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Greek Tyranny

Greek Tyranny. 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. Political and Material Preconditions of Early Poleis.

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Greek Tyranny

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  1. Greek Tyranny 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

  2. Political and Material Preconditions of Early Poleis • Agrarian Economy at Subsistence Level • Population Growth and the Limits of the Polis’ Resources

  3. Unity and Divisions in the Polis • Citizen: Adult Male with Citizen Father • Non-Citizen: Resident Alien, Slave, Woman, Child • City as Parasite (?): Astu and Rural Countryside • Aristocratic Clan and Class Struggles • Aristoi Claim Hereditary Political Rights and Privileges • Competition among Great Aristocratic Clans • Stasis: Horizontal and Vertical

  4. Historical Developments and Tyranny • Dark-Age Monarchy (petty kings orbasileis) • Aristocracy (dual kingship survives at Sparta) • 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)

  5. Tyranny’s Heyday, Dangers of Historical GeneralizationSeventh and Sixth Centuries (ca. 650-510 BCE) • 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 (Miletus, Athens, Samos, Syracuse) • Neutrality of the word tyrannos (pejorative meaning a result of later Greek writers such as Plato and Polybius)

  6. J.F. McGlew, Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece 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.

  7. 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.

  8. Typology of Greek Tyranny • Exile of rival aristocrats and confiscation of property • Sending out colonies; seeking revenue abroad • Engage in public works projects; beautification of polis • Promotion of new civic festivals; fostering polis solidarity • Break down patron-client hierarchies of aristocracies; liberate demos (“people”) for future political participation • New aristocracies of wealth as opposed to birth and aristocratic privilege

  9. Periander of Corinth’s Diolkos

  10. 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. Herodotus (3.60): Polycrates and Samos

  11. 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. Herodotus (1.60) on Pisistratus’ Reestablishment at Athens

  12. Pisistratid Athens Panathenaic Way

  13. Amphora Similar to Those Awarded as Prizes at the Panathenaic Games

  14. Aftermath of TyrannyConstitutional Governments and Written Law Codes • Submission of Private Disputes to Third-Party Arbitration • Written Statutory Law • Earliest Greek Written Law Codes • ca. 650 BCE in Cretan Dreros • Law Code of Gortyn

  15. Greek Tyranny: Key Factors • Monetization of Greece--advance of the rising commercial class against the old, landed aristocracies • Hoplite Military Development?

  16. 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?

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