My Favourite Tyrant
It’s a shame that the word ‘tyrant’ has come to mean a cruel, oppressive leader because my favourite tyrant seems to have been a really good guy.
In Ancient Greece rule was by kings, this was about 10th and 9th centuries BCE. Aristocrats then took over their power but by the 7th century BCE they had become unpopular among their citizens. Cue a tyrannos .This was the word for an autocratic leader who overturns the legitimate government and rules as a usurper. Peisistratos was a populist tyrant of Athens. He held the position on and off between 561 and 567BCE. Each time the aristocrats managed to dislodge him he made a comeback, once by the brilliant Public Relations stunt of employing a rather tall peasant woman dressed as Athena, the patron goddess of Athens, to ride with him into the city in his chariot. The ploy worked and the people demanded his reinstatement. And he was an honest tyrant. He didn’t spend his time gatherings wealth for himself. He championed the lower class Athenians and was not afraid to reduce the privileges of the aristocrats, even confiscating some of their lands to give to the poor. Peisistratos wanted to boost the Athenian economy and spread the wealth more fairly among all levels of society. He was also passionate about the theatre, arts and sculpture and introduced two new forms of poetry, the dithyramb and tragic drama, while enlarging the ancient festival of the Panathenaic Games, held every four years in honour of Athena.
But the reason why he’s my favourite tyrant is that he was also credited with the first attempt to copy and archive Homer’s great poems the Illiad and the Odyssey. Without Peisistratos we might never have met Helen of Troy or Achilles the great warrior or the ‘wily’ Odysseus. How much poorer our cultural life could have been.
Yes, just because you’re a tyrant doesn’t mean you have to be a bad guy!
Illustration from 1838 by M. A. Barth depicting the return of Peisistratos to Athens, accompanied by a woman dressed as Athena, as described by the Greek historian Herodotus
