The seventh and sixth centuries B.C. constitute from many points of view one of the most momentous periods in the whole of the world’s history. No doubt the greatest final achievements of the Greek race belong to the two centuries that followed. But practically all that is meant by the Greek spirit and the Greek genius had its birth in the earlier period. Literature and art, philosophy and science are at this present day largely following the lines that were then laid down for them, and this is equally the case with commerce. "(a) of the first known metal coins," It was at the opening of this epoch that the Greeks or their half hellenized neighbours the Lydians brought about perhaps the most epoch-making revolution in the whole history of commerce by the invention of a metal coinage like those that are still in circulation throughout the civilized world.

It was no accident that the invention was made precisely at this time. Industry and commerce were simultaneously making enormous strides. About the beginning of the seventh century the new Lydian Dynasty of the Mermnadae made Sardis one of the most important trading centres that have arisen in the world’s history. The Lydian merchants became middlemen between Greece and the Far East. Egypt recovered its prosperity and began rapidly to develop commercial and other relations with its neighbours, including the Greeks. Greek traders were pushing their goods by sea in all directions from Spain to the Crimea. Concrete evidence of this activity is still to be seen in the Corinthian and Milesian pottery of the period that has been so abundantly unearthed as far afield as Northern Italy and Southern Russia. It was a time of extraordinary intellectual alertness. Thales and the numerous other philosophers of the Ionian School were in close touch with the merchants and manufacturers of their age. They were in fact men of science rather than philosophers in the narrow modern sense of the latter word, and most of them were ready to apply their science to practical and commercial ends, as for example Thales, who is said to have made a fortune by buying up all the oil presses in advance when his agricultural observations had led him to expect a particularly plentiful harvest^[1]. A corner in oil sounds very modern, and in fact the whole of the evidence shows that in many ways this ancient epoch curiously anticipated the present age.

Politically these two centuries are generally known as the age of tyrants. The view that the prevalence of tyranny was in some way connected with the invention of coinage has been occasionally expressed^[2]. Radet has even gone so far as to suggest that the first tyrant was also the first coiner^[3]. He does not however go further than to suggest that the tyrant started a mint and coinage when already on the throne.

The evidence appears to me to point to conclusions of a more wide-reaching character. Briefly stated they are these: that the seventh and sixth century Greek tyrants were the first men in their various cities to realize the political possibilities of the new conditions created by the introduction of the new coinage, and that to a large extent they owed their position as tyrants to a financial or commercial supremacy which they had already established before they attained to supreme political power in their several states.

In other words their position as I understand it has considerable resemblances to that built up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D. by the rich bankers and merchants who made themselves despots in so many of the city states of Italy. The most famous of these are the Medici, the family who gave a new power to the currency by their development of the banking business, and mainly as a result of this became tyrants of Florence. Santo Bentivoglio of Bologna passed from a wool factory to the throne. Another despot of Bologna was the rich usurer RomÉo Pepoli. At Pisa the supreme power was grasped by the Gambacorti with an old merchant named Pietro at their head. At Lodi it was seized by the millionaire Giovanni Vignate. The above instances are taken from Symonds’ sixth class of despots of whom he says that “in most cases great wealth was the original source of despotic ascendancy^[4].”

Still closer analogies lie at our very door. It is a commonplace that we are in the midst of an industrial revolution. This modern movement was already beginning a century ago, when Byron pleaded the cause of the frameworkers before the House of Lords. There are of course obvious differences between the two revolutions. That of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. was mainly financial, that of the present time is mainly industrial. But the difference is not so great as it at first sight appears^[5]. The invention of a metal coinage was accompanied by great industrial changes^[6], and we can no more divide sharply the financial and industrial activities of the great houses of archaic Greece than we can separate the banking and the mercantile enterprises of the great families of the cities of Italy at the time of the renaissance, such as the wealthy Panciatighi of Florence, who lent money to the emperor Sigismund and exported cloths to London, Avignon and North Africa^[7]. On the other hand the modern industrial movement, with its development of machinery and its organization of masters and men into trusts and trade unions, has been accompanied by a revolution in the nature of the currency. The modern financial revolution began at the same time as the industrial. "which has replaced metal coins by paper," Its earliest phases are described and discussed in William Cobbett’s Paper against Gold^[8]. Since Cobbett’s days the paper currency which so distressed him has developed enormously. Even before 1914 we were told that “Gold already acts in England only as change for notes^[9].”

It is not necessary here to examine in detail the various forms taken by this new paper currency. It is enough to point out that it enables property to be transferred and manipulated far more rapidly and on far larger a scale than was previously possible^[10]. Only one other point in the history of the new currency needs to be here mentioned. It cannot be better expressed than in the words used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the House of Commons on November 28th, 1914:

I have been much struck since I have been dealing with these transactions (bills of exchange) with how little even traders who form a part of this great machinery know about the mechanism of which they form an essential part.... I do not think that the general public—and I am putting myself among them—ever realized the extent to which the business not merely of this country, but of the whole world, depended upon this very delicate and complicated paper machinery.

Apparently it needed a European war to bring home to the modern world of commerce the nature of its currency. This fact should warn us against expecting to find in early Greece any very clear recognition of the revolution in the currency that then took place. When gold and silver coins were first circulated they had a corresponding effect to the modern issues of paper. They enabled property to be transferred with greater ease and rapidity. We may be sure however that the character and possibilities of the new currency did not at once receive universal recognition^[11]. The merchants in the bazaars of Lydia and Ionia who best understood how to make use of it must have profited enormously.

The experts in the new finance of the last two generations have been exercising a profound influence upon politics and government. There are many people, particularly in America, who believe that there is a possibility of this influence becoming supreme. It is worth while quoting a few of these opinions:

This era is but a passing phase in the evolution of industrial Caesars, and these Caesars will be of a new type—corporate Caesars^[12].

The flames of a new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the state and have bred individuals greater than themselves, and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master instead of servant^[13].

For some months past the sugar trust has been the Government of the United States^[14].

In 1884 there seems even to have been an idea of running a Standard Oil senator for the United States presidency. “Henry B. Payne is looming up grandly in the character of a possible and not altogether improbable successor to Mr Tilden as the Democratic candidate for the presidency^[15].”

The danger of supreme power in America passing into the hands of a few capitalists has even been publicly acknowledged by a President of the United States during his period of office. “Mr Wilson also discussed the division between capital and labour. He dwelt for the greater part of the speech on the effort of ‘small bodies of privileged men to resume control of the Government,’ and added: ‘We must again convince these gentlemen that the government of this country belongs to us, not to them^[16].’”

Similar views are expressed by French, German and Italian writers. According to the most brilliant of modern Frenchmen the government of France has in some recent periods been in the hands of three or four groups of financiers^[17]. Salvioli in his Capitalism in the Ancient World speaks of the “kings of finance who exercise in our states a secret but pervading sway^[18].” Even the warlike von Bernhardi fears an impending “tyranny of capital^[19].”

These quotations might be multiplied^[20], but enough have been given to show that the opinion which they express is widely held. There is no need to discuss the honesty of particular expressions of it. If any of them could be shown to have been insincere, it would be only additional evidence of the plausibility of the opinion. Nor is this the place to discuss from a more general point of view the extent to which that opinion has been or seems likely to be verified. To have indicated how widely prevalent is the fear of an impending “new tyranny of wealth^[21]” or “tyranny of capital^[22]” is by itself enough to show that the relation between the tyranny and the new form of wealth that arose in the seventh and sixth centuries before our era is a subject that deserves investigation, and to show also that the particular view as to those relations that is maintained in these pages has a priori plausibility^[23].

It should however be said at once that my view appears to have been held by no one who has published opinions on the subject from the fourth century B.C. onwards. This however is not fatal. Later in this chapter reasons will be suggested for holding that the true character of the early tyranny was lost sight of in the days of Plato and Aristotle. Why truer views on this particular subject should be recovered precisely at the present period may be sufficiently explained by the modern financial revolution, which makes it possible to approach the question from a point which has scarcely been accessible during the last two thousand years. With this warning we may proceed to state the nature of the evidence in favour of this view that the earliest tyrannies were founded and based on wealth.

(1) The greater part of it is drawn from anecdotes and incidental statements of fact about particular seventh or sixth century tyrants preserved in Herodotus and later Greek and Latin writers. The various tyrants are dealt with individually in the remaining chapters of the book.

(2) Glimpses into the economic and political life of the seventh and sixth centuries are occasionally to be got from the scanty remains of the poets of the period, supplemented by cautious references to later writers. It will be convenient to examine at once this more general evidence.

The only two writers of the age of the tyrants of whom more than the merest scraps have come down to us are Solon^[24] and Theognis^[25]. Both deal professedly with the social and political problems of their day. But both address audiences who are familiar with those problems. Even if their whole works had been preserved instead of a few hundred lines in either case, we should not expect to have the fundamental problems explicitly stated. It would be possible to read a large selection of articles and speeches by quite the best journalists and politicians on many recent political measures and at the end of it to be left in uncertainty as to the content and purport of the measure in question. We must expect the same difficulty in reading Solon and Theognis. And it must be confessed that we find it. But there is nothing in the extant fragments of either writer which discredits the theory. More than that there are passages in both of them that become of the utmost significance if the early tyrants owed their power to their previous wealth but are rather pointless on any other hypothesis.

Solon’s position in relation to the tyranny is explained in the chapter dealing with Athens. But a few lines may be quoted here:

By the wreck of the city the poet means the establishment of a tyranny, as is indicated by another couplet:

These last two lines were presumably written after Peisistratus had made himself tyrant of Athens. Solon’s fears had been realized. The citizens had been “won over by wealth” to “wreck their great city.” Is not the best sense made out of these lines by assuming that what Solon feared and what actually happened was that the popular leader had made use of his wealth to establish himself as tyrant? Neither the “people’s leaders” of the first quotation nor the “great men” of the second are specifically stated to have been extremely rich, but to quote again the words of Solon, both may be plausibly identified with the foremost of

The political aim of Theognis was to prevent a recurrence of tyranny in Megara^[30]. What does the poet bid his townsmen beware of? Not of eloquence, not of violence, not of rashly appointing a lawgiver or a?s???t??. All his warnings are directed against wealth. The whole town of Megara had become commercial^[31]. Birth had lost its prestige, and wealth acquired unprecedented power. He complains how

When he explicitly alludes to the dangers of the establishment of a tyranny, his references to wealth are no less prominent:

The couplet last quoted almost certainly refers to a possible tyrant. Insolent pride (????) is one of the tyrant’s stock characteristics^[41]. There is no reference to wealth in this particular context. But there can be little doubt that this same character is also referred to earlier in the poem. Who, the poet asks, can preserve his reverence for the Gods:

In this last passage the pride and insolence are directly attributed to enormous wealth.

Or again:

What are the gains that lead up to tyranny? Is it not most probable that they are some form of payment received by the commons (“those that are bad”) from the would-be tyrant^[44]?

Solon and Theognis wrote with the examples of Gyges, Pheidon, Orthagoras, Cypselus, Theagenes and the rest of the seventh century tyrants before them^[45]. If they constantly feared that some wealthy tradesman^[46] would make himself tyrant, it must surely have been because the tyrants had sprung from or been allied with this new class of wealthy traders and financiers.

The view here set forth as to the basis of the tyrant’s power finds nothing to contradict it in the fifth century references to the early tyranny. On the contrary such few references as are explicitly made to the origin of the tyranny by writers of the fifth century bear it out. “Is it not folly,” says Oedipus to Kreon in the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, “this attempt of yours, without a host of followers and friends to seek a tyranny, a thing that’s gained only with hosts of followers and money^[47]?” “When Greece,” says Thucydides, in his introductory sketch of early Greek history, “had grown more powerful, and was still more than before engaged in the acquisition of wealth, tyrannies were established in the cities^[48].” Herodotus gives no account of the rise of tyranny, but a large proportion of the evidence as to the careers of individual tyrants is derived from his work. Perhaps the fifth century writer who might be expected to throw most light on the question is Pindar, who visited the courts of the Sicilian tyrants and wrote odes in their honour. His poems contain many references to the supreme importance of wealth:

So elsewhere^[51] in a similar spirit he describes Hiero’s great victory over the Etruscans as “the crown of his lordly wealth.” The Syracusan monarchs of the early fifth century seem to have had fewer affinities with the commercial tyrants of the two preceding centuries than with the military despots of a later age. It is therefore all the more significant that wealth is so frequently regarded by Pindar, who more than any other writer represents the transition from the sixth century to the fifth, rather as a means to power than as one of its rewards. Later documents, as has been said already, give a different account of the early tyrants’ antecedents. But here and there statements are to be found in them that, though perhaps reconcilable with other views, only become fully significant on the commercial theory.

Isocrates for instance speaks of the “huge wage bills and expenditures of money by which all modern dynasts maintain their power^[52].” He wrote these words between 342 and 339 B.C.^[53], but as his modern times are contrasted with those of Agamemnon and he himself was nearly thirty years old at the close of the fifth century, his modern dynasts may well include sixth century tyrants like Peisistratus and Polycrates, the more so as “dynasts” arose so seldom in fifth century Greece.

Aristotle preserves the tradition that the early tyrants were good business men. He speaks of “rendering account of their receipts and expenditure, as has been done already by certain of the tyrants. For by this kind of administration he would give the impression of being a manager (????????) and not a tyrant^[54].”

That the early tyrants had previously been men of wealth is also perhaps to be inferred from certain remarks of Aristotle about the “lawgivers” of the same period. The general character of these “lawgivers” is a matter of some dispute; but they appear to have differed from the tyrants in at least two points. They governed by general consent and they marked an earlier stage in the economic evolution of the city state^[55]. They are perhaps to be compared with the “arbitrators” between employers and employed who in recent times have sometimes enjoyed considerable influence^[56]. When Aristotle^[57] emphasizes the fact that the best “lawgivers” were all drawn from the citizens of moderate means (?? t?? ?s?? p???t??) he is making a fairly pointless remark unless the same could not be said of the tyrants of the period. That Aristotle did actually recognize the connexion between tyranny and extremes of wealth and poverty is shown by another passage of the Politics^[58]:

For this reason it is very fortunate when those engaged in politics have moderate but sufficient means, for where some have very great possessions and others none, the result is either extreme democracy or unmitigated oligarchy or tyranny, which is caused by both extremes. For unbridled democracy and oligarchy lead to tyranny, the intermediate and more closely allied forms of government do so far less.

The philosopher himself may have pictured some of the early tyrants as having risen from being penniless demagogues. The difficulties in the way of accepting the view that a poor man ever became a tyrant before the democratic development of the fifth century will be set forth later in this chapter. If there is any basis of fact for Aristotle’s statement, the early tyrants must have come from among the wealthiest of the citizens.

There is nothing surprising in this conclusion. In the age that saw merchants like Solon made practical dictators in their native cities^[59], and philosophers like Thales anticipating the Rockefellers by making a corner in oil^[60], there must have been individuals with something of the abilities of these great men, but little of their disinterestedness, who would be quick to grasp the possibility of reaching through the corner to the crown.

At a later date cornering became less easy. In fifth century Athens there were statutes and magistrates (s?t?f??a?e?) to prevent corners in corn, and we still have a speech of Lysias directed against some speculators who had bought beyond the legal limit. The context of a passage in this speech suggests that the general controllers of the market (????a????) were expected to be on their guard against corners in other articles^[61].

The detailed evidence in favour of this view is given in the chapters that follow. It will be found however that these men who made themselves tyrants through their riches were not all of them mere speculators. Some at least had acquired their wealth from trade or industry. This means that they were large employers of labour. There are reasons for thinking that from this point of view they would be politically far more influential than their successors in business in the days of the Athenian democracy.

The big merchants and manufacturers of the fifth and fourth centuries relied largely, and more and more as time went on, on servile labour. The thousand miners whose services Nikias commanded were all slaves. Six hundred slave miners were owned by his contemporary Hipponikos and three hundred by Philemonides^[62]. The hundred and twenty hands in the shield factory of the orator Lysias were all slaves^[63]. So too were the fifty-two in the knife and bedstead factories inherited by Demosthenes^[64], and the nine or ten in the boot-making establishment of Timarchus^[65], as also those in the flute-making establishment from which the father of Isocrates made his living^[66], and the sail-makers and drug-pounders who appear in Demosthenes contra Olympiodorum^[67]. These instances might be multiplied^[68]. Slaves were of course only a form of wealth^[69]. As human beings they were entirely without influence on politics. It would have been another matter if Nikias had had a big constituency of miner citizens at his entire disposal. That I believe was one of the great differences between Nikias and Peisistratus and generally speaking between the captains of industry in the fifth and fourth centuries and their predecessors in the seventh and sixth. The evidence is not decisive, but as far as it goes it all points in this direction.

At Athens in the generation that preceded the tyranny it is reported of Solon that “he encouraged the citizens to take up manual trades^[70],” a policy perhaps to be connected with his release from debt and semi-slavery of the “pelatai” and the “hektemoroi^[71],” since fresh employment had possibly to be found for many of these liberated serfs. It is further reported of Solon that he offered the citizenship to any who “transplanted themselves to Athens with their whole family for the sake of exercising some manual trade^[72].” Aeschines quotes Solon, laws attributed to whom were still in force when the orator flourished, to the effect that “he does not drive a man from the platform” (i.e. he allows him to speak in the assembly of citizens) “even if he is practising some handicraft, but welcomes that class most of all^[73].” Solon himself, describing the various paths by which men pursue riches, declares that

Another learns the works of Athena and Hephaestus of the many crafts, and with his hands gathers a livelihood^[74].

The tyrants themselves are repeatedly found making it part of their policy to keep their subjects employed on big industrial concerns. In more than one case we shall see their power collapsing just when this policy becomes financially impossible^[75]. This part of the tyrants’ policy is noticed by Aristotle, who quotes the dedications (buildings and works of art) of the Cypselids at Corinth, the building of the temple of Olympian Zeus at Athens by the Peisistratids, and the works of Polycrates round Samos^[76]. To these names we may add Theagenes of Megara, Phalaris of Agrigentum, Aristodemus of Cumae, and the Tarquins of Rome, all of whom are associated with works of this kind^[77]. Aristotle says that the object of these works was to keep the people busy and poor. This explanation is more than doubtful, as has been already recognized^[78]. It is not employment that leads to poverty. More probably the tyrants pursued this industrial policy because, to quote an expression used in another context by Plutarch, “stimulating every craft and busying every hand it made practically the whole city wage earners (??s???),” employed, as in the case Plutarch is describing, by the government of the state. In other words may not the tyrants have been building up an industrial state of employee subjects who in their turn involved an army of “customer subjects^[79]”? The words just quoted come from the life of Pericles^[80] and refer to the way that he employed the poorer citizens (t?? ??t???? ?????) in the rebuilding and adornment of Athens. Among the people so employed he mentions carpenters, sculptors, coppersmiths, stone masons, dyers, moulders of gold and ivory, painters, embroiderers, engravers, merchants, sailors, wheelwrights, waggoners, drivers, rope-makers, flax workers, leather cutters, road-makers, miners. We still possess fragments of the accounts of payments made to these workmen or their successors some years after Pericles’ death^[81]. The Alcmaeonids, the family to which Pericles belonged, had been opponents of the house of Peisistratus for ages, and had consistently fought it with its own weapons. Pericles himself was commonly called the new Peisistratus^[82]. His public works were a continuation of those of Peisistratus^[83]. The whole situation as well as our scanty information about industrial conditions in the age of the tyrants alike suggest that in this use of public works to convert the industrial classes into an army of his own employees, which is what they very nearly were^[84], Pericles was in a very particular sense a new Peisistratus.

To judge too from the purely industrial evidence Pericles seems to have been continuing the traditions of an earlier age. It is true that free labour was largely employed on the restoration of the great sanctuary at Eleusis some eighty years after the operations just referred to. An inscription relating to the wages paid during this later undertaking shows that the employees included 36 citizens, 39 resident aliens, 12 strangers, 2 slaves, besides 57 persons of uncertain status^[85]. But this evidence only tends to show that building was always a free man’s trade^[86]. We must beware of arguing from one trade to another or from one particular trade to trade in general. There were doubtless many subtle shades of status depending on the nature of either the work or the profits^[87]. As servile industry develops, it drives free labour from work thought to be particularly damaging to body or mind such as employment underground in mines. Speaking generally, however, there are signs that in Athens at least between the days of the tyranny and those of the Periclean democracy the conditions of free labour had been radically changed. This is most obvious as regards the status of the citizen artizan^[88]. Solon refers to him without a trace of contempt and is careful to maintain his political dignity. In so doing he appears to have been conservative and simply following the tradition of the Homeric age, when a prince was proud to make his own bedstead or build his own house and a princess took pleasure in acting as palace laundress^[89]. In Attica at any rate manual labour appears to have enjoyed an equally honourable reputation from the heroic age onwards till the end of the age of the tyrants^[90]. In the good old days, so Plato declares in the Critias^[91], “the other classes of citizens were engaged in handicrafts (d???????a?) and agriculture.” The earliest division of the free population, ascribed to the half historical Theseus, comprised three classes—nobles, farmers, and artizans (d????????)^[92]. When Solon, who was himself a merchant^[93], reorganized the population he divided it (or perhaps simply preserved an existent division) into four classes, of which the lowest were ??te? or day labourers^[94]. The names of the others (pentekosiomedimnoi, hippeis, zeugitai) show that this class must have included all the artizans, the men who, in the lawgiver’s own words, “learn the works of Athena and Hephaestus of the many crafts.” This description of the ancient Athenian craftsmen as sons of Pallas and Hephaestus recurs in Plato^[95]. A class that is described in this way plainly rests under no stigma. As Wallon puts it, “le travail, loin d’Être un titre d’exclusion, Était un moyen d’arriver au pouvoir^[96].” Some five years after Solon’s legislation the old classification of the free population as nobles, farmers and artizans (d????????) reappears and the artizans secure two out of ten seats on the board of chief magistrates^[97].

But in the fifth century this has changed. Contrast the tone of Solon with that of Xenophon^[98], who states that some citizens “actually” live by handicrafts, and that mechanical occupations are rightly held in contempt by civilized communities. When Socrates has demonstrated to Alcibiades that the Athenian ecclesia is made up of working men (cobblers, criers, tent-makers and the like), he proceeds to this inference: “if you have a contempt for them individually, then you must have a contempt for them as a body^[99].” This contempt for manual work appears in Aristophanes, as for instance in his constant contemptuous references to Euripides’ mother, who had been a greengrocer^[100]. It is recognized and discussed by Herodotus, who regards it as of comparatively recent growth: as he puts it, “most of the Greeks have learned to despise artizans^[101].” His view is supported by Isocrates, who when describing the state of things that prevailed in the Athens of Solon and Cleisthenes, declares that “the propertied classes, so far from despising those who were not so well off,... relieved their necessities, giving some of them farms at moderate rents, sending out others to travel as merchants, supplying others with capital for their various employments (???as?a?)^[102].” The passage just quoted is no doubt tendencious. But, as maintained by Mauri^[103], it does indicate that labour was not despised in archaic Athens. More than that it suggests that in the days of Solon and Cleisthenes there was a good deal of free labour under the patronage, if not in the actual employment, of rich individuals. The transformation that began in the fifth century seems to have occurred gradually. It had not been completed when Herodotus wrote. Among the Athenian citizens who just at that time were being employed by Pericles on the Athenian acropolis we have seen from Plutarch that there were included carpenters, smiths, and leather workers. In the next generation we find Xenophon declaring that most of those who understand these crafts are servile. The words are put into the mouth of Socrates, who was the younger contemporary of Herodotus by some fifteen years^[104]. Socrates and Xenophon however sometimes voice the earlier view. In the Apology for instance artizans are compared favourably with politicians, poets, and the like^[105]. Similarly in the de Vectigalibus of Xenophon, in which the writer expresses some of his own personal views, artizans are placed with no suggestion of inferiority in the company of sophists, philosophers, poets, and sight-seers^[106]. In Plato, except for the passage just quoted from the Apology, manual labour is consistently condemned as unworthy of a free man in a free city^[107]. He would have no member of a state or even the slave of a citizen among those engaged in manual trades^[108]. He admits that there is nothing inherently ignoble in trade, but explains at length how all trading has in fact become so^[109]. Trade has come to imply money-making and to mean that the city where it flourishes is “infected with money of silver and gold, than which, speaking generally, no greater evil could arise for a city that aimed at producing just and noble characters^[110].” When Plato is building up his ideal state wage earning is left to those citizens who are mentally deficient^[111]. Plato is above all things an independent thinker with no great respect for the masses and less still for popular opinion. But in this particular point his views do not seem to be unusual. He is echoed again and again by Aristotle: “Citizens ought not to live the life of an artizan or tradesman^[112].” “Farmers and artizans and all the working-class element must exist in cities: but the real constituents of the city are the military class and the parliamentarians^[113].” “The best city will not make the artizan a citizen^[114].” “The city where the artizans are numerous and men at arms are few cannot attain to greatness^[115].” The speech of Demosthenes against Euboulides makes it plain that in the fourth century a doubtful claim to Athenian citizenship might be damaged by pointing out that the claimant was a small tradesman. “It is your duty,” the orator makes his client say to the jury, “to uphold the laws and not to regard as outlanders people who work for their living (t??? ???a???????)^[116].” Aristotle and Euboulides would have agreed with Pollux^[117], our earliest lexicographer (second century A.D.), that thetes is a name for free men who out of poverty do slave’s work for money (?p’ ??????? d???e???t??).

The Greeks despised the artizan largely because of his lack of leisure and impaired physique which to their minds necessarily implied a lack of culture and a weakened intelligence^[118]. This being the ground of their contempt, the feeling must plainly have grown up when the claims of culture and of industry had become exacting. This means that it was probably subsequent to and a result of the industrial developments of the age of the tyrants; and this dating is confirmed by other considerations.

The growth of contempt for labour has been explained by Drumann^[119] as due in part at least to the Persian wars and the resultant plunder, which must have made a good many citizens financially independent. The payment of the huge panels of jurymen, which at Athens did so much to release the poorer citizens from the necessity to work, was an ultimate outcome of the Persian wars. The Peloponnesian war may have completed the process. It lasted through nearly thirty campaigns (431–404 B.C.) and must have deeply disorganized the labour market. Slaves must in all directions have supplanted the free men who were wanted for military service, just as women took men’s places in the modern counterpart of the Greek disaster^[120]. The continued campaigning is sure to have left many of the fighting men with a distaste for the dull routine of industry^[121]. In the Plutus of Aristophanes, brought out in 388 B.C., Poverty argues against an even distribution of wealth on the ground that it would destroy the slave trade and drive free men to manual labour as smiths, shipbuilders, tailors, wheelwrights, shoemakers, brickmakers, laundrymen, tanners and ploughmen^[122]. Rather than return to their trades they preferred active service in distant lands. When early in the fourth century Agesilaus of Sparta was campaigning in Asia Minor against the King of Persia we are told that most of his troops except his own Spartans were potters, smiths, carpenters and the like^[123]. Mechanical occupations are said by Aristotle to have been in his own days in some Greek cities mainly in the hands of slaves and outlanders: “in ancient times in some cities the artizan element (t? ??a?s??) was servile or alien, for which reason most of them are such now^[124].” This growing contempt and dislike for manual labour as such, combined with the passion for freedom and independence, would make free citizens particularly unwilling to become factory hands or miners or anything that meant working under a master for a daily wage, the receipt of which tended to be regarded as a degradation^[125]. Ciccotti^[126] observes that piece work becomes much commoner at this period. He explains the tendency in abstract Marxian principles. The change may be due to much more human causes, such as the workman’s growing desire to work his own hours at his own pace. The work that the free man refused to do was undertaken by the growing population of slaves. There was at this time a glut in the slave market, as is sufficiently proved by the single fact that while the prices of all other commodities went up in the fifth and fourth centuries, that of slaves went down^[127]. Among the unpleasant occupations that fell more and more completely into servile hands were mining and quarrying^[128], two of the occupations with which we shall find that the early tyrants were most frequently concerned.

If therefore in the fifth and fourth centuries citizen craftsmen appear to have worked mainly in small individual concerns^[129], it by no means follows that the same was the case in the seventh and sixth centuries. The conditions during the later period were due to causes that only began to operate during that period. On the other hand industry must have begun to organize itself into considerable concerns somewhere about the beginning of the earlier period, at the time of the developments that are admittedly associated with the beginnings of tyranny. What was the status of the employees in these earlier enterprises such as the potteries of Corinth, the sixth century mines at Laurium, or the metal and woollen works at Samos? Almost our only piece of direct evidence on this subject is a statement of Alexis^[130] that Polycrates the tyrant of Samos, whose connexion with Samian industry is established in Chapter III, “used to send for skilled artizans at very high wages (etest???et? te???ta? ?p? ?s???? e??st???).” These highly paid artizans may have been foreigners—Athenians, Milesians, or the like^[131]—but they can scarcely have been slaves. Indirect evidence in the same direction is more abundant. Periander for example, the second tyrant of Corinth (about 620–580 B.C.), is said to have forbidden the purchase of slaves^[132]. This regulation looks like an attempt towards the end of the period of tyranny at Corinth to stem an influx of servile labour.

It is doubtful whether slave owning on a large scale existed at this period^[133]. The Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries regarded slavery as they knew it as a modern development^[134]. Timaeus says^[135] that till recently the Locrians had a law and likewise the Phocians against possessing either maid servants or slaves (??te ?e?apa??a? ??te ????ta?) and that Mnason the friend of Aristotle having acquired a thousand slaves was ill-spoken of (d?a?????a?) among the Phocians as having deprived that number of the citizens of their daily bread. There is much therefore to be said for the view expressed by Clerc^[136] that free labour flourished afresh in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. with the overthrow of aristocracies, or in other words in the age of the early tyrants. Ciccotti has recently well observed that in all the literature from the hymn of Demeter to the writings of Plutarch slaves occupy no place in the picture of social conditions at this period^[137].

It was long ago recognized by Buechsenschuetz^[138] that in preclassical Greece the manual trades were in the hands of free men, but each man was his own master, there being no factories or division of labour. In classical times there was considerable division of labour and there were businesses employing a large number of hands, but citizens seldom worked in them. The age of the tyrants falls between the two epochs just formulated. It is the one short epoch in Greek history when there were probably considerable industrial enterprises employing citizen labour. Thus it is the age in Greek history when apart from all details of evidence there would be the greatest a priori possibility of an individual having secured the political power which may fall to the employer of organized free labour on a large scale^[139].

It is difficult in these days to realize how unique a situation is here implied. We are apt to forget how completely slaves were excluded from any part whatsoever in the life of the state. Politically they were non-existent, and the whole free population was vitally concerned in keeping them so. The slave was an essential form of property. To question the institution of slavery in ancient Greece was like questioning the fundamental claims of property in modern Europe. It was a proclamation of war to the knife against the whole established order of things. Individual slaves might win freedom and political rights, but any organized effort at emancipation on the part of the slaves themselves was put down with merciless severity. When in 71 B.C. Pompey and Crassus had crushed the slave rebellion of Spartacus, the moderate and statesmanlike revolutionary whose name has come again to such prominence in recent days, six thousand of his followers were crucified along the road from Rome to Naples. The distance is about 150 miles. At the time therefore of this exemplary punishment if anyone had occasion to pass along the road in question, one of the most frequented in the whole Roman state, he would see some forty of these victims writhing in agony or hanging dead upon the cross for every mile of his journey. No piece of frightfulness quite so thorough and methodical is to be found in all the frightful history of the present century. The punishment of 71 B.C. is typical of the whole attitude of the ancient republics of Greece and Rome towards rebellious slaves. No wonder then if in their history servile labour played no active part^[140].

Some parts of Greece never passed under a tyrant. The most conspicuous of these is Sparta^[141]. The Spartans never struck real coins. The iron pieces “heavy and hard to carry^[142]” that formed the classical Spartan currency seem to be a survival of a premonetary medium of exchange^[143]. Sparta was also practically without any urban population^[144]. It may be more than an accidental coincidence that the most anti-tyrannical state in Greece was without a real coinage, and backward in trade and industry.

Another region where nothing is heard of early tyrants is Thessaly. Thessaly had a large serf population called pe??sta?, whose position much resembled that of the Spartan helots^[145]. Both were mainly agricultural labourers, asscripti glebae. Such a population might serve the purpose of a would-be military despot. Pausanias, the Spartan generalissimo against the Persians, had dealings with the helots when he was trying to make himself tyrant of all Greece^[146]. But for a commercial tyrant they would not be very useful material. The other important district that seems to have been immune from tyrants is Boeotia. It is natural to associate this immunity with the dominantly agricultural character of the district where Hesiod wrote his Works and Days^[147].

When the tyrants had been suppressed or expelled, or their families became extinct, the government in most cases either reverted to an oligarchy or developed into a democracy. Oligarchs and democrats (or at least democratic governments) seem to have been equally inspired with a hatred of the tyranny. The steps that they took and the fears that they displayed under that influence may be expected to throw light on the source of the tyrant’s power. Once more however it is necessary to limit ourselves to the fifth century, when the conception of the tyrant had not yet undergone the great change that came over it in the days of Dionysius of Syracuse^[148].

Of the oligarchic Greek states our knowledge is comparatively slight. History has preserved for us no oligarchic counterpart to the picture that we still possess of democratic Athens. But thanks to the Politics of Aristotle, that precious storehouse of incidental statements and remarks, the fact has come down to us that^[149] “in many oligarchies it is not allowed to engage in business (???at??es?a?, perhaps better construed ‘money-making’), but there are laws forbidding it.”

Of the anti-tyrannical measures of democratic Athens during the century that followed the expulsion of the Peisistratids we are better informed. So are we also as to the measures taken in the early days of republican Rome to prevent a re-establishment of the kingship. The evidence supports the view that in both cases what the established government mainly feared was the rich man becoming politically powerful by means of his riches.

Only, if that view is right, why is it nowhere specifically formulated in extant records?

One set of causes has already been incidentally indicated. The state of things that could lead to a tyranny of the early type was passing away at the time of the Persian wars. The payment of jurymen rendered a recurrence of it in Athens finally impossible. Sparta had always been equally averse from making either coins or tyrants. What Athens and Sparta both disapproved of had little chance of finding a home in fifth century Greece. It was during this period that Herodotus and Thucydides, our earliest Greek historians, composed their works. Each wrote the history of a great war. But even if their themes had been more peaceful, it would be a mistake to imagine that their enquiries into economic causes would have been any more searching. Cornford in his illuminating study of Thucydides^[150] complains of the general blindness of the Greeks in this direction. This is hardly fair on the Greeks. Thucydides and his successors are not unusually blind. It is the moderns who are unusual in the way they fix their eyes upon this particular aspect of history. Only in times of financial and industrial revolution does the world at large become distinctly conscious of the financial and industrial basis of its social and political organization. The revolution now proceeding has produced this effect. It has led modern historians to concentrate, perhaps unduly, upon the investigation of economic causes and conditions. From this modern point of view the Bank of England or the Standard Oil Company is as fruitful and important a subject of historical research as the policy of a prime minister or the strategy of a general. But this attitude is unusual. The financial revolution associated with the realms of Gyges and Pheidon had been accepted by the whole Greek world before the outbreak of the Persian wars. For writers of the new epoch that began with Salamis and Plataea economic conditions must have appeared a changeless and somewhat boring factor. If the early tyrants had previously been kings of finance or industry, we must not expect many statements or illustrations of the fact in the Persian Wars of Herodotus, or the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides. It should satisfy us if, as is the case, their allusions to the tyranny are all in complete harmony with that hypothesis.

The writers of the fourth century offer a more serious difficulty. Both Plato and Aristotle deal at some length with the origin of tyranny, and both give explanations quite different from the one that is here offered. As their accounts have been the basis of all subsequent views, it is necessary to state briefly what they are.

According to Plato^[151] “it is fairly plain that tyranny develops out of democracy.”

When a tyrant comes into being, the root he springs from is the people’s champion, and no other.... What then is the beginning of the change from protector to tyrant?... The people’s champion finding a multitude very ready to follow him... enslaves and slaughters, and hints at the abolition of debts and the partition of land. When such a man so behaves, is he not subsequently bound and doomed either to be destroyed by his enemies or to become tyrant and be changed from a man into a wolf? This is what becomes of the leader of the rebellion against the owners of property^[152].

Plato goes on to describe how the tyrant either gets banished and effects his return by force or avoids exile only by the famous expedient of demanding a bodyguard.

Aristotle’s account is similar, but less rigid, and emphasizes the military element. “In ancient times, whenever the same individual became both demagogue and general, the result was a tyranny. It is fairly true to say that the majority of the early tyrants have developed out of demagogues^[153].” Other tyrants he describes as establishing themselves as such after having previously either reigned as kings or held for a long period some important office^[154]. In ancient times Aristotle includes the fifth century (and perhaps the beginning of the fourth), as is shown by his quoting Dionysius of Syracuse^[155]. Plato’s treatment is less historical, but as he specifically excludes the possibility of any other sort of tyrant pedigree than that he gives, his account is plainly meant to hold good for all periods^[156].

In short both Plato and Aristotle regard their accounts of the tyrant’s origin as being of general application. As such they have always been accepted, and not at first sight without reason. The Platonic-Aristotelian pedigree (with an alternative) is already ascribed to the tyrant by Herodotus: “under a democracy it is impossible for corruption not to prevail..., until some individual, championing the people (p??st?? t?? d???) blossoms out into a monarch (?e?te ???a???? = tyrant)^[157].” But what are the facts? The process just described makes the early tyrant develop out of a demagogue who is usually also a general. Demagogues may have existed in Greece before tyrannies began to be established; but the evidence for their having done so is extraordinarily meagre^[158], and it is highly doubtful whether Aristotle adds to it. He does not attempt a picture of a seventh or sixth century demagogue. Those of his own day secured their influence by confiscations effected through the popular courts^[159]. They are essentially the product of a full-blown democracy, and pretyrannical democracies are extremely doubtful. Athens is a special and only partial case, and even there, in spite of Solon, Herodotus^[160] can speak of Cleisthenes, who overthrew the tyranny, as “the man who established the democracy.” The demagogues from whom Aristotle derives his early tyrants are mainly military demagogues: “the tyrant,” he says, “is also prone to make war^[161].”

This statement is hardly borne out by the facts. As a body, in spite of the times they lived in, the early tyrants were remarkable for their works not of war but of peace^[162]. Some of them indeed, as for instance Orthagoras and Peisistratus, are reported to have distinguished themselves as soldiers before they became tyrants. The warlike exploits of the youthful Orthagoras are discussed below^[163]. He cannot have been really prone to militarism, since Aristotle declares that a successor of his altered the character of the Sicyonian tyranny by becoming warlike^[164]. Peisistratus’ early feats of war are well attested. Naturally enough he made political capital out of them. “He asked of the people that he should receive from them a bodyguard, having previously distinguished himself in the expedition against Megara, when he captured Nisaea and performed other great deeds^[165].” But earlier in the same chapter Herodotus has made it perfectly plain that Peisistratus was not a military despot. “Having formed designs on the tyranny he raised a third faction, and having collected partizans, and posing as a champion of the Hillmen, he devised as follows.” It was the faction of the Hillmen and not^[166] the Megarean expedition, that was the stepping-stone to the tyranny. Who the Hillmen were is discussed in the chapter on Athens. It has never been suggested that they were military^[167].

A military demagogue who makes himself tyrant is essentially the product of an advanced democracy threatened by invasion from without. When the tyrants of the seventh and sixth centuries secured their positions there was no foreign invader without the gates and no democracy within. Aristotle^[168] calls democracy “the last word in tyranny” (? te?e?ta?a t??a????). From the point of view of historical development the converse comes much nearer to the truth, and tyranny is the first word in democracy. "and is due to false generalizations from the conditions of their own days," The evolution of the tyrant as described in Aristotle and Plato cannot have taken place until after the reforms of Cleisthenes or precisely the period when the last of the early tyrants was finally banished from Greece. The two philosophers, and likewise Herodotus in the passage just quoted^[169], must be reading into more ancient times a state of things that only became prevalent shortly before their own^[170]. The words of Herodotus are put into the mouth of Darius. This means that they really hang loose and may be influenced by the careers of contemporary demagogues like Cleon.

But the main source of error lies in Plato and Aristotle, and is still more obvious. The most distinguished figure in the political history of the early part of the fourth century was Dionysius of Syracuse. Dionysius is, like Plato’s tyrant in the Republic, the product of democracy: like Aristotle’s in the Politics he begins his career as a military demagogue. The resemblances are not accidental. Dionysius made himself tyrant when Plato was just reaching manhood. Plato visited his court and few political experiments have become more famous than Plato’s attempt to turn the tyrant’s son into the ideal philosopher king^[171]. Aristotle naturally shared his master’s interest in the famous Syracusan. His Politics bears frequent witness to the fact. It contains only eight references each to the tyrant houses of Corinth and Athens as against twenty to those of Syracuse (eleven to the Dionysii and Dion, nine to the Deinomenidae). Of the three individuals, Theagenes, Peisistratus, Dionysius, chosen to illustrate the way a tyrant may be produced out of a military demagogue, Dionysius is the only one whose career the process fits.

Other philosophers of the period wrote under the same dominant influence, notably Aeschines the Socratic, and Aristippus, both of whom had stayed with the tyrant^[172]. Similarly with the fourth century historians: their notion of a tyrant was Dionysius as described by that potentate’s own historian, his fellow-citizen Philistus.

Everything tended to confirm this view. The greatness of Dionysius naturally drew attention to that of Gelo and Hiero, his predecessors at Syracuse. Gelo and Hiero were, like Dionysius, military despots. To later generations they were the great soldiers who had saved Sicily from the Carthaginians and Etruscans. Their contemporary Pausanias had tried to raise himself from generalissimo of the Greek army to tyrant of all Greece^[173]. These events were still in men’s minds. Of the earlier tyrants they had only hazy notions^[174]. The best remembered were probably the Peisistratids, both from their late date and from the fact that they were Athenians. Peisistratus, as has been already noticed, chanced early in his career to have distinguished himself as a soldier. It so happened that Polycrates, the other great tyrant of the latter half of the sixth century, also engaged in war. It was forced upon him by the Persians. The evidence is all against the view that it was the basis of his power. But the warlike achievements of these two rulers, the last and perhaps the greatest of the earlier tyrants, lent colour to Aristotle’s hasty generalizations^[175].

Aristotle himself, speaking of the ways of maintaining a tyranny, says that “the traditional method, in accordance with which most tyrants conduct their government, is said to have been mainly instituted by Periander of Corinth^[176]?” Only a few pages later in the same work^[177] we are told that Periander abandoned the policy of his father Cypselus and that he did so by becoming warlike or in other words by approximating more to Dionysius of Syracuse. Once more then the typical tyrant of Aristotle is a ruler who departs from the policy of a typical founder of an early tyranny.

For an example of the victory of the Aristotelian view over the truth we may compare Herodotus, I. 59, which states that Peisistratus, who had fought against Megara, made himself tyrant by means of the faction of the Hillmen, with Justin, II. 8, according to whom “Peisistratus, as though he had conquered (the Megareans) for himself, not for his country, seized by craft the tyranny.” Justin is a perversion of a passage in Chapter 14 of the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens, which states that Peisistratus, “having the reputation of being a great friend of the people, and having greatly distinguished himself in the war against Megara,” secured his bodyguard and the tyranny. Aristotle misinterprets the Hillmen and exaggerates the importance of the Megarean expedition. Justin omits the former altogether and makes the latter the sole cause of Peisistratus obtaining the tyranny.

Aristotle’s conception of the tyrant class as drawn mainly from that of the military demagogue was taken over by the Romans. In the chapter on Rome it will be shown how little this conception fits in with the Romans’ own early history. But the times before the great wars at Rome (Samnite, Pyrrhic, Punic) are like those before the Persian wars in Greece. They belong to a different epoch from those that follow. The later history of the Roman republic harmonizes with Aristotle’s view. The Gracchi may be represented as demagogues who failed to make themselves supreme for lack of military power^[178]. Marius, Pompey, and Caesar succeeded in proportion as they realized the Aristotelian combination. The fourth century conception was therefore unchallenged by Roman writers, the more so since Dionysius appears for a while to have dominated the Roman conception of a Greek tyrant^[179]. Fortunately however, owing to the careless way the Roman historians worked over their material, they have left us glimpses of the different conditions that had once existed.

The view that was thus disseminated in classical Greece and Rome was naturally accepted by the scholars of the renaissance and has prevailed ever since.