Third, the Greeks believed that this process was inevitably accompanied by a progressive moral decay, sometimes over several generations within one dynasty. This gradual process is termed here ‘the tyrant’s progress’. A king or other magistrate may, therefore, become a tyrant if he exceeds his prerogatives and so ceases to be constrained by law. But one becomes a tyrant through a gradual monopolization of power, wealth and honour within the polis. A magistrate is a magistrate from the moment of his appointment or election, a king from the moment of his accession or coronation. A tyrant will thus not generally begin as a tyrant and one cannot simply become a tyrant in the same way that one becomes a king or magistrate. Second, because tyranny is not a constitutional office, the Greeks considered tyranny not as a fixed state of being, or not being, but instead a gradual process of development. (For this reason, extreme oligarchies or radical democracies may be said to possess tyrannical power, even though they are not strictly tyrannies). Tyrants are, in sum, simply those who possess the means to monopolise constitutional offices and the good life of the polis for their own enjoyment. 4.6.12) – especially, but not exclusively, usurpers. Tyrannos can thus be applied as a label to rulers unconstrained by law (e.g. 1 A tyrant may be distinguished from a king ( βασιλεύς): an alternative and supposedly early form of autocrat whose privileges were hereditary and whose powers were restricted by custom (e.g. First, tyranny was not a constitutional or legal office, but a position of de facto, rather than de jure, power and authority. Three factors determine the Greek understanding of this term. This is because ancient authors conceived of tyranny and the career of the tyrant as a gradual decline into despotism and infamy. Some are more obviously ‘tyrants’ than others. ![]() However, not all ‘tyrants’ necessarily exhibit all the characteristics associated with tyrannical rule at any one time. I argue here that, for the Greeks, the word tyrannos always potentially entailed negative connotations of ‘tyrannical’ or ‘despotic’ rule, not dissimilar to those associated with the English cognate ‘tyrant’. While this question is hardly original, I can at least plead that, since it remains a topic of live dispute among scholars, an alternative approach – ‘the tyrant’s progress’ – may not be unwelcome. The problem discussed here will be familiar to most students of Greek history: the meaning of the Greek word τύραννος in the classical period.
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