision never extended outside the Peloponnese, but King Cleomenes I expanded the alliance past the Isthmus of Corinth to Thebes and Athens, albeit only de facto in Athens’ case. There was no obvious reason for this expansion: Sparta could not easily project power beyond the Isthmus for fear of a helot revolt at home. In fact, when the Plataeans in Boeotia had requested Spartan protection from Thebes, they had been referred instead to Athens, who was closer at hand. Additionally, Cleomenes had largely destroyed the threat from Argos in 494 B.C., though he wisely left the city intact. The danger from Persia soon loomed large, so the expanded alliance was fortuitous, but it also set Sparta up for overextension later on.
The Persians had no strong feelings about Greek government. As long as subject Greek cities paid their taxes, the Persians were happy to leave them be. However, tyranny was a simple and easy way for the Persians to administer these cities: choose a particularly prominent local person to be the liaison between a particular city and the Persian king and give him money and political support to ensure his loyalty. This system worked quite well for a time, but in 499 B.C., the tyrants led their people in rebellion against the Persians. Later, when the Persians received the Ionian cities back from Sparta, they let the Greeks govern themselves as democracies. The Persian connection did nothing to burnish the image of tyranny.
Trapped between the hammer of the Spartan army and the anvil of their own people, the tyrants were crushed. Only in Sicily, where the Carthaginian threat necessitated a very high degree of military readiness, and in Ionia did tyranny survive into the Classical period. Of these two factors, however, the ideological one was much stronger: when the Spartans tried to restore the Peisistratids in Athens, their own allies refused to participate.
Stories about the excesses of tyranny can be some of the most colorful and memorable in Greek history. Take for instance the story of Thrasybulus’ advice to Periander. Wishing for counsel on how to secure his rule, Periander sent a messenger to his friend Thrasybulus, tyrant of Miletus, to pick his brain. Thrasybulus took the messenger through a wheat field saying nothing but periodically striking a noticeably tall wheat stalk with his stick. The puzzled messenger reported the events to Periander, who understood that Thrasybulus was recommending that he kill all the outstanding men in Corinth, which, according to Herodotus, he then did. (Readers of Livy will note that this story is probably the inspiration for the infamous tale of Tarquin and the Tulips.)
This story is at least plausible—presumably Periander did kill a fair number of illustrious men—but others more than strain credulity. Another story about Periander reported by Herodotus goes as follows: an unnamed friend of Periander’s gave to the tyrant a certain item which Periander misplaced. In order to find this mysterious item belonging to his mysterious friend, Periander did not send slaves rummaging through his house but instead dispatched a messenger to an oracle where he encountered the ghost of Periander’s wife (whom Periander had murdered, oh! and with whom he’d committed necrophilia, apparently) who was upset that she had been cremated and wanted better clothes in the afterlife. In order to set this matter to rights, Periander summoned all the ladies of Corinth to the temple of Hera, where he stripped them of their garments (because he couldn’t have just asked for donations of clothes, apparently), which he then burned. The shade of his wife was thus placated and informed Periander where he had put the anonymous friend’s unknown item … wherever that was.
The failure of the tyrants to establish a tyrannical ideology was not completely their own fault. Greece never fully accepted the notion of a divine right to rule: the first Greek to be accorded divine honors was Lysander of Sparta. The Macedonians would grant either heroic or divine honors to their kings after they had died, and Alexander twisted the Greeks’ arms to receive them while he was alive, but it never really caught on as long as the Greeks had any kind of autonomy. (The Spartan reply to Alexander’s request went thusly: “We permit Alexander to be called a god if he wishes.”)
The absence of divine sanction for tyrannical rule meant that the tyrants had to rely purely on material interests to maintain their rule. This worked for a while, but people do not simply want good government, they want righteous government. They will gladly make the perfect the enemy of the good if their sense of right tells them to, no matter how good that good may be.
What did their anti-tyrannical ideology buy for the Greeks, after all? War. War and death and murder, slaughter unlike anything they had ever experienced before. The one-hundred-thirty-one years between the battle of the Eurymedon, which ended the Persian threat, and the battle of Chaeronea, which established Macedonian hegemony, were a political and moral catastrophe.
On the bright side, at least the Classical period produced some great literature.
We can certainly praise the great tyrants or their latin counterparts, the Republican dictator, but the philosophic tradition irrevocably assigned the moral meaning to those words as in The Republic and The Politics. A tyrant is a ruler who is a slave to his passions. If we want to talk about these ancient concepts in a contemporary sense, we need a new rhetoric and a new paradigm of power and authority to describe it.
A tyrant seems then very similar to a warlord, that is one who can enforce his political rule only by the material means at his disposal and not from loyalty of the people. For this, in the long term it seems tyranny is not entirely stable or at least it shouldn’t be without factoring in some other dynamic at play. Divine right had problems in Greece because their theology was not very advanced in the sense of its political relevancy. As compared with other theologies that existed in the Middle East and elsewhere and were very well suited to autocratic rule, the Greeks lacked this. See Egypt for example.
Yes, the people do wish for righteous government. This I think, can never be forgotten by anyone who supports autocracy. It must be a bedrock principle of the successful autocrat.
Lydia was also called Sfarda or Sparda by the native Lydians.
Plato said the tyrant’s ruling principle was passion — quite an apt description, if you think of modern tyrants like Mao or Stalin who were notorious womanisers and (at least in the case of Mao) into artistic expression too.
(Plato’s other rulers, from best to worst, were the military timarch ruled by honour, the oligarch ruled by love of wealth, and the democrat ruled by freedom.)