Peisistratiden tyranny in Athens

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The Peisistratiden tyranny in Athens is a phase in the archaic epoch of Athens, which was determined by the supremacy of Peisistratos and his successor sons Hippias and Hipparchus in the Athenian polis . This era, which lasted almost half a century, followed the Solonic reforms and resulted in the Kleisthenian reorganization of the Attic citizenship. In ancient historical research, the judgment on the Peisistratiden tyranny fluctuates, due to doubts and gaps in the historical sources, especially the question of what contribution Peisistratos and his sons made to the further development of the Attic state association.

Unclear tradition

The sources for the Athenian history of the 6th century BC BC is determined by the fact that practically no written evidence from this period exists. The earliest account of the Peisistratiden tyranny comes from Herodotus , who wrote 100 years later and had to rely on oral accounts. His portrayal contains legend-like elements that are not always easy to separate from historical reality. In contrast, Thucydides used the events of the tyrannical murder of Hipparchus to highlight his own meticulously scrutinizing approach as a historian. His depiction of the Athenian tyranny is limited to a few excerpts. The remarks by (pseudo-) Aristotle in the Athenaion Politeia , which emerged again 100 years later, are interspersed with anachronisms and projections. This leaves room for a variety of doubts and different interpretations. For example, some historians assume that Peisistratos tried not three times, but only twice, to rise to become the sole ruler. In part, the conventional chronology is also called into question, for example with the assumption of later life dates of the Peisistratus.

Conditions of origin of the tyranny in Attica

About the origins of the tyranny in Athens, Herodotus reports that three groups as followers of the nobles Lykourgos , Megakles and Peisistratos fought for supremacy in Athens: the “coastal inhabitants” ( Paraloi or Paralioi ), the “people from the plain” ( Pediakoi or Pedieis ), and the "inhabitants beyond the mountains" ( Hyperakrioi or Diakrioi ). This in the 5th century BC According to regional affiliation differentiated followers were in the Athenaion Politeia from the 4th century BC. Additionally attributed to certain constitutional preferences: The inhabitants of the Attic level therefore stood for an oligarchy ; the coastal inhabitants for a middle or mixed constitution type ; the inhabitants of the mountain regions for a particularly people-friendly rule. The Peisistratos, popular because of his leading role in the war against the Megarians, stood for the latter group .

The thus Aristotle assigned the three Attic regions for the 6th century BC. Constitutional preferences assigned to BC are considered by recent research as an anachronistic backprojection from the 4th century BC. Hardly seriously considered any more. But Herodotus' clear distinction between the respective followers according to major regions is not undisputed. Karl-Wilhelm Welwei does not see well-organized collectives in them, but rather temporary interest groups that were not composed uniformly in terms of their origins. In collecting his following, Peisistratos had at least temporarily gained numerical preponderance, which helped him to succeed. Even Michael Stahl does not recognize entrenched trailer blocks in the three opponents. As a reliable basis for his own ambitions for power in the disputes between nobles, he sees only the respective oikos , i.e. the direct possession with family and associated management staff. Gender associations or clientele relationships like those of the ancient Roman aristocracy did not arise in archaic Greece: “The individual acquisition of honor linked to the realization of aristocratic norms only takes place when the individual aristocrat his initially given economic and social isolation by consciously cultivating various aristocratic ones Forms of conviviality (e.g. hetairies , symposia , agonies ) as well as appearing in front of and serving the community public overcomes. "

Ambitious nobles not only sought support for their own strivings for supremacy in their own polis association, but also through hospitable relationships with external partners in other Greek polis. As a result, even if you were temporarily inferior or cut off from your own Oikos by exile , you were not left without support, but had the chance to return stronger with outside help. After two failed attempts to outflank rivals Lykourgos and Megakles like a coup d'état - and subsequent withdrawals from Attica - it was only in the third attempt that Peisistratos was able to establish the supremacy of a tyrant in Athens with the support of internal and external helpers. The exploitation of gold and silver mines on the Strymon in the Pangaion Mountains served him in almost 10 years of exile as an economic basis for the recruitment of mercenaries and for the acquisition of non-Athenian aristocrats as partners for his armed return company .

Features of the Peisistratiden rule

The special position of Peisistratids everyday Athens appeared evident in the mercenary - bodyguard who held up the tyrant regime demonstratively to intimidate opponents. The Athenian tyrants did not emerge as legislators; rather, the Solonic legal order continued to apply . However , the Peisistratids and their followers exercised significant influence on the filling of the important archon offices.

Many other measures of the Peisistratiden era mentioned in the later sources are under scrutiny in research as attributable weight or as historical fact at all. There are reasons for doubts, for example, with regard to the type and extent of the safeguarding of rule, including the position of hostages by noble families or with regard to the disarming of the entire citizenry. Only in the Athenaion Politeia is there talk of Peisistratos having appointed demenrichter and having worked in Attica in the countryside to get the citizens to settle their legal disputes there in order to keep them away from the center of Athens. As a financial policy measure, there is talk of a ten percent land yield tax, otherwise unknown in archaic Greece, and of the fact that the poor peasantry were given generous loans to appease them.

The building activity of the Peisistratids is also fraught with uncertainties, in particular with regard to dating, such as their share in the construction of the ancient Temple of Athena on the Acropolis, which was later destroyed by the Persians, and in the 6th century BC. New buildings erected on the Agora , the political center of Athens. In addition to a larger building complex, which comes into question as the residence and government seat of the Peisistratos, several other buildings that could be used for assemblies, jurisdiction and administration. A well house built at the time ensured a significantly improved water supply for the city center. The 522 BC served cultic purposes. Twelve gods altar erected on the agora .

The foreign policy situation of Athens at the time of the Peisistratiden tyranny remained largely stable. Militarily risky companies were avoided. Peisistratos was able to achieve a prestigious success with the recovery of Sigeion in the fight with Mytilene . An important trading post for the Black Sea region was thus back in Athenian hands.

Overthrow of the regime

After the death of Peisistratos in 528/27 BC The sons Hippias and Hipparchus continued the father's regime as the undisputed heirs. In the occupation of the highest-ranking archonate , Hippias, who held the office personally in 526/25, was followed by the Alkmeonide and later reformer Kleisthenes . Apparently, the successors of the Peisistratos tried to cooperate with prominent Attic noble houses at the highest level. The Alkmeonids, however, went back into exile soon after Kleisthenes' archon, probably in order to position themselves against the tyrants - initially in vain.

The extent to which the tyrant regime caused criticism and subliminal resistance in Athens before the overthrowing activities of the assassins Harmodios and Aristogeiton is not known. However, those who were later celebrated as murderers of tyrants reckoned with their attack during the Great Panathenaic Mountains in 514 BC. With support in the citizenry. Only a few people knew about their assassination plan. When their original plan to kill Hippias, who was waiting for the Panathenaic pageant on the Acropolis, the leading head of the tyrant team, might be the first to fail due to a misunderstanding, they killed their brother Hipparchus, who was still in the agora, who was still in charge of the procession. While Harmodios was immediately killed, Aristogeiton was subjected to torture after his capture in order to find out who knew it. The Constitution of the Athenians , according to Hippias has finally slain himself.

Afterwards, the hippias, who were now suspicious of many, hardened his tyrannical regime and thus strengthened the potential for resistance, without the Alkmeonids, who were working towards the overthrow of the regime, having been able to assert themselves with their supporters. Only the help of the Spartan King Cleomenes I , who allegedly followed Delphic oracles , led to repeated sieges of the refuge of Hippias on the Acropolis and finally 510 BC. To his exile, negotiated under pressure.

Historical classification of the Athenian tyranny

The assessments of the direction, handling, effects and significance of the Peisitratiden tyranny fluctuated among the ancient source authors since Herodotus. In modern research on ancient history, the judgments depend not least on which of the sources' statements are accepted as historical facts and used or rejected as incorrect. Central is the question of the significance of tyranny for the further political development of Attica.

Broad ancient spectrum

The sources already in ancient Greece of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Chr. Show a range of judgment on the Peisistratiden tyranny, which extends from a damn memorial on the Acropolis to the praise of a resurrected Golden Age . These extremely controversial evaluations become mentally comprehensible if one assumes with Pedro Barceló that their creation was based on changing situations in the domestic politics of Athens.

Up to the fatal attack on Hipparchus, Thucydides and the Athenaion Politeia of the Peisistratiden tyranny, which established and maintained peace, set impulses for economic and cultural development, and acted in a relatively moderate, sensible and people-friendly manner, gave primarily positive testimony to the fatal attack on Hipparchus . Herodotus, on the other hand, says that the regime under Hippias only became more oppressive after the assassination than it was before.

As a reason for the 5th century BC The anti-tyrant awareness in Athens, which was clearly pronounced in the 3rd century BC, refers Barceló to the repeated attempts of the exiled Hippias - first with Spartan, then with Persian help - to return to Athens in the former position of power. The self-assertion achieved in the Persian Wars with the use of all forces led the Athenians to link the fear of Persians to the trauma of tyrants and shaped the political consciousness of the citizens. In this context, the murderers of tyrants Harmodios and Aristogeiton have risen to found freedom and founders of the democratic form of government and have become publicly venerated identification figures. The originally aristocratic anti-tyrannical battle slogan and demand for isonomy had in this way become a radically democratic idea of equality, which applied to all citizens: “In the polis of the Athenians, both tendencies were united, namely the demand for isonomy, the defensive stance against Assumption of power by individuals born from the intellectual world of the nobility, and the idea of ​​the complementary terms democracy and isonomy, adapted by the entire citizenry, to form the ideological housing of the democratic form of government. "

It was only against the background of the experience of the development of the democratic system in the course of the external increase in power of the Athenians, however, that tyranny as a form of rule also became constitutionally important and an important element in Herodotus' constitutional debate . By tyranny as the well-known negative counter-image to the 5th century BC. It was established as a derogatory term in various variants as common property. It became a catchphrase for everyday use, for example, with Euripides , who in a drama apostrophized children and women as "a great tyranny for men". The term tyranny took another highly political turn, where it was applied to Athens' position in the Attic League . In the context of the origins of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides reproduces the politically most influential Athenian Pericles in an address to his fellow citizens with the words:

“And if our city is honored because of its rule and you are all proud of it, it is now your turn to come to your aid and not to evade the hardship […] and do not believe that this fight would work only about the one thing, not to become slaves instead of free, but you are also threatened with the loss of your kingdom and the dangers of hatred that grew out of your rule [...] because the rule that you exercise is already tyrannical; It may be unfair to raise it up, but it is dangerous to give it up. "

With the destabilization of the Periclean democracy in the course of the Peloponnesian War, according to Barceló, the condemnation of the Peisitratiden tyranny, connected with the exaggeration of democracy, was at the end of the 5th century BC. BC no longer a matter of course and in some cases gave way to a completely different view: In the Athenaion Politeia, the Athenian tyranny took on the traits of a golden age; and in the pseudo-Platonic dialogue " Hipparchus " a literary memorial was created for the murdered Peisistratiden.

Newer research positions

Michael Stahl regards the emergence of tyranny as the logical result of the course of archaic history with its aristocratic power struggles. The tyranny helped the statehood in the Athenian community to finally enforce. Although the tyranny has not changed the basic conditions of the social structure, it has shown all citizens the advantages of an institutional concentration of power. On the agora , the Peisistratids created a new state center through construction work, including the construction of the Twelve Gods Altar and the well house. The new construction of the agora aimed to involve broad sections of the population: "This was served by the places of worship as well as the fountains and the provision of larger traffic areas for the market and finally the facilitation of the orderly coexistence through the promotion of the state administration."
The introduction of land yield taxes in the form of taxes in kind the tyrants primarily served to maintain their own position of power. With them, however, important community tasks were also financed, such as mercenary wages, loans to farmers in need (in the form of seeds) and payment in kind for the craftsmen involved in the construction of the places of worship. The expansion of the Athena cult and the Panathenaia by the Peisistratids established a mythical-cultic representation of the national identity of Athens, "which also connects tyranny with classical democracy in this respect."

Karl-Wilhelm Welwei opposes a view according to which statehood and civic awareness have received important impulses from the Peisistratiden tyranny. Rather, after his third and successful attempt, Peisistratos tried to exercise moderate power and wanted to guarantee peace and security. But with the establishment of tyranny he intervened in a functioning political order and had no other concept than “a multi-faceted policy of securing power”. Neither public buildings nor the glamorous design of the cult festivals would have created a new point of reference for political ties to the community for broader strata.
The fact that Peisistratos could not simply replace the polis order created by Solon with an institutionalized monarchy serves Welwei as evidence of the viability of the Solonic foundations. On the other hand, with the establishment of tyranny, political life stagnated in the community. According to Welwei, the Peisistratiden did not take a single measure in three and a half decades of their rule, which should be viewed as a future-oriented reform. It was only the kleisthenic reforms that led out of the domestic and foreign policy impasse of the tyrannical era: "The line from Solon's eunomia idea to the understanding of democracy in the classical period led past the tyranny in Athens."

According to Loretana de Libero , the Peisistratiden secured their own rule by means of a double strategy: elimination of the most prominent nobles on the one hand and cooperation with the less dangerous “average” on the other. According to Libero, decisive for the subsequent political development of Athens was the pushing back of the nobility from their traditional fields of activity, which also resulted in a loss of influence and importance. The continuing Solonic order was able to become established and firmly rooted in this way. Even without successful Spartan intervention, the Peisistratiden tyranny would soon have been ousted from power by other forces, Libero said. "Despite all references to aristocratic traditions, mentalities and ways of acting, the Athenian tyranny was not an unnecessary interlude, despite its recognizable backwardness, but inadvertently and unconsciously created some of the prerequisites that were to come into play in the political development towards isonomy in Athens."

literature

  • Pedro Barceló : Thucydides and the tyranny. In: Historia . Vol. 39, No. 4 1990, pp. 401-425, JSTOR 4436164 .
  • Helmut Berve : The tyranny among the Greeks. 2 volumes. CH Beck, Munich 1967.
  • Konrad H. Kinzl (Ed.): The Elderly Tyrannis up to the Persian Wars. Contributions to Greek tyranny (= ways of research. Vol. 510). Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1979, ISBN 3-534-07318-5 .
  • Frank Kolb : The building, religious and cultural policy of the Peisistratiden. In: Yearbook of the German Archaeological Institute. Vol. 92, 1977, ISSN  0931-7007 , pp. 99-138.
  • Loretana de Libero : The Archaic Tyranny. Steiner, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-515-06920-8 (partly at the same time: Göttingen, University, habilitation paper, 1995).
  • James F. McGlew: Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY et al. 1993, ISBN 0-8014-2787-8 .
  • Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg (Ed.): Peisistratos and the Tyranny. A Reappraisal of the Evidence (= Publications of the Netherlands Institute at Athens. Vol. 3). Gieben, Amsterdam 2000, ISBN 90-5063-416-8 .
  • Michael Stahl : Aristocrats and Tyrants in Archaic Athens. Investigations into tradition, social structure and the formation of the state. Steiner-Verlag-Wiesbaden-GmbH, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-515-04501-5 .
  • Karl-Wilhelm Welwei : Athens. From the beginning to Hellenism. One-volume special edition, 2nd edition, bibliographically updated and provided with a new foreword, of Vol. Athens , 1992, and The Classical Athens , 1999. Primus, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-89678-731-6 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ Herodotus, Historien 1, 59; 5, 55–57, 62–65 and 90 ( Greek text and German translation ).
  2. ↑ Thucydides 1:20 ; 6: 54-59.
  3. ↑ Aristotle, The State of Athens 13, 4-19.
  4. ^ Herodotus, Historien 1, 59 ( Greek text and German translation ).
  5. ↑ Aristotle, The State of Athens 13, 4; 14, 1.
  6. ↑ Welwei 2011, p. 222 f.
  7. ↑ Stahl 1987, p. 101.
  8. ↑ Stahl 1987, p. 87.
  9. ↑ Stahl 1987, p. 96 f.
  10. ↑ Welwei 2011, pp. 227–229.
  11. ↑ Aristotle. The State of Athens 16, 5.
  12. ↑ Aristotle, The State of Athens 16, 2-4.
  13. ↑ Stahl 1987, pp. 233-241; Welwei 2011, pp. 214-217; 250 f.
  14. ↑ Welwei 2011, p. 244 f.
  15. ↑ "Since the polis system still existed formally, a legalization of the monopoly of power was undoubtedly out of the question." (Welwei 2011, p. 247)
  16. ↑ Welwei 2011, p. 249.
  17. ↑ Aristotle, The State of Athens 18.
  18. ↑ Aristotle, The State of Athens 19.
  19. ↑ Thucydides 1:55; Berve 1967, vol. 1 p. 73 / vol. 2, p. 562.
  20. ^ Aristotle, The State of Athens 16, 7.
  21. ↑ Barceló 1990, p. 417.
  22. ↑ Thucydides 6:54; Aristotle, The State of Athens 16, 2; Barceló 1990, p. 411.
  23. ↑ Herodotus, Histories 5, 55.
  24. ↑ Herodotus, Historien 5, 91-96.
  25. ↑ Barceló 1990, p. 412 f.
  26. ↑ Barceló 1990, p. 414. James F. McGlew writes: “Of course, even in the popular tale, the Athenian demos played no part in the conspiracy that killed Hipparchus, and the tyrannicides' motives were obviously personal. But this probably did not bother the Athenians more than the fact that the conspiracy failed. When they treated Harmodios and Aristogeiton as civic heroes, the Athenians embraced the private actions of the tyrannicides as public and secured themselves from the contradictions revealed by the historian's logic. "(James F. McGlew 1993, p. 154)
  27. ↑ Barceló 1990, p. 416.
  28. ↑ Barceló 1990, p. 418. Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg emphasizes: “It is nothing new that reflections on tyranny in the fifth century were deeply influenced by political and democratic constitutional thinking”. (Sancisi-Weerdenburg: The Tyranny of Peisistratos . In dies. (Ed.) 2000, p. 14)
  29. ↑ Berve 1967, Vol. 1, p. 205.
  30. ↑ Quoted from Barceló 1990, p. 420. Barceló calls this a striking reversal of the generally widespread tyrant ideology in Athens and sees the concept of tyrant being transformed into a political slogan for perseverance. (Ibid.)
  31. ↑ Barceló 1990, p. 417.
  32. ↑ Stahl 1987, pp. 258-260.
  33. ↑ Stahl 1987, p. 242.
  34. ↑ Stahl 1987, p. 197 f.
  35. ↑ Stahl 1987, pp. 252-255.
  36. ↑ Welwei 2011, p. 259 f.
  37. ↑ Welwei 2011, p. 262 f.
  38. ↑ Welwei 2011, p. 261.
  39. ↑ Welwei 2011, p. 265.
  40. ↑ Libero 1996, p. 134.