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J O S I A H O B E R T Y R A N T K I L L I N G A S T H E R A P E U T I C S T A S I S : A P O L I T I C A L D E B A T E I N I M A G E S A N D T E X T S My starting point is the evolving relationship between Athenian democratic ideology and the arguments developed by politically dissident Athenians, that is, those who were not willing to accept that democracy was the best of all political worlds or even the best that could reasonably be hoped for.1 I have argued elsewhere that democratic ideology, with its quasi-hegemonic tendencies, was challenged in texts produced by members of an informal yet self-consciously critical ‘‘community of interpretation.’’2 Here, I hope to show that the contest between democratic ideology and a dissident sensibility that sought political alternatives informs some notable moments in the long and intellectually fertile Greek engagement with the concept of tyranny. As other essays in this volume have demonstrated, the general issue of the tyrant, his nature, and what to do about him was conceptually very important within Athenian democratic ideology and equally important within what I am calling the ‘‘dissident sensibility.’’ But the tyrant issue was also important for debates between democrats and their critics from the early fifth century .. through the late fourth. Both democrats and dissidents agreed in general terms on why tyranny is at once morally and politically unacceptable : the tyrant is wicked because he uses illegitimately acquired public power systematically to alienate from ‘‘us’’ that which is most dear to us.3 Tyranny, by embodying a negative political extreme, the intolerable politeia (or nonpoliteia ), in turn helps to define what ‘‘we’’ require ‘‘our own’’ politeia (present or hoped-for) to secure and ensure for us. It also helped dissident Greek intellectuals to explore the positive political extreme—the ideal or best-possible politeia, and it helped them to think more deeply about ‘‘moderate’’ political alternatives.4 In the context of debate, certain questions arise: Who is the (actual or potential) tyrant? Who are ‘‘we’’? What should we do about tyrants? The an215 swers to these questions will help to establish some conceptual similarities between democrats and their opponents but also to distinguish democratic ideology from critical challenges. In brief summary: For Classical Greek democrats, the tyrant can be defined as anyone who would seek to overthrow ‘‘we the demos.’’ This demotic definition equates oligarchic revolutionaries with tyrants. An obvious example of conflation is Thucydides’ reference to Athenian demotic fears of an ‘‘oligarchico-tyrannical conspiracy’’ (ἐπὶ ξυνωμοσίᾳ ὀλιγαρχικῇ καὶ τυραννικῇ, ..). The democratic association of oligarchs with tyrants is one reason that tyranny remained such a lively issue for the Athenian for so long after the threat of ‘‘actual’’ tyranny (of the Archaic Greek sort) was past.5 Defense of the democracy tended to be equated with resistance to tyrants. That resistance might culminate in tyrannicide and therefore murderous violence by citizens against fellow citizens. Tyrant slaying thus becomes, in democratic ideology, a rare example of therapeutic civil conflict. Dissidents, in seeking alternatives to democratic ideology, sought to complicate this simple scenario. They argued that the demos was the real tyrant. They posited a spectrum of regimes as an alternative to the binary ‘‘democracy/tyranny’’ political universe. They offered alternative narratives about the actions and motives of tyrannicides and about when stasis in the polis was and was not therapeutic. T H E D E M O C R A T I C I D E O L O G Y O F T Y R A N N Y I N I C O N O G R A P H Y A N D T E X T Among the arresting features of the ideological debate over tyranny is that it can be traced in both textual and iconographic registers. Moreover, the texts and iconography of tyrant killing are mutually implicated and in a variety of ways: texts referring to tyrannicide pay explicit and implicit homage to artistic monuments, and the iconography of tyrannicide is often transparently narrative. My discussion of the iconography of ‘‘democracy and tyranny’’ is necessarily selective. I begin with two very familiar monuments (Figs. ., ., .) from early and late in the history of the independent Athenian democracy . They are perhaps, for students of Athenian...

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