The Way of Oligarchs & The Tyrant

A Small Story About the Birth & Loss of Ancient Greek Democracy

Marble stele inscribed with a decree of the Athenian boulē, an ancient Greek legislative council (wikimedia)

Miei car’amici, my dear friends, it is true that if we did not know the ancient Greeks for their Democracy, we may know them equally well for their tyranny.

You see, in this corner of the ancient world, the self-governance of citizens was born, not out of kind enlightenment, but through a chaos full of warring oligarchs and power-hungry tyrants.

Her difficult birth was seeded centuries earlier when the Greeks began to run out of land. Land on which they had been turning plants into products that were then turned into great wealth on the vast markets across the Sea.¹

Off of such land, a common free man could transform himself into a Greek elite.² As earlier generations had done away with blood requirements to enter to the aristocracy, all that mattered was his ability to compete.³

And to do so ferociously and in all things: trade, sport, politics, dance, reputation, wealth, power, love.⁴

For several generations, Greek life had grown in this way. The earlier era of the village and their basileus, who led and answered to them, was pushed aside. Instead, the newly wealthy turned from that common life and began to answer only to one another.⁵

In fact, in their very first laws, they declared that power would be shared exclusively amongst themselves.⁶ Then they went about shaping the whole of the common life around them. Cities were molded to serve their ends. Trade agreements were carved to cut out the common man. Laborers were given, without negotiation, hard demands.⁷

All things were done in whatever ways pleased them. Dressed in costly purple robes, they poured the best of the wine over poetic performances high in their luxurious symposiums.⁸ Without a blink of concern for village, citizen, or the common life below them.

Symposium scene: banqueters playing kottabos, an ancient drinking game, while a girl plays the aulos (wikimedia)

With these new heights arose new problems. Assassinations and paranoia. Scheming and hidden alliances. Power plays and law-breaking. Exile and even, at times, stasis.

Or as you would call it in your tongue, civil war. ⁹