LITMIR.BIZ

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various aspects in which the tyrants resemble the big men or chieftains of an earlier age. Charismatic authority for what was essentially an “achieved” office was secured by means of martial and athletic prowess: Orthagoras, Cypselus, and Pisistratus are all said to have distinguished themselves in the military sphere (105 FGrH 2; Nicolaus of Damascus 90 FGrH 57.5; Hdt. 1.59.4), while Cleisthenes of Sicyon was commemorated for victories in the four-horse chariot race at Olympia and Delphi (Hdt. 6.126.2; Paus. 10.7.6). Loyalty was bought through public munificence: Cypselus made costly dedications at Delphi and Olympia (Plut. Mor. 400d; Paus. 5.17.5); the Pisistratids began construction of the Temple of Olympian Zeus (Arist. Pol. 1313b); and Polycrates probably initiated the second dipteral temple to Hera on Samos (Kienast 2002). Like Homeric basileis, tyrants contracted marriage alliances and guest friendships with peers beyond their own states: in addition to the intermarriages mentioned already mentioned, Cypselus’ successor, Periander, married the daughter of Procles, the tyrant of Epidaurus (Hdt. 3.50), while Thrasybulus of Miletos and the Lydian king Alyattes were guest-friends (Hdt. 1.22.4), as were Polycrates and the Egyptian Pharaoh Amasis (3.39.2). But, also like Homeric basileis, the position of the tyrant was intergenerationally unstable: while the tyranny of the Orthagorids may have lasted around a century at Sicyon, the Cypselid tyranny at Corinth was suppressed in the third generation, when Periander’s nephew, Psammetichus, was removed after just three years (Arist. Pol. 1315b); at Athens, the younger of Pisistratus’ sons, Hipparchus, was assassinated after fourteen years while his brother, Hippias, survived only a further four years before being expelled by the Spartans (Hdt. 5.55–65; [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 19). By the end of the sixth century, tyranny had become virtually extinct in mainland Greece and the Aegean islands, but it continued in Sicily, witnessing a new, more imperialist manifestation with the establishment of Deinomenid power over first Gela, and then Syracuse and much of eastern Sicily (Thuc. 1.18.1; see Luraghi 1994).

      The Advent of Democracy?

      The Athenians of the classical period liked to think that the Pisistratid tyranny had been replaced by democracy: Herodotus (6.131.1) has little to say about the younger Cleisthenes, other than that he had “instituted the tribes and the democracy.” But this was largely self-delusion (Hall 2010: 15–18). The immediate aftermath of Hippias’ expulsion was a return to elite infighting. Indeed, the word dēmokratia is heavily freighted with meaning because it implies that supreme authority or power (kratos) resides with the dēmos—a word that, in Archaic poetry, regularly denotes the population of a city exclusive of the elites. In other words, a political revolution occurred in which the masses wrested power away from the formerly governing elites and this can only really have happened with Ephialtes’ attacks on the aristocratic council of the Areopagus in 462/1 BC ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 25.2; see Raaflaub 2007; Giangiulio 2015: 21–24). It can hardly be coincidental that the word is first paraphrased (δήμου κρατοῦσα χείρ) in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Maidens (604), thought to have been performed in the later 460s, or that this is also the approximate date attributed to a gravestone for a certain individual named Democrates (Hansen 1991: 70). But, if Athens crafted what is often termed a “radical” brand of democracy, it may not have been the first experiment in what we might call popular rule. Argos probably adopted a form of democracy very similar to Athens at about the same time, but there are some indications that elite rule had already yielded to more popular governance three decades earlier (Gehrke 1985: 361–363; Piérart 1997: 333). Herodotus (5.30.1) recounts how the wealthy—literally “fat” (pacheis)—of the island of Naxos had been expelled by the dēmos and had found refuge in Miletus in the years immediately prior to the Ionian Revolt of 499 BC. And Plutarch (Mor. 304e) refers to the establishment of an “undisciplined democracy” (ἀκολάστου δημοκρατίας) at Megara as early as the first decades of the sixth century, though the testimony has been doubted (e.g., Forsdyke 2005: 53–55).¹⁹

Kurke (1991) has argued that athletic victors, who were almost invariably from elite backgrounds in the Archaic period, stood at the intersection of three concentric circles, constituted by the oikos (household), polis, and the wider transregional community of aristocrats, and that one of the functions of Pindar’s epinician odes was to reintegrate the victor into his home community and to mitigate the potential tensions that might arise between him, his family, and his fellow citizens. Peter Rose (1992: 159, 177–178) has gone further and argued that Pindar’s celebration of aristocratic values was a response to the Cleisthenic democracy of Athens. Yet, as Rosalind Thomas (2007) has pointed out, there are few odes that are commissioned for Athenian victors while the epinician tradition can be traced back to at least Simonides ca. 520 BC and perhaps even Ibycus before him (and may have developed alongside an even earlier tradition of setting up honorific statues)—i.e., well before Cleisthenes’ reforms which in any case, as we have seen, do not seem to have ushered in true democracy at Athens. There can, however, be little doubt that, by the end of Pindar’s and Bacchylides’ careers in the middle of the fifth century, the Greek world was a very different place. The tyrannies on Sicily had collapsed, democratic regimes had been installed in many cities throughout the Greek Mediterranean, and the more elitist expressions, values, and concerns of lyric poetry began to yield to the sort of civic self-reflection that is so characteristic of Athenian drama.

      FURTHER READING

      For overviews of the archaic period, see Osborne 2009 and Hall 2014. For discussions of archaic authorship, see Nagy 1985; Kurke 2007a; and Lefkowitz 2012. Donlan 1985 and 1997 discusses early archaic Greek society, while Gehrke 2009 treats the development of institutions in the seventh century BC. Mazarakis-Ainian 2006 surveys the archaeological aspects of early authority. For Solon’s political thought, see Irwin 2005. Anderson 2005 presents an important reassessment of archaic tyranny. For early experiments in popular government, see Robinson 1997.

      Notes

      1 1 See, however, Lane Fox 2000: 39, who suggests that Theagenes is not the tyrant imagined in lines 39–52 and that Theognis can therefore be dated to the first half of the sixth century.

      2 2 Kontoleon (1964: 44) identified two marble slabs, dating to ca. 510 BC, as part of the monument, whose original location is unknown. The first depicts a bull being attacked by a lion and the second a banqueting scene. An associated Ionic capital bears an inscription dated to the fourth century: “Archilochus of Paros, son of Telesicles, lies here; this monument was dedicated by Dokimos, son of Neokreon.” See also Schilardi 1996: 58.

      3 3 Although Plato (Laws 629a–b), Lycurgus (Leoc. 106), and Philochorus (328 FGrH 215) all say that Tyrtaeus was Athenian by origin, it is generally accepted that he was a Spartan poet. See Lefkowitz 2012: 40.

      4 4 Kontoleon 1964; Graham 1978; Jeffery 1990: 300–301, 307 no. 61; Parker 1997: 62–67, 76–79; Osborne 2009: 220–224.

      5 5 Morris 1986; van Wees 1992; Raaflaub 1998.

      6 6 Forsdyke 2005: 42; Gehrke 2009: 405; Hall 2014: 142–144; Stein-Hölkeskamp 2015: 143.

      7 7 Plutarch, probably following the now lost Aristotelian Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, says that the veto clause was added later, “after the multitude twisted and violated proposals by subtraction and addition.” But this is probably an inference generated by a chronological difficulty: while Tyrtaeus seems to have linked the Rhetra to the joint rule of Polydorus and Theopompus in the early seventh century, Aristotle dated Lycurgus, who is supposed to have been the architect of the document, to the first Olympic Games of 776 BC. Ancient authors, however, offered a variety of dates for Lycurgus and there are good reasons to believe that the legend concerning his famed legislation and connection with Sparta postdates Tyrtaeus, in which case there is no obstacle to seeing the veto as an integral part of the original constitutional provisions: see Thommen 1996: 33–36.

      8 8 Van Wees 1999 has argued that the oracle to which Tyrtaeus refers is unconnected with the Great Rhetra as presented in Plutarch. Nevertheless, even if there is a clear difference in emphasis between the two accounts, the central features (kings; elders; damos) and certain linguistic expressions are common to both:

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