TYRANNY AND POLITICAL CULTURE IN ANCIENT GREECECopyright © 1993 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published in 1993 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1996. International Standard Book Number 0-801 4-8387-5 (paper) Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 93-15653 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book. @ The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Tyranny and History c Tyrannus fulminatus: Power and Praise 14 Justice and Power: The Language of Early Greek Tyranny 32 The Lawgiver’s Struggle with Tyranny: Solon and the Excluded Middle 87 Master and Slave: The Fall of Tyranny 124 Narratives of Autonomy: Greek Founders 157 Lovers of the City: Tyranny and Democracy in Classical Athens 183 Afterword: Justice and Liberation 213 Bibliography 217 Index 227Acknowledgments This book has taken a long time to write, and it would have taken even longer but for a generous grant from the American Council of Learned Societies and a fellowship at the Stanford Hu- manities Center, which allowed me a year free from teaching. | am indebted to the encouragement and suggestions of Toni Bowers, James Hogan, Daniel Hooley, Michael Jameson, Robert Kaster, Cynthia Patterson, Kurt Raaflaub, James Redfield, David Schenker, and Peter White. Thanks also to Bernhard Kendler, Teresa Jesion- owski, Marian Shotwell, and to Cornell University Press's readers for their prompt and helpful comments, and to Roz Macken for her acuity and patience. Only a much better book than this would be sufficient thanks for the persistent efforts of M. B. Wallace to lend it respectability, Thanks of a different kind are due to my parents, to whom this book is dedicated. J. F. McGLew viiTyranny and Political Culture in Ancient GreeceINTRODUCTION Tyranny and History It is so difficult—at least | find it so difficult—to understand people who speak the truth. Miss Bartlett in E. M. Forster, A Room with a View This book began as a treatment of the image of the tyrant in Greek authors of the fifth century B.c. and in democratic Athens. That image was certainly complicated. When tyrants had disap- peared from all but the remoter areas of the Greck world, tyranny nonetheless remained an object of general fascination and horror. The fifth century invested the tyrant with considerable ideological force. The advocates and enemies of democracy made various uses of him as a negative image of citizenship, while the more radical sophists embraced him, for yet other purposes, as a positive image of deliberately self-interested political action.! The book I intended to write was to complement treatments of the rise and fall of tyranny in the seventh, sixth, and early fifth centuries B.c., such as those pro- duced a generation ago by Antony Andrewes and Helmut Berve.? I did not think I needed to discuss the political or social characteristics of archaic tyranny. It was enough to show that later images of the tyrant continued and developed the self-representations of archaic 1. For the various elements of these views, see chaps. 1, 2, and 6, 2. Andrewes 1956 and Berve 1967, Major studies since their time include Pleket 1969, Mossé 1969, and Spahn 1977. Among treatments of the language of tyranny in its earliest manifestations and the self-representations of tyrants, see Labarbe 1971 and Cobet 1981.Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece tyrants in response to the distinctive political and intellectual en- vironment that emerged in fifth-century Greece. What I have finally written bears little resemblance to that project. Instead of examining the post-tyrannical ideology of tyr- anny, I attempt to make sense of the Greeks’ experience with auto- crats and their reactions to that experience. This change represents a rethinking of tyranny and its political significance. I have come to doubt whether the distinction between the “real” and the “ideologi- cal” tyrant, which was the basis of my original project and most studies of tyranny, does justice either to the interpretations and uses of tyranny in the fifth century or to its appearance and collapse in archaic Greece. These doubts require a short explanation. Scholars have had good reasons to distinguish carefully be- tween real tyrants, who flourished in many Greek city-states begin- ning in the middle of the seventh century B.c., and their classical shadows. The very interest in tyranny in the post-tyrannical period, they argue, obscures its historical reality. H. W. Pleket expresses the common opinion: “The historian of the archaic period is, as regards the present subject, less handicapped by the scarcity of sources in general . . . than by the lack of contemporary sources. In this particular case the sources we have for a study of the Greek tyrants are to a high degree—if not completely—coloured by the undenia- ble aversion to the tyrant in later, more democratic times.”> The problem allows for a single, if difficult, solution. Only by sifting with minute precision through the large bulk of lore that attached to tyrants and the biased assessments of those that followed them is it possible to discover the rational basis of their support. When look- ing for this basis, scholars have typically constructed their inter- pretations of tyranny to explain the tyrant’s attractiveness as a ruler. This allows for positive assessments of tyranny’s achievements that can also account for its political deficiencies. In some interpreta- tions, tyrants have appeared as military innovators‘ or entrepre- neurs who parlayed their economic preeminence into a new form of 3. Pleket 1969, 19-20. 4. For the connection between the hoplite and tyranny, see Andrewes (1956, 31-32), who seems to view tyranny, once it establishes its political existence, as a solution for diverse social crises. See also Forrest 1966, 88-122. For Corinth in particular, see Drews 1972, 129-44Tyranny and History political power, or they have been stripped of historical agency and rendered as opportunists who profited from the social and political crises of early archaic Greece;5 or, again, they are represented as religious and cultural reformers. Just as they have worked to distinguish archaic tyranny from its later representations, scholars have diligently separated the politi- cal, social, and economic reality of tyranny from the tyrants’ own political ideology: the religious claims that tyrants made, their conspicuous public behavior, and the oracles, images, and poetry that were crafted for them.’ For heuristic—albeit not metahistori- cal—purposes like those of pre-Althusserian Marxists,® tyranny has been split asymmetrically into infrastructure and superstruc- ture. Its rise and existence are explained in terms of the political, social, and economic interests of individuals and social groups, while the language with which tyranny was presented and under- stood is treated as logically and perhaps chronologically secondary: as if that language did nothing more than rationalize the extraordi- nary power of the tyrant after the fact. Tyrants, we have come to believe, might have justified their power in a number of ways; the language and images they adopted were chosen because they were believed to maximize the profitability and duration of individual 5. So Ure 1922. The less radical view that tyrants were mere consequences of economic change is adopted by Roebuck (1972, 96-127) and apparently also by Sealey (1976, 38-65), for whom “to explain why Greek tyranny first arose in the seventh century is to explain why ostentatious splendor on a new scale became possible then, and the answer must clearly be sought in the growth of prosperity under oriental influence since late in the eighth century” (58). 6, The Peisistratids have been the focus of much reexamination along these lines; see especially Kolb 1977, 99-138; Connor 1987; Ober 1989, 65-68; and Shapiro 1989. 7. Louis Geret’s germinal essay, “Mariages de tyrans” (1968, originally pub- lished in 1954), represents an important exception. Recent work by Connor (1987) calls into question the separateness of the tyrant's private interests, and doubts that the cultural program of tyrants can be adequately understood as the mere “manipu- lation” of their subjects. So also Veyne (1988, 84-85), who argues that “the notion of ideology is a laudable and unsuccessful attempt to guard against the legend of the idea of a disinterested knowledge, at the limits of which there would exist a natural understanding, an autonomous faculty, different from the interests of practical life” and that “it would be better to admit that no knowledge is disinterested and that truths and interests are two different terms for the same thing.” 8. Fora more complicated image of ideology, sce especially Althusser 1971Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece rule. Only by bracketing the public posture and claims of tyrants as fictions do scholars believe they can avoid committing the histo- rian’s worst crime: to be tricked by the subject’s own discourse. Thus, like Forster’s Miss Bartlett, scholars have felt they can make much more sense of tyrants when they take their words as lies. This bifurcation of tyranny into reality and ideology, now hardly new, still dominates our understanding of archaic Greece. Its influence can be seen in the virtual absence of studies of the political aspects of tyranny, that is, attempts to understand the rise and fall of tyranny as interactions between tyrants and their subjects. Instead, the political and rhetorical character of tyranny is typically pre- sented as the consequence—natural, necessary, and hence insignifi- cant—of the economic and cultural dynamics of archaic Greek soci- ety; most especially, tyranny is the by-product of complex tensions within the archaic aristocracy. As a result, the gap between the reality and the language of tyranny continues to grow. The very tyrants who styled themselves as uniquely superior to their fellows find themselves relocated as the temporary and dispensable tools of forces they were unable to control or even to understand. Tyranny itself has dwindled to an unconstitutional and private form of sub- jugation that possessed no conceptual or institutional integrity. It came to exist in moments of political crisis exploited by individuals whose political language and self-representation had little to do with their common, but hardly universal, political achievement: displacing political power from an aristocratic elite (to which the tyrants belonged) and toward citizens. For all its familiarity and apparent cogency, this traditional approach has no place in the present study. I have attempted rather to develop a new, less restrictive interpretive framework for tyranny that is based on a reexamination of its distinctly political aspects and that focuses closely on the relationship between the discourse and the political character of tyranny. I aim to take seriously the lan- guage that tyrants spoke and the reception their subjects gave them. This tyrannical discourse supports the view that despite the eco- g. So Berve (1967) resists any explanation of tyranny as the consequence of struggles between social and economic classes in archaic Greece. His position has been developed most recently by Stahl (1987) and Stein-Hélkeskamp (1989).Tyranny and History nomic, cultural, and political domination of tyrants, tyranny arose through, and was sustained by, a complex interaction between tyrants and their subjects, and that interaction defined tyranny’s sources, purpose, and limits. Tyranny, from this perspective, is political in the most elementary sense: a process of complicity, not simple ambition, transformed one citizen into a ruler and his fellows into his subjects.'” Yet if the self-representation of tyrants articu- lates, rather than conceals, their power, that self-representation also, circumscribes and limits it. Tyrants, by claiming (and being under~ stood) to possess an unprecedented and unique right to autocratic individual rule, implicitly defined that rule as untransferable and unrepeatable. When their subjects learned about the extraordinary powers and privileges of tyrants, they also learned that these were terminal. The tyrant’s overthrow seems then to be the logical conclusion of his own self-representation, and the complicity of his subjects contains the seed of resistance against him. Yet this resistance did not constitute an absolute rejection of tyranny. Cities participated in the self-representation of tyrants less because they were blind or indifferent to its mendacity than because they perceived its co- herence and decisiveness. Likewise, when they revolted, they did so not simply to destroy their master’s power but to appropriate it for themselves and to possess and wield the distinctive freedom that his. power elaborated. So, just as the city’s initial complicity with its tyrant established a basis for resisting him, that resistance was the basis of an enduring complicity between the polis and tyranny. This study begins with an examination of the self-representa~ tion of the early tyrants and the attacks made on them by their enemies, both of which are pervaded by the notions of hubris, divine necessity, and, most importantly and conspicuously, justice (diké), From this carly dialogue there soon issued a more complex interaction between tyrants and the poleis that were quickly learn- ing to challenge them. This interaction is most evident in the emer- to. Tyranny qualifies therefore as power in Foucault's (1977, 26-27) precise sense: it is “exercised rather than possessed; it is not the ‘privilege,’ acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic position—an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated.”Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece gence of a rich series of political images of autocratic power—the founder, lawgiver, liberator, and tyrannicide—which answer and criticize the tyrant’s distinctive power and offer a real or symbolic replacement for it. All, like the tyrant’s own self-representation, are images of power and resistance. In them is embedded the story of the life and death of single individuals, whose achievements were decisive for their city’s political history; indeed these images func- tion as narrative symbols of the distinctive (albeit unwitting) politi- cal contribution of tyranny: the sovereign polis. Tyrants were not unaware of the significance of these new, alternative images of autocratic power. And as their claims to be reformers of injustice became gradually less persuasive, tyrants joined their enemies at a costume ball of autocratic images: disguising themselves as found- ers or even as liberators, they sought to prolong their power by pretending to be anything but what they were. The material that | employ to support my view of tyranny and its reception is not new: I draw from the Greeks’ rich memories of their tyrants and their inventions and legends of lawgivers, found- ers, and the like. But the perspective I employ to make sense of this material is less traditional. I do not try to “decode” the Delphic oracles that variously support and castigate tyrants, the lore that grew up around tyrants, or the poetry directed against them, in the hope of locating social and economic causes and conditions moti- vating and enabling the tyrants and their enemies. Instead, I attempt to discover the power and constraints implicit in the language of tyrants: to reconstruct the expectations and options that discourse engendered, trace the history of its exploitation, and find the limits it imposed on those who used it. But while searching for the political power and historical logic inherent in these concepts, rather than the social and economic interests concealed behind them, I do not mean to reject the goals and methods of traditional critical analysis, but rather to avoid its pitfalls. Thucydides will continue to guide us in our quest to avoid the evils of credulity, to look for exaggeration, misrepresentation, and simple error, and to question the motives of our sources. But Thucydides’ own use of a stringently critical methodology to puncture exaggerated claims about the past also serves to demonstrate that historical methods 6Tyranny and History and conclusions can never be completely independent.'! Critical methodologies are certainly not immune to uncritical application. A methodology that completely demythologizes tyranny is sure to reduce it to a nexus of social and economic interests. To identify those social, economic, and political supporters whom tyrants con- sciously or unwittingly served, without considering their posture, images, and language, is to doubt at the start whether tyranny possessed political principles or made real political contributions. Worse still, if we ignore or dismiss the discourse of tyrants and their opponents, we risk becoming entrapped by it; for tyranny played a crucial role in the development of the political ideas of interest, legitimacy, and representation, concepts that also are basic to the distinction between political reality and political ideology, with which conventional treatments of tyranny are concerned. Yet it is obvious that the great mass of material about tyranny that comes to us from antiquity contains much that is false and mis- leading. In particular, the Greek popular history typically shaped the establishment of tyrannies into single coherent events bound up with the life and achievements of single individuals. The plain aorists Herodotus uses when he reports that Cypselus “attempted and held Corinth” (évexeipnoé te Kai goxe Képuvbov: 5.9281) confuse our efforts to recapture the founding of the Cypselid tyr- anny, much as the newborn Cypselus’s sweet smile baffled the murderous Bacchiads. But if the popular history of the Corinthian tyranny distorted the memory of the Cypselids’ rise, the distortion itself—that is, the remaking of the Cypselids’ rise into a single event of monumental and mythic proportions—also articulates tyranny’s political character. The point can be extended. Much of the lore surrounding the autocratic figures of the early archaic period— tyrants, founders, and lawgivers—belongs to the category that Thucydides rejected as “fabulous” (76 pvO@des: 1.22). But such material elaborates more than it obscures the political reality of such figures; in particular, it helps to show what drew to them the 11. Itis true for Thucydides, as for modern historians, that the demythologizer's power springs in great part from his self-representation as disinterested, Yet that Thucydides was no enemy of speculation is clear from his own discussions of historical method (see 1.20-22).Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece romantic elaborations of legend. If therefore it is right to take the representation and reality of tyranny as inseparably bound, we cannot entirely discount materials not contemporary with tyrants, any more than we can ignore contemporary information that ro- manticizes their power. To read the history of tyranny as a kind of story that follows a careful plot and gives precise roles to tyrants and their opponents, subjects, and supporters is not, I think, to falsify it. The historical empiricist tends to insist on the distinction between individual innovation and enterprise, on the one hand, and conceptual frame- works and historical logic, on the other. To such a critic, I will likely seem to transform individuals into causes and to read their actions as stage directions they found in a script. But I attempt to show that the individuals who appear prominently here—the Cypselids, Solon, the Peisistratids, Maeandrius of Samos, the Deinomenids, and the fifth-century Athenians—believed and wanted others to believe that they were following a script; that is, they variously appealed to, interpreted, and exploited a body of accepted truths and common images that were articulated in narrative frameworks associated with the quests and trials of particular individuals. Tyranny, from this viewpoint, very much deserves the storied reputation it has held since antiquity; for it was as a story that tyrants acquired power and that the cities subjected to them appropriated it. This is not to say that all tyrants or all cities that endured a period of tyranny behaved in precisely the same manner. But they developed similar strategies in response to common political problems: for tyrants, how to define and sustain personal possession of the city; for their cities, how to destroy tyranny without losing the extraordinarily subjec- tive and personal power that characterized it. The establishment and fall of tyrannies were neither intellectual exercises nor bloodless dramas. Indeed, the archaic Greek tyrants sometimes engaged in remarkable acts of brutality. By treating tyranny as a political phenomenon with a distinctive discursive character, I do not mean to deny or excuse its violence. But I reject the notion that tyranny (or any form of political power) exists exclusively by means of force. Rendering tyranny as primarily rhetorical does not diminish the significance of its brutality; indeed the violence of tyranny only then acquires meaning. It was incum- 8Tyranny and History bent on tyrants to articulate their distinctive claims to possess un- delegated and unrestricted authority in concrete terms, and their brutal treatment of their subjects did this uniquely well. The pri- ority of the tyrants’ claims over their actions should explain the great attention I give to language and representation, media of power that both actively involved and victimized the tyrants’ sub- jects. But I do not primarily intend to attack conventional wisdom on archaic politics or the methodologies that sustain it. Instead I wish to address the connection between archaic tyranny and classical forms of political power. | focus on the tyrant as a progenitor of a political vocabulary that anticipates classical conceptions of sov- ereignty, and likewise on the actions, memories, and fictions by which the polis appropriates the tyrant’s language and power. So in this book I argue that the collective sovereignty of post-tyrannical states was based not on the structure, function, or membership of their political institutions—for tyrants often made few changes in existing institutions, and the constitutional regimes that succeeded tyrannies learned little from them here. What they learned was to think of those who had political rights, whether the few in an oligarchy or the many in the democracy, as collectively sharing in the possession of the tyrant’s unfettered personal power. Behind the change in the polis’s function from mediating legal disputes in the early archaic period to protecting and representing its citizens’ com- mon interests in classical Greece stands a shift in the perceived nature of power, not merely in its masters or its quant From this perspective, tyranny confronts us with the fiunda- mental question of how classical poleis—in different but related ways—articulated sovereignty, discouraged the appropriation of political power by single individuals or factions, and persuaded their citizens that they were exercising power when they parti pated in their institutions and when their political bodies deliber- ated. In effect, my aim is to argue, and to explore, a single paradox: that the freedom of the post-tyrannical polis continued the charac- teristic self-interest of the tyrant. This aim clearly assumes that the classical conceptions and images of sovereignty were the great political legacy of tyrants, and, still more important, that these images existed as the interpretive memories, not the simple results, of 9Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece historical experiences of individual autocratic power. In this sense, I wish to revive a discourse that was crucial to the Greeks, who as carly as Aeschylus’s Oresteia identified a transformation from the submissive acceptance of autocratic and arbitrary forms of rule to collective and voluntary self-domination.'? This is not to re- mythologize the early Greek polis and its struggle with tyrants, but rather to isolate and capture the elements of that struggle that made it a principal object of the political memory of later poleis. Hence the shape of the chapters that follow. In chapter 1, I explore the relationship between popular images of the tyrant and founder and the post-tyrannical city’s own distinct sense of political sovereignty. I argue that the popular representations of the lives of such individ- uals reflect a considerable political investment in their memory. The stories of founders and tyrants spring from a politics of analogy: in the ambitions, achievements, failures, and deaths of such figures, the polis constructs and remembers its own political identity. Chapter 2 addresses the self-representations of tyrants in the first generations of tyrannical power: the middle and second half of the seventh century. There was, I maintain, no convincing prece- dent for the extraordinary power exercised by the early tyrants and no political framework in which it may comfortably be located. In its rhetoric and reception, tyranny seems to have emerged through the manipulation of contemporary conceptions of diké (justice), which functioned in the earliest accounts of the polis as the most pressing concern of civic action. Presenting themselves as (and apparently believing themselves to be) responding to breakdowns in justice, tyrants reshaped the early archaic polis’s dominant con- cern with justice to build a foundation for individual autocratic power, As agents of divine retribution, they assumed extraordinary prerogatives to realize their designs and interests without answer- ing to their cities in any conventional way, The basis of the tyrant’s power, however, also limited its duration and suggested its end by an.ancient lex talionis, which the tyrant could exploit but not con- trol, and his corrective justice was itself understood to require correction, to which he himself characteristically fell victim. In chapter 3, I highlight the remarkable figure of Solon, the most articulate enemy of tyranny and, as both political mediator 12. See most recently Meier 1980, 144-246. 10Tyranny and History and poet, the individual best able to devise an alternative to it. Solon understood and accepted tyrants’ claims that injustice engendered tyranny. When named mediator in Athens, he was most concerned to give the Athenians the tools to combat injustice and prevent the need for an extrapolitical resolution: he opened the courts to anyone who saw injustice in the city, established an appeal to the popular courts, and placed strict limits on legal self-help. He corrected the political structure of Athens in such a way as to emphasize the opposition between sovereign laws and individual rule, and his new laws paradoxically disallowed even the tyrantlike powers that he himself was granted in order to institute them. Solon’s solution was a failure: the Athenians ignored the laws that Solon gave them and soon allowed Peisistratus to establish a personal form of justice and a tyranny. In my view Solon failed because he undertook to resolve a problem that no individual could solve, for it demanded a collec- tive solution. The polis did not need to avoid tyranny but to politi- cize it. The character of that solution is described in chapter 4, which considers the reality and mythology of the fallen tyranny and the transition of autocratically consolidated political power from the tyrant to his city. In the Greek popular sense of history, the last tyrant of a dynasty was destined to pay for the crimes of his entire family. It is true that the Greek popular imagination represented this vengeance as popular, when only a minority of tyrants seems to have fallen to open revolts. But it is a rule without exception that tyrants could not simply resign their powers and return to citizen life, To explore the dimensions of this important rule, Iexamine the many personas that tyrants adopted in the later history of archaic tyranny. I argue that tyrants’ attempts to reconfigure their power, which were at best temporary palliatives, revealed the extraordi- nary pressure to which they were gradually subjected. And, in this sense, the political realities of archaic and classical Greece confirm popular history. At the end of tyranny the roles of master and slave were effectively reversed as the tyrant’s power was depersonalized and reintegrated and the polis came to function as the political entity in whose name citizens acted and to whom they were held account- able. In this reversal lay the origins of the classical notions of autonomy and liberty. Chapter § is devoted to the ofkistés (founder), the figure on 1Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece whom many of the Greeks’ memories of colonization were cen- tered. Founders, like tyrants, controlled their cities as if personal possessions; but their stories were less the products of history than vention. Instead of attempting to locate a kernel of historical truth in the plethora of tales that narrate the exploits of Greek founders, 1 undertake to locate and understand their narrative structures and imagery: the wandering oikistés who escapes the stain of domestic crime or illegitimacy by leaving his home and traveling to the end of the known world, where he assumes tyrantlike powers to estab- lish a new city. I argue that this image, propagated in different but related versions by various colonies, served to enforce and preserve concepts of collective independence and autonomy. The cults and legends that recalled the founder's achievements shaped his death into his new city’s coming of age and formed the period of his individual rule as a single, remote, and unrepeatable event. And by remembering and honoring their founders’ crimes and quests, colo- nies celebrated their autonomy from them and their own possession of the autocratic power that their founders held. Thus, in symbol and narrative, stories of founders captured images of collective sovereignty very much like those that came from the experience of tyranny. As have already noted, I do not consider the ideology of tyranny in the fifth century in isolation. Yet tyranny clearly does perform an ideological role after its collapse as a political form. This is espe- cially true in classical Athens, where attacks against the democratic regime were defined as tyranny—a definition that, by implication, made the democracy synonymous with the polis itself. Yet tyranny functions in Athens in more important ways. In the last chapter, | undertake to make the distinctive logic of Greek tyranny specific in a close reading of the political language of the classical Athenian democracy. Examining the tyrant in his public manifestations, the fifth- and fourth-century Athenian legislation that made him il- legal, and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles that replayed his demise, I attempt to show that the Periclean image of the free citizen who is a lover (épao77s) of his city, a virtual “tyrant citizen” who revives the language of tyranny in archaic Greece, rests on a distinctive and coherent image of citizenship. From this perspec- tive, I turn finally to Plato's provocative attack on the democratic 12Tyranny and History citizen in the Republic, which, while secking to debunk the freedom (éXevepta) of democracy as an invitation to tyranny, actually suc- ceeds in emphasizing Plato's own dependence on the potential for reform that the tyrant’s (and democratic citizen's) freedom articu- lates.CHAPTER ONE Tyrannus fulminatus: Power and Praise Quo quis loco fulmine ictus fuerit, codem sepeliatur. Tyranni corpus extra fines abiciatur, Tyrannus in foro fulminatus est: quacritur, an codem loco sepeliatur Whoever is struck by lightning must be buried on the very spot. The body of the tyrant must be thrown outside the borders. A tyrant is struck by lightning in the forum: it is asked whether he should be buried in the same place. Quintilian, Declamario 274 Among the rhetorical exercises preserved under Quintilian’s name is a declamation entitled Tyrannus fulminatus, “The Tyrant Struck by Lightning.” The problem of the declamation is described above. The problem is typical of Roman rhetorical exercises in posing an imaginary situation to which contradictory conventions or laws can be applied with equal validity. The Tyrannus fulminatus draws on the popular conviction that lightning is an act of Jupiter with a definite message and purpose, and on the convention that the city must punish its tyrant by ejecting his body from the city. To argue effectively that the tyrant who is struck by lightning should be buried in the forum, a Roman schoolboy would insist that the Abbreviations of ancient authors and works follow those adopted by The Oxford Classical Dictionary. All translations are the author's, unless otherwise indicated. 4Tyrannus fulminatus obligation to bury the victim of lightning where he falls carries the weight of a divine law, which the city would ignore only at great risk. Yet he could construct an equally compelling argument for the opposite position: to bury the tyrant in the forum, where even the most worthy (optime meritus: 274.9) could not be buried and where, in fact, only the city’s greatest hero, its founder, was buried, would be tantamount to polluting the city. In Quintilian’s day, tyrants were fleshless creatures that came out only in the dim light of classrooms; and even there they were not taken very seriously. Petronius's Encolpius (Sat. 1) and Juvenal (7-10-51) dismissed the rhetorical struggles schoolboys fought against tyrants as trite and valueless—a judgment echoed by the more cautious Tacitus in his Dialogus de oratoribus (35.5). It was obvious to all that the political life of imperial Rome reduced the Tyrannus fulminatus to a logical quibble. But the Quintilian exercise preserves political characters and ideas that had been altogether crucial for the Romans in the last years of the Republic, when Romans variously struggled to understand, support, and resist au- tocratic power. Then Cicero, Rome's greatest rhetorical strategist, designed and argued elaborate declamations that brought tyrants and tyrannicides to the fore (Att. 9.4). This he did not just to amuse himself but to prepare for rhetorical warfare: it was against the idea and image of the tyrannus that Cicero measured Marc Antony in his Philippics (13.18). Not only the exercise’s image of the evil tyrant fits the political atmosphere of the late Republic; the founder—the one exception to the rule forbidding burial in the forum—is there by implication: the Romans burned Julius Caesar's body and buried his ashes near Romulus’s tomb in the Roman Forum, a conspicuous public act that answered the dictator's own apparent interest in sharing the title and honors of Rome’s legendary founder.” Yet the Quintilian Tyrannus fulminatus does more than capture the Romans’ historical struggles with individual rule; it replays and renews religious and political conceptions that were borrowed from the Greeks. Fulminatus captured in Latin the Greek dioblétos, “Zeus-struck.” which describes the class of heroes whose deaths 1, See Béranger 1935, 85. 2. On Caesar's interest in Romulus, see Gelzer 1968, 318 1sTyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece complete the record of their troubled lives and deeds with a mixture of honor and punishment.* Greek too are the human rewards and punishments that the Roman rhetorical exercise considers confer- ring on the fulminatus. In fact, burial in the agora (= forum) and expulsion outside the city’s borders mark the extremes in the polis's memory of its most illustrious dead. The body that was expelled extra fines was understood as a curse on the city and a perpetual enemy of its citizens; to be buried in the agora, on the other hand, was to be honored as a civic hero of the first order. And, as the declaimers must have known, these were rewards and punishments with precise objects. Expulsion extra fines was the final vengeance exacted from the deceased tyrant,* while burial in the agora was an honor usually reserved for the city’s greatest civic hero, its foun- der.> By treating tyrants and founders as deserving opposite fates, the Quintilian exercise implicitly recalled their roles as paradigms of political behavior in the Greek city-state: the tyrant, whose indiffer- ence to the constraints of political and personal morality both fasci- nated and horrified the Greek popular imagination, stood as a po- litical opposite to the founder, whose achievements the city might remember as a lasting model of personal commitment to civic ideals. But more important, the exercise tacitly focuses on the city and its place in relation to its dead tyrants and founders. To answer the problem, the schoolboy constructed an imaginary city, which decided the rewards and punishments to which the declamation al- ludes and that profited or suffered as a result of its decision. In this sense, the hypothetical debate that the exercise was intended to en- gender rehearsed the polis’s real place as the final judge over its citi- zens—even those who once dominated it and to whom it owed its very existence. So the Quintilian Tyrannus fulminatus through im- plication revives and sustains a complex relationship among three 3. See Rohde 1925, 581-82, and Garland 198s, 99-100. Zeus characteristically reserves his thunderbolts for those whose crimes (or achievements) challenge his power. To be sure, in Aristophanes’ Clouds (397). the perjurer is said to deserve to be struck by lightning, bue this does not trivialize the punishment; rather it elevates the crime above the level of ordinary misdemeanors. 4. Among tyrants whose remains were expelled when their tyrannies fell were the Cypselids of Corinth and Hicron of Syracuse (sce chap. 4). 5. On the founder's burial, sce below in this chapter and chap. 5 passim. 16Tyrannus fulminatus figures: the tyrant, whom the exercise represents as a curse on the city; the founder, whose distinctive honor of burial in the civic center the tyrant struck by lightning threatens to arrogate; and the city, which sits in judgment over the lives and achievements of both. The Quintilian Tyrannus fulminatus not only flatters Greck po- litical images by imitating them but, when imitating them, also considerably illuminates them. Following the lead of the Tyrannus fulminatus, | argue that the opposition between the tyrant and the founder pervades classical political culture and articulates the polis’s self-representation as politically sovereign. This is hardly obvious. In stories of founders and tyrants the city appears as the victim of the tyrant’s self-interest and the beneficiary of the founder's achievements. Yet in its citizens’ individual and collective remem- bering of the final destinies of tyrants and founders, the city exer- cises political superiority over its formative early history and its own political models. This narrative control over the autocratic figures of the city’s past will emerge as a measured response to the language of autocratic power and the threat of its return, a re- sponse—this is most important—that was in great part prepared by tyrants themselves. On the way to understanding this response and its relation to tyranny, I begin with the classical image and memory of founders, who, though creatures of political legend, possessed a significance for Greek political language that stands in inverse pro- portion to their doubtful historicity. Stories of Founders The Greeks had a great passion for legends about inventions and immensely enjoyed recounting the origins of various aspects of their common life, both material and cultural, as the works of single moments and the personal achievements of single individuals. This is particularly true of the invention of cities. Founders, whom the Greeks called oikistai or archégetai, were credited with finding suit- able sites for their cities, conducting large numbers of diverse colo- nists to them, and ensuring that they began their histories as true poleis—that is, that they preserved the religious traditions and cults 17Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece of the older cities from which they sprang.° The tale of the foun- der’s achievements is now a virtually forgotten genre of oral litera- ture, which must be reconstructed from fragments that found their way into works of history, geography, and mythography in the classical period and later. Stories of founders were, however, im- mensely popular in antiquity.” And it is most probable that their origin lies before the start of the archaic age: Homer preserves a trace of a foundation legend in the story of Tlepolemus’s coloniza- tion of Rhodes (JI. 2.653-70). Over time, foundation legend devel- oped into a genre whose authority was invoked and increased every time a new city was established. As Agesilaus and Alexander used Homer as a guide to heroic action and surrounded themselves with aspiring poets to grace their own deeds with the dignity that Homer gave Achilles and Odysseus, so too newly founded cities fed upon and in turn nourished the body and stature of foundation legend. In this sense, foundation legends were invested with meaning as narrative models of city foundation and cannot be considered the simple products of an innocent desire to remember the past. They suppress more information than they preserve about colonization projects and the social crises and political decisions that gave rise to them. Moreover, to the frustration of historians since Thucydides, foundation lore identifies the early history ofa city exclusively with the founder’s personal quest; the establishment of the collective and political entity becomes the story of the founder’s origins, his rea- sons for leaving, and his personal trials. Distinctive patterns are conspicuous in these stories. As a rule, foundation legends remember single founders. Even when cities have alternative accounts of their origins with alternative founders,* particular narrative versions of a city’s establishment typically focus on a single founder. A few legends make the identification of city 6, On the historical elements of foundation procedure and the occist's place in it, see Graham 1983, 25-39; Leschhom 1984; and Malkin 1987, 17-91 7. See Pl. Hp. Ma, 285d on Spartan interest in legends of political origins. Polybius (34.1. 3) notes the importance of such stories for a historian like Ephorus. Chapter 5 explores the analogy between the domestic and political spheres in Greek foundation myths. 8. Examples include Zancle, Rhegion (for the two, see Leschhorn 1984, 25), Gela (see Thuc. 6.4.3), Camarina in Sicily (see Thuc. 6.5.3), and perhaps Thasos, whose establishment seems to have involved two steps separated by a generation; see Pouilloux 1954, 1:22. Older cities more commonly had multiple founder fig- ures; Athens had several. 18Tyrannus fulminatus foundation with a single individual into an explicit theme. Calli- machus (Aet. 2.43.74—79) reported that the two leaders of the expe- dition to the Sicilian city of Zancle, Perieres and Crataemenes, each wished to be honored as the new city’s oikistés. Delphi was invited to decide between the two and determined that the city should honor an anonymous founder instead of either Perieres or Crataemenes. Roman foundation myth offers a less peaceful variation on this theme with the contest between Romulus and Remus for the status of conditor (founder) of Rome. The religious honors paid founders confirm the exclusiveness of the founder's position in colonization legend: no Greek colony is known to have honored two founders equally.? The rule, one founder—one city, is followed even in the farcical rendition of a colonization project offered by Aristophanes in the Birds: although Euelpides and Peisetaerus jointly conceive of a plan to quit Athens and together persuade the chorus of birds to accept them as their leaders, Euelpides disappears in the course of the play, leaving Peisetacrus to act as the new city’s sole oecist. Where there are conflicting traditions about the origins of a city and its founder (the Rhodian story of Macar and the tales of the sons of Codrus in Ionian colonization are examples), separate traditions usually reflect competing political interests." The method of the founder's selection fits the magnitude and uniqueness of his powers; as a rule, Delphi plays some role in naming or confirming the founder, and foundation stories generally abound in visits to Delphi and oracles.'! This stress on the divine 9. Malkin (1987, 254) rightly stresses the limits of our evidence. to. Miletus is an example, An oracle survives that makes Neleus the founder; on this, see PW 2:301-2. Other accounts (c.g., Ephorus FGH 70 F 127) give the honor to Sarpedon or Miletus, his lover. The latter surely reflects Athenian interests. See also below. 11, On Delphi’s role in colonization, see, most recently, Malkin (1987, 17-91). who supplements PW 1:49-81 and Forrest 197. Oracles are particularly prominent in the principal foundation stories of early colonies. On Cyrene, see the foundation decree incorporated within a surviving fourth-century Cyrenean law (5 ML); on Croton, see PW 1:68-70; on Thasos, see Leschhorn 1984, s6-60; and on Ambracia, see chap. §. Sce also Fontenrose (1978, 143-44), who argues (to my mind uncon- vincingly) that Delphi's involvement in colonization and the great majority of colonization oracles were much later inventions. It is true that Delphi is not men- tioned in the oldest foundation legend, Homer's account of Tlepolemus’s coloniza- tion of Rhodes (JI. 2.653-70), but Pindar seems to have felt a need to correct Homer's omission in his account in Ol. 7.32: that Delphi must be involved was taken as given already in his time. 19Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece support behind the occist’s actions is occasionally augmented when Apollo, rather than the founder himself or his home city, is given credit for the impulse of establishing a colony. The foundation decree “spontancously prompted [avropariéer] Battus” to estab- lish Cyrene. '* Similarly, Myscellus, Croton’s founder, is surprised by the oracle that sends him to his new home and is reluctant to believe it; he appears at Delphi in search of a solution for his childlessness, not for support in establishing a new city (Antiochus of Syracuse FGH 555 F 10), and he later quibbles with the site Delphi has selected for his new city (Hippys FGH 554 F 1). The founder's significance is hardly diminished when his actions are made involuntary; rather, Delphi's spontaneity confirms the foun- der in his role as Apollo’s agent. But it is not only when Delphi speaks first that the founder acts for Apollo. Most of the surviving, foundation oracles are commands in which the oecist (in fact or legend) finds a divine mandate to define his authority. The religious dimensions of the oecist’s selection in foundation legend suggest his political significance: foundation legends seem to have functioned virtually as manuals for the establishment of cities. This does not imply a blind devotion to the patterns evident in foundation legend. Greek cities, particularly after colonization be- came an important clement of imperialist programs in the fifth century, occasionally selected more than one founder. The Spar- tans, for example, picked three to lead the expedition that settled Heracleia in Trachis in 426 (Thuc. 3.92), unwilling, apparently, to trust any single individual. So also the fifth-century Athenians named ten surveyors (yeovépos) to be responsible for dividing land among the new settlers of Brea, perhaps the most important under- taking for the future political configuration of the colony. But while unwilling to allow control over their colony to be consolidated in the hands of a single founder, the Athenians seem still to have respected and valued traditional formulas concerning foundation; the decree establishing the colony formally names Democleides as Brea's autocratic oecist, whom the colony was surely expected to remember and honor as its founder.'* 12. 5 (24) ML. On aciropeiriger, sce also below p, 68 13. For the decree and discussion, see 49 ML. Democleides is named [adto]xpa- Tope at line 9; the ten yeordyos (= yewvdpous) are mentioned at lines 6-8. 20Tyrannus fulminatus Foundation legends’ unwavering attention to the founder's quest offered colonies a precise sense of their origins and identity. The significance is clear in the history of interpolitical relations: the city in which the founder began his quest was typically recognized as the colony's mother-city. Mother-cities and colonies were bound by a less formal but also more enduring bond than those created by simple treaties (ouppaxiar), which were notoriously subject to in- terpretation. Unlike allies of convenience, a colony and its mother- city were tied by religious and military obligations that were con- ceived, as the maternal metaphor suggests, to be permanent and irrevocable. The link is visible in the late archaic and classical peri- ods. In 492, when Syracuse was threatened by Hippocrates, tyrant of Gela, Corinth hurried, with Corcyracan help, to save it (Hdt. 7.14.3). Corinth’s remoteness did not make it indifferent to Syra- cuse’s fate; Corinthian troops soon went to Syracuse, bringing with them a contingent from Corcyra, which overlooked its own long- standing hostility to its mother-city, to help. Corinth certainly did not act entirely from altruistic motives. Had Hippocrates taken Syracuse, he would probably have destroyed it (at least in some formal sense) and refounded it with himself as the new oecist—as he did at nearby Camarina (Thuc. 6.5.3). Im that case, Corinth would have lost any future benefit it might have hoped to derive from Syracuse. The founder's home was honored as his new city’s mother-city even when a number of cities participated in the foundation. * The most striking example of the founder's role as a virtual symbol of the nascent city involves Epidamnus, a colony founded on the coast of Illyria in the late seventh century. According to Thucydides (1.24-25), the great majority of Epidamnus’s original settlers came from Corcyra and far fewer from Corinth, but the Corcyraeans invited Corinth, Corcyra’s own mother-city, to send an oecist for the expedition. Thucydides asserted that the Corcyraeans did so in deference to an “ancient law” (77a dauds vopos), although there is no 14. The Sicilian Naxos is an apparent exception, It was founded by Chaleis and Naxos, but its founder, Theocles, was sometimes said to be Athenian (Strab. 6.2.2; ps.-Scymn, 270-76). It is very possible, however, that Theocles’ Athenian origin was an invention intended to support fifth-century Athens’s interest in extending its hegemony westward. On this, see Leschhorn 1984, 9 2ITyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece other mention of such a requirement, and mother-cities were not always involved in their colonies’ new foundations.'* Whether or not we follow Thucydides, the Corinthian oecist certainly figured largely in the later dispute between Corinth and Corcyra over Epidamnus, the prelude to the outbreak of open hostilities between Athens and Sparta. Epidamnus illustrates the rule: conflicting attri- butions of colonies and founders usually derived from local political groups that supported conflicting interpolitical allegiances. '° The memories that colonies maintained of their founders were so closely linked to their international position that if a colony wished to change allegiances, it might be compelled to reenact its founda- tion. The Amphipolitans did precisely that in 422 when they tore down all civic monuments honoring Hagnon, the Athenian foun- der, and installed the Spartan Brasidas in his place (Thuc. §. 11.1). By enacting a symbolic destruction of their city—much as Hip- pocrates (Thuc. 6.5.3) or perhaps Nero (Tac. Ann. 15.40) did quite literally—they were able to exert political control over their own refoundation. If, at the other extreme, a colony forgot the name and origins of its founder, it took the risk that a stronger city would remember him for it or that the matter would be decided by civil conflict. Thurii, according to Diodorus (12.35. 1-3), did not have an officially sanctioned oecist, which fed the rivalries of political fac- tions. However real the danger, the inherent flexibility of founda- tion narrative made a solution relatively easy: Thurii sent a delega- tion to Delphi to ask Apollo to name the founder and the city from which the colony had originated. Apollo finessed the question by electing himself as Thurii’s founder. The memory of the founder certainly also influenced the internal political fabric of colonies, alongside their better-known interna- tional personas. Political and social unity must have been a concern in new cities. It was not uncommon for inhabitants of a new city to 15. Megara was involved in the foundation of Sclinus by its Sicilian colony Megara Hyblaca, but the Euboeans apparently played no role in the foundation of Leontinoi by the Euboean colony of Naxos in Sicily, and Sparta was not involved at Cyrene, which was established by Thera, a Spartan colony. 16, Camarina, whose two oecists were from Syracuse (Thuc. 6.5.3), seems to be an exception to the rule of one colony—one founder, although Dunbabin (1957. 105) has proposed that one was Syracusan, the other Corinthian. 22Tyrannus fulminatus derive from all corners of the Greek world. Archilochus remarked that “the misery of all Greece ran to Thasos” (102 W), searching, in his view, for the better life that would elude them. The obvious attractions were political and economic: a fresh start as an equal ina less oppressive social system, and a workable and unencumbered plot of land (kA7jpos). It was not always possible or desirable for the founding city to restrict participation to its own citizens. Policies of exclusion seem to come late in the history of colonization and were meant to keep out undesirables, not to limit participation to a select few: Sparta, for example, excluded “Ionians, Achaeans, and a few other peoples” from Heracleia in Trachis (Thuc. 3.92.5) but did not invite only its own citizens and close allies. Simple safety in num- bers was perhaps the most common reason that mother-cities in- vited settlers from other cities. Even when colonization became a tool of imperialistic policies, the mother-city had to maintain a balance between its colony's loyalty and efficient use of its own human resources: too few of its own people and the colony would be difficult to control, too many and the enterprise became pro- hibitively expensive. It is most likely that the founder and his quest for a new position of social legitimacy offered a point of identifica- tion for the heterogeneous collection of colonists that streamed to new cities. !7 This defines the relationship between the founder's legend and his burial, whose importance for the city’s sense of political identity is clearly implied in the Tyrannus fulminatus.’* Burial in the agora marked the founder as a civic hero, a status that was sanctioned by his place in cult. In fact, the founder was typically considered among the most important of civic heroes; he was summoned along with the patron deities to the city’s annual festivals, and his aid was sought if the city were in some way threatened. In this sense, the founder's legend, which was likely told and retold in a social and cultural context defined by cult, complemented his religious status: the city honored its founder by remembering his story—the discur- sive equivalent of burying him in the center of the city. The memory of the founder seems then to have explained and 17. On the founder's quest, see also chap. passim 18, For a review of the evidence and secondary literature on cults for occists, see the recent study by Malkin (1987, 189-260) 23Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece justified the institutional character of the city and its international allegiances, as though a colony’s political history were a mere clabo- ration of its earliest moments.'? When the Grecks remembered their early histories by analogy with their founder and crafted that analogy into narrative, they recovered and unified histories other- wise lost to them; the founder's life and quest became a moving symbol of the city itself. But if the city’s history followed from the founder's own personal story, the recounting of that story was very much the city’s possession, No one can write the ending to his own story, because, as Herodotus’s Solon tried to explain to Croesus (1.3032), the happiness of every mortal can be determined only after his death. So, from the city’s perspective, the meaning of the founder's story—the decision about his happiness—comes, like any narrative, only with its conclusion.”” When the city’s history was narrated, the activity of remembering the past invariably under- went a split between matter and form; the founder’s story became recognizably dependent on its retelling, and the city and its citizens asserted their rights to judge their history. Foundation legend thus implicitly established the city as the master of its own story at the same time that it defined the founder as that story’s hero. This mastery defines the enduring political force of foundation legend. To tell the founder's story was both to invoke and to overcome the dangerous model of the individual possessing tyrantlike powers. So the city was able to remember a period of autocratic power without affirming that power as a viable political option. In short, the city sanctioned its past by narrating a happy ending to its founder’s story and in so doing defined itself by implication as the heir and benefi- ciary of his power and achievements. Tyrannical Memories Rewarded for his deeds with burial in the civic center, a civic cult, and eternal fame as a symbol of the nascent city, the founder seems 19. On the highly compressed image of political history in Greek foundation myths, see Veyne 1988, 77. 20. So Brooks 1977, 283: “The very possibility of meaning plotted through time depends on the anticipated structuring force of the ending: the indeterminable would be the meaningless.” 24Tyrannus fulminatus an obvious antithesis to the tyrant. This contrast between Greek images of the founder and tyrant is particularly clear in the para- digmatic narrative that accompanied the image of the tyrant: as the Quintilian declamation suggests, the tyrant’s story ends with his expulsion extra fines. And the contrast gives force to the politi- cal nightmare that the Tyrannus fulminatus elaborates: that the city should be compelled to honor its dead tyrant—that, in other words, the tyrant should end his life happy. Happiness, in the eyes of the Greeks, was a gift of the gods. The city did not make the founder sacred by burying him in the agora or by recounting his achieve- ments. Rather it recognized his happiness (i.e., his sacredness), of which the city itself—the founder's great personal achievement— was lasting proof. From this perspective, the figure of the tyrannus fulminatus utterly perverts the city’s narrative self-representation. When Zeus strikes the tyrant with lightning in the agora, he pre- empts the city’s final decision about him—whom that city tolerates during his lifetime on the condition that it may condemn him when he is dead. The city, whose tyrant is marked for honor by the gods, finds its most elementary assumption contradicted by its most important allies: the once quiescent gods reject its conviction that the tyrant is ultimately unhappy. Thus the rhetorical exercise points to a question that lies at the very heart of the city’s political integrity. If, as the declamation imagines, a tyrant were struck by lightning and buried in the agora, his city would be unable to judge him unhappy by concluding his story with the ultimate and extreme form of ignominy. Not only would the sacred areas of the city be defiled and positive values of citizens negated; in such a case, the city would yield control over the history of autocratic power and over its own sovereignty. This is clear enough from the prior declamatio included to elucidate the Tyrannus fulminatus, which announces that if the tyrant were buried in the forum, “it would be better to abandon the whole place to the tyrant's tomb and change the place of our legal business.” The pars altera’s argument that placing the tyrant’s tomb in the forum might serve, like the crucifixes of condemned criminals that lined Roman roads, as a deterrent to tyranny strains credibility in an obvious effort to circumvent this very problem: the tomb is transformed into a mark of dishonor to permit the city to exist alongside a permanently installed tyrant.Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece Most Greeks would clearly have found the idea of honoring tyrants equally repellent, and a threat, as the Roman exercise sug- gests, to the essentially narrative structure of the city’s sovereignty. For Greeks from Archilochus to Aristotle, the tyrant was a politi- cally liminal and dangerous creature, over whose story the city maintained a difficult but vital control. And both the liminality and the danger of tyranny sprang from the extraordinary personal bene~ fits that tyrants derived from their power. First among these in the popular imagination was wealth. Gyges, the regicide and usurper of the Lydian throne and a paradigmatic tyrant, was envied from Archilochus’s day for his fabulous wealth.?" Other tyrants, such as Croesus and Polycrates, whom the Greeks also treated as paradigms of this form of rule, likewise stood conspicuously above their fel- lows in their remarkable accumulation of wealth.?? The tyrant’s wealth was not his only benefit. The Greeks thought that tyrants were able to reward their friends and punish their enemies in any way they wished, and that they possessed nearly unlimited sexual freedom. Herodotus’s accounts of Periander’s relations with his deceased wife (5.92.93) and Cambyses’ incest with his sister (3.31) perhaps represent the extension of this freedom to the grotesque. Plato captures the full range of this freedom in his story of the magical ring that allows Gyges “to take without fear whatever he desires from the agora, go into any house and sleep with whomever he wishes, kill or release from bonds whomever he wants, and do other things that the gods do to men.”?3 21, See 19.17-21 W. Herodotus’s account of Gyges' rich gifts to Delphi (1.14) recalls this association. On the connection between freedom and tyranny, see Connor (1977, 102), who notes that “to the tyrant his rule is a blessing; to the city it isacurse. And in each case the reason is the same: the tyrant can do what he pleases.” Also see Farenga (1981), who relates the image of the tyrant and concepts of personal identity and the proper in the ages of Archilochus and Plato. 22. On the treasures of Croesus, see Hdt. 1.30; for Polycrates’ wealth, Pl. Meno 90a. Solon did not become a tyrant, for he refused to be swayed by the prospect of ploutos aphthonos (wealth free of envy and therefore unlimited: Plut. Sol. 14.6 = 29a GP); the stress is on aphthonos: the tyrant’s wealth is not limited by the threat of envy. Sophocles (OT 380-81, 873-74; Ant, 1056) elaborates the connection be- tween wealth and hubris in tyranny. The connection between power and wealth reemerges in modern clothing in Ure’s (1922) image of tyrants as entrepreneurs. 23. Rep. 360b-c: é£6v abr@ nai Ex Ths deyopas ddeas Gri BowAorro KavBawew, kai eicuivre eis 145 oixiaas TvyyiyverGat Sry BowdoeTo, Kai deroxrewivat Kai BK Seopa yew obotwas Bovdowro, Kai réAAa Tpéerrew bv Tos dvOparrots lodbeov 26,Tyrannus fulminatus Tyranny’s detractors particularly chided the tyrant for the im- moderate behavior that his freedom made possible. For Herodotus, tyrants are enemies both of the gods and of the city and become the common objects of divine punishment. If Herodotus appreciated the achievements of some tyrants, such as Polycrates (3.39) and Peisistratus (1.64), he nonetheless made good use of the image of the hubristic ruler, the tyrant of Greece or the Eastern monarch, whose immoderate appetites led him to violate divine law and made him subject to an implacable divine punishment.** This idea is clabo- rated in Plato’s Republic; it is for his unrestrained ability to realize his desires that the tyrant must expect to face the greatest horrors in the remotest depths of Plato’s hell (616d). Even more self-consciously historical images of the tyrant— Aristotle offers the best examples—do not differ in essential re- spects.?5 In the Politics, Aristotle represents tyranny as a “ sion” (rapéxBaots) that serves the personal advantages of the ruler alone, a “despotic monarchy of the political community” (1279b5— 8, 16-18), or a “despotic rule conducted according to the ruler’s personal judgment” (1295a16-18). “Despotic” (6ea7ro7uKy) is the crucial word here. For Aristotle, the tyrant establishes himself as a master of the city and inevitably treats his fellow citizens as slaves. This makes tyranny illegal, for, by the distinction that underlies Aristotle's political theory, master and slave belong to the house- hold, not to the polis (Pol. 1252b16-17). Tyranny is therefore a kind erver- 4vra. In Plato, the ring itself functions as a metaphor for tyrannical power: it comes from the gods, and it makes everything possible for Gyges. Sce also Plato's treat- ment of the tyrannical state and individual in book 9 (562a~$76b). In Herodotus's story of Cambyses’ relations with his sister (3.31.2), it is law rather than magic that underlies the monarch’s extraordinary freedom: in response to Cambyses’ question whether the Persians had a nomos (law) that permitted the king to marry his sister, the royal judges said that there was a nomos permitting “the king of Persia to do whatever he wanted.” 24. It is not surprising that Cleisthenes of Sicyon eams the gods’ anger when he threatens to displace Sicyon’s legendary founder: “Adrastus is the truc king of Sicyon, while you are a stone thrower,” so Apollo of Delphi tells Cleisthenes (Hat. 5.67}, who has asked permission to expel Adrastus’s bones 25. Like Herodotus, Aristotle does not feel altogether constrained by his general view of the tyrant; he finds much to admire in Cypselus, Orthagoras, Cleisthenes of Sicyon (Pol, 13 1sbt2—21), and Peisistratus (Pol, 13 15b2-23; see also Ath. pol, 16.1— 5). Like his teacher, Plato, he believed that the tyrant could be educated and reformed (Pol. 1313a34-131tsbr1), 27Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece of category mistake: the misapplication of a principle of domestic domination to the city.76 That the great majority of classical sources rejected the tyrant as a political anathema should not obscure the sophisticated position of his few supporters. The hatred of tyranny did not prevent sophists such as Thrasymachus and Callicles (at least as they appear in book 1 of Plato's Republic) from embracing tyranny as the model and implicit goal of all political activity. Yet the tyrant’s enemies and friends agreed that tyranny was unlimited rule exercised by a single individual for his own personal benefit. As the Athenian Euphemus says in Thucydides, “For the tyrannical man or city, nothing is unreasonable that is profitable.”?” In the popular imagination, the great freedom that the tyrant took from his power gave him a great potential for virtue. He could be benevolent and gencrous. (Peisistratus, for example, forgave a struggling farmer's tax burden: Ath. pol. 16.6.) The tyrant might even obey laws that apparently conflicted with his immediate inter- ests. (Peisistratus came before an Athenian court on a charge of murder.)?5 But it was the tyrant’s ruthlessness that most charac- teristically articulated his distinctive freedom. Herodotus tells that Thrasybulus, when asked by Periander’s messenger how a tyrant best rules, walked into a nearby wheat field and, without speaking a single word, cut down the highest stalks. The messenger was baf= fled, but Periander understood the pantomime to mean that the ty- rant destroys the most excellent individuals in his city as a preemp=- tive strike against potential tyrannicides (5.92¢),?? Tyrants were the masters both of their virtues and of their vices. And although their 26. For Aristotle, the distinction between household and city is a characteristic of the Greek world. For the Greeks, “tyranny does not exist naturally, nor do any of the constitutions that are perversions (mapexBawers), for these run counter to. nature” (Pol, 1287b40-42). Where the distinction between the city (7éAts) and the home (olxos) does not exist, there can be a “despotic rule according to lw” (1285b24-25). For a similar notion, see PI. Leg. 832¢. 27. Thue, 6.85.1. See also Xen. Mem. 4.6.12 and Carlier 1984, 234. 28. Ath. pol. 16.8, The prosecution was too shocked by Peisistratus's appearance to proceed, and the case was dismissed. Herodotus also occasionally attributes extraordinary benevolence to Eastern monarchs, to whom the Greeks often likened their tyrants. 29. Aristotle (Pol. 1284226~-33) tells the same story in reverse: itis Periander who teaches Thrasybulus a silent message about political rule, 28Tyrannus fulminatus actions often sprang from whim, they were seldom believed to be stupid. Some, in fact, were credited with remarkable wisdom. Periander’s treatment of Arion’s kidnappers and his solution of the conflict between Athens and Mytilene over Sigeum (Hdt. 1.23-24; 5-95) suggest that the tyrant’s cleverness matched his brutality. Herodotus's famous story of Peisistratus’s ruse to regain the Athe- nian tyranny argues this for the Athenian tyrant as well. Peisistratus and his friends formed a procession featuring a tall country woman dressed to look like Athena and standing in a chariot, which was led by a herald loudly proclaiming that Athena was personally wel- coming Peisistratus to her dwelling on the Athenian Acropolis (t.60). Peisistratus, Herodotus comments, found it easy to fool the Athenians, although they were “the cleverest of the Greeks.” The author of the Athenaion politeia (15.4—5) tells another story that is only slightly less spectacular. Having taken the Acropolis, Peisis- tratus called the Athenians to an armed assembly. The Athenians placed their weapons on the ground to listen, but Peisistratus spoke very quietly, and they needed to step closer to hear him, When they did so, his men came behind them and collected their weapons.™” Stories of this sort clung to tyrants. The common perception of their extraordinary acuity helps explain their presence among the Seven Sages; Periander of Corinth and Cleobulus of Lindos on Rhodes were enshrined alongside Solon, Pittacus, and Chilon as models of political and practical wisdom. The tyrant possessed eleutheria in the sense that Aristotle labeled vulgar: “the ability to do what one wishes” irrespective of the interests of other citizens and the constraints that were imposed on them (Pol. 13 10a32—33).2! From the tyrant’s almost boundless free- dom came the various elements of his amorphous personal charac- ter: indifferent to the human and divine rules governing the rela- tions between women and men and fathers and sons, the tyrant is 40. On Herodotus’s story, see Connor (1987, 40—$0), who makes better sense of it than Herodotus, For Cypsclus’s tricks, see Polyacn. 5.31, Many tyrants were skilled in the use of omens and the manipulation of oracles. Herodotus reports that Periander once consulted his deceased wife by means of the oracle of the dead in Thesprotia (5.92n). 31. The tyrant is accordingly the individual who has unlimited ability to realize his desires; in this sense, tyrannos serves often as a byname of the gods in the classical period. On this see LS} s.v. ripawvos Lt 29Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece barbarous and even bestial in his appetites and almost godlike in his ability to realize them. In his enemies’ view, the tyrant’s pursuit of limitless pleasures leads him down a path of self-destruction as he negates his sexual identity, his family, his humanity, and, ulti- mately, his own existence.>? Tyranny derived its popular definition as a political institution from this image of the tyrant’s extraordinary personal freedom. This is clear in Otanes’ description of monarchy in Herodotus (3.80.3) as the government that “can do what it wishes without rendering an account”—a description that was intended to apply to tyranny no less than to the Persian monarchy. This is the definition that Thrasymachus uses in his favorable account of tyranny at Republic 1.344¢: injustice (a5uxia), which tyranny realizes most fully, was, he claimed, “stronger, freer, and more despotic [daxupo- Tepov kai ékevOepi@tepov Kai SearroTeKw@TEpor] than justice [6e- Kkavwoovrn).”” And it is this notion of tyranny as the rule of a single individual who accepts no constraints on his personal freedom that Plato's Republic was most determined to attack (cf. 572¢). For all Greeks, the tyrant’s personal freedom and the political power that gave it to him had an obvious purpose: to make him happy. The tyrant did not, however, want simple human happiness in greater quantity than his fellows. While intensely personal, the happiness of the tyrant was also completely public. Tyrants did not hoard their wealth or invest it only in private pleasure; they spent it conspicuously.* And they also made public the liberty they en- 32. On Plato’s treatment in Republic 8 of the perversity and self-destructiveness of tyranny, sce Farenga 1981, 5-10. Herodotus's portrait of Cambyses offers a perfect complement to Plato's theoretical account of tyranny, The reversal of gender roles in Acschylus’s presentation of Clytemnestra, the wife who becomes a tyrant and usurps the throne, and of Acgisthus, who for his support of Clytem- nestra is labeled “woman” (Ag. 1625: see Zeitlin 1984), and in the appropriation of Clytemnestra to represent tyrannical abuse of power in Pindar's Pythian 11 suggests that the association of tyranny and sexual amorphousness is still carlicr. Bushnell (1990, 20-25) sees this feature revived in the Renaissance image of the tyrant. 33. Their conspicuous spending has left monumental traces. That tyrants built sanctuaries, altars, temples, civic buildings, and the like as public demonstrations of their wealth does not mean that these buildings did not express some programmatic purposes; they certainly did so. On the Peisistratid building program, perhaps the most extensive undertaken by a tyrannical regime in archaic Greece, see Boersma 1970, Kolb 1977, and Shapiro 1989. 30Tyrannus fulminatus joyed from the constraints that were imposed on the domestic behavior of their subjects. The conspicuous use of consorts and illegitimate offspring was a feature common to the Cypselids, ty- rants of Corinth, and the Peisistratids of Athens. The elder Dio- nysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in what was perhaps intended as an ultimate expression of his freedom from social conventions, cele- brated weddings with his two legitimate wives on the very same day—only leaving to the speculation of his subjects which of the two marriages was first consummated.* The happiness of the ty- rant is, therefore, the happiness that looks for, and is compounded by, a large number of admirers—who are, for the tyrant, “looking- glasses,” as Virginia Woolf wrote of women, that have the “deli- cious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”*5 In a passage including one of the earliest known occurrences of the word tyrannia, Archilochus compared himself to a city “never before conquered,” which you, he says to his lover, viv eles aixun Kai wey’ &&jpw Khéos. eins Gvacce Kai Tparviny éxe. Trohdoiat Onv (nhwrds dvbpaTwv Evreat. (23.19-21 W)36 have now taken at spear point and made off with great fame Rule it and hold a tyranny. Many will envy you. As early as the Greeks knew tyranny, a predominant form of re- sistance to it was a steadfast refusal to acknowledge its attractions and to envy the tyrant for his happiness. So Archilochus in another passage: ov por ra Peyew Tod TOAUxpicou WEAEL, 08" elAé ma pe Los, 005" ceyaiopar 34. On the Cypselid and Peisistratid bastards, see chap. s. On the marital prac- tices and politics of tyrants, see Gernet 1968. Gernet suggests that Peisistratus was also bigamous, but this seems unlikely; on this, see also the discussion in chap. 5. 35. Woolf 1929, 35. Completing her pun, Woolf adds that "mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action” (36). 36. On the poem, sce West 1974, 118-20. 3rTyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece Oedv Epya, peyadns 8 ox Epéw Tupavvidos: Grémpobev yap sore bgbadpav Epav. (19.1-4 W)7 The possessions of golden Gyges are nothing to me, and enivy has not yet caught me, nor do I wonder at the deeds of gods; and I do not long for a great tyranny, for that is far from my eyes. This refusal to envy the tyrant would later gain a firmer basis. Not satisfied merely to avert their eyes, the lawgiver Solon and the political theorist Plato undertook to disprove the common opinion that the tyrant was genuinely happy.** Yet this is clearly the minority position. “Everyone envies ty- rants,” Xenophon has Simonides say in the Hieron (1.9). Xeno- phon’s Hicron protests that the popular conception is false, but his argument—that great burdens rest on the shoulders of the individ- ual ruler—would have persuaded few in archaic or even classical Greece. And to those few who denied the value of envy, Epichar- mus gives the most effective response: “Who would wish not to be envied, friends? It is clear that the man who is not envied is nothing. When you see a blind man you pity him, but not a single person envies him.”*? The enviable nature of tyranny appears prominently in the attempt Periander makes in Herodotus (3.52.4—5) to persuade his son Lycophron, who is disgruntled by reports that his father murdered his mother, to give up “the life of a vagabond” and take 37. Similar lines were at some point attributed to Anacreon, who (their author pethaps thought) was too well rewarded by tyrants to envy them: 00 pou péder ra Toye rob Napbewy dvaxtos: 000" aipées pe xpuods ovre pbove Typavvas. (8.1-4 Pr) I do not care about the wealth of Gyges, king of Sardis, nor docs gald attract me, nor do I envy tyrants 38. On Solon’s reaction to tyranny, see chap. 3 passim, 30. CGP 285. 32Tyrannus fulminatus over the tyranny and the “goods that | now have.” Lycophron, Periander hopes, will relent when he learns “how much better it is to be envied than pitied.” With the tyrant’s great need to arouse the envy (£7#A0s) of his political audience came a weakness to fall prey to resentment (¢80- vos), that is, to begrudge others the public display of their happi- ness. Tyrants did not tolerate superiors or equals. Rival aristocrats were common victims of a tyrant’s envy. And tyrants might even murder or exile members of their own family rather than tolerate them as partners.” Herodotus saw resentment (y@6vos) as a charac- teristic affliction of absolute monarchy. In the Persian constitutional debate (3.80), Otanes, who encourages the conspirators to adopt political equality (évovopie), identifies two vices in the single ruler who cannot be held accountable for his power, hubris and resent- ment. Hubris comes from the extraordinary status that belongs to the absolute monarch alone; resentment, on the other hand, “is natural to man.” The two vices make odd partners: Otanes remarks that “having every good thing”’—which makes him hubristic— “the tyrant should be free from resentment.” But Otanes explains that “the exact opposite characterizes his behavior toward citizens: the tyrant envies the best men their very life and presence, and he delights in the worst of the city and is the first to listen to their slanders.” This makes the tyrant a hard man to please. “If you admire him moderately, he is angered that he is not courted even more,” though if someone courts him as he wishes, “he would be angry at the man as a flatterer.” 4! Otanes’ monarch is uninterested in his subjects’ wealth, for he has every material benefit that he could want. What he does not have is the good opinion of his subjects. And for this, Herodotus’s Otanes—anticipating Plato*?—insists, 49. So Polycrates (Hdt. 3.39) and Cleisthenes of Sicyon (Nic. Dam. FGH 90 F 61) and, among barbarian monarchs, Croesus (Hdt. 1.92) and Cambyses (Hat. 3.30). On the other hand, Xenophon makes his Cyrus into a model ruler by characterizing him as willing to share praise (Cyr. 1.4.15). 41. How and Wells (1912, t:278) compare Otanes' image of a tyrant with Taci- tus’s treatment of Tiberius and his subjects (Ann. 1.12.2), who reach the height of self-debasement in competing to flatter the princeps sincerely. 42. Inthe Republic Plato focuses on the interchangeability of freedom and slavery in formulating his own new definition of justice. It is the eleutheria of democracy, its greatest good, that determines its downfall, its enslavement to the rule of a single 33Tyramny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece the tyrant becomes a virtual slave. Demanding that his subjects court him abjectly, and, moreover, that they do so with sincerity, the monarch falls victim to the oxymoron of sincere flattery. Herodotus’s constitutional debate presents Greek political con- ceptions in Persian dress.43 Oligarchy and democracy are political forms that belonged to the Greeks rather than to the Persians; so too Herodotus’s image of the ruler trapped by an insatiable and contra- dictory desire for sincere praise elaborates (if also exaggerates) com- mon Greek conceptions of autocratic rule. For Herodotus's con- temporaries, the tyrant's immense resources for human happiness came at the price of considerable dangers. And if the attractions of tyranny were obvious to anyone, no one was unaware that the tyrant’s happiness was provisional and threatened. The dangers of tyranny represent an answer to those, like Plato’s Thrasymachus, who bluntly advocated it. But the realization of the dangers inher- ent in tyranny was not first made in Herodotus's time, and it was not the exclusive discovery of tyranny’s enemies. The image of the tyrant as a man whose extraordinary happiness was destined to destroy itself stands in odd agreement with the self-representation of archaic tyrants themselves, who portrayed the happiness that their power gave them as conditional and fragile for the very reason that it surpassed that of other men. A first suggestion of the complexity inherent in self-representa- tion of tyrants, which forms a major theme of this book, can be found in the tyrannical odes of Pindar and Bacchylides, poetry commissioned by the early fifth-century tyrants of Sicily that in celebrating their athletic victories also articulated and supported the political relations that underlay their power. The epinician, or vic- individual (Rep. $62b—c). Democracy, it follows, fashions voluntary slaves (&6e- AodowAot: Rep. $624), out of free citizens. Nor does the tyrant escape the slavery of tyranny himself, for he is eventually enslaved by his own intemperate passions (Rep. $77¢). 43. On the historicity of the debate, see the discussion in Ostwald 1969, 178-79. Ostwald is reluctant to dismiss the debate as a simple fabrication of Herodotus or his sources but does not give convincing reasons that the ideas Otanes expresses are genuinely Persian, For attempts to explain the function of the debate as a literary construct, see Evans 1981 and Lateiner 1984. Connor (1971, 199-206) suggests that the debate reflects Athenian political belicfs in the late 430s and the following decade. 34Tyrannus fulminatus tory, odes of Pindar and Bacchylides addressed the problem that Otanes noted in absolute monarchy; but they did so to profit from it, not to solve it—that is, epinician pretended to offer an answer to the problems arising from the tyrant’s extraordinary power, wealth, and honor in order to characterize him as threatened by hubris and resentment and, therefore, as essentially distinct from other men. So while epinician anticipated the developed classical image of the extraordinary happiness of the tyrant, it also located within tyranny itself the tyrant’s flaws and weaknesses, his depen- dence on language and imagery that limited and rendered tempo- rary his political power and personal happiness. For this reason, the interaction between the epinician poetry commissioned by tyrants and an audience deeply concerned with tyrannical power merits close inspection. The Poetics of Power: Pindar and Bacchylides The short compositions that were danced and sung in honor of their victories at Panhellenic athletic competitions were obviously valued by Sicilian tyrants. Bacchylides’ odes 3, 4, and 5 and Pindar's Olympian 1 and Pythian 1, 2, and 3 honor Hieron. Pindar also wrote Olympian 2 and 3 for Theron, who ruled Acragas from 489 to 473. Odes composed for other Sicilians with connections to tyrants include Olympian 6, which was written in honor of Hagesias, a close supporter of Hieron; Pythian 6, for Xenocrates, Theron's younger brother; and Nemean 1 and 9 for Chromius, an in-law of the Deino- menids. Both Pindar and Bacchylides also wrote other forms of occasional poetry in honor of Sicilian tyrants. 4 The epinician poem was a species of praise poetry, and, like all praise poetry, it undertook to position its patron at the center of an admiring audience; this the epinician poct did by remembering and reenacting his patron’s moment of athletic victory. But in contrast to the encomiastic compositions that were typically sung at drink- 44. Fragments survive from an encemion in the form of a dance in honor of Hieron (105 SM), and another (118-19 SM) for Theron of Acragas; Bacchylides wrote at least one encomion for Hieron (20C). On Pindar’s Sicilian connection, see Stautfenberg 1963. 35Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece ing parties, victory odes were presented to audiences that were often public and diverse. The epinician poet could not assume that he was speaking to people who were in complete sympathy with the victor; it was incumbent on him to persuade others to share his enthusiasm for the victor. To do this, victory odes characteristically assert that the victories they celebrate were not the simple conse- quences of careful preparation or good fortune, but rewards that were given to victors by the gods for their good deeds, piety, or illustrious birth.45 This predominant interest in human excellence (areté) explains epinician’s generic inattention to athletic skill or the vicissitudes of athletic contests—even when its patrons owed their successes to extraordinary personal efforts.“ It also helps explain the victory poet's ability to praise victors who were only marginally responsible for their victories. Among such victors were tyrants who competed in the chariot races of Olympia and Delphi and collected prizes without driving their own teams, and even in some cases without leaving home to witness their victories. To persuade an audience to find genuine virtue in athletic victory was the epinician poet's great challenge. How challenging it was is proved by the characteristic indirection of his argument. Epinician poetry typically expresses only passing interest in the thoughts and feelings of the immediate audience, which it clearly intends to 4. See for example Pind. Isthm. 2.12-19; Bacchyl. 36-8 and 4.14-20. The gods were in fact responsible for all human success: Pind. Pyth. 1.41 46. Pindar compliments Herodotus of Thebes for driving his own team (Isthm. 1.15), but he docs not make this the reason that Herodotus wins, nor is it for this primarily that Herodotus deserves praise. See also Pyth. 5.34-39, where Pindar praises Carrhotas, Arcesilas’s chariotcer, not for skillful driving but for remember- ing to entrust his chariot to the gods. Bacchylides 9 is also an apparent exception: Bacchylides honors Automedon for his extraordinary strength, but that strength is represented not as Automedon’s personal achievement or private possession but as a conerete link to the mythical world with which the poet intends to connect him. Ie fits Pindar's metaphor of the poet as athlete to reject the role of skill in poetry. For the metaphor, see Pyth. 1.4145: “All manner of mortal virtues comes from the gods, so men are wise, mighty in body, and eloquent; | desire eagerly to praise this man, but I hope that I do not throw my bronze-cdged spear that | brandish in my hand outside of the field, but far outstrip my competitors with my throws.” For his rejection of the role of skill in poetry, see Ol, 2.86-88 and 9, 100-104. And for Pindar's presentation of the poet as inspired, see 52f.1-6 SM, where Pindar calls himself the “singing prophet of the Muses,” and 150 SM: “Speak your oracle, Muse, and I shall interpret.” 36Tyrannus fulminatus persuade. Indeed, it directs itself in great part to an imaginary audience, which it constructs of immortal gods, heroes, and per- sonified cities.4” Epinician poets constantly invoke and beseech this second, imagined audience; the poems themselves are sometimes represented as gifts to it. This constant reference to an imaginary audience most clearly distinguishes epinician from epic and most of lyric. Although the epinician poet was typical in representing him- self as the spokesman of the gods, he had a special need to remind his audience that he derived his inspiration from a divine source; for while the epic poet's success did not depend entirely on the veracity of his story, the epinician poet clearly needed to convince his lis teners that his assertions were true to have any hope of persuading them to praise the victor. There is another reason that the victory ede constructed a divine audience. Epinician subscribed to the view, conservative already in Pindar's day, that areté derived exclusively from the gods. This view is basic to the victory ode’s mission: to discover and illuminate a connection between the victor’s achievement and the world of the gods and heroes. Steeped in genealogy and mythical history and skilled in manipulating poctic images—epinician’s version of the Heracleian stone of Plato's. lon—the poet linked the quotidian real- ity to which his patron's victory belonged to the gods and the mythical past; at the end of a successful poem, the patron’s victory emerged adored with divine causes and mythic antecedents. Epinician, in the words of Leslie Kurke, was a “tool finely cali- brated for registering and accommodating the particular status of the victor within his civic community.”4* Within the chain that 47. On the distinction of epinician's real and ideal audiences, see Nagy 1990, 249. 48. Kurke 1991, 224, Kurke is sensitive to Pindar's interest in accommodating the political and social aspirations of his patrons: she reads Pindar’s aristocratic odes as aiming to reintegrate the victor into his community by incorporating the com- munity into the poem. But she does not, I think, pay enough attention to epinician’s ability to justify and affirm those aspirations; little is made of epinician’s power to reshape the relationship between the victor and his community to effect a real political difference: that, at the end of the successful ode, the victor and his victory are situated at the community's center, It is this restructuring of the relation between patron and his city that is crucial for epinician (just as the tyrannical odes aim to reorder the patron's relation to the world of gods and heroes). Epinician is less concerned to assure the community that “athletic victory is not a stepping stone to political domination” (224). On the relation between Pindar’s tyrannical odes and 37Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece epinician constructed linking the gods and the victory, the victor, ifa boy, could be employed as proof of the divinely bestowed areté of his family; or if an aristocrat, his success might figure primarily to sug- gest or represent his city. In such poems—Pindar’s Aeginetan odes are obvious examples*’—the patron’s family line or city stands between his victory and the gods and figures as the whole of which the patron is a part, his link to the gods,and the immediate audience of his achievements. Or, as in the odes honoring the Sicilian tyrants, the epinician poet might attempt to devise a more direct link be- tween the areté of the victor and the gods.5# Odes honoring aristo- crats typically represent the city as the final link in the chain connect- ing victory to the gods. But in odes honoring tyrants, the patron himself often assumes this role. So the good ruler and the good city both appear as the immediate objects of the gods’ attention and both demonstrate the distinctive areté that comes from the gods. Thus an important political anaology is made in epinician. The similar place given to the ruler and to the aristocratic patron’s city allows the poet to describe them in like terms. At Nemean 5.47, Pindar delights that “the entire city [of Aegina] is eager for good deeds” as if Aegina were a single individual determined to prove its areté. And at Pythian 1.7§-79, Pindar includes Hieron’s victory over the Etruscans in a single set with the Athenians’ defeat of the Persians at Salamis and Sparta’s victory at Plataea. The significance of this chain is especially immediate when a those composed for aristocrats, see Nagy (1999, 175), who challenges the conven- tional view that Pindar and Bacchylides wrote odes primarily for aristocratic pa- trons and that the odes written for tyrants are a mere variation of the aristocratic ode. Epinician, for Nagy, is a genre that is essentially related to the position and aims of tyrants and “quasityrants” (i.c., aristocrats who aspire to the political status and reception of tyrants). Nagy’s view of the “quasityrant” is attacked by Stoneman (1991, 35154). who insists (to my mind rightly) on the difference between Pindar’s tyrannical and aristocratic odes. But Stoneman himself (1984. 43-49) seems to locate that difference in terms of poctic attitudes and diction, leaving aside entirely the question of epinician's complex reception and political situation, This may help us appreciate Kurke’s achievement. 49. See also Ol. 13.1-$, composed in honor of Xenophon of Corinth, and Kurke (1991, 205-7), who constructs the relationship of the victor and his city on analogy with the Homeric relationship of the warrior and sovereign: as the warrior's success brings glory («i60s) to his sovereign, the victor's achievement confers a particular power and charm on the city to which he returns, 50, As Race (1986, 101) notes, “Pindar portrayed Hieron, Theron, and Arkesilas as model rulers; Aigina was his ideal polis.” 38Tyrannus fulminatus human ruler serves as the link between the aristocratic patron and the divine source of his victory. This clearly happens in Pindar's Olympian 6, Atthe conclusion of the ode, Pindar turns from Hage- sias, whose victory the ode celebrates, to speak of Hieron: eltov 56 pepvacdat Svpaxooaay te Kai ‘Oprvyias, Ta ‘lépwy kabape oKanTy diet, ap7 undd.evos, gowiKdTrelav duwpérer Aaparpa, Meuiarou te Ovyarpés EopTav, Kai Znvas Airvaiov Kpceros. &5vAoyou BE vu Avpar podrai Te ywarKoVTL. 17) Opacaor xpavos GABov égéprrav. abv 5E prrogpootvais einpérors ‘Aynoia déauTo KaLwY. (Ol. 6.92-98) Isaid to remember Syracuse and Ortygia, over which Hieron holds sway with an unsullied scepter, taking counsel for right things, and attending to purple-slippered Demeter and to the festival of Persephone with her white horses and to the power of Aetnean Zeus. Sweet-speaking lyres and dances know him. May time, sneaking up, not trouble him, now happy, and may he receive the victory celebration of Hagesias with well-loved acts of friendliness. Only gods, heroes, and divine places and things could be invoked as present when they are absent. Pindar is careful to avoid addressing the absent Hieron directly; he uses the third person optative (“may he receive") instead of the vocative. Yet he comes very close to putting Hieron on a level with the gods. Hieron holds sway over Syracuse; it is he who will welcome the victory celebration in Syracuse, and it is he, therefore, who will determine the success of the ode. Hence the ode to Hagesias ends with an appeal to Hieron, who is characterized as a godlike force, whose potential anger and envy the poem acknowledges as its final task.5! 51. The analogy that epinician constructs between the city and the tyrant sup- ports Burnett's (1985, 42-43) suggestion that epinician praised victors in much the same way that the pacan praised gods. Since the Greeks personified their cities as 39Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece In all epinician, the poet undertakes to render to god what is god’s: ultimate credit for victory. In this sense, the patron reaps the victory as a return on a religious investment he has made in the pasc.®? But epinician does not intend to represent the victory as a settlement of religious accounts, for even if the gods give him victory as a reward for his past loyalty, the victory puts him deeper in their debt. Epinician poetry renders this complicated relationship between the gods and the victor (or the entity whom the victor represents) in its concern with divine envy. Divine envy and resent- ment were, of course, important elements of the Greeks’ religious vocabulary; in fact, they are among the chief qualities the gods share. “Envious more than others,” Calypso calls the Olympian gods who deprive her of Odysseus’s company (Od. 5.118). Yet, in their envy of the happiness of others, the gods were perhaps most human. Like certain men, most especially kings and tyrants, the gods put great value on the exclusive character of their happiness. Disastrous consequences met those who directly challenged the status of the gods, the Giants, or creatures such as the unfortunate Marsyas. The same fate fell upon paradigmatic tyrants, such as Croesus and Polycrates, whose wealth and power allowed them to. escape the common toils of mankind. >? Epinician poets fully subscribed to the popular views of divine envy. To praise victors the poet needed to recognize and avert its danger. So at Pythian 8.71—72 Pindar prays: beav & émw dgbovor aitéw, Zévapxes, twerépats Toyxats. {ask that the sight of the gods be unenvious of your fortune, Xenarkes. But these things are not really within the poct's control; unalloyed happiness is the exclusive possession of the gods. So while attempt- divine entities, the tyrant, who occupies the place assigned to the aristocratic patron's city, is implicitly separated from the rest of mankind. 52. Epinician, in this respect, follows epic, See II. 23.859-83, where Teucer’s loss in the archery contest is tacitly attributed to his failure to pray to Apollo before shooting. The rewards of piety are most fully elaborated in Bacchylides’ version of Croesus’s story. $3. See Walcot (1978, 25-26), who traces the idea to Homer. On envy in Pindar, see Bulman 1992. 40Tyrannus fulminatus ing to appease the gods, Pindar must also warn his mortal patrons that they cannot hope to escape a measure of unhappiness. “No one is or will be without a share of toil,” Pindar insists at Pythian 5.54 and also at Pythian 12.28-30: £1 5€ Tus GABos év dvOpw7ootw, avev KapaTou od gaiverau &k 5& TeheuTdcret vey Trot TaLEpOV Saipwr: 76 56 popaysov ob mapgvKrov. If there is some happiness in men, it does not appear without toil; a god might bring happiness to an end today, for it is not possible to flee what is fated. This same reflection prompts Bacchylides to tell the story of Hera~ cles’ encounter with Meleager in Hades, which underscores the tragic dimensions of Heracles’ undoing: Heracles returns from the meeting with an overwhelming pity for Meleager, which evolves into a passion for Meleager’s sister, Deianira, the agent of Heracles’ death, Thus the hero meets a tragic end, which Bacchylides uses to support by synecdoche his judgment on the universal condition of mankind: “No one who dwells on earth is happy in all respects” (5.54—55). Even Hieron, the poet implies, cannot expect that his favored status will always bring him an extraordinary measure of happiness. The epinician poet’s insistence on the subjects of divine envy and the inescapable suffering of man may seem to cast a shadow on the victor’s otherwise bright achievements and his god-given happi- ness. Yet the poet clearly intends to build on the relation between the patron's achievement and the gods, not to question the value of that achievement. In fact, the anxiety about divine envy that de- mands the transference of praise from the victor to the gods is best equipped to do just that; for, just as the poet augments his praise for the victor when he credits the gods for the victory, so too he places his patron in a special class of men when he makes him liable to the gods’ resentment. The threat of the gods is a form of attention, which confirms the victor’s uniqueness. Epinician poetry thus con- structs a close relationship between areté and phthonos. The patron's great virtue—most especially, the tyrant’s—invites both the gods’ attention and their envy. The epinician poet lives on this problem; 41Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece he certainly does not intend to reject or obliterate it. In fact, he will go to great lengths to make it seem real. This may make us wonder about the political ethics of epinician poetry: the poet, despite his great religious and poetic claims, was apparently willing to praise any victor, even a tyrant, who could pay his fee, Certainly any discrimination of the worthiness of his patron was unrelated to his role as a praise merchant. This is most obvious at the very places where the poet appears to instruct, and not just to praise, his patron. So Pindar’s address to Hieron at Pythian 181-86: xatpov ef pbéyaio, TOMO TEtpata GUVTAViCoNS Ev Bpaxei, peiwv Ereran papos avOparrar. dnd yap K6pos apBdvver aiavns taxeias EXmibas: aorav 8 &Kkod Kpiguor Oupov Bapwvet padvor’ éodoior Er” eddortpiors. GAN Gpws, Kpéoaor yap oikTippod eOdvos, BY Tapia Kaa. VOLO diKaig THdarip oTpaTdr: dpevbet 6€ mpds Gkwov xadneve yOooav. If you speak in season, tightly weaving together many lines, less reproach of men will follow. For persistent satiety blunts quick expectations, And stories especially of others’ achievements weigh heavily upon the heart secretly. Nonetheless, envy is better than pity. Do not give up good deeds; guide the people with a straight rudder, and forge your tongue with an unlying anvil. Pindar’s readers will look in vain for any specific political or ethical message or any real program for reform in this passage. With poetic images bordering on the trite, Pindar’s moral advice can do little to moderate or direct Hieron’s political behavior. Like the semi- fictional Timotheus in Dryden's “Alexander's Feast,” the epinician poet “cou’d swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire,” making his patron smile or assuaging his pain. But he did not have the power to 42Tyrannus fulminatus alter the nature of his master’s power, and it certainly was not in the nature of tyranny to change by degrees. From this perspective, the poet's advice that the tyrant should behave well, and the tyrant’s conspicuous reception of such advice—whether he merely pre- tended to listen or did so sincerely—did most to highlight the tyrant’s freedom to behave just as he wished. In fact, the mixture of praise and advice that is characteristic of epinician itself serves to neutralize the claim, embraced by Herodotus’s Otanes and by Plato, that the tyrant is enslaved by his huge appetite for praise.54 Epinician poets were likely aware that they could not really instruct their patrons; and it was not for this that they most extolled their art. What they do well, they insist, is reward virtue, and virtue that is well rewarded, they claim, is the greatest happiness available to men. In fact, as Bacchylides insists at 3.89-92, the honor that poets bestow on virtue may serve as an antidote for the inescapable march of time: dperas ye mév ob purin Bportov &wa copa péyyos, dda Moiord viv tpéger.55 The light of virtue does not wither together with the body of mortals but is nourished by the Muse. The power that poetry possesses to combat forgetfulness comple- ments the inherent value of virtue (“Cheer your heart by doing things that are holy, for this is the greatest of profits”: Bacchyl. 3.83-84) in rewarding victors for their glorious achievements. We may complain that epinician here praises itself in the same isolated $4. In this sense, the appeals in Pindar to the tyrannical patron's moral virtues function much like the image of Clementia in the principate (Res gestae 34; see Adam. 1970 and the succinct remark in Ferguson 1970, 73: “Clementia is a reminder of the ‘emperor's absolute power and his kindness in not using it”) or like the entreaties for the ruler’s forbearance that were commonplace in the court literature of monarchi- cal Europe. On the connection between autocratic power and clemency in Greek political language, see the various remarks on the virtues of forgiveness attributed to Pittacus: Diod. 9.12.3; D.L. 1.76. 35. Cf Pind. Isthm. 7.16—19; 11.1317. 43Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece and unpolitical terms it uses to praise its patrons. But victory pocts were not oblivious to the political realities of praise poetry, as a passage in Pindar that explicitly mentions tyranny argues: Tiav yap dve TOW ebpirkuy Te LéEH MaxpoTépY OMB TEbadora, pEppop’ aicay Typavvibwy Evvaior 8 dug’ dperais térapar. gOovepoi 5° &pivovrat. GAN ef ts Gxpov EXOD HOUXE TE VELSpeEvos aivar IBpw drréguyev, pédavos dv soxeruav Kadhiova Oavérou oreixor yhuxvrare yevege evavupor KTeavay Kpatiotay xapw Topi. (Pyth, t1.§2—58)% Believing that those citizens in the middle flourish with the longest happiness, I find fault with tyrannies. I reach for common virtues. For the envious are warded off, but if someone who has reached the heights dwells there in peace and avoids dread hubris, he would come to a better end in black death, leaving for his sweet offspring the grace of a good name, strongest of resources. Tyranny receives a striking interpretation in this aristocratic vic- tory ode. Pindar’s “common virtues” are not common to all men; instead, they are virtues that deserve the community's collective honor. Conversely, behavior labeled as “hubris” is unwelcomed and isolated and, for that reason, entices no poet to celebrate it. From this perspective, it makes sense that Pindar elsewhere chooses Phalaris of Acragas as his paradigmatic political villain. Phalaris, in his hubris, roasted his enemies inside a bronze bull, and he suffers eternal damnation as a result (“Hateful infamy holds [him] down in every way") and is deprived of all the benefits of song (Pyth. 1.96— 98). Ir is likely that Pindar’s mythological presentation of athletic victory kept tyranny in the minds of his audience. If so, Pindar’s interest in addressing tyranny explicitly is perhaps a preemptive 56. On the passage, see Young 1968, 12-22, and Kurke 1991, 215-18 44Tyrannus fulminatus move. Pindar, in other words, incorporates tyranny within the distinct conceptual framework of epinician in order to insist on a strictly moralistic interpretation of it. Tyranny, for Pindar, is hubris deserving the silence that the poet bestows just as he bestows praise. The poet's threat of “hateful infamy” may not seem impressive. Like the condemnatio memoriae of the enervated Roman Senate, his refusal to praise evil deeds seems to articulate his powerlessness; Pindar does not speak against, but can only refuse to support, actions that he deems tyrannical. Pindar’s powerlessness becomes all the more obvious in his example of actions that deserve silence: his Phalaris is a fiction with little resemblance to real tyrants. But although—or, indeed, because—his claim to power is imaginary, Pindar's interpretation of tyranny offers real power to his patron. When he asserts for himself and incorporates in his poem the final judgment over tyranny, Pindar in fact appropriates the power of praise from the community, his audience, and gives it to his patron. In the hands of the praise poet, the final decision over the patron and his victory becomes poetic. The beginning, middle, and end of his story, which epinician narrates and sanctifies with myth, is told by the patron’s own agent, who supports his account of his patron with poetic proof of his credibility. The epinician poet allows the tyrant to replace his audience, preempt its decision over him, and exercise sovereignty over his story. The tyrant becomes a virtual narrator of his own story, the form, as Walter Benjamin has said, in which “the just man encounters himself"5?—or, in which any man is able to invent his own justice. Of course, the epinician poet did not serve his patron just by composing prayers, and divine jealousy did not itself diminish the power of tyrants or the reputation of aristocrats. Danger to tyrants and aristocrats came from their fellow citizens, the real audience of epinician poetry. Although the poet's talk about divine envy is 57. Benjamin 1977, 410: "Der Erzahler ist die Gestalt, in welcher der Gerechter sich selbst begegnet.” 458. Kurke (1991, 220) observes that Pindar’s tyrannical odes treat the problem of envy far more cavalicrly than his aristocratic odes: “The enviers are mocked rather than mollified.” Pindar’s disdain is, | think, strategic: he means to suggest that the audience's envy of his tyrant-patron is proved to be foolish by the considerable divine support the patron enjoys. 45Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece indirect, it is neither incidental nor insignificant. The acknowledg- ment and appeasement of the envy of the gods provided in fact the uniquely satisfactory solution to the very real problem of human envy. This is at times explicit: in one place, the envy of mortals is taken as proof of the victor’s areté (Ol. 6.72—76); in another, praise, which links mortal achievements with the gods, overcomes human envy: pe vuv, Ore Pbovepai vara gpévas &ppucpéspavrat éhmides, nr’ Gperay Tote atyérw ratp@av, pndé roves’ Suvous. (Usthm. 2.43-45) Not now, that envious hopes cling about the hearts of men, must he ever let his ancestral virtue be silenced, nor these songs. Thus epinician links the victor and his divine patrons by means of mythical narrative and the invention of a divine audience. This link is intended as an appeal to the poem's human audience to honor the victor. And the appeal is powerful for the very reason that it is indirect. The audience that follows the music and dance of epinician watches and participates in a spectacle that anticipates and answers all doubts about the victor’s areté. Bacchylides makes it clear that this aim is traditional: xp? & ddadsias xapw aiveiy, gO6vor duporéparow xepoiv aracdpevov, ei tus eb Tpdoan Bpotav. Bowwros danjp ree gounoer, yAuetay ‘Hoiodos tpért0hos Movoay, dv dv &Bévaror typaon, TooTy xai Bporav ghpav érecba. (5.187-94) It is necessary for the sake of truth to give praise, shunning envy with both hands, 46Tyrannus fulminatus when someone of mortals fares well. That Bocotian man, Hesiod, servant of the sweet Muses, said these things: whomever the immortals honor should be followed with the good fame of mortals. Thus epinician poets attempt to win honor for their patrons by asserting that they already possess the special honor that gods give men; some patrons, particularly rulers, possess so much honor that they risk the gods’ envy. Because the gods have recognized the victor, the poct’s real audience should find it casy and even neces- sary to honor him as well. This is the sophisticated aim of the victory poet, If he is successful, the patron emerges outfitted like Acacus, whom, according to Pindar at Nemean 8,8—10, ToAAoi Aeravevor ide. &Boari yap paw &wro TEepwaceTadvTa@Vv HOedov keivou ye teiec’ dvakiass Exav7es. many pray to see. And unsummoned the flower of the heroes living nearby wish, though not forced, to obey his commands. Victory, the poet asserts, is the source of praise, and praise is the source of honor, the public acknowledgment that victory comes from the gods. With this claim, epinician seems to complete its refutation of Herodotus's Otanes. While in the Persian debate the ruler’s desire for the regard of his subjects is a logical contradiction that renders his power irrational, in epinician that regard is a neces- sary and inevitable consequence of the divine origin of his special areté, The victory poct obviously needs to present the relationship between the victor and the gods as real. Like the student arguing the Quintilian declamation, his theology is axiomatic; the victorious patron, like the tyrannus fulminatus, must be honored because the gods have marked him for honor. The poet is not guilty of insin- cerity. From his perspective, alétheia (truth), the opposite of con- 47Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece cealment,*? insists on the celebration of areté. The obligations of his politics and poetics dovetail perfectly: the poet serves truth when his song echoes in his audience's praise for the victor. But the victor also has his obligation. He must avoid the supreme impiety of. failing to acknowledge in song that the gods are responsible for the victory. So Pindar at Pythian 5.23-25: Ta oe pH hedeTa Kupava yAuniv dppi xémov 'Agpobizas deBouevor, mavri pév Oedv aciriov dreprBeper. Therefore do not let it escape you, when you are honored in song in the sweet garden of Aphrodite in Cyrene, for each to hand over credit to the god. The victor, in other words, must not forget poetry. And if the victor is pious and the poet is successful, the result is a poem of great power. As Pindar insists, “The song of good deeds makes a man fortunate like kings.” It is not difficult to see why Sicilian tyrants were attracted to victory odes as a poetic supplement for the glory they won in their wars against the Carthaginians, the Etruscans, and rival cities and tyrants in Sicily.°' The epinician poet undertook to reorder poeti- cally the relationship between his audience and his patron. Tending 59. In Pindar, see Nem. 8.2426 (Homer on Odysseus). In general, see Detienne 1967 and Cole (983. Pindar’s aesthetics are hardly naive; they concur with Hesiod and Solon (“Poets tell many lies”: Sol. 25 GP), not with Homer ("Poets are not to blame" for the stories they tell: Od. 1.347-48). For Pindar, the poets may lie by revealing what did not happen, as Homer does in telling the tale of Odysseus (cf. Pind. Nem. 7.20-21). 60. Nem. 4.83-85: dros dé TaY cyabaw épyparwn Bacideiaw icodaipova reixet para. 61. Athletic victory and martial victory are occasionally linked in epinician, In Pyth. 1, Pindar extends his praise for Hieron's chariot victory in 470 to celebrate his defeat of the Etruseans at Cumac several years earlier. For the link between victory in war and victory in games, see also Pyth, 8.25-27, where the subject, however, is not a Sicilian tyrant but the city of Aegina. 48Tyrannus fulminatus by nature to collusion rather than confrontation, epinician used meter, music, and myths to draw the audience into a celebration of the areté of the victor. For all its patrons, the celebration aimed to translate athletic victory into civic stature. For aristocratic patrons, it was enough that the celebration offered an image of the commu- nity—brief but repeatable—in which the patron and his family appeared as first citizens. But the tyrant clearly wanted more from victory odes. Epinician attempted to bring the tyrannical patron's fellow citizens, like Aeacus's, to “obey his commands willingly” (Pind. Nem. 8.10), or, if we may gloss Pindar with Machiavelli (Discourses 1.8), “to yield him the first place without deeming them- selves degraded thereby.” But was epinician successful? Performances of victory odes were intense but also fleeting; the poet tried to convince the audience of the gods’ immediate interest in his patron's victory, but he could not hope to make that conviction outlast the performance by very long. It is not only the remoteness of modern sensibilities that makes the victory ode now seem rather pompous and hollow. Pindar and Bacchylides might temporarily elevate their patrons in the eyes of their audience, but they did so by pretending to offer cternal proof. that the patron's victory stemmed from divine areté. As masters of mythical narrative and interpreters of the divine, epinician poets asserted complete control over their audiences’ judgment of their patrons. Yet temporary success seems to have come at the price of ultimate failure. To make the patron seem honorable, the poet also made him seem threatened. The gods are powerful, but also fickle; they want the victor to be honored now, but they may feel very differently later. Every argument that epinician gives for its patron's distinctiveness is also an argument for his fragility. In its own terms, then, epinician seems to question, even as it proclaims, the happi- ness of the poet's tyrant-patron; and its listeners, even if they are brought to praise him, are left with the impression that the victor's fate is still very much in doubt. If this is correct, epinician’s very effort to control the tyrant’s re~ ception unwittingly invokes the rule implied by the Quintilian Ty- rannus fulminatus: the tyrant, despite all his efforts, could not exert final control over his own reception. In turn, the declamation im- 49Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece plies the city’s obvious response to the representation that poets in- vented for tyrants: holding the power to expel the body of the tyrant extra fines, the city was able to replace with lasting infamy the tem- porary honor that rulers created by their own self-representation or purchased from praise merchants. So read, the Quintilian exercise suggests that stories about the tyrants and founders offered Greek cities a kind of narrative power over their past. The lives of tyrants and founders functioned as fables to which cities could append their own morals: burial in the civic center made the founder's story a happy one, while expulsion extra fines redefined the tyrant’s entire life as miserable. By adding its own conclusion, the polis embedded a narrative reversal in both stories. The founder's quest, which usually began and often pro- gressed ignominiously,“? ended in complete success, while the ty- rant lived for a short time as the happiest of men to end life perfectly unhappy. And the narrative reversal served a political reversal. In honoring its founder, the city, which remembered him as its maker, honored him as its own possession; likewise, in oppressing its tyrant with dishonor, the polis was able to spurn its onetime master as if he were chattel that it might keep or discard at its discretion. The honor and dishonor detailed in the declamation thus celebrate the maturity and mastery of the city in the form of a story that retains the founder and tyrant as both decidedly significant and utterly finished. So Greek city-states did not need to conceal their carly histories: when they wrote conclusions to the stories of their autocratic masters, they rendered innocuous their debt to founders and marked their subjugation to tyrants as forever past. In Quintilian’s day, the Tyrannus fulminatus could only have been appreciated for the quandary that it offered schoolboys. I have argued that the quandary (should the tyrant be buried in the civic center because he died as a result of Zeus's special attentions, or should he be cast from the city because he lived as a tyrant?) reflects the opposition between the tyrant and the founder and the city’s mastery over their stories, both of which are basic to the polis's political identity and to its conception of sovereignty. But in reflect- ing the political language of the polis, the rhetorical exercise also 62. On this, see chap. 5 passim. 50Tyrannus fulminatus captures its distinctive political achievement: the Greek city-state solved the very quandary at the heart of the Quintilian exercise. Unfertered by the conventional logic that made the Tyrannus ful- minatus a puzzle for the Roman schoolboy, poleis found ways to honor the tyrant as fulminatus—that is, as marked by the gods—at the same time that they utterly devalued his memory and negated his claims, as tyrannus, to happiness. stCHAPTER TWO Justice and Power: The Language of Early Greek Tyranny Eviow Byypod beopsvors Kai KOAGT EWS éuPadav 6 Beds mKpiav Tie Tupavvov duo peidextor Kai TpaxirnTE Xakem@y &pxovr0s, oF mparepov ékeide 76 AuTOby Kad Tapérrov 3 76 voTOdD daddaEau kai xaOhpat. Sometinies the god applies the implacably bitter and harsh rule of a tyrant to peoples needing a caustic and correction, and does not remove the pain and annoyance until he has expelled and purged the disease Plutarch, De sera numinis vindicta 5534 ‘The sophist Hippias reports that tyrannos, the Greek word for autocratic ruler (the individual who dominates a state through his own strength and abilities rather than by perceived conceptions of right), was first used in Archilochus’s time, the seventh century 8.C." In his extant poetry, Archilochus labels only one ruler a ty- rannos, Gyges, the fabulously fortunate king of Lydia. But Archi- lochus clearly did not see tyranny as something entirely foreign or strange. When he drew on it to construct metaphors for love (23.18-21 W) and greed (19 W), he was exploiting a political situa- tion that his Greek audience must have known, although perhaps not yet from personal experience. If Archilochus and his genera- 1. Cf FGH 6F 6. On the origin and original meaning of tyrannos, see Labarbe 197k. 2. For Archilochus on tyranny, see also chap. 1 52The Language of Early Greek Tyranny tion were the first Greeks to label individual rule as tyrannia, they were certainly not the first to form ideas about the political domina- tion of single individuals and small groups. Homeric epic incorpo- rates complex models of kingship that much predate tyranny. But the political institution that Archilochus and his contemporaries marked with a new word, was a new and very different form of political power. To frame the political innovation that this new word reflects and, most important, to understand its close relation- ship with the concept of justice (6é«7), | begin with a discussion of kingship in Homer and Hesiod, who record the ideas and images of political domination in the generations that saw tyranny come to exist. Kings in Homer and Hesiod When Louis Gernet madc his provocative suggestion that archaic tyrants deliberately revived images of Homer's kings in order also to recapture their privileges and power,* he was ignoring much that Homer's narratives offered their carly archaic audiences on the subject of kings and kingship. Tyrants could not help being in- trigued by the godlike status of Homeric kingship, but they would hardly have wished to resurrect its tenuous and fragile social and political basis. The kings of the Iliad and Odyssey are, asa rule, pre- cminent warriors who enjoy power and privileges in proportion to their martial achievements.4 The Lycian king Sarpedon suggests this relation in iad 12 (310-14) when, on the verge of battle, he asks Glaucus why their people honor them like gods, and imme- diately defines his question as rhetorical by answering it himself. with an exhortation to Glaucus to join him at the head of the army.° 3. Gernet 1968, 4. On Homeric kingship in general, sce Carlier 1984, 165-68, Drews 1983, Andreev 1979, Descat 1979, and Deger 1970. On the fragile nature of Agamem- non’s power as king of men (vag dvépav), see McGlew 1989; and on the ideology of Homeric power sce also Rose 1975 and Thalmann 1988. 5. To the question, Draixe, rin 8) vi TeryspeoGa padiora bpp te kpéaciv re ibé mheins bemdecow $3Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece And what Sarpedon stresses by leaving unsaid—that kings live well because they fight well—explains the peril as well as the power of Homeric kingship. The prerogatives of kingship obligate Homer's warrior-kings to face repeatedly the possibility of death in the heroic duels that kings characteristically fight. In this fandamental sense, victory is the first condition of the Homeric king’s royal status, Yet, despite the conditional nature of their power, Homer, like Thomas More, saw kings as “the springs both of good and evil."* A good king ensures social harmony, while a bad or weak king threat- ens it. And for Homer the king is necessary even if his power is insecure and his devotion to his community wavers. The absence of a king is an important feature of the perfectly uncivilized society of the Cyclopes; and, although Homeric kings never rule entirely alone, a community with too many kings, as Odysseus suggests at Iliad 2.204, courts political disaster. This ambiguous image of king- ship as necessary but fragile fits the narrative demands of the Iliad and Odyssey, which plot the fates of communities through the personal trials of their kings, but it does not exhaust Homer's thoughts on the subject of royal power. Interspersed within his stories of the struggles of Agamemnon and Odysseus, Homer offers occasional glimpses of a less heroic world and less heroic forms of power, which have been thought “ordinary” from the av Avxin, mavres Bé Beats is etc Kai Témevos vemoperba péya eo ‘rp’ GxGlas; Kaden puTahtis Kai Gpovpns Tupopspow: Sarpedon answers: 1a viv xpm) Avxiourt wera mpdrourw éévras sorrépev ABE wayns Kavareipns dvTiBokAoas. (I. 12.310-16) Why have we been rewarded most of all with a seat of honor and meat and many goblets in Lycia, and everyone regards us as gods, and we dwell on a great estate by the banks of the Xanthus, lovely in its vineyards and grain-bearing fields? So now we must go forward and stand among the first of the Lycians and meet the raging battle 6. More 1964, 5 34The Language of Early Greek Tyranny perspective of the poet’s own world.? These glimpses, much like Homer's similes, were intended to frame the distinction between the world of his heroes and that occupied by himself and his au- dience, men who, in the language of the similes, could not lift stones even half as large as those heaved about by his heroes. But even if Homer turns to his contemporary world only to highlight the stature of his heroes and their struggles, his images of his own world offer much of value on the character of political power in the generations before tyranny. This is particularly true of the shield scene in Iliad 18, Homer's description of the images Hephaestus etches into the new shield he makes for Achilles. The shield scene is an elaborate microcosm that provides dynamic and static images of the heavens, Ocean, the worlds of agriculture and urban life, and the points of intersection between civilized life and nature. In this world within a world, Hephaestus places two cities, one of which is at war, the other at peace. The former is simultaneously beset by two hostile armies, while the latter enjoys weddings and feasts and witnesses the peace- ful arbitration of a blood dispute between two citizens. The poet's account of the two cities is particularly terse, and details of the cities’ social, political, and economic institutions are sparse. Yet is clear and important that Homer accords no place in the two cities to the sort of royal power that elsewhere dominates the political, social, and economic center of heroic society. No king is involved in the activities of either city, while the one anonymous king of the shield is busy tending his kingly estate at the periphery of the shield,® as if to suggest that his remoteness from the shield’s social activities reflects the unimportance of kingship in the world that the shield depicts. The absence of kings certainly does not hamper the two cities. In the battle surrounding the less fortunate of Hephaestus’s two cities (the sort of activity that Homer’s kings would not usually miss), the shield men are obviously able to fight to protect their city or to destroy someone else's without the leadership of Homeric kings and without the heroic duels that they fought. 7. So Edwards (1988, 279-86) refers to the Iliadic shield scene, 8. IT. 18,550-57. On the function of the Homeric royal estate (rézevos Baot- Arion), see Carlier 1984, 158-60. 55Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece The people of Achilles’ shield are also able to solve their legal problems without the help of kings.” In his account of the legal dispute in the more fortunate of the two cities, Homer relates thata man offers a certain sum as restitution for killing a fellow citizen, while a relative of the victim rejects the offer. The community's elders listen to the arguments of the two litigants and then take turns offering solutions, each announcing his opinion with a scepter in hand. Although the scepter is elsewhere in Homer a symbol of exclusive god-given power in legal matters (@éuto7es: Il. 2.206; 9.99), the elders do not themselves determine or enforce the final judgment in this case. For “two talents of gold lay in the middle” (18.506), which the litigants,'® or, more probably, the assembled people who also hear the litigants (18.500), award to the elder whose “judgment is most straightforward” (18.508). Established legal procedures now perform the function performed elsewhere in Homer by kings. The change is apparently for the better. The orderly assembly bears little resemblance to chose that Homer posi- tions in the crucial second books of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which prove disastrous because of the weakness or absence of the ruling king. Throughout the Iliad and Odyssey, Homer constructs and ex- ploits an elaborate analogy between the worlds of gods and kings. In the shield scene, too, theology is closely related to politics. The role of the Olympian gods, who are otherwise prominent in Homer as the patrons of kings, is much curtailed in this world lacking royal power. Zeus himself does not appear, and no Olympians are pic- tured among the immortal bodies with which Homer encircles his two cities. Instead we are offered brief glimpses of Athena and Ares in the thick of battle around the city at war (18.516), fighting apparently as patron gods of warring groups and as divine soldiers of fortune, but not, as far as we are told, in the service of a supreme god or as patrons of individual warriors. Epic, which was both product and ingredient of carly archaic Greece, frames its own relation to its world as antithetical rather than mimeuc. The shield scene is obviously included in the Iliad for 9. On the legal scene and controversies, sce Gagarin 1986, 26-33. 10, So Gagarin 1986, 31 36The Language of Early Greek Tyranny literary, not historical, purposes: itis an anuheroic image created by the artist-god Hephaestus and exhibited (paradoxically) by the in- comparably heroic Achilles. But that it also reflected the social concerns of Homer's own world is argued by the marked similarity of the shield scene to the world described by Hesiod’s more didac- tically oriented Works and Days. Like the shield scene, Hesiod’s Works and Days shows little interest in the claim that kings owe their position to their divine ancestors.!! Hesiod’s kings (Baothjes), again morc like the elders of the shield scene than the kings who dot Homer's battlefields, function as arbiters rather than warriors. And the parallel extends to the gods: the Olympian gods who appear in the Works and Days have entirely shed their roles as the personal patrons of powerful kings. In fact, the most important god in the lives and social dealings of men in the Works and Days is not an Olympian at all, but Dike, a thin personification of the principle of political order and responsibility. Her mythological shallowness perhaps explains Dike as a relatively new invention, but it also articulates her essence and function. Unmotivated by anthropomorphic passions, without mortal chil- dren, and unwilling to play favorites among men and women, Dike is defined by a single concern: to punish the devotees of Injustice (= Adikia or Hybris), her antithesis and eternal enemy. Though clearly one-dimensional, Dike is hardly peripheral: Hesiod makes it clear that “the gift-devouring kings (BaotAjes) who sell themselves to the largest bidder” (Op. 36-39) keep her very busy. Hesiod's kings resemble Homer's in one important respect: they are responsible for the goodwill of the gods and the prosperity of the city. This is apparent in Hesiod’s image of the fates of the good and bad cities. The good city, where “kings give straight judgments and do not transgress the just, fares well and the people flourish” (Op. 225-27).'° But the evil city, in which kings give crooked judgments, suffers all sorts of torments. Dike watches over men 11, See, however, Th. 96, where Hesiod, in discussing kings who listen to the voices of the Muses, concedes vaguely that “kings are from Zeus.” 12. On Hesiod’s notion of justice, sce Vernant t978, 42-79. The forswearing of oaths and taking of bribes are characteristic of injustice for Hesiod; so also in Heraclitus (B28 DK) and Alcacus (see below, n, 31), Few would have argued with the Orphie saying, "The oath is justice” (D.L. 8.33) 37Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece and records their transgressions, comes to the city in a mist, “bring- ing evil to the men who drove her out” (Op. 223-24), while Zeus, her partner in punishment, exacts vengeance on a broader scale: “The son of Cronus puts great trouble upon the people, famine and plague at the same time; the people wither away; the women do not give birth; households are diminished” (Op. 242-44). Hesiod’s ideas of diké and adikia extend into the political sphere the religious notions of pollution and purification.’ Injustice, like pollution, troubles the entire community, not kings alone, although kings most often commit the offending acts. Yet there is one clear differ- ence between religious purification and the Hesiodic notion of punishment, Hesiod never speaks of restoring diké by expelling or killing an unjust individual or by designating and eliminating a scapegoat. Only the suffering of the entire community will appease the divine Dike: “It often happens that a whole city is punished on account of a single bad man,” Hesiod writes (Op. 240). In this notion of justice there lies perhaps the first trace of an acknowledg- ment of the demos’s (people’s) political rights. Hesiod’s kings are no less vital for the welfare of their commu- nities than are Homer's. But while Homer's kings, with the excep- tion of Alcinous, seem oblivious to social and political respon- sibilities off the battlefield, Hesiod’s are never permitted to forget that they must maintain justice in their cities; in fact, Hesiod sees it as his duty to remind them. The poet does not always find this easy; Hesiod at one point compares himself to a nightingale who pleads for mercy from a hawk who has captured her, but the hawk says, “One far stronger than you holds you tight, and you, though a songstress, must go where I take you” (Op. 207-8). Hesiod’s point is perhaps less the poet's weakness than the implacable rule that strong dominates weak: “He is a fool,” the hawk tells the night- ingale, “who wishes to fight against his superiors” (Op. 210). It is a rule that Hesiod probably thought applied to kings as well, for Zeus, who supports the cause of justice, is much stronger than kings. '4 The poet thus performs a moral duty that exceeds his social position, and “kings who understand,” Hesiod adds (Op. 202), will 13. Sce Parker 1983, 25780. For the significance of purification in the legends of founders, see chap. 5. 14. See Lamberton 1988, 121—22. 38The Language of Early Greck Tyranny avoid committing acts of injustice against him. As Hesiod insists in the Theogony (81-93), the good king and the poet share the Muses’ attentions: the king owes his ability to make straight judgments to the Muses (93), whom the poet also claims to serve (100).!5 Epic's idealized view of the heroic past and Hesiod's severe view of his contemporary society offer very different pictures of king- ship. In Homer, cities and nations are each dominated by a single king. Homer's heroes (and his gods) are driven by a desire for honor and vengeance, but not for diké. In Hesiod (and in the Homeric shield scene), on the other hand, there is no one single king, no master of the city, whose political actions articulate his personal desires. Instead the many leaders of each community are responsi- ble for the preservation of justice. The character of the relation between the gods and kings changes along with the definition of kingship. Hesiod’s gods define the responsibility and irresponsi- bility of kings and scrutinize their behavior with great care; Hesiod seems convinced that without divine supervision kings would glad- ly ruin their communities to indulge their personal interests. This transformation of the nature of the gods, and of Zeus especially, is no less dramatic than the change in the conception of royal power. In Hesiod, Zeus and Dike, goddess of justice, become father and daughter (Th. 902); and in the moralistic spirit of Hesiod’s reflec- tions on power, Zeus will soon trade in the scales with which he measures the fates of heroes for a set that weighs the crimes and punishments of all men.'!@ As the struggle between justice and hubris dominates Hesiod's political conceptions, so it also pervades his view of the history of mankind. In his tale of the history of mankind (Op. 109-201), hubris plagues the ages of man that perish at the hands of Zeus, but is clearly absent from the Golden Age and the Age of Heroes, which Zeus honors with a measure of immortality. The notion that in- justice cannot escape divine punishment enjoyed a long life in the 15. The Muses have a dual role: they teach the poet to “sing of the glories of earlier men and of the blessed gods” (Th. 100-101) to charm away his audience's sorrows, and they lend him authority to advise kings and the demos, 16, Scales of Justice (rAawra Aixns) appear first in Hymn. Hom, Merc, 324 and Bacchyl. 4. 11-12 and 17.24~26. For the idea, sce also Aesch. Ag. 250-51 and Cho 61. 39