Greek Tyrants

There is much agreement from both ancient and modern sources, to pinpoint what a typical Greek tyrant was. The word ‘Tyrannos’ is not of Greek origin, but has been used by poets to convey a particular description of a dictator- like leader during the Archaic Greece era. The tyrants during this time were characteristically men whom held power in their Polis and overthrew the Aristocracy as a way of liberating the oppressed people of the city-state, and whom quenched their desire for immense power and wealth, using violence and bloodshed as a way to uphold conformity and plunder surrounding islands for riches. Armed forces are used by all tyrants as the way of creating a Tyranny, disarming the opponents and claiming the city as theirs, with the support of the people and specifically the hoplite class. Some Tyrants never ruled for very long, being overthrown by enemies, but during their tyranny they were able to supply their Polei with immense growth and advancement. The Samian Tyrant, Polykrates was able to solely rule over his city-state from 532BCE after disposing of his two brothers, and created a sea empire where he dominated many islands, parts of mainland Greece and Asia Minor, using powerful naval forces. We may conclude that Polykrates seemed to be a typical Greek Tyrant, due to the similar actions that were undertaken by many other Greek tyrants, and therefore creating fundamental characteristics of a Tyranny.

How ancient is the link between tyranny and technology? Autocrats have deployed automatons as weapons since antiquity--not just in Greek myth but also in historical times. This article describes automatons and machines deployed by tyrants in mythology and recounts how historical autocrats, from Sicily and Sparta, as early as the 6th century BC, also used actual animated statues and machines to exert power.

in considering how power manifests in ancient folktales, let us first consider what we mean by "power." in one respect, power can refer to the ability to do something; many animals and inanimate objects in ancient tales, for example, have the power of speech. in its larger sense, of course, power refers to the ability of one person or group to influence or direct the behavior and lives of others, and perhaps even to influence the course of events of entire cities and countries. This chapter focuses on the latter aspect, examining power relationships in tales from antiquity. What kind of power could people attain and how did they attain it? What did they use power for-to benefit their communities, or to benefit primarily themselves? And to what extent might the representations of power in these tales reflect real-life societal attitudes toward power, including its uses and abuses? Tales from the ancient Eastern and Mediterranean regions reflect various concerns with the appropriate and inappropriate use of power. The Greeks, as they tried to develop a working democracy, told many cautionary tales depicting the negative effects of absolute power. The Romans, too, despite a rather more authoritarian political structure, incorporated tales about the use and abuse of power into various literary genres. in literature down the centuries, abuse of power is repeatedly vilified and often punished in folktales reflecting real-life concerns about oppression and individual freedoms. Only occasionally is power used wisely and wielded with beneficence.

The confrontation between philosophers and powerful characters is a common element in Hellenistic biographies. Occasionally, this confrontation is simply dialectical, but there are no shortage of cases of genuine, bloody pagan philosophical «mar-tyrdoms», with persecutions in every sense of the word. These deaths give the philosopher a celestial heroisation, at least according to the epigrams integrated into his biographical narration, probably because of the association with the cult of tyranni-cides and, in general, heroes who receive a violent death in the mythological tradition. Inspired, plausibly , in the death of Socrates, the pattern is perpetuated in the lives of the pagan holy men. However, these latter confrontations do not cause in any case the heroic and divinising death of the philosopher, although it would have been an excellent counterpoint to the acts of Christian martyrdoms, whose literature begins to flourish just in this period.

Tyranny (tyrannis) is a name given to a type of Greek monarchy that came into being in the seventh century B.C.E. The democratisation of Greece and the transference of aristocratic ideas of equality and liberty to the whole citizen population led the vilification of tyranny as the opposite of democracy and its extensive use as a foil for democracy in Athenian politics. This political idea made its way into literature, including tragedy where it was one of several important anachronistic political ideas. The demonization of the tyrant also led to the development of tropes to create the stereotype of the tyrant. These tropes are catalogued in Plato and Aristotle and widely recognised in Herodotus, but as Lanza (1977) and Seaford (2003) have pointed out, they also occur in tragedy, to the same extent as they do in prose. The tropes can roughly be split into two groups – those that are based on real power-conserving strategies and those that were created to characterise the tyrant as a ...