The Heroic Rulers of Archaic and Classical Greece

Lynette Mitchell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781472513465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte antiguo

With an in-depth exploration of rule by a single man and how this was seen as heroic activity, the title challenges orthodox views of ruling in the ancient world and breaks down traditional ideas about the relationship between so-called hereditary rule and tyranny. It looks at how a common heroic ideology among rulers was based upon excellence, or arete, and also surveys dynastic ruling, where rule was in some sense shared within the family or clan. Heroic Rulers examines reasons why both personal and clan-based rule was particularly unstable and its core tension with the competitive nature of Greek society, so that the question of who had the most arete was an issue of debate both from within the ruling family and from other heroic aspirants. Probing into ancient perspectives on the legitimacy and legality of rule, the title also explores the relationship between ruling and law. Law, personified as 'king' ( nomos basileus ), came to be seen as the ultimate source of sovereignty especially as expressed through the constitutional machinery of the city, and became an important balance and constraint for personal rule. Finally, Heroic Rulers demonstrates that monarchy, which is generally thought to have disappeared before the end of the archaic period, remained a valid political option from the Early Iron Age through to the Hellenistic period.

1

Basileia and tyrannis: Exploding myths

In the early archaic period, basileus and tyrannos (which was an imported word, and does not appear at all in Homer) seemed to be used synonymously. It is often noted that the first usage of tyrannos is in the poetry of Archilochus, who rejects the wealth of Gyges, but not necessarily the rule of one man (fr. 19 IE West). It is clear that by the late sixth century, however, tyrannos, or at least Asian rule with which tyrannis seems to have been associated, could be understood more negatively.¹ Certainly Xenophanes rejects Lydian tyranny, just as he rejects Asian luxury (fr. 3 West = DK 21 F3):

Having learned useless luxury from the Lydians,
while still free from hateful tyranny (stugera tyrannis),
they come into the market-place wearing purple cloaks,
as often as not in their thousands,
proudly glorying in their beautiful locks,
steeping their body odour in rare unguents.

However, even in the early fifth century Pindar could call the Deinomenids both basileis (Pindar, Ol. 1.23 [cf. 114], Pyth. 1.60, 3.70) and tyrannoi (Pindar, Pyth. 3.84–6), which he could not have used interchangeably if tyrannos was a negative term, especially since he was a singer of praise. It is worth noting in this connection that basileis and tyrants could also be vilified in the same terms – Achilles called Agamemnon a dēmoboros basileus, a ‘people-eating’ basileus (Il. 1.231), just as Theognis can say:

Cyrnus, respect the gods and fear them,
for this prevents a man from doing or saying impious things.
But for laying low a dēmos-devouring (dēmophagos) tyrannos, in whatever way you wish,
there is no retribution (nemesis) from the gods. (1179–82)

There were always reasons to resent a man who stood alone.

There has been a lot of uncertainty in modern scholarship about the historical relationship between basileia and tyrannis. On one level this has to do with how ruling in early societies might be understood, and whether, and in what terms, we can really talk about rulers in early or pre-state contexts. The other major issue is the apparent contrast between basileia and tyrannis, and the change from an age of basileis to an age of tyrannoi, marked by an alleged shift in values between the two different kinds of rulers. One of the major issues in this book is whether basileia and tyrannis are two separate, temporally distinct phenomena, or whether they can be considered together as part of the same ideological and value system. This question, of course, as already indicated in the Introduction, has a bearing on how and where we are prepared to make the breaks in our analyses of ancient societies, and whether we always have to make the distinctions our sources suggest to us are important. Yet before we turn to the problems for our interpretation created by ancient sources, and Thucydides in particular, we need to address the issue of ruling itself, and discuss who or what a ruler might be.

Kings, Big Men, and chiefs?

The ambivalence in our sources about rulers has caused problems for modern scholarship on actual rulers in the archaic and classical periods, as opposed to the mythical or stereotyped ones found in sources which post-date the mid to late fifth century. The uncertainty has been exacerbated by a lack of clarity about how the office of basileus might be defined (if it is an office), and how it might relate to other forms of one-man rule (including tyranny). A prominent feature of modern discussions about ruling in Greece is also the extent to which monarchoi, basileis and tyrannoi compare with ‘proper’ kingship, or ‘our sense’ of kings. What seems to be meant by ‘proper’ kings are the feudal rulers of medieval Europe. However, confidence in medieval Europe for providing stable comparanda against which other rulers could be judged is misplaced. In medieval Europe there is no single model for kingship, but the variety of forms was great and included elective kingship as well as both hereditary kingship and sometimes not much more than warrior chieftainship. Not all of these rulers were strictly feudal, and relatively few provided lasting political stability. What is more interesting, and more notable, is the extent to which, and the ways in which, most applied energy, resources and strategies to prove that as a sole ruler they held rule legitimately.²

Defining kingship is as much a problem for anthropologists as for classicists, since a stable and consistent theorization of kingship in political terms is difficult to pin down and analyse. The problem has not been helped by the fact that the technical terminology for chieftainship and kingship has not been defined conclusively, and is sometimes used interchangeably. For Sahlins, for example, a chief belongs in a ranked society and a king in a state (or stratified society);³ for Carneiro a chief belongs to a chiefdom (an aggregation of villages, organized as a stratified society) and a king to a kingdom (a post-stratified formation, that is, a state), both taking an explicitly evolutionary view of state development.⁴ On the other hand, in regard to Africa, chief-tainship and kingship have often been used interchangeably, which makes it difficult to adhere to technical terms and meanings.⁵

Indeed, the political nature of the phenomenon of kingship (qua kingship) has rarely been analysed in detail. Since Frazer’s Golden Bough, anthropologists have generally been more interested in kingship in terms of ritual and symbol as expressions of power.⁶ So, for instance the idea of ‘sacred’ or ‘divine’ kingship, which has been a particularly powerful tool for understanding the phenomenon of kingship, has been explored and analysed in a number of societies in Africa, the Near East, Europe and the Mediterranean, and comparatively across societies in different periods.⁷ Divine kingship as a means of understanding Near Eastern kingship has been particularly productive, especially in Egypt, where the divine king maintained order in the cosmos through the performance of ritual and ceremonial, and in the Islamic world where the so-called ‘absolutist imperative’ reflects the relationship of the king to his subjects by mirroring that of God and mortals.⁸

Yet even in Egypt this focus on the divine only takes us so far as a means of understanding kingship as a whole phenomenon,⁹ and more recent scholarship has wanted to emphasize the mortality of the pharaoh as an adjunct to his divine status. O’Connor and Silverman state clearly the current scholarly orthodoxy:

Kingship [in Egypt] is a divine institution, in a way itself a god, or at least an image of the divine and capable of becoming its manifestation; each incumbent, each pharaoh, is fundamentally a human being, subject to humankind’s limitations. When the king took part in the roles of his office, especially in rituals and ceremonies, his being became suffused with the same divinity manifest in his office and the gods themselves. With this capacity, the king would be empowered to carry out the actual symbolic acts that contributed to the maintenance and rebirth of cosmos. Indeed in these contexts, the king acted as a creator deity and became the sun-god. On these occasions pharaoh would be recognized by those who saw him as imbued with divinity, characteristically radiant and giving off a fragrant aroma.¹⁰

On the other hand, the case of Persia is also often cited as one where the king is not involved in divinity, although this is now being challenged, and the new consensus seems to be moving towards an understanding of Persian monarchy which emphasizes the ambiguity of the king as man and god.¹¹ As we shall see, the relationship of ruling to the divine was also a matter of concern in Greece, although it was not until the fourth century that a living ruler dared to call himself a god (and even Alexander may have recognized the twin aspects of a mortal and immortal existence: Plut. Alex. 28).

In Greece ruling was not just about divinity, although the roles which rulers may have played, especially in the developing polis, have been debated. In part, this discussion has become mired in questions about the relationship of the Homeric texts to archaic society, state development and the legitimacy of tyrannical rule. Furthermore, modern scholarship has sometimes been uneasy about whether we can refer to ‘kings’ at all in archaic and classical Greece. Drews and Murray, in particular, are sceptical about early Greek kingship. Drews has made a case for discounting most of the supposed Dark Age kings of later sources, and argued for rule by aristocracies.¹² Murray tends to take a more moderate view, but suggests that basileis were the heads of noble families whose primary responsibilities relate to debate, warfare and the arbitration of disputes.¹³ Pierre Carlier is more positive about the number and role of kings in Homer and archaic Greece, although he rejects tyrannoi as illegitimate rulers and so does not consider them.¹⁴ He also detects a decline in kingship with the rise of the polis, and a tendency in the classical period for the office of kings to be presented as magistracies. Starr expresses surprise at what he thinks is the quiet disappearance of the basileis, but thinks that the decline was swift.¹⁵ For Qviller, the institution of kingship was ‘seriously dysfunctional’ in early Greece, and so disappeared unnoticed.¹⁶

For those who think that it is not appropriate to talk about ‘kingship’ in Greece, there is little agreement about what models we should be adopting in its place. Drawing on the influential (though sometim...