História da Grécia Antiga #8 com Donald Kagan, de Yale

Before I start on the today's topic which is a Greek tyranny I have been asked to say a word on the subject well to answer the question really the best I can if the hoplite phalanx was so stunningly successful in the period of the 5th 6/5 4th centuries BC why was it that other peoples other than the Greeks the ones who came in contact with them and saw it and were victimized by it why didn't They adopt it but let me make it perfectly clear like all other all the other interesting questions in this course

I cannot give you a firm answer I can only give you opinions and it but that whole subject now is so wonderfully more controversial than it was probably ever before in history because everything now in history that bears on the Western world and its relations with some other world is part of a great political assault by those people who Are eager to pull down anything that seems to be admirable or special or positive about the West and either to say it really was bad or to say it wasn't so terrific or it didn't exist so

that's the context in which not the students question but the the larger question is getting kicked around these days well I think part of the reason for unhappiness about it is that I think the answer lies in the character precisely of the polis the fact that it had an Ethos a set of values which placed so powerfully at the center of the minds of the citizens the notion that the combination of courage in a military setting which was the inheritance from Homer and the new ideology of devotion to the polis as the most important kind

of commitment that a citizen could have produced an attitude which was that it was the job of a man who was a citizen of a polis beyond anything else to fight Bravely in the ranks of his army and as it happened they developed I think this latter part of the story is simply accidental they they happen to develop this technique which employed the weapons and defensive armor that they had and then because they had those things and because this ethos was present it was possible to put together this fighting unit which was the phalanx which

depended so enormous ly heavily upon the commitment to the commonality To the common cause that was characteristic of the polis now every state of every kind every people every tribe they have some degree of this kind of commitment to one another or else they wouldn't exist as a unit but there are really very sharp differences of degree in terms of how powerfully this commitment really affects people you might even find that in the sent you would find in the same people at different times in their history the Power of this idea and this commitment and

it's so beyond an idea somehow it sort of really bred and trained into the bones of every Greek man in the polis beginning sometime I would say in the seventh century or earlier and carrying forward so long as the polis remained an autonomous and independent unit so if you looked at you Greeks against Persians is the best case we have because the Greeks fought the Persians more than they fought other non Greek Peoples and the Persians were very formidable let's remember the Persians had defeated every other power there was in the world that they knew

and and controlled and dominated a vast vast empire by anybody's standards but certainly by the standards of the world in which they knew so for the Greeks to defeat the Persians there was nothing routine about that that was always going to be surprising And needing explanation so really a way to focus the question that I'm addressing is how come the Persians didn't do it and there I think in that case the answer was not so very hard because the Persian Empire was a composite unit made up of lots of places and vast numbers of people

who had been conquered by the Persians and whose relationship to the great king of Persia was really in a almost technical sense that of slaves they needed to do they Had to do they were expected to do whatever the Persian King told him to do now he was not fanatical and and he did not make requests that typically were impossible for people to do in fact his the Persian rule over their conquered peoples was in many ways easier and more generous and less intrusive than other people's for instance in the realm of religion the Persians

did not bother didn't interfere with people's exercise of religion those of you who have read a Book called the Old Testament will remember that the Persians show up at important places and they get treated very nicely there are there's a bad Persian or two here or there but he gets put down but the Persians treat and the Persians were among the people who treated the Jews very well because they didn't care what the Persian what the Jews did in their religious life so long as they did the two important and essential things that the Persians

Required which was you had to do military service for the king at his demand and you had to pay taxes if you did those things and made no trouble that's all they told you how to worry about the Persians well okay why didn't the Persians then adopt it because the greater part of their army wasn't Persian even so the kinds of allegiance that's necessary for this kind of fighting wasn't motivated by most of These people a second reason was the Persians themselves and their Aryan allies the Medes had achieved their success militarily as cavalrymen and

that was their nature and that was what they practiced and elevated to the highest levels so that the best Persians fought in the cavalry they had infantry and some of the infantry was relatively very good but there wasn't that kind of all that matters in a polis basically I'm Exaggerating only very slightly is how you fight in the infantry and happily that question isn't so bad because when we get to the story of the Spartans which comes after our story of the tyrants I will read to you some of the poetry which was the the

material with which Spartans were trained and you'll quickly see why the Greek ethos the Greek feeling of absolute commitment voluntary absolute commitment even at the risk of your life for the polis was The central most important force in society so the answer is essentially a moral commitment based upon training and belief is why the Greeks did the thing and plus the historical accident of their having developed that technique it should be pointed out that there were peoples in the ancient Near East before the Greeks ever came to be anything who had closely ordered armed infantry

soldiers the Assyrians are a very good example but if you examine Assyrian Fighting it's not quite the same thing as the Greek fighting and if I knew more about Assyrian fighting I might be able to say still more I don't know how much it's actually know in detail but there was obviously an element in the Greek story which went beyond merely equipment and order and so on it had to do with what was in their heads and I think you know if you know about warfare in the modern world even right today so much of

how of what Determines whether armies succeed or fail and their missions has to do with what's in their head every army I think let's let's say every good army even is good at certain things and they are trained and their culture prepares them if they are successful to do certain kinds of things if you take them and make them fight in a different way until they are able to make an adjustment which is sometimes never they can fight with that same skill and so there is a Very close union I would say and I'll come

back at home to say a smarter guy than I said it long ago there's a there's a close connection between the nature of the society that produces and uses the military force and the kind of fighting that military force can do I'm really just giving you a little riff on a tune written by Aristotle back in his day when he connects closely the character I think I mentioned that the other day the character of a regime and The character of the fighting I did tell you about that you know if it's going to be a

cavalry based it's going to be ours to kradic or oligarchy if it's going to be a naval base is going to be democratic and so on and so forth so I hope that's of some help in dealing with that question let's turn now precisely to this phenomenon which is Greek tyranny tyranny emerges in the seventh century BC maybe it might no I think not anything before that and it it emerges I Would think for many of the same reasons and in response to some of the very same developments that I described for you in talking

about the great burst of colonization that began in the eighth century in the Greek world all of those tumultuous troubling changing forces that were at work in society were at work in bringing about this new kind of regime which lasted from one to three generations among the Greeks before it faded away It was a transitional phase in Greek society rather than one that lasted for a terribly long time but it was not trivial and as I say in some cases it went for three generations okay what is tyranny let's begin with the word the word

tyranny ax is tyranny the word tyranny nose is tyrant and etymologically that the word does is not a Greek word it was a borrowed word that the Greeks took from somebody else and then applied it to certain elements that Emerged in their society chances are it was borrowed from Lydia that kingdom in asia minor that was inland from the greek settlements on the coast and the first Lydian king of whom we hear that could fit as a the first tyrant from Greek perspective was a man called guy G's gy GES who ruled in Lydia for

something like the years 685 to 657 something like that the first time the word here on us or some version of it appears in Greek that We have comes in the fragments of the poet Achilles and he is a fascinating character and we do have fortunately a few nice fragments of his poetry in fact for the first time in the last couple of decades for the first time since they were lost we actually have a full lyric poem by our Killa cos but in any case he has this bit of poetry that is reserved preserved

in a late writers collection which says I don't care for the wealth Of golden guy jeez nor have I ever envied him I am not jealous of the works of the gods and I have no desire for lofty tyranny this is where the word tyranny comes into the picture and even in that small collection of words you get some idea of what the Greeks meant by tyranny they were talking about tremendous power from their perspective and it's golden guy jeez and that's not an accident they mean wealthy guy jeez tyrants are people Who have lots

of wealth and lots of power and they also rule in one translation that poets give for tyranny dose is for for lofty despotism that is he rules not as an equal he rules not as a legitimate king he rules as a master ruling slaves is the implication of that it is a it is it comes from the Greek perspective it comes from the east it is not native Greek it is something new in the Greek experience they haven't had Kings like that even in their legends so That's going to be a central idea that surrounds

the concept of tyranny the Greek word that comes closest to it but it doesn't do the same job is monarch owes our word monarch and that simply means a ruler who is one a single ruler well you know you need a word for that in Greek because that's not the natural thing in Greece is you know already every regime that we have discussed from the homer Homeric world on post post Bronze Age Shows multiple kings in the early in the Odyssey yes there is the Generalissimo you remember Agamemnon but everybody there is a king there's

not just one king so that's that's the Greek way of looking at things whereas the rest of the world and if the Greeks had only known anywhere you look in the rest of the world the typical regime is monarchy of one kind or another absolute power nobody in Greece has Absolute power in the Greek point of view but kings elsewhere do but is another sense that is attachés for the Greeks - the word tyrannous or tyranny and that is that the power is not legitimately acquired the Greeks could understand that there'd be somebody called the

boss allows and that the reason he was boss allows was that his father was and that the the regime of that state is royal and this is a perfectly legitimate regime the Greeks Although they don't practice kingship during the period that we study they don't regard that as an illegitimate form of regime kingship is legitimate tyranny is not and I want to spell that out for you but before we get to my spelling it out for you let me just give it a few more of the characteristics that it comes to have by classical times

in the minds of the Greeks it is as I say despotic alee exercised it is not legitimate and one aspect of it's not Being legitimate is that it is not responsible okay tiranos does not have to explain himself and nobody would dare insist that he do he need not consult anybody if he doesn't want to he doesn't need to have the approval of anybody all of that makes him illegitimate irresponsible is another word I think that fits into the picture because we shall see that certainly by the Classical period the Greeks felt any regime to

be legitimate Must be responsible in the technical term since it must be an thurible to somebody because all human beings was the philosophical core of this idea are not to be trusted by complete power they will abuse it they will abuse it with violence they will and that violence will very often mean sexual violence but it will take every other form as well and let's go back to our killer kiss as few words which are so rich in telling us so much about he Says I am not jealous of the works of the gods what's

that guy did there with anything well because the Greek view of tyranny was that tyrants and one of the things that's wrong with tyrants is that they see themselves as rivaling the gods as thinking themselves to be divine or at least thinking that they could act as though they were gods and because they have the power and the wealth and because they have no responsibility to anybody Presumably they can and this is one of the things that makes them terrible because when they do it's this act of behaving as though they were gods is what

the Greeks one of the things that the Greeks meant when they said hubris this arrogant this violent arrogant kind of exercise of power now on the that's that is the way things look fundamentally in the Classical period but even in the Classical period there was a remnant of I but I think and Most scholars I think would agree was the special characteristic of the idea in its earlier days which was not so much how evil a tyranny was because in the early days it's not clear that they thought it was but because of the fact

that it was not legitimately acquired it was not part of the normal way things happen and I've mentioned this to you earlier the good example of that is either poster honest Oedipus the King Oedipus notice that they don't usually Nobody translates it either piss tyrants and their right not to do so because it would mislead us way we use the word tyrants it's always bad there's no good tyrant but it so that you will often see it translated eat up as Rex into the Latin but Rex means king so eat oppose the king it's okay

actually it's not bad to say he just bliss Rex because to the Romans had this idea that Kings were bad so there's a little bit of that Glittering around the edge but for the Greeks that's not there at the beginning okay probably the contemporaries of guy Gees and of the tyrants who came after him in Greece probably didn't use the term yet probably sprang up at a later time but we can't be sure of that for the Greeks that originally meant something much more neutral without this great moral baggage to carry with it it simply

meant more than anything else Two things one man rule well and it would always raise an eyebrow but you could imagine it being okay and the fact that it was unconstitutional it did not come about in a way that followed tradition which was what Greek constitutions were traditional sets of laws or customs okay that's the general picture let's take a look at tyranny as it emerges in Greece and we don't know very much about it here's another one of these cases where we are dependent on Later sources we have no I think I'm right in

saying nothing really contemporary at all that speaks about any tyrant and so that's a problem but we have to deal with that and then there are very limited tales that are told about them so that we have to piece together a lot of information and ask ourselves what does it all mean in any case the first tyrant named in the Greek tradition is a man called Pheidon of Argos who is mentioned by Aristotle in His politics and he says some interesting things I'll come back in a moment here are some of the facts or alleged

facts that us that surround fight on in the Greek tradition one said oh I he is the king of Argos and Argos you know in their home Erik tradition is a very big powerful important place Argos includes Mycenae and all of that so this would be a king of a large and important area that these the archives went and Phi thomas was king of Argos were engaged in a conflict with Sparta as to who would be the dominant force in the Peloponnesus and they fought a battle at a place called he CI in the Year

668 in which the archives under fight on defeated the Spartans and really defeated him wasn't just a little skirmish they were now the top dog as proven by the following other alleged facts about what's going on here fight on got himself elected chairman President of the olympic festival that was a tremendous honor and it indicated deference to him and scholars suggested have really happened that would have suggested they they were that he would the argos and fight on were the dominant force in the Peloponnesus they and further evidence and this is really rather better evidence

I think even than that is the fact I don't hesitate to use that fact that fight out of Argos apparently imposed a system of uniform Weights and measures on the entire Peloponnesus and those remained the weights and measures employed in the Peloponnesus thereafter so that they were called the fight donee in' measures you don't do that if you're not in effective control of the region nothing is more basic than determining something like that so I think that lends considerable plausibility to the general story it is also said that he was a leader of the army

which was a hoplite Army and that his success depended on his successful leadership of the hoplite army well that fits in with one general interpretation that scholars have used about the rise of tyrants it's nobody claims it's universal but one feature that seems to be plausibly present is that the new way of fighting in the hoplite phalanx which was to turn out to be decisive well that brought about that leaders who were very good leaders of hoplite phalanx is and should They decide to seize power in any state where they had been doing the leadership

they could typically count on their army the army they had led to assist them all which makes obvious sense if you're gonna get the best fighting force around and they like you and you're popular and you want to be a boss that's your best shot so tradition also lends some small support to the idea that maybe that's how fight on brought himself to the kingship before I depart I just feel it Necessary to make one small point I said weights and measures there are elements in the ancient tradition that also say that fight on was

the first man I want to put it very carefully and literally because it's all part of the argument he was the first man to strike silver coins on the island of Aegina coins have not been present in Greece prior to this time and the most well-informed and professionally skilled and capable people and almost everybody who studies The subject says this is false there were no coins in the Greek world yet and they weren't going to be any for a very long time afterwards so this is merely a myth I'm sorry to say that in spite

of the fact that I am NOT an expert a numismatist and everybody's against me they're all wrong and I won't put you through the pain of listening to the argument but just keep in the back of your mind one day somebody's going to find Hard evidence that I'm absolutely right about this and so then you can tweak and say aha because that's it but right now no sensible person has any credit in the field at all believes me there are about two or three people maybe that's about it okay another very interesting important element about

fight on Aristotle tells us he was a king who became a tyrant and by now you know the Greek words he was boss allows who became Terra knows now How do you do that he would you would think of a man was king and that implies legitimacy how do you become an illegitimate thing like a tyrant and we can only speculate but I think we what we've learned already about the early Greek Kings in those towns that had any was that they were Homeric Kings they were not really monarchs they were not really powerful rulers

they did they did not simply dominate everybody and give orders they were maybe the most striking Or the the best connected or the best descendant of a bunch of noblemen who were roughly equal well if we imagine that's the way fight on began and then I'm just making up the story you understand then he himself led the archive phalanx to these tremendous successes defeating the Spartans establishing our doses as the president of the Olympic Games giving weights measures in heaven help us maybe coins to the people of the Peloponnesus and Then began to act as

though he really was the boss because he could and people recognized that and said you know he's not just King anymore he has made himself a tyrannous something like that would make sense of Aristotle's Statesman statement now it just raises the question which is to be raised whenever we think about tyrants coming to power and that and Greece okay he wants to be king he's popular and all those things but what does it Take well it takes military force because there are people who are going to resist and so I would suggest again nothing original

about this that the the positive connection with the hoplite army now emerging in these states has to be part of the story why would these hoplites support a tyranny it doesn't really accord with their own long-range interests or the autonomy and the way the independence that are so Clearly a part of what it is to be a hoplite farmer well I think the best answer would be that that's what had to be done to break the monopoly of power and influence of the old aristocracy which would have been presumably resisting the changes in society that

were part of that hoplite uprising that a development of hoplite stand movement towards a hoplite community and so they joined with a leader who had what it took to make it work and to destroy the Power of the aristocracy and to create a new kind of state with a new kind of Constitution but the first step would have been a tyranny because that's the way they got to where they had to go in the first instance now this is easy to connect again theoretically because the we just don't have the kind of hard evidence that

would make it possible to be sure we're to join this hoplite development with other changes that are occurring in society and that is to say The economic change that means trade is becoming more and more important and so is a simple industry so that there are now people in society who by virtue of what they do to make a living get ahead don't fit in to the traditional aristocratic aristocratic system who don't have what they want in terms of influence power recognition because there hasn't been a place for such people before and the people who

are in charge are not About to give it away from very readily and so they might very well also assist let us imagine the hoplite farmers as being the guys who do the fighting for the most part but joined and supported by these other elements in society who need a change for the same reason and that fits rather nicely with where we find the earliest colonies Argos is a special place but Argos was in addition to being a fine agricultural area it also from an early time it had Commercial activity so that would be good

but then on top of that the next three towns I'm going to mention as being very active in colonization you're familiar with that from our last talk Corinth and a little town that I haven't mentioned before but it's right next to Corinth and I'm surely was part of the same set of developments that we've described there a place called City on also has an early tyrannical family and Megara which is located I should say City on is sort of to the south and to the west of corinth and megara is to the north and to

the east of corinth it's right on and around the isthmus of corinth that some of these early States that have tyrants come into being just as these are states that are very very active in the colonial movement if we go away from the mainland again my Letus has a tyrant at a fairly early time just as you would expect because it fits into the whole picture and you don't have Tyrannies very early if at all in places like Athens we will have a famous tyrant but that will come later Thebes will not have a tyrant

in spite of the mythology surrounding Oedipus Sparta of course never has the tyrant so all of this is sort of reasonable support for the interpretation that most scholars take so you have all of this stuff the pressure of a growing population new groups challenging the aristocracy hoplites among them if you Go to Corinth the story of the establishment of a tyranny there involves a an individual called Kip Silas and the stories that are told about Kip Celeste fit pretty decently into what we've been talking about he is specifically called a polar mark which means the

war Archon the war leader he was a commander of the Army in in Corinth and at that time that would have been a hoplite army but he was not a king like phyton he was according to the Myth I I shouldn't say miss because it isn't a myth according to the legend the truth no it's not really even alleged Knight let's take tradition according to the tradition Kip Celeste was a descendant from a mixed marriage between a patrician a an aristocrat and somebody who was not so that that's a very competent sort of typical historical

development people who become revolutionaries and troublemakers are Often people on the margin but who have by birth some kind of a connection or think they have some kind of a connection with the higher ranks and our annoyed irritated angry jealous and therefore likely to take the trouble to seize power I mean Napoleon descended from some kind of Corsican aristocracy of course the French thought that that was well what is it when a word it contradicts itself what's the word no not paradox Oxymoron that's right the French thought it was an oxymoron a Corsican aristocrat ridiculous

but but no but that was his feeling and that kind of French attitude helped I think explain the drive that he had to get ahead to the degree he did anyway Kip Silas was one of that group in in Corinth I might point out was an unusual polis before the emergence of the tyranny because most police is best we can figure it out they had an art Aristocracy that consisted of many many many many families but Corinth had the narrowest of all aristocracy's one family who were called the backi adds completely monopolized the regime and

so that meant that there would it would be easier once you've started to make trouble to find help against them from a rather powerful people who were in other states likely to be part of the regime but here were cut out and so kip sillas joins comes puts Together a force of military folks with some folks who are discontented and finally attacks the back he adds either kill them or drove them into exile and then there is establishes his own regime which is in fact one of the most successful tyrannies at least is judged by

the most basic thing how long do they last Kipps a list in effect died in bed leaving the tyranny to his son and then his son had another son who became Tyrant and he was driven out finally and he was the last of them so the Kipps Allah tyranny is a very successful one we know something about it the colonization movement which had already the Corinthians had already started but it really took a real hold in the time of the Kipps lives and so corinth is colonizing quite vigorously in the time of the Kip's Allah

tyranny mostly out in the West because they that sort of empty territory from the Greek Point of view and so you will see corinthian colonies stretching out along the shore the north shore of the gulf of corinth and the north shore is less greek and more barbaric than the south trail which is the Peloponnesus and then if you go to the to the to the end of greece as far west as you go and make a right turn and head up into the Adriatic region the army I'm sorry the Ionian Sea and the beyond that

the Adriatic corinthian colonies right along in there They suggest and I think they're supported by other archaeological evidence that commerce was one of the things that was very important for Kipps Allah sand and Corinth is booming from a commercial economic point of view in the years of the Kip solid tyrants none of that is surprising all of this is very characteristic of this phase of Greek tyranny that we're talking about in addition to that we know that capsule is like just about all the tyrants use his Power to do something that the Greek government normally

did not do namely collect taxes from their people you have to understand that the idea that of taxation being normal would have gotten a Greek foaming at the mouth when there is no tyranny there's no taxes no direct tax I should say the normal form of taxation that existed in the Greek world when it was in its independent polis phase is simply customs duties on trade but the hoplite farmer wasn't going to Be taxed paying taxes is what barbarians did to their kings a very powerful feeling people like that in America today are used to

be called Republicans another of course you might no surprise that Kip's Alisa and his descendants just like the other tyrants were very wealthy they there was undoubtedly wealth they seized when they took power there was also wealth that they could enjoy from the tremendous income that would come from the booming commerce and Then finally taxation just put it right smack from somebody's hands into theirs and so tremendous wealth is another picture that goes with this if you go to City on another element comes into the picture which may or may not have occurred in other

tyrannical towns we do know that it played a role in sickie on there the founder of the tyranny was a man called or thakura's and again one thing we are told about him is that he was Paulo mark leader of the Phalanx so We understand that another story says that he was a cook and they didn't mean Escoffier or anything like that I mean that was not a high ranking position and so I think the implication was he came from a very low source we don't know what to do with that it sounds surprising but

maybe it's true anyway we get down to the point where one of his descendants is still tyrant I think it's his son Cleisthenes of city on well now you want to keep that name in your mind And you want to keep it straight there will there will be a descendant of that guy who will be an Athenian whose name is Cleisthenes who will not only be later but thoroughly different not a tyrant quite different from that so just remember this is Cleisthenes of city on as opposed to Cleisthenes the athenian well a picture that Herodotus

who was one of our main sources here the main source I guess gives us is one of incipient Ethical oppression of a kind that we haven't run into yet because it is based on really on ethnic origins and ethnic differences here we see I think without any question a case of the pre Dorian Greeks have been defeated and conquered by Dorian's and have been these groups have been kept separate throughout the centuries and one was top dog and the other was the underdog so what you what has happened obviously is that the part of The

tyrants coming to power must have been a reversal of that situation because the the leading forces are anti during very powerfully anti Dorian they hate our ghosts because our ghost is in the illy in the Odyssey the great leader of the Peloponnesians and the wrong guys and of course our guys the Argos in their day is a Dorian city and I should you don't have to go back to the Illya the honest I should I mean back to the days of fight on the Archives would have ruled Ziggy on presumably if fight on was in

charge well they didn't like that they had achieved I presume an overthrow of that so they're anti Argos anti Dorian and they they introduced changes in the tribes if you go to any Dorian town in the Greek world there are three tribes they have the same names in all Dorian towns and that's the way the world is organized so what did they do these guys the or Thakur it's changed the tribes That's interesting too because we'll see that Cleisthenes the athenian does the same thing that's amazing that's very rare when you're talking about changes in

tribal things you're getting at the most oldest possible memories and traditions and beliefs and associations that primitive peoples have so when you're fussing with that you're really making a great problem but you'll see in a moment what's driving this sort of thing Instead of having three tribes thereafter from once the earth a grid's got there they had four but they changed the names of the old three the old three now were called the I'm translating the Greek words asked men Pig men and swine men whereas the non Dorian's were the ark allows leaders of the

people you can see very objective set of names and evaluations so you've got vengeance here you've got a group long annoyed long angered long feeling the oppressed Taking out their hatred when the victory comes in but once you're past this peculiarities this particular ethnic conflict in this town that had such an important effect you'll find that the tyrants are pretty much like all the other tyrants they have great wealth they and we'll come back in just a moment to indicate how striking that was they engage in conspicuous display which is what tyrants also do and

they are filled with a tremendous ego a terrific Sense of their own importance and self the kind of thing that made our kill occurs say you know I'm not going to try to add vie with the gods the way these tyrants do well the story that I heard at this tells and I I think you will enjoy it in his wonderful prose if you haven't gotten to it yet his cleisthenes of sicyon now is in charge we're in the sixth century BC and he has a daughter and he wants her to have the very best

husband that there Was available Griese huh just like your parents that's he felt the same way as your parents do so but he was going to see to it it was going to work out by the way he himself was a very significant figure and this again makes him not so very unusual among the tyrants he entered in in the Olympic competition and in those days and probably forever in the Olympic Games I mean the ancient Olympic Games the most prestigious the most important Contest was the four horse horse race chariot race for one thing

you couldn't do that unless you were very rich so it meant that the noblest and wealthiest people with competing against one another in this well he was the winner in the four-horse chariot race which made him an international celebrity on top of all the other things that he had going for him and so he decides by God he's going to have the best guy in Greece be his daughter's husband he Invites all the most the best aristocratic richest handsomest most athletic guys in all of Greece to come to sikyong and spend a year at his

expense and treated royally all that time to compete for the hand of his daughter and so they all are and Herodotus reads off the names of all of these amazing young men who come to the competition pretty much I think copying homers lists of the catalogue of the ships in the Iliad and they come well After the bulk of this year it it is clear two finalists are emerging one of them is called Hippolyta's and the other is called mega cleese mega cleese we better take seriously because he's an athenian and he will be the

ancestor of Cleisthenes of athens later on but anyway they're competing in every respect and we're down to the last kinds of things and it looks like a HIPAA cleitus has the edge he seems to be the number one candidate and he has Quite a few belts at the party when we're reaching the final stages of all this and next he jumps up on a table and he begins dancing wildly I mean like beyond what is seen to be seemly dancing we expect a young nobleman to be a good dancer but this guy is doing stuff

that nobody ever heard of and this is making Cleisthenes little nervous I mean who is this guy what's happening here and then he flips upside-down and begins to dance on his hands with his feet flipping Around in the air at which point Herodotus tells us Kleiss and he speaks up and says son of ty sander you have danced your bride away he lost and Cleese got to marry Hippolyta's brother hi Christy and the story goes on well what are we to believe of that tale I don't know but this much I think is clear such

a legend does not come from nothing the picture is first of all of a man who is fabulously wealthy think of the kind of Entertaining he is said to have done also fabulously full of himself just you know imagine saying my daughter will only marry the very best young man there is and you will all have to go out there and compete for her hand and I'll tell you who she's going to marry and who can then act the way he did I think that's a picture that he probably was extreme in all of these

respects and that kind of situation was part of the tale so let me just sum up some things untraditional Route to power is important Gai geez perhaps you remember the story of guy Gees gaijin's was a sort of the Prime Minister of the king of lydia and the king was had this incredibly beautiful wife and he was terribly proud of her and so he said to God is you can't believe how gorgeous my wife is of course she's wonderfully beautiful you can't tell with her clothes on for God's sake he says come on come with

me cuz she says no no no please your Majesty says come with me so this guy Gees hidden behind the curtain and here's his wife disrobing and indeed she was as advertised and the King goes out guy T's would have slipped away but the Queen spots him and of course she's totally disgraced she's deeply embarrassed is to put it very very mildly and so she says to him unless you do what I tell you I will tell my husband that she sneaked in and did this and that he will kill you but what I Want

you to do is to kill him and marry me that's how you can make what good guy Jesus do and so he did that's how he became King this is not your normal constitutional procedure even in Lydia so that's guidance phyton I've talked to you about already see a Genizah of Megara haven't mentioned but he comes to power by force with the use of the soldiers and the same thing is true of Kipps --less all these tyrants get there By means that are not traditional they have personal power whatever else is going on they have

controlled the military and the military gives them what they need in the way of command they have to have skill if the founder of the dynasty at least has to have skill in order to be a soldier he has to be a good talker to get people to go along with him he's got to have talent it's not the easiest thing in the world to do to overthrow a traditional regime And make yourself to boss so that he would have had these qualities but he's got to have support out there from the various elements that

I mentioned to you prestige from some great deed whatever it might be military victory or athletic victory perhaps and when he has wealth once he's acquired wealth he can use it further to strengthen his position and they typically do because he introduces something new mercenary soldiers it's one thing to seize the power with the Help of the hoplites to hold on to it you're going to need something more solid than that first of all hoplites don't stick around in uniform they go back and work their fields so they're not around to suppress anything that needs

to be suppressed most of the time but beyond that tyrants grow unpopular you know this is one of the great rules of politics in any system the one question that's in the minds of all people who have anything to do with it And that is what have you done for me lately any any benefit that people might have achieved from the establishment of the tyranny gets to be taken for granted after a while and then what why is this guy taking taxes for me what why is he such a big shot and I'm not that's

just going to be inevitable and so if you're going to keep your power and keep people down you can't just rely on the citizen body and so tyrants typically hire foreigners to serve as mercenaries for Them now another thing is that while these tyrannies last it is typical that they should accomplish very significant things that most anybody would agree were positive contributions to the life of the community they ruled you find economic prosperity is one of the things is characteristic of these regimes diversified economies because they support trade and industry and sometimes even agriculture the

spread of wealth to new groups could there's much more money Around there are people who don't fit into the old system in which the land was simply dominated by the aristocrats and where there was no other way to make any money or make any wet gain any wealth so all of that is happening and of course many of the kings of the start of the tyrants foster and engage in colonization which has all the benefits I mentioned last time as well now there's another thing that is characteristic of tyrannies when they Make themselves tyrant they

come to live if they whether they did before or not in what is the major city of that whole polis the capital so to speak and it's always been a place that had would have a special place you know it's where the the Acropolis is and therefore where the worship of the gods takes basically there's worship with the gods everywhere but that's a special place for them it was always a special place but now that's becomes the center of the Community and there's a result because where the tyrant is that's where all the action is

people begin to move into that capital city if they leave the land of their fathers and some number of them in fact do if you're going to conduct commercial activity if you're going to conduct factory work and if you're going to be somehow involved in the various aspects of government and things that have to do with the tyrant you want to be there and the cut tyrants have courts And so people come to be in the court of the tyrant so what you have is a kind of urbanization that is characteristic of this period well

if you're going to have more people living in this town than ever did before there's all sorts of things you need number one no question number one water supply how do you supply people with enough water to meet their needs when they weren't there before and the answer is you have to bring water into the System into the city by a variety of ways any way that you really can they do aqueducts of a certain kind they dig wells and have fountains coming from those wells they build fountain houses to cover those fountains they bring

a water supply also if you're going to have these common places where a lot of people live who didn't live there before drainage is essential or else you will have terrible disease breaking out it's not that they were scientists and knew About germs it's just that if you know when there's a lot of people there and there's a lot of water lying around people seem to die so you don't have to be a genius for that there is there are sewer systems introduced by these tyrants which never existed before and since they are trying to

encourage trade there was always a place I shouldn't say there was always but at some point in the development of the polis there emerged a kind of central place in the City called the Agora which was a place that people came together for different purposes it looks like in the beginning political meetings meetings of the assembly for instance might take place in the Agora it pretty early seem to have had some religious significance and then over time not at the beginning though but over time they became commercial centres in our if you use the word

Agora in Greece today you're talking about a shop because that's how Much that comes to be the thing but we need to keep in mind that it is a religious center it becomes a civic center and it also of course was a commercial center as well and so the Agora come from these tyrannical periods public buildings are created by the tyrant for whatever use he needs but he he might be building courthouses he might be building places for magistrates to stay things like that and but also he has a tendency to try to make them

very Attractive very impressive so that people will be impressed with him for having done so you know the phenomenon people like to have now they like to have their name on a building I'm told they will actually give you millions and millions of dollars to put their name on a building I'm told there are places where they will even give you lots of money to put their their names on bathroom stalls but only the the tyrants in their day would have been rich enough To do the kind of thing we're talking about including and this

is a very large thing I believe temples the Greeks had been building temples I'm sure for a long time but essentially out of wood but now with people having the kind of wealth that were being accumulated by these tyrants they begin to build them of stone and where possible a very fine stone such as marble and I think we have to imagine the construction of such a building in an old town like any one of The Greek city-states had it would have had a tremendous impact this is something I'd like to pass on to you

when you think about the Greeks here's one of the places where they're so stunningly different from us that we need to make an imaginative leap to understand what's going on remember this is a world that has got no next to no writing this is there are a few there a lot there are some people who know how to write but it's not part Of life and of course there's no paper so I mean this did this get more writing out of your life for the most part but also there are there's no movies there's no

television there's no radio there's no newspapers there are very few buildings now I'm suddenly up pop let's go to Carnes and suddenly up pops this incredible thing made of stone a temple to the gods decorated beautifully painted typically blue and red and gold with a big statue of the goddess and Anybody in town can go by and look at that that would have made a sensational experience and people would have been talking about it in various elements of detail forever in a day and they would not forget who it was that constructed that temple so

that's an example of what I'm talking about beyond that the that the tyrants were patrons of the arts by which I mean architects sculptors painters painters of this that the other thing but vase Painters as well potters of a very special kind but that's not all also poets singers lyre players all of those kinds of entertainments which had been monopolized by the aristocracy to the degree they existed at all would now be broadly more broadly available and the retirements took pride in bringing the world's best to their cities and allowing at least some of them

to hear and see what was going on when we get to Athens I'll be more specific when we Have some more specific information about it so that is all part of a story that would have made the the tyrannies much more widely supported and much not and and not so easy to knock over as you might think people would have had many many reasons for gratitude to the tyrants and would have been very pleased by much of what the tyrants were doing of course the old aristocrats would have been typically very unhappy about it thing

they were doing because they've Been cut out but if you go to everybody else their feelings I think would have been mixed because first or I don't know which came first but they would be impressed and enjoy these positive things but they would also be troubled by something that was counter to their own traditions and two central elements of their own beliefs and concerns I keep thinking about those hoplite farmers and who have grown to be confident and independent Desire to be autonomous didn't want to be told what to do and yet there was somebody

who was doing just that so this is the conflict that there is and in fact what we see is a steady decline in the popularity of tyrannies from generation to the generation the founder of the tyranny he's probably still popular when he dies he did it most people are very conscious of what he achieved and he's a glorious figure but his son is only tyrant because he was His son it doesn't he doesn't come from his personal qualities and one it becomes more and more aware of the shortcomings and fewer and fewer people are interested

in the achievements even though they may do wonderful things and by the time you get to the third generation that's the end the third generation of tyrant gets thrown out if you've made the made it that far and when the tyranny is overthrown the typical successor to the tyrannical Regime is an oligarchy I would say it would include many of the old aristocrats who had the best land and the greatest wealth and indeed the chances are those people would be the leaders of the new regime but they would very quickly because it was not a

monarchy of any kind they would very quickly form into factions that would be competing with one another based on all kinds of difference which would compete with one another the Leader of each faction for becoming the leading faction the dominant figures in the state but also and this is much more important the really fundamental thing is a typically almost always the hoplite class of independent farmer would have participated in this regime he would have been a full-fledged citizen fighting would be done chiefly by the Phalanx with these folks doing the fighting the these men would

be the economic backbone of the community Turning out the grain and the wine and the olive oil and whatever else vegetables that they had to produce and being the independent fellows that they were and finally they would have played a part in the political life of the city here it would vary from town to town you might have a relatively narrow oligarchy in which the council was what counted and that that would be typical the council would count but it might be very narrowly defined or it could be very Broadly defined where it might include

Olli all the hoplites or something in between but not ever until we get to Athens would you get a democracy the definition being that every adult male who is born of native parents is a citizen and who has some significant political rights that doesn't come yet you have an oligarchy meaning short of that but with the with the variations I've indicated me Corinth for instance after they get rid of the tyrant finally It becomes famous in the Greek tradition for the moderation and therefore the longevity and peacefulness of its oligarchic regime I think we should

imagine that the corinthians became a hoplite city not that they didn't have aristocrats who had wealth and importance but that the hoplites really played essential part in the picture and I think I just to raise the question I remember I raised it about colonization let me Raise it about tyranny what were the contributions made by this development in Greek history to the life of Greece and they were many obviously economical growth in the way I've pointed out social change up to a certain point but certainly doing away forever with the aristocracy of birth as the

normal basis for citizenship and participation in the state and I would go further I would say that by destroying that and substituting for it some kind of economic basis for What role you played they actually opened the door for a form of government that didn't come in many places but did come in some and I'm talking about Greek democracy let me rivairy finally to the question of how did Greeks think about tyranny after tyranny was gone because it played a terrific role in Greek thinking and had a lot to do with the way the Greeks

felt about their relations with foreign powers and and their own regimes one thing I'll just Say in passing and come back to it the next time and that is sparta because of its behavior in the sixth century and a little bit into the fifth developed a reputation as being the state that was the enemy of tyranny they never developed a tyranny and the D they often fought against the tyrants and that was when tyranny was gone that was seen to be a great credit to them and helped explain how did it happen that Sparta emerged

and rose to the level as the Leader of the Greeks which they certainly were at the time of the Persian Wars beyond that so the picture that comes down to us it's it's or it will be a double picture in which opposite elements exist but certainly the dominant one is negative tyrannies are arbitrary they are violent tyrants are arrogant they do not permit free speech which by the way the Greeks placed it the Greek Democrats placed in a very central place in the important Things that are necessary for a man a Greek a citizen a

person who was not a barbarian the ability to come forward into the center of political life and speak your mind and when you didn't have that to some considerable degree you were a slave and tyrants didn't permit that there was no true political life for citizens they were de facto subjects of this tyrant who himself was an irresponsible not responsible to another body and therefore potentially dangerous And in and very easily could become a despot which is a Greek word Herodotus uses tyranny as critically well you know by and large he depicts the king of

Persia who finally invades Greece for in first and 499 another king of 480 these men are tyrants because they fit precisely the categorization of tyranny as the Greeks Noah in Aeschylus is play Prometheus Bound Zeus himself is seen to be a tyrant and the word is used of him by characters in the play for the same Reason he is punishing Prometheus for his good deeds towards men which make men more divine than they would otherwise be Zeus is very angry that's because he gave them fire Zeus is very very angry with him and he he

locks him up but changed him to a rock in the focuses mountains while birds are pecking away at his liver forever and ever a typical Greek hell of the worst kind and we are led in what we have of that Play to think Zeus is doing terrible things he is behaving tyrannically that is not good even for the king of the gods Plato of course will regard tyranny later on as a terribly evil thing and because of his anti-democratic prejudices will say tyranny is the natural outcome of democracy because people can't rule themselves they're not

competent to do so and it's only a matter of time before some strong Violent selfish man makes himself tyranny it is a distinguishing feature in Greek thought tyranny or monarchy these are not appropriate for free men that is to say Greeks Greeks they felt were by nature free and they couldn't be free so long as there was tyranny but tyranny was in fact a natural way of life for barbarians who were not by nature free men so it's helpful and this is a form of ethnocentric stuff but that the Greeks were very very spelled it

out Very carefully thought about it very carefully and and and if you said well why do you say that well they would might hole too deep down they might hold what we would call sort of racial prejudices but I think they would have made a better case for it they would have said to be a free man as Aristotle said you need to live in a polis because that's the only place it's possible to live as a free man so because Greeks chose to live in Pawleys they are free People who choose to live as

the slaves of monarchs and tyrants that's because they are natural slaves and that prejudice is very deep and so when the Greeks end up having to fight the Persians there's a lot more going on than just we're being invaded and have to defend our land next time I look at the great exception to all of the things we've been talking about Sparta the state like no other Greek state