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book: Popular Tyranny
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Popular Tyranny

Sovereignty and Its Discontents in Ancient Greece
  • Edited by:
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2003

About this book

The nature of authority and rulership was a central concern in ancient Greece, where the figure of the king or tyrant and the sovereignty associated with him remained a powerful focus of political and philosophical debate even as Classical Athens developed the world's first democracy. This collection of essays examines the extraordinary role that the concept of tyranny played in the cultural and political imagination of Archaic and Classical Greece through the interdisciplinary perspectives provided by internationally known archaeologists, literary critics, and historians.

The book ranges historically from the Bronze and early Iron Age to the political theorists and commentators of the middle of the fourth century B.C. and generically across tragedy, comedy, historiography, and philosophy. While offering individual and sometimes differing perspectives, the essays tackle several common themes: the construction of authority and of constitutional models, the importance of religion and ritual, the crucial role of wealth, and the autonomy of the individual. Moreover, the essays with an Athenian focus shed new light on the vexed question of whether it was possible for Athenians to think of themselves as tyrannical in any way. As a whole, the collection presents a nuanced survey of how competing ideologies and desires, operating through the complex associations of the image of tyranny, struggled for predominance in ancient cities and their citizens.

Author / Editor information

Kathryn A. Morgan is Associate Professor of Classics at UCLA. Her previous publications include Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato.

Reviews

Classicists around the English-speaking world will welcome such a treatment of tyranny, an increasingly important topic in studies of archaic and classical Greece.
— James F. McGlew

The book is extremely successful in guiding the reader, who is not expected to be a classicist or ancient historian, through the paradoxes of the ideology of tyranny in classical Athens. [...] On the whole, this is a very stimulating volume, offering food for thought to historians, ancient and modern, and to anybody interested in political theory as well.
— The Historian

This is a fascinating book, and should be an excellent stimulus for further discussion.
— Journal of Hellenic Studies

Topics

  • Publicly Available

    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    v
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    Acknowledgments

    vii
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    Introduction

    ix
    Kathryn A. Morgan
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    Imaginary Kings: Alternatives to Monarchy in Early Greece

    1
    Sarah Morris
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    Form and Content: The Question of Tyranny in Herodotus

    25
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    Stick and Glue: The Function of Tyranny in Fifth-Century Athenian Democracy

    59
    Kurta Raaflaub
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    Tragic Tyranny

    95
    Richard Seaford
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    Dēmos Tyrannos: Wealth, Power, and Economic Patronage

    117
    Lisa Kallet
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    Demos, Demagogue, Tyrant in Attic Old Comedy

    155
    Jeffrey Henderson
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    The Tyranny of the Audience in Plato and Isocrates

    181
    Kathryn A. Morgan
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    Tyrant Killing as Therapeutic Stasis: A Political Debate in Images and Texts

    215
    Josiah Ober
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    Changing the Discourse

    251
    Robin Osborne
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    Afterword

    273
    Kathryn A. Morgan
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    Bibliography

    277
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    Notes on Contributors

    305
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    General Index

    309
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    Index Locorum

    315
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 25, 2021
eBook ISBN:
9780292797826
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.7560/752764
eBook ISBN: 9780292797826
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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