ABSTRACT
Tyranny in ancient Greece was not confined to a particular period, and tyrants are found ruling Greek cities from the seventh until the second century BC, the time of the Roman conquest of Greece. However, the seventh and sixth centuries were a period when numerous tyrannies arose, particularly in the Peloponnese, and this is accordingly sometimes referred to as the ‘Age of Tyrants’. This ended on the Greek mainland with the expulsion of the tyranny of the Peisistratidai from Athens in 511/0. Tyranny had a longer history in Sicily, and the tyrannies there, in the absence of Spartan interference, lasted until 467, the death of Hieron. A new age of tyranny developed in Sicily with the accession of Dionysios I of Syracuse (405-367), and this period is often referred to as the time of the later tyrants, while in Asia Minor, tyranny survived the Persian conquest. The first appearance of the word ‘tyrannis’, tyranny, is in the poetry of Archilochos (doc. 2.1), who uses it to describe the reign of Gyges, the usurper of the Lydian throne, and tyrants in Greece resemble Gyges in as much as they usurped power. Many of them were ostentatious figures, and, just as Gyges was wealthy, it is possible that this was one of the connotations of the word for the Greeks. The first time the word ‘tyrannos’, tyrant, is applied to a specific Greek ruler in our surviving sources is in the work of another poet, Alcaeus, and is used of Pittakos of Mytilene (doc. 2.24). The main character of tyranny was the usurpation of power, because the tyrants overthrew the existing political system and replaced it with one-man rule.
