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L I S A K A L L E T D Ē M O S T Y R A N N O S : W E A L T H , P O W E R , A N D E C O N O M I C P A T R O N A G E The party line in fifth-century .. Athens on tyrants and tyranny is not difficult to find. The image of the tyrant as antithetical to, indeed the polar opposite of, the free community in general, and democracy in Athens specifically, is ubiquitous. The tyrant as ideological Other pervaded the discourse and life of the democratic polis, as several of the essays in this volume make clear. Euripides’ formulation in the Suppliants, when Theseus expresses the view that ‘‘nothing is more harmful to a city than a tyrant,’’ is typical:1 the presence of a tyrant means the absence of equality. The metaphor of the tyrant, and the historical memory of both the sixth-century Peisistratid tyranny and the threat of Persian domination, served to define Athenians and were re- flected not only in genres like tragedy but in the daily realities of democratic Athenian life. Such prominence has seemed surprising to some, for the Athenians had been free from tyranny since the late sixth century, and the institution of ostracism in theory effectively eliminated the possibility that tyranny might reappear in the polis. Yet, as Vincent Rosivach has pointed out, the figure of the tyrant was woven into the institutional fabric of the democracy, by means of procedures like the heliastic and bouleutic oaths (though we do not know exactly when these were initiated) and the heroizing of the ‘‘tyrant slayers,’’ Harmodius and Aristogeiton.2 In fact, these public reminders of tyranny bring out an essential point, namely, that tyranny was central to collective Athenian identity; it was something about which all Athenians could agree as represented in ‘‘official’’ discourse and therefore could serve as a crucial binding agent in a polis with otherwise conflicting and competing interests and ideologies , like those of the farmer, rower, trader, and wealthy landowning elite. Yet at the same time, Greek writers, mostly Athenian, played with the identity of Athens as a tyrant: thus not who we are not, but who we are. 117 The evident usefulness of the metaphorical image of the tyrant in contemporary discourse extended to both the polis’ role as ruler of an empire and the demos’ role as sovereign of Athens. Two questions immediately present themselves: first, in what way were the polis and the demos like a tyrant, and, second, was such a metaphor universally negative? Scholars examining the deployment of the metaphor of Athens the tyrant city have been concerned primarily with its imperial context of Athens as a tyrant ruling over its subjects in the archē (empire).3 This makes sense, given that the conception of the city as tyrant appears explicitly in connection with Athens’ rule over its allies. Less attention has been paid to the notion of the demos as tyrant in a domestic context, which is what I shall focus on here. I shall suggest in what follows that when we look at one remarkable feature of democratic Athens, namely, the demos’ control over and use of its massive public moneys, the conception of the demos as tyrant becomes more ambiguous, ranging (depending on context, speaker, and audience) from formulations that resist the identification to those that flirt with—if not broadcast—the notion, making it seem even appealing and empowering.4 Thus my approach and argument will differ substantially from those of Kurt Raaflaub and Josiah Ober in their essays, who view the metaphor of the tyrant as unequivocally negative by the fifth century (Raaflaub) or, relatedly, see its application to the demos emanating from democracy’s critics (Ober). Three points need to be made clear at the outset. First, dēmos tyrannos and polis tyrannos are clearly interrelated, in the same way as are Athenian democracy and archē.5 Thus the focus here on dēmos tyrannos aims not to create an artificial distinction but rather to give weight to the deployment of the metaphor in the domestic, political realm in an attempt to appreciate more fully and accurately its nuances in both democratic and imperial spheres. Second, the argument that the metaphor of tyranny was not deployed in a negative context alone does not deny or necessarily...

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