عنوان

Tyranny and political culture in ancient Greece

(Number (ISBN

0801483875

(Number (ISBN

9780801483875

Number

b602437

Title Proper

Tyranny and political culture in ancient Greece

General Material Designation

[Book]

First Statement of Responsibility

James F. McGlew.

Place of Publication, Distribution, etc.

Ithaca

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

Cornell University Press

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

1996

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

vii, 234 pages ; 23 cm.

Series Title

Cornell paperbacks.

Text of Note

Previously published: 1993.

Text of Note

Introduction: Tyranny and History --; 1. Tyrannus fulminatus: Power and Praise --; 2. Justice and Power: The Language of Early Greek Tyranny --; 3. The Lawgiver's Struggle with Tyranny: Solon and the Excluded Middle --; 4. Master and Slave: The Fall of Tyranny --; 5. Narratives of Autonomy: Greek Founders --; 6. Lovers of the City: Tyranny and Democracy in Classical Athens --; Afterword: Justice and Liberation.

Text of Note

Resistance to the tyrant was an essential stage in the development of the Greek city-state. In this richly insightful book, James F. McGlew examines the significance of changes in the Greek political vocabulary that came about as a result of the history of ancient tyrants. Surveying a vast range of historical and literary sources, McGlew looks closely at discourse concerning Greek tyranny as well as at the nature of the tyrants' power and the constraints on power implicit in that discourse. Archaic tyrants, he shows, characteristically represented themselves as agents of justice. Taking their self-representation not as an ideological veil concealing the nature of tyranny but as its conceptual definition, he attempts to show that, although the language of reform gave tyrants unprecedented political freedom, it also marked their powers as temporary. Tyranny took shape, McGlew maintains, through discursive complicity between the tyrant and his subjects, who presumably accepted his self-definition but also learned from him the language and methods of resistance. The tyrant's subjects learned to resist him as they learned to obey him, but when they rejected him they did so in such a way as to preserve for themselves the distinctive political freedoms that he enjoyed. Providing a new framework for understanding ancient tyranny, this book will be read with great interest by classicists, political scientists, and ancient and modern historians alike.

Despotism -- Greece -- History.

Greece -- History -- Age of Tyrants, 7th-6th centuries B.C.

Greece -- Politics and government -- To 146 B.C.

Class number

Book number

James F. McGlew.

James F McGlew

Electronic name

[Book]

Y