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Form and Content: The Question of Tyranny in Herodotus
- University of Texas Press
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C A R O L Y N D E W A L D F O R M A N D C O N T E N T : T H E Q U E S T I O N O F T Y R A N N Y I N H E R O D O T U S At the moment there does not seem to be much scholarly consensus on the Archaic Greek tyrants and what they meant to their cities’ political development .1 The tyrant as a moral monster and tyranny as the lowest form of government, autocracy unconstrained by law or custom, was a fourth-century construct. Plato, Aristotle, and their contemporaries fashioned it out of earlier hostile formulations of the idea of the tyrant, but they were also responding to early fourth-century political contexts and theoretical issues.2 When we turn back to the extremely scanty and mostly poetic contemporary evidence for the Archaic Greek tyrannies themselves, the picture becomes no clearer. It is not certain where the word tyrannos itself came from or what its original semantic field was.3 Nor is our sense of a general development in Archaic Greek political structures as definite as it might be. There is little convincing evidence for the widespread phenomenon of an eighth-century basileus as a reigning monarch unseated by aristocratic clans. It is also hard to document the specifics of a seventh-century ‘‘hoplite revolution’’; in particular, we can no longer link that revolution with some sort of newly enfranchised or newly wealthy body of citizens forcing change on a traditional aristocracy.4 Whether and/or how the Archaic tyrannies were relevant to the development of a civic consciousness, the rule of law, the creation of mass politics, or even a money economy—all these issues currently remain under discussion.5 Given the uncertain parameters of what was after all a historical phenomenon of real interest, it is not surprising that historians turn with particular attention to Herodotus. Herodotus gives us the first extensive prose narrative about the Archaic tyrannies, and he is the first extant Greek author to describe them in their social and political contexts. But historiographers continue to debate whether Herodotus’ Histories present a portrait of the Archaic and Early Classical tyrannies that is systematically hostile (in effect, 25 anticipating the more elaborately constructed schemata of Plato and Aristotle ) or whether his logoi, stories, about tyrants and tyranny do something else that is more complicated and ambiguous.6 The problem of tyranny in Herodotus is a particularly useful and interesting one, because it allows us to look closely at some of the ways in which narrative history shapes its material and in shaping it, necessarily creates patterns in the data it presents. Here we will first look at how the Histories taken as a whole produce a strongly negative pattern of despotism and what it does to people and institutions . In this development the Archaic Greek tyrants certainly play a role: they share in the negative thematic connotations of the pattern of autocratic tyranny and its coercive powers. But if we focus instead on the portraits that Herodotus constructs of the Greek tyrants as individual actors in events, the picture that emerges is rather one of idiosyncratic personal achievement of the very sort that Herodotus thinks large-scale autocracy threatens. Thus if we are trying to tease out the notion of Greek tyranny in Herodotus, the foregrounded portraits of tyrants in the individual logoi and the diachronic, larger thematic patterns about monarchical autocracy in general do not carry the same message, although Greek tyrants figure in both. The resulting ambiguity or doubleness of Herodotus’ treatment of despotism and despots is encoded in the basic doubleness of Herodotus’ narrative structures. As Charles Olson, one of the founding fathers of postmodernism, opined: ‘‘Form is never more than an expression of content.’’7 Herodotus’ work is both an ongoing narrative with substantial thematic continuity linking together its various parts and a paratactic progression of individual logoi. The tension or inherent contradiction between the overarching structure of the ongoing narrative and the idiosyncratic autonomy of the individual logoi qua logoi both reproduces and reflects upon the tension between despotism as an organizing theme in the Histories and the individual portraits of highly autonomous Greek tyrants within the narrative. T H E T Y R A N T A S D E S P O T The case for Herodotus’ deliberately negative...