Hello and welcome back to the history of ancient Greece.

Episode 16, The Age of Tyranny.

Hardly had the nobles rid them of tyranny.

Hardly had the nobles rid themselves of the position of Bassalaeus, when a new type of

one-man rule arose throughout the Greek world as tyranny emerged during the late 7th century

B.C. as a consequence to all of these social and economic changes that

began to take place in the 8th century B.C. Modern historians have called this period from roughly 675 to

510 BC as the age of tyranny although technically there will be tyrants later during the Hellenistic period and not every Greek polis had tyrants either.

The first time Tyrannos appeared on the Greek record, it is found in one of the fragments of the lyric poet

Archilicus of Peras, around 675 BC in connection to the Lydian King Gyges. He describes

tyrants as having tremendous power and wealth, but they do not

rule as legitimate monarchos or hereditary king. They had seized power, usually through a

military coup, and ruled as an autocrat outside the institutions of the state.

Tyranny was also found in myth.

For example, the title of the famous play, Eedipus the King, in Greek is Ettipus Tyrannos, written by Sophocles.

Tyranny in itself was not originally thought of as wicket.

It was morally neutral and did not imply that the monarch was bad or cruel just that he used

illegitimate means to obtain sole power despite the myth tyranny never reached thieves though.

While background, aims, and means might differ, the general result was the subordination of local Greek nobility to the power of a single man.

Unfortunately, only a few of the dozens of tyrants who grabbed

power in their polis are known in any detail. Still, we can see a general pattern in their

rise and fall.

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