Tyranny and Democracy in Isocrates and Xenophon

Thucydides famously states in the methodological introduction to his history (1.20.1) that “people tend to accept uncritically oral traditions of the past handed down to them, even when these concern their own country”. As an example, he cites the popular but mistaken belief in Athens that Harmodius and Aristogeiton liberated the city from the Peisistratid tyranny by assassinating Hipparchus (1.20.2), and develops at length his refutation of this historical misconception in a flashback situated in a narrative context redolent not only of tyranny, but also of democratic power and imperialism.1 It is no coincidence that the so-called tyrannicides very early on became associated with not only the expulsion of the tyrants, but also with the foundation of democracy in Athens (inconvenient intervening events having been excised from the collective memory of the Athenians). After the brief oligarchical interludes at the end of the fifth century, the Athenian democracy was refounded in the wake of the polis’ liberation from a new set of rulers popularly identified as tyrants, the Thirty. It is in this late fifth-century historical context that the foundation narrative of the Athenian democracy privileging the role of the tyrannicides was newly enshrined,2 and public discourse on tyranny consisted generally of knee-jerk reactions of the demos, such as the