The little states of old, with their natural citadels, provided a splendid opportunity for any ambitious and unscrupulous person who wished to make himself tyrant. All you had to do was to stand forth as champion of the oppressed “demos” against the oppressive aristocracy, declare that your life was in danger, acquire a bodyguard of a few score stout knaves armed with spears, or even cudgels, then seize the citadel, and, if you had not forgotten provisions, there you were. It was a simple trick that was tried again and again in Greek history, and it nearly always succeeded. For example, at Corinth there was a singularly offensive aristocracy called Bacchiads. One of them had a deformed daughter who was permitted to marry beneath her. Her son, Cypselus, was not received in Bacchiad circles; he felt aggrieved, and he adopted the programme I have indicated. He founded a little dynasty which lasted more than seventy years, until it was put down by the Spartans in 581 B.C. The same thing had happened a little earlier at Sicyon; it was repeated at Megara a little later, and at Epidaurus. At Athens the first attempt by Cylon, about 621, failed; at Miletus a similar attempt succeeded. In the sixth century tyranny broke out everywhere in Sicily. In 560 Athens followed suit with the tyranny of Peisistratus. Polycrates of Samos comes about thirty years later. Thus many states in Greece went through the tyrannical phase about this time.
Although the Greeks, to their eternal honour, ever afterwards detested the name of tyrant, and although they tried to expunge the benefits they owed to them from the tablets of their history, yet we can see that tyranny was a valuable, almost a necessary, stage in the progress of the Greek state. Anything is better than aristocracy of the Bacchiad type: even
[Illustration: Plate 27.--Corinthian Vases.]
a tyrant has the merit of possessing a single throat. As a matter of fact, most of the Greek tyrants, with the exception of Phalaris of Acragas, who had a habit of roasting his subjects in a brazen bull, were intelligent and not oppressive rulers. They were able to form a consistent foreign policy, which is always the strong point of autocracies, to found colonies, acquire empires, form alliances, and marry their neighbours’ daughters. We hear of tyrants having relations with Egypt and Lydia, and importing copper from Spain. At home they policed their cities and made them appreciate the benefits of order. Above all, no doubt from sordid motives, they encouraged commerce. The flourishing commerce of Minoan days had ceased with the end of the thalassocracy. Piracy had become rife on the Ægean, as we see in Homer, where no visitor thinks it impolite to be asked whether he is or is not a pirate. For art and literature, here at last were the patrons. It is under the tyrants of the late seventh and sixth centuries that the art revival begins.