Satyros

This article deals with the Athenian politician of the 4th century BC. Further bearers of this name can be found in the article Satyros (disambiguation) .

Satyros ( Greek  Σάτυρος ) of Kephisia was an Athenian politician at the time of the Peloponnesian War (431 - 404 BC) who belonged to the Sparta-friendly oligarchic party. He came from the Attic Demos Kephisia or Kephissa, a place a few miles from Athens on the river Kephisos . His exact life dates are not known.

Satyros must have been politically active for a long time in the final phase of the Peloponnesian War and engaged on the side of the oligarchic party, which was striving for aristocratic rule in Athens. The famous rhetorician Lysias mentions that Satyros belonged to the Athenian people's assembly and had great influence in it. After the defeat of the Athenian fleet (at Aigospotamoi ) in 405 BC. The democratic demagogue Cleophon accused the people's assembly of treason. At the request of the satyr, Cleophon, who persistently opposed a peace with Sparta, was then put in chains and thrown in prison.

Since the oligarchs under Satyros and Chremon , who later became 30 man, feared that they would not succeed in killing Cleophon in prison, they bribed the Athenian state clerk Nicomachus and had him issue a falsified law that gave the people's assembly the opportunity to vote on judicial matters . In this way they succeeded in bringing the cause of Cleophons to the people's assembly and, with the approval of the people's assembly, to have him condemned and executed.

After the end of the war, at the time of the oligarchic rule of the Thirty Tyrants , Satyros was - as the historian Xenophon reports - a kind of police chief of Athens. As the commander of the police force of the so-called " Elfmänner " or Hendeka , he was the head of the most important executive body of the oligarchical reign of terror, which killed an estimated 1,500 people.

Xenophon calls Satyros a "particularly daring and ruthless" man. On the orders of Kritias , the leading head of the "Thirty", he arrested the oligarchical dissident Theramenes in the council and led him to execution on the orders of Kritias.

No details have been handed down about the later fate of Satyrus. Possibly after the collapse of the rule of the Thirty, he retired into exile with the other oligarchs in the fortified city of Eleusis . The newly established democracy of Athens initially respected the agreements with the oligarchical exiles . However, when it became known that these were recruiting foreign mercenaries, Athens (at the end of 403 BC) undertook a military advance against the tyrant stronghold. In the negotiations taking place between the two sides, the oligarchs' generals were lured into a trap and murdered. It is possible that Satyros was also killed in this action.

swell

• Lysias: " Against Nicomachus ". (Sect. 9-14).
• Xenophon: " Hellenika ". (Book II 3,54-56).

literature

• György Németh: Kritias and the Thirty Tyrants. Studies on the politics and prosography of the ruling elite in Athens 404/403 BC Chr. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-515-08866-0 .
• Karl-Wilhelm Welwei : Classical Athens. Democracy and Power Politics in the 5th and 4th Centuries . Primus, Darmstadt 1999, ISBN 3-89678-117-0 .