Tyranny and the Polis
“A tyrant was roughly what we should call a
dictator, a man who obtained sole power in
the state and held it in defiance of any
constitution that had existed previously.”
A. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants
What is a Polis?
 Origins?
 Physical Characteristics?
 The “Spiritual Universe” of the Polis?
 Types of Government?
Historical Developments and Tyranny
 Dark-Age Monarchy (petty kings or basileis)
 Aristocracy (dual kingship survives at Sparta)
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Aristoi = “best men”
Hereditary groups claiming descent from first king
or ‘founder’ of the polis (Eupatridae at Athens,
Bacchiadae at Corinth, Hippeis at Eretria)
Evidence: fragments of Solon and Alcaeus, Homer,
Institutional Survivals (king-archon at Athens),
Herodotus (ca. 430 BCE), Later Political Theorists
(Plato, Polybius)
Political and Material Preconditions
of the Early Poleis
 Agrarian Economy at Subsistence Level
 Aristoi Claim Hereditary Political Rights and
Privileges
 Competition Among Great Aristocratic Clans
 Population Growth and the Limits of the Polis’
Resources
Tyranny’s Heyday, Dangers of Historical Generalization
7th and 6th Centuries BCE (ca. 650-510)
 Autocratic power seized in times of crisis arising from external
threats and/or internal tensions (tyrant employs bands of
mercenaries as personal bodyguard)
 Tyranny as Phenomenon of Political Transition
 Result of abuse of aristocratic privilege
 Hesiod, Works and Days (ca. 750-700 BCE?): “Keep her
[Justice’s] commands, O gift-devouring kings, and let verdicts
be straight; yes, lay your crooked ways aside!” (lines 263-264)
 Crises of small farmers and debt-bondage (Miletos, Athens,
Samos, Syracuse)
 Neutrality of the word tyrannos (pejorative meaning a result of later
Greek writers such as Plato and Polybius)
Herodotus (5.92) on Periander of Corinth
“At the beginning Periander was gentler than his father had been. But
afterwards, when he had dealt, by messengers, with Thrasybulus, tyrant
of Miletus, he became yet bloodier…For he sent a herald to Thrasybulus
inquiring about the safest political establishment for administering the
city the best. Thrasybulus led out Periander’s messenger, outside the city,
and with him entered a sown field; then he walked through the field,
questioning, and again questioning, the herald about his coming from
Corinth. And ever and again as he saw one of the ears of grain growing
above the rest he would strike it down, and what he struck down he
threw away, until by this means he had destroyed all the fairest and
strongest of the grain….Periander understood the act of Thrasybulus and
grasped in his mind that what he was telling him was that he should
murder the most eminent of the citizens.”
“The Greeks remembered the rise and fall of their tyrants most diligently;
they were far less interested in what tyrants did after their power was secure
and before it began to waver. This focus expresses the Greeks’ own interests
in tyranny, which, when its temporal limits were clearly defined, became a
single coherent political event with a clear plot, characters, and a tangible
moral lesson. But this focus also makes it very difficult to reconstruct
tyranny in other terms than the Greeks did. From a perspective that
rigorously distinguishes between the reality and the perception of tyranny,
the memories of tyrants are, at their best, politically interested, biased, and
partial; at their worst, they are incidental, sensational, and scandalous, full
of the fascination tyrants held and virtually devoid of information about
what they did. It is impossible to miss the significance of these gaps and
biases, and no historian would hesitate to trade a story like Herodotus’s
tragic account of Polycrates’ fall for information about the interactions
between tyrants and aristocrats.”
James F. McGlew, Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece
Typology of Greek Tyranny
 Exile of Rival Aristocrats and Confiscation of Property
 Sending out of colonies; seeking sources of revenue
abroad
 Engage in public works projects; beautification of polis
 Promotion of new civic festivals; fostering polis
solidarity
 Break down patron-client hierarchies of the
aristocracies; liberate the demos for future political
participation
 New aristocracies of wealth as opposed to birth and
aristocratic privilege (?)
Periander of Corinth’s Diolkos
Herodotus (3.60): Polycrates and Samos
“I have talked…about the Samians, because, of
all the Greeks, they have made the three greatest
works of construction. One is a double-mouthed
channel driven underground through a hill nine
hundred feet high….The second is a mole in the
sea around the harbor, one hundred and twenty
feet deep. The length of the mole is a quarter of a
mile. The third work of the Samians is the
greatest temple that I have ever seen.”
Causes of Greek Tyranny: Some Theories
 Monetization of Greece--advance of
the rising commercial class against
the old, landed aristocracies
 Hoplite Military Development?
Herodotus (1.60) on Pisistratus’
Reestablishment at Athens
“There was in the deme of Paeania a woman called Phya, and in
stature she was but three fingers short of four cubits, and beautiful
besides. They fitted her with full armor, put her in a chariot,
arranged her pose so that she would appear at her most striking,
and drove her into the city. They had sent heralds to run ahead of
them, and these, when they arrived, spoke as they had been ordered,
“Men of Athens, receive with good will Pisistratus, whom Athena
herself, having honored him above all mankind, is bringing back
from exile to her own Acropolis.” So the heralds went about, saying
these things, and the word immediately spread through the demes
that Athena was bringing Pisistratus back. The people in the city
believed that this woman was the goddess herself and offered
prayers to her, for all that she was only human, and they welcomed
Pisistratus.”
Athens at the End of the Pisistratids
The Panathenaic Way
Amphora Similar to Those Awarded as Prizes at
the Panathenaic Games
Aftermath of the Tyrants
Constitutional Governments and Written Law Codes
 Submission of private disputes to thirdparty arbitration
 Written statutory law
 Earliest Greek Written Law Codes
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ca. 650 BCE in Cretan Dreros
Law Code of Gortyn
Discussion Question
Compare and Contrast the Wanax or King of the
Bronze-Age Palace-Centers and the Greek Tyrant
of Archaic Period (ca. 650-510 BCE).
What would you regard as the most significant
historical parallels and differences?