Greek tyrants

Greek attitudes toward tyranny, as already noted, changed over time, shaped by external events. In the beginning the tyrant figures in the poetic sources as an enviable status, something to which an aristocrat might aspire. In the early stages of the Greek polis (city-state), the hereditary aristocracy held all political power and ruled as a group, with the mass of citizens excluded from political life. Tyrants first appear in that milieu in the mid-7th century bce, but there is controversy about precisely how. One view sees rivalry between aristocratic families who vied to take all power into their own hands; the other suggests that tyrants were representative of a newly politically conscious dēmos (people) who supported their rise in the hope of improving their position within the state. Although the idea of any political consciousness on the part of the dēmos in the 7th century is optimistic, it is true that early tyrants tended to have popular support. Figures such as Cypselus at Corinth and Cleisthenes at Sicyon offered an alternative to exploitation by the aristocrats, and certainly tyrants introduced reforms intended to please the dēmos, codifying the laws and establishing justice—Peisistratus in Athens set up traveling courts—and gathering resources for public projects, such as fountains to supply water and grand temples.

Thus, the tyrants of the Archaic age of ancient Greece (c. 900–500 bce)—Cypselus, Cleisthenes, Peisistratus, and Polycrates—were popular, presiding as they did over an era of prosperity and expansion. But those attitudes shifted in the course of the 5th century under the influence of the Persian invasions of Greece in 480–479 bce. Most sources for Greek history are Athenian, and for them the defining moments of the Athenian state were the establishment of the democracy in 510 bce and the Greeks’ astonishing defeat of Persia in the next generation. The outcome of the Greco-Persian Wars was interpreted as the success of the free and democratic Greeks against the autocratic and tyrannical Persian king; consequently, in Athenian writing after 480 bce tyranny became the hated opposite of democracy. That coloured attitudes toward tyranny in the past as well; rulership that had previously seemed positive and acceptable was condemned as oppressive and self-serving.

The idea that tyranny vanished in 510 bce, however, is a false one. One of the most-successful tyrant dynasties ruled in Sicily between 406 and 367, that of Dionysius the Elder and his sons, and tyrants reappeared in numbers in the 4th century bce. In part that reflects a genuine change in political circumstances. Impoverishment and an increase in foreign interference meant that constitutions tended to become unstable, and hence many of those classical tyrants came to power on a platform of economic reform to benefit the lower classes, offering the cancellation of debts and redistribution of land.

By the end of the 4th century, Philip of Macedon had conquered the Greek states and put an end to their political freedom, and under Alexander the Great a huge Macedonian empire was created. That in turn spawned new tyrannies and monarchies. At first, dependent governments were set up under Macedonian rule. After Alexander’s death independent kingdoms were established by his successors and imitators. The 3rd century saw the creation of new tyrannies that were less and less distinguishable from hereditary monarchies, such as the rule of Hieron II in Syracuse. Under those circumstances the idea of tyranny changed from a constitutional issue to an ethical one, and tyrannos, rather than indicating a ruler who was not a king, came to be used to describe a particular type of king: one who put his or her own interests before those of the citizens and acted without restraint by the law.

Tyranny in Rome

Roman attitudes toward tyranny were clear. Early in their history Romans had been governed by kings, but the true beginning of the Roman state was the foundation of the republic in 509 bce. Kingship, according to Roman historians, could all too easily turn into tyranny, and the later kings are depicted as tyrants of the negative type—cruel, exploitative, and self-indulgent—so under the republic, the Romans set their faces against monarchy of any kind. Clear limits were set to the amount of power any one individual could command. The dictatorship existed as an emergency measure whereby one man could be appointed to overall power in the state, but it could be held for six months at most. Much Roman history, however, was written several hundred years later, in the 1st century bce, and betrays a very contemporary concern with the problem of tyranny. By 133 bce the growth of the empire had changed Rome from a small city-state to a global power, and the conquest of Italy and the Mediterranean had created the conditions for individual generals to gain both enormous wealth through conquest and a huge following among their soldiers, paving the way for them to seek personal power through military force. Generals began to use the dictatorship unconstitutionally to achieve domination. Sulla was the first to take his army to Rome in 82 bce after fighting a civil war and was elected to an indefinite dictatorship by a cowed Senate. He chose to lay down the role and returned to private life, but his example was noted by Julius Caesar. In 46 bce Caesar also took an army into Italy and was made dictator—first for 10 years and then, in 44, for life. That made him effectively a king, superior to all other magistrates and not subject to their veto or appeal, and in that context the idea of tyranny began to be discussed by historians and philosophers. Thinkers such as Cicero adopted the language of Greek tyranny to describe Caesar’s position and debated the moral justification for tyrannicide. The assassins of Caesar presented themselves as overthrowing a tyranny, but the removal of one man could not prevent the drift to monarchic power in Rome, and Caesar’s heir Augustus took control as the first emperor.

At several points under the early emperors, conspiracies were formed to remove the ruler and restore the republic on the grounds that the imperial power was unconstitutional and therefore illegal, but they failed owing to lack of support by the people (who strongly favoured monarchic rule) and the individual ambitions of the conspirators. Soon imperial rule was established as constitutional, and the language of tyranny again became ethical in application rather than political. Accusations of tyranny came to refer to the quality of rule rather than its legitimacy: an emperor who abused his power or used it for personal ends was seen as despotic, although it took a brave man to say so in public.

Tyranny and the people

The most-significant change in the conception of tyranny from the ancient world to the modern lies in the role of the people under a tyrant. In ancient times tyrants tended to be popular, because the people saw them as upholding their interests. Tyrants often introduced measures to improve the economic and social status of the poor; it was the aristocracy (who wrote the histories) who tended to oppose tyranny, because, in bypassing the constitution, tyranny threatened their traditional privileges. But as absolute rule became established in the Roman Empire, the terms of debate shifted, focusing on the question of when monarchic power became tyrannical in nature. From that springs the idea of tyranny in its modern sense: a situation in which the power of the ruler outweighs that of the ruled. That definition allows even a representative government to be labeled a tyranny.