Hello! Χαίρετε, and Happy New Year from Epic Greek History! I’m Scott Emmons, and here at the start of 2026 CE, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who’s supported the podcast, not just financially, but by subscribing, commenting, or just listening. I’m still new to the podcasting game, still learning the ropes, but when I look at the stats, it’s rewarding to see a slow but steady growth in listenership over the first few months. I’m looking forward to diving into a lot of fascinating topics in Greek history this year. So let’s get right to Episode 16, “Not Such an Ugly Word: Tyranny in Archaic Greece.” 

In earlier episodes, I’ve mentioned that a crucial step in the development of the Greek city-state was end of the aristocratic monopoly on power. That wasn’t an easy thing to accomplish, because the aristocrats’ authority was firmly entrenched in Greek society. Especially in the early period we’re talking about, that society was organized along the lines of ethnic, tribal, and family groups. At the highest level, you had large divisions that identified as ethnic groups, such as Dorians, Ionians, Aeolians, and so on. Those overarching groups were divided into tribes. The Dorians, for example, had three tribes called Hylleis, Pamphyloi, and Dymanes. The Ionians had four separate tribes of their own. Those tribes were subdivided into clans and family groups that were often organized into what were called phratries, or “brotherhoods.” As the name suggests, everyone in the group was thought to be in some way related. So if you were a small landowner outside the elite, you might resent the privileged position of a nobleman in your brotherhood, but you’d still probably feel a bond of kinship. There was also a strong religious component. The aristocrats held the important priesthoods, not just in the bigger state cults but in local cults that might involve only your brotherhood. 

So the dominance of the aristocrats, the quote-unquote “best” people, was ingrained in the social structure. The game-changing development in the Greek polis is that some of that family loyalty is transferred to the city-state. As the author Antony Andrewes puts it in his classic book, The Greek Tyrants, quote: “The interesting thing about the Greeks is not that they began thus organized, but that they largely freed themselves from the system.” Unquote. But it’s also interesting that they never entirely shook off that tribal organization. Even in Athens at the height of the classical period, the phratries, the brotherhoods, still had important state functions, such as keeping track of who was a citizen. There were religious festivals where a citizen would introduce his son to the phratry at different life stages until he became a full adult member. And if there was any doubt as to whether you were a citizen, you’d have to get members of your phratry to vouch for you. So as the polis developed, the old kinship groups were woven into the political structure. 

But to get back to the 7th century BCE, by this time there are economic and social forces that will ultimately undermine the aristocrats’ monopoly on power. For one thing, the aristocrats aren’t a monolithic unit. They’re ambitious people, often in competition with one another. A disruptive force in the early city-state is aristocratic families fighting each other for power and prestige. Another disruptor, as we’ve seen, is the rise of the hoplite infantry, which brings more men of a lower order into the central unit of the military. So more of this so-called “middle class” is now demanding a voice in government. But how does the change happen? I don’t think anyone ever stood up in a council meeting and said, “You know what? Those farmers and craftsmen have really done their part to defend the city, we really ought to give them a piece of the pie.” That’s not how it works. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as an iron law of history, but this comes close: people don’t give up power unless they have to. So in order for people below the aristocracy to get into the game, there has to be some kind of revolution. 

That can play out in a variety of ways, and we’ll explore some different ones in future episodes. But here’s one scenario. Suppose one of those ambitious noblemen, maybe someone who’s very capable but isn’t in the most powerful inner circle, someone who may have distinguished himself in military operations… suppose that person positions himself as a champion of the people. When I say “the people,” I mean probably not the poorest part of the population but those who own some property, fight in the phalanx, and feel like they should have more of a say in the state. But these people have no experience in government and no connections. They’ve never held a government office or sat in a council meeting. But now, here’s someone who does have some clout, who knows the ropes, and he says, “Stick with me, and you’ll get what you’re looking for.” And once he gets the military solidly on his side, he can set himself up as a monarch — a specific kind of monarch that the Greeks called a tyrannos, a tyrant. 

Now, right away, we have to clarify what a “tyrant” is in this specific sense. To us, a tyrant is someone who abuses power, who rules harshly. Doesn’t even have to be a head of state, could be just a bad-tempered boss, a real “tyrant.” In ancient Greek, it didn’t have that connotation. It just meant a monarch who had come to power by overthrowing an established order, whether a hereditary kingship, an aristocracy, what have you. Or a tyrant could be a member of a dynasty that had started that way. The word itself is not even native Greek. It seems to be a borrowing from the Lydian language. The first time we see a form of it in Greek is in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, who played a big role in the last episode. Here he’s referring to the Lydian king Gyges. As translated by Douglas Gerber, quote: 

The possessions of Gyges rich in gold are of no concern to me, not yet have I been seized with jealousy of him, I do not envy the deeds of the gods, and I have no love of tyranny. That is beyond my sights. Unquote  

It may be significant that this king, Gyges, overthrew the earlier Lydian king and started a dynasty of his own. In any case, the Greeks sometimes used “tyrant” interchangeably with “king,” but as a technical term it meant a monarch who’d taken power in a non-constitutional way. In classical Greek authors it’s not a flattering term, just because tyranny didn’t fit very well with their ideals of freedom and justice. But it has nothing to do with the harshness of their rule. Some tyrants had a reputation for ruling as benevolent monarchs. 

Well, in the volatile conditions of the seventh century BCE, tyrannies started popping up all over the Greek world. Sometimes this period is even called the “age of tyranny.” That term may be a little misleading because tyranny wasn’t limited to this era. It could develop anywhere, at any time in ancient Greek history. But still, it was an especially strong trend in the seventh to the sixth century. And in fact, it can be seen as an important transition between the narrow rule of the aristocracy and the development of a broader oligarchy or democracy. There were a lot of tyrannies, and for most, we really don’t know very much. So in this episode I’m going to stick to three high-profile dynasties that we do know something about, and that can help us understand the broader trend. These are the tyrannies that developed in the city-states of Argos, Corinth, and Sicyon.

The first tyrant we hear about is Pheidon of Argos. We only have a few scraps of information about his reign, but what we do have indicates that he was a force to be reckoned with. Aristotle gives us the curious detail that he was already the basileus, the king, and then made himself a tyrant. Which I think tells us something about the limitations of kingship in the early archaic period. As a king he wasn’t all-powerful, but he seized absolute power as the tyrant. From what we can tell, he seems to have been a very energetic, warlike, and innovative leader. There’s a caveat here, though, because it’s hard to pin down exactly when he lived and what events he was involved in. Like so much in early Greek history, it’s debated. So what I’m presenting here is a reconstruction, and some of the details aren’t as secure as we’d like. 

With that disclaimer, most scholars put his reign in the early-to-mid-seventh century BCE, and it was in this period that Argos reached the height of its power. In 669, Argos won a major victory over the Spartans at the battle of Hysiae, a town in Argive territory. That victory seems to have been decisive enough to allow Pheidon to assert his power over the region of the Argolid and other parts of the Peloponnese. He had a handy propaganda weapon for his expansionist policy, because he could connect it with the origin story of the Dorians in the Peloponnese. The legend was that the descendants of Heracles returned from exile to reclaim it as their rightful territory. They drew lots to determine who would rule over each region, and one of the Heraclids, Temenos, received the Argolid. So the tyrant Pheidon could claim that he was reuniting the territory allotted to Temenos by expanding Argive power in the region. And it helped that he was supposedly a tenth-generation descendant of Temenos himself. 

Pheidon had enough weight to throw around that he meddled in the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia and actually presided over the Olympian games, probably in 668 BCE — just a year after that victory over the Spartans. His most lasting accomplishment, though, was that he established a standard system of weights and measures for the Peloponnese, which stayed in use for a long time after his reign. Some ancient authorities say he minted coins too, but that’s almost certainly an anachronism. Greek coins didn’t appear until sometime in the last quarter of the 7th century. Still, the standardization of weights and measures in and outside of Argos shows he had considerable clout in the Peloponnese. 

So Pheidon had a brilliant reign, but the supremacy of Argos was ultimately a flash in the pan. Not long after his death, Sparta reasserted its influence, and although Argos remained a significant city, it was never again a superpower in the Greek world. Some scholars, including Antony Andrewes, the author I quoted earlier, have offered an ingenious hypothesis about that. They suggest that Pheidon, or at least Argos, was an early adopter of hoplite tactics, and that gave the Argives a temporary edge in confrontations with other city-states — which would explain their decisive victory over the Spartan forces at Hysiae. I don’t know if there’s been any solid archaeological or historical evidence to prove that, but it’s an intriguing possibility. 

Well, that’s one tyranny down and two to go, so I think it’s time for our first break. Epic Greek History is and will continue to be free. I’m never going to run ads or put any content behind paywalls. If you’re enjoying the podcast and have a few extra bucks to kick in to help with the cost of production, the one way to do that is by going to www.epicgreekhistory.com and hitting that “Support” button at the top. There you’ll be given a choice of contribution levels starting at three dollars a month. As always, thanks to all who’ve contributed so far. And now, let’s move on to…

[SFX: A moment of Greek!] 

Today’s episode is a perfect opportunity to talk about one of the most important words in Greek political thought — “Demos.” It’s the root of our word “democracy,” as well as “demographics,” “demagogue,” “pandemic,” and so on. It’s a tricky word to translate, because it has a range of meanings. Basically, it means the “people,” the whole population of a community. But more often in Greek writings it means the lower classes in that community, the commoners as opposed to the elites. When Greek political thinkers talked about “democracy,” they meant essentially rule by the lower class — which most of them didn’t think very highly of. And even within that framework, it can be hard to pin down the exact shade of meaning. When someone like Aristotle says an aspiring tyrant put himself forward as a champion of the “demos,” the dividing line is between the aristocrats and everybody else. So in that case, the “demos” probably means the people who have some wealth but haven’t had access to real power. Just to add to the complexity, “demos” can also be a technical term to refer to one of the districts in Attica that made up the Athenian state. But that’s a subject for another episode, so that’ll conclude today’s moment of Greek. 

[SFX]

 Moving on from Pheidon’s tyranny at Argos, we have a much more fleshed-out picture of a dynasty that arose nearby, in Corinth. Up to now in this podcast, I’ve mentioned Corinth only in passing. But it deserves more recognition because it was an immensely wealthy and influential city. As early as Homer, its epithet is “wealthy Corinth.” And it got that way because it was perfectly situated to capitalize on the movement of trade goods. It’s located on the Isthmus, the narrow strip of land that connects the big landmass of the Peloponnese to the rest of mainland Greece. The “-nesus” part of the word “Peloponnesus” actually means “island,” and it really is almost an island, joined to the mainland by that four-mile-wide isthmus. That meant Corinth could exact duties on any goods moving by land in either direction between the Peloponnese and central Greece. And anyone moving by sea in that area had to make a choice of either sailing all the way around the Peloponnese or transporting their goods — and maybe even their boat — across the Isthmus to the Gulf of Corinth on the other side. And again, Corinth would take a cut. So its position enabled it to become an economic powerhouse. We’ve seen that it was a major player in sending out overseas settlements. And from the late eighth century through the beginning of the sixth, Corinthian pottery dominated Greek markets all over the Mediterranean. 

Now, Corinth was a little unusual in that, instead of having several families dominating the political scene and jockeying among themselves, there was one clan that held a monopoly on power. Its members were called the Bacchiads, and we’re told that they guarded their power so jealously, they only married within their own clan. That, of course, caused a lot of resentment among the other families, and the sources generally portray the Bacchiads as harsh, despicable rulers. So, by the middle of the seventh century BCE, Corinth was ripe for revolution. A man named Cypselus put himself forward as champion of the demos and set himself up as tyrant. 

Now, for Cypselus and all the other tyrants I’ll be talking about in the rest of this episode, our main ancient source is Herodotus. And as I’ve mentioned before, Herodotus was the first Greek historian. So for events before his time, he had to rely mainly on oral tradition, stories that had been passed down through generations. Cypselus lived around 200 years before Herodotus. Add to that the fact that Herodotus loved a good story. So for these seventh and sixth-century tyrants, there’s always the challenge of trying separate fact from fiction. I have to admit that my own mental image of these rulers has a kind of fairy-tale quality that comes from Herodotus’s narrative.  

The origin story of Cypselus is a great example of what we’re up against. It starts with a woman named Labda, who’s from the Bacchiad clan, but she’s lame, so no Bacchiad man is going to marry her. So her family marries her off to a man of the lower nobility named Eëtion. Eëtion visits Delphi, and the oracle says Labda will give birth to a stone that will crush the Bacchiads. When that oracle is leaked to the rulers, they round up ten tough guys to go and kill the baby. So these ten goons show up at the house and find that Dad isn’t home, so they tell Labda, “We heard you just had a baby! Can we see him?” That all seems perfectly innocent, right? So she hands the baby over, and the guy who takes him is all set to dash him on the ground, but at that moment the baby smiles at him, and he can’t go through with it. So he hands the baby to the second guy and says, “You do it.” The same thing happens all the way down the line, until they finally give him back to his mom. Out in the courtyard, they start arguing, pointing fingers at each other, and they finally decide, “Okay, we have to do this together.” So they knock on the door again, but now Labda has finally gotten the idea that maybe something isn’t right about all this. So she hides the baby in a chest. The guys come in and look everywhere, but somehow they never think to look inside that chest. Nobody comes off as a genius in this story. Their mission has failed, so they go back to their bosses and lie about it. “Yeah, we killed the kid.” Meanwhile, the baby gets the name Cypselus after “kypsele,” which is the Greek word for the chest where his mom hid him. So grows up to overthrow the Bacchiad rulers, and the oracle is fulfilled. 

It’s a fun story, but there’s not a lot in it that we can believe. It’s a good bet that it originated with someone in Cypselid family or at least someone friendly to them. But what Herodotus tells us about the beginning of his reign is a lot more plausible. He tells us that when Cypselus seized power, he put a lot of prominent Corinthians to death, banished others, and confiscated their property. That probably means he redistributed a good part of that land to his supporters. But after all that initial bloodshed, when he’d firmly established his position as tyrant, most of the sources portray him as a moderate ruler. Aristotle tells us he generally had the goodwill of the Corinthian people, so much so that he could go around without a bodyguard. We know he cultivated good relations with Delphi and dedicated a lot of lavish gifts. Herodotus tells us he built the Corinthian treasury there.  

Well, Cypselus did all right, but his dynasty really kicks into high gear with his son, Periander. The ancient authors usually portray him as a harsher ruler than his dad. That may be partly just a Greek drive to put things into recognizable patterns. So there’s a tendency in the authors to see tyrannical dynasties in terms of a decline from moderate rule to what we could call tyranny. But if we can believe even half of what the historians tell us, he could be brutal if you got on his bad side. Herodotus tells a story that sets the tone for his rule. Periander had close ties with the tyrant of Miletus, a man named Thrasyboulos, and he thought Thrasyboulos could give him some good ideas on how to rule successfully. So he sent a messenger to Miletus to ask for his advice. And when this messenger got there, the tyrant didn’t say a word but just took him out into a field of grain, and every time he came to a taller stalk with a good head of grain on it, he’d take his sword and hack it off. The messenger was puzzled about this, but when he reported back to Corinth, Periander got the message immediately. As Herodotus puts it, he “finished everything Cypselus had left undone” in killing and banishing prominent Corinthians. On a side note, Aristotle tells the same story, but with the roles reversed. In his version it’s Thrasyboulos who asks for advice, and Periander is the one who cuts down the grain stalks. 

In other ways, Periander seems to have been a very competent and dynamic ruler. He continued Corinth’s policy of sending out settlements, something that had been going on since far back in Bacchiad times. He expanded Corinthian power in the Peloponnese, taking over the city of Epidaurus, whose tyrant Procles had been Periander’s own father-in-law. He attained a high profile on the world stage and established or strengthened ties with foreign powers. He maintained close relations with King Alyattes of Lydia. In one of those acts of cruelty that Herodotus reports, he tried to punish Corcyra for a transgression by sending 300 sons of its prominent men to be castrated and become eunuchs in Alyattes’ court. Fortunately for them, the Samians intercepted them before they could get to Lydia. But we know Corinth and Lydia continued to be closely connected, because Lydian gifts to Apollo at Delphi were often kept in the Corinthian treasury. Periander had close ties with Egypt too, and in fact his nephew and successor was named Psammetichos after the contemporary Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik.

At home, Periander pursued an ambitious building program, which was typical of tyrants in wealthy cities. They wanted to build things and leave lasting monuments to their reigns. It may also have been a way of keeping a good part of the population employed. The project that’s most securely linked to Periander is the transport system across the Isthmus. One ancient source says he had plans to cut a canal through it, which would have made maritime trade a lot simpler. This is something that was tried repeatedly through history. The Roman emperor Nero tried to get it done and failed. The Venetians tried it in the 1600s when they had control of the Peloponnese. It wasn’t until 1893 that a French engineering team finally cut a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth. But in Periander’s time, it was impossible, so he did the next best thing. He either constructed or greatly improved the “diolkos,” which translates literally to the “drag-across” — a paved road from one side of the isthmus to the other, built for carrying heavy loads of cargo and even boats if they could be loaded onto wheeled carts. We know from ancient historians that warships were sometimes carried across the isthmus that way to speed up naval operations.

Periander became a kind of standard type of a Greek tyrant in another way too, as a patron of the arts. It was a point of pride for a tyrant that he could attract the best artists and especially poets, who would perform their works to the accompaniment of a lyre or a similar instrument. We might think of Greek lyric poets as singer-songwriters. A real feather in Periander’s cap was that he brought the poet Arion to his court. Virtually all of Arion’s poetry is now lost, but he was especially famous for perfecting a kind of choral lyric called the dithyramb, which was connected with the worship of Dionysus and later with the origins of tragedy. In any case, along with military might, expansion of settlements, and building projects, having a poet like Arion at court added to Periander’s prestige. 

From different sources, we get a somewhat mixed picture of Periander as a ruler. What Herodotus says about his family life reads almost like one of those salacious Roman biographers writing about a particularly twisted emperor. Aristotle says Periander set the standard for totalitarian practices to suppress dissent. Things like forbidding clubs, using spies to inform on troublemakers, and so on. But elsewhere, Aristotle mentions that he was very moderate when it came to taxation. Curiously, Periander was sometimes included in lists of the so-called “seven sages” of archaic Greece. This was a list of those thought to have been the wisest men of their age. It varied a little from one author to another, but some versions included Periander, presumably because of his cleverness and cunning in politics. 

In any case, Periander brought the Cypselid dynasty to its height. After his death, his nephew Psammetichos succeeded to the tyranny. We don’t know much about him, other than that he was assassinated only a few years into his reign, and the tyranny was replaced by a broader oligarchy than what had existed back in the Bacchiad era.

And the end of the Cypselid tyranny will take us to our second break. Which means it’s time for… 

[SFX: Random facts!] 

This is really more of a random legend than a fact. The best-known episode in the life of that  poet Arion comes to us — of course — from Herodotus. The story goes that Arion had been at Periander’s court for some time, and he really wanted to travel to Italy and Sicily. He finally got a chance to go, and he made a lot of money performing there. When he decided it was time to go back, he got passage on a Corinthian boat, thinking the Corinthians were more trustworthy than others. Well, as soon as got out to sea, the captain and crew decided they’d like to get his money, so they gave him a choice: either he could kill himself and be buried on land, or he could just jump into the sea and drown. Arion said, “Okay, there’s not much I can do, but at least give me one last request. Before I throw myself overboard, I’d like to sing for you.” The sailors thought, “This is our lucky day, we get to hear the world’s greatest singer, and then we get his money.” So Arion put on his costume, grabbed his lyre, stood at the stern, and sang a hymn. When he was done, he jumped into the sea, and the sailors headed home to Corinth.  

Arion figured he was done for, but a dolphin came to his rescue and carried him all the way to a town called Tainaros on the southern coast of the Peloponnese. From there he made his way to Corinth and went to tell Periander what had happened. Periander summoned the sailors to his court and asked them if they could tell him anything about Arion. They said, “Oh, he’s doing great! He was still doing gigs in Sicily when we left.” At that moment Arion came out of hiding, still in the costume he was wearing when he sang for them. So the jig was up and they got what was coming to them.  

Herodotus adds the detail that Arion dedicated a small bronze statue of a man riding a dolphin at Tainaros, the place where he came ashore. Herodotus may have seen that statue himself. And the travel writer Pausanias reports that he saw it at Tainaros about 600 years later. It’s just one example of the remarkable continuity over centuries that we can often see in the Greco-Roman world. And that’s today’s random fact! 

[SFX]

 We have one more tyrannical court to visit, and for that we have to travel just a little west of Corinth to the city of Sicyon. Today it’s just about a twenty-to-thirty-minute drive. Sicyon was also very wealthy, but in a different way from Corinth. It commanded a big alluvial plain that was one of the most fertile in Greece, perfect for grain, olives, and grape vines. So a great deal of its wealth came from agriculture, but it also benefitted from trade, since it was situated on land routes leading to the Isthmus. 

 Well, in the mid-seventh century BCE, a tyranny arose under a man named Orthagoras. And the dynasty he founded was one of the longest-lasting. Aristotle says it lasted a hundred years, for the reason that Orthagoras and those who came after him ruled gently and considered themselves bound by the laws. Other than that, we know virtually nothing about him. He had a couple of successors who are just names to us, and then comes the real star of the Orthagorid dynasty, the tyrant Cleisthenes, who ruled from about 600 to 570 BCE. 

 Cleisthenes was another very capable and ambitious tyrant, but to me the most striking thing about him is the effort he put into propaganda. He held himself up as a supporter of the non-Dorian part of the population. In a way, it’s the opposite of what Pheidon of Argos had done, connecting himself with the Dorian legend of the return of the Heraclids. Cleisthenes portrayed himself as being solidly on the side of those who didn’t identify as Dorian. He went to war with Dorian Argos, and part of his propaganda program involved rejecting anything Argive or Dorian. We’re told that he actually banned the recitation of the Homeric epics by rhapsodes because they contained so much that glorified the Argives. As we’ve seen, Homer played a huge role in Greek identity so banning him is really a radical move. 

 Continuing with his anti-Argive message, he also disrupted long-established religious practices. There was an Argive hero named Adrastos who had an important shrine in the middle of Sicyon. Adrastos was even supposed to have been a king of Sicyon at one point. Well, Cleisthenes decided he wanted to banish Adrastos because he was an Argive. But you can’t just banish a hero without some religious sanction, so he consulted the Delphic oracle. And the story is that he got a harsh reply. “Adrastos was a king,” it said. “You’re just a stone-thrower.” There’s some question as to what that meant, but I take it to be an insult making him out to be a low-class type who wouldn’t be good for anything in a battle but throwing rocks. In any case, it’s a harsh rejection of what Cleisthenes requested.

 So he couldn’t out-and-out banish Adrastos, but he did the next best thing. He imported another hero cult, bringing the remains of the hero Melanippus from Thebes to Sicyon. This Melanippus was Adrastos’s arch enemy in the legend of the Seven Against Thebes. Cleisthenes now established his cult in Sicyon and transferred the rites from Adrastos to Melanippus. There had also been choruses dedicated to Adrastos, and he transferred those to Dionysus. Take that, Adrastos! And take that, Delphi!

 And then, just in case it wasn’t clear how anti-Dorian he was, he renamed the tribes in Sicyon. Remember those three Dorian tribes I mentioned at the beginning — Hylleis, Pamphyloi, and Dymanes. Cleisthenes gave them new Greek names that meant Swine people, Ass people, and Pig people. The non-Dorian tribe now got the name Archelaoi, meaning “Leaders of the People.”  Herodotus adds the strange detail that those names persisted for 60 years after Cleisthenes’ death. It’s hard to see what’s going on there, but maybe after the dynasty fell, the non-Dorians still had enough influence to keep his system in place.

 But Cleisthenes did a lot more than lash out at Dorians. In spite of the harsh takedown he’d gotten from Delphi, it was still important to cultivate good relations with the oracle. He may have played a major role in supporting Delphi during the First Sacred War. Just a quick refresher from the episode on Delphi, this was when the city of Crisa — also sometimes called Cirrha — had been shaking down travelers on the way to consult the oracle, until the alliance known as the Amphictyonic League made war on Crisa and ultimately wiped it out. Cleisthenes’ role in this war is a textbook case of how hard it is to reconstruct early Greek history. If you look up Cleisthenes in Wikipedia, it says in the very first sentence that he aided in the First Sacred War. That’s based on a few ancient references, especially Pausanias, who tells us that the league put Cleisthenes at the head of its forces. The trouble is, all that literary evidence is very late. Pausanias wrote in the 2nd century CE. There’s no mention of Cleisthenes fighting in the Sacred War in Herodotus, nothing in Thucydides or Aristotle. That doesn’t prove it didn’t happen, but it does raise questions. Cleisthenes, how do you explain this gap in your résumé? 

 So there are questions, but we can tentatively say Cleisthenes took a leading role in the Sacred War. And we’re told that soon after, he took part in the Pythian Games at Delphi and won the four-horse chariot race. By the way, in case you’re wondering… whenever you hear that some nobleman won the chariot race at one of these big athletic festivals, that doesn’t mean he actually drove the chariot. He had a trained charioteer to do that. But Cleisthenes was the one who owned the horses and the chariot and ultimately got all the glory. He also seems to have had the first Sicyonian treasury built at Delphi, which would have been shortly after Sacred War. As with any powerful leader in Greece, it was smart policy to to try to have Delphi on your side. 

 Well, there’s one last big event from Cleisthenes’ reign to recover, and that is the marriage alliance he struck up in Athens. This is another classic story from Herodotus, and a lot of it has to be taken with a grain of salt, but there’s some solid history in it too.

 The story begins when Cleisthenes has just won another victory in the four-horse chariot race, this time at Olympia. Just an amazing athlete, wasn’t he? Right. So after receiving all his honors, he makes an announcement. He has a daughter, Agariste, who’s ready for marriage. So he invites all the most eligible young men in Greece to come to Sicyon as his guests and compete for Agariste’s hand. They’ll be judged on their athletic prowess, their musical ability, how well they speak, all the qualities that upper-class Greeks value in a gentleman. 

 Herodotus then gives us a list of all the suitors who came to compete for Agariste and where they came from. It reads like something out of a Homeric epic, except that it’s in prose. From Italy came Smindyrides of Sybaris and Damasos of Syris, son of Amyris, who was known as “the wise.” From the Peloponnese came Leokedes, the son of the tyrant Pheidon of Argos, and so on. So for the next year, Cleisthenes watches them wrestle and run foot races, he visits with each one individually, and holds lavish feasts to see how they behave at a banquet. And over the course of the year, two of the suitors rise to the top, both of them Athenians. There’s Megacles, who comes from the prominent Alcmaeonid family, and his rival is Hippocleides, another young noble. When the time comes to choose, Cleisthenes is leaning toward Hippocleides.

 Well, on the appointed day, he throws a magnificent feast where he’s going to announce the winner. But the contest isn’t quite over yet. At the feast, the suitors have to compete in music and speech-making. Hippocleides has had a few belts of wine, and he’s feeling good. So he orders the flute player to strike up a tune, and he starts dancing. He thinks he’s got some pretty hot moves, but Cleisthenes is starting to get a little put off. Hippocleides doesn’t notice. He orders a slave to bring in a table, then jumps up on top and really cuts loose. At last he flips over and stands on his head, kicking his legs wildly like he’s dancing in the air. At this point, Cleisthenes can’t take it anymore. He shouts, “Son of Tisander, you have danced your marriage away!” And the young man replies, “Hippocleides doesn’t care.” That response became a popular catch phrase in Greece, “Hippocleides doesn’t care” being roughly equivalent to “Zero F’s given.” 

 So of course, Megacles the Alcmaeonid won the contest and married the tyrant’s daughter. No doubt, the story has a lot of embellishments. But we know that the outcome is true. Agariste went to Athens as Megacles’ wife, and the two had a son named Cleisthenes after his grandfather. And, as we’ll see in a future episode, that Cleisthenes grew up to have an enormous impact on the course of Athenian history.

 Well, we’ve looked at three high-profile tyrannies — Pheidon of Argos, the Cypselids of Corinth, and the Orthagorids of Sicyon — and at this point, you might wonder, what about the two most famous city-states, Sparta and Athens? Those are two different cases. Sparta was unusual in the way its constitution developed, and it never had a tyranny. That was something the Spartans took great pride in, and political thinkers outside of Sparta admired it too. Athens did have a tyranny, but for various reasons it came later than the ones I’ve been talking about. We’ll soon be digging deeper into both of those. Let’s just say I’m looking forward to some meaty episodes in 2026. 

Before wrapping up, I’d like to return to something I referred to at the beginning. It seems counterintuitive that tyranny — a form of monarchy — would be a step toward breaking the aristocratic stranglehold on power. If anything, it seems like a step backwards. But from what the ancient authors tell us, most tyrants in this period came to power by championing the demos. In a lot of cases, there was probably a redistribution of land, so more people below the elite class ended up owning more property. People who before had no way of participating in government might now hold certain offices and gain some experience. By the time a tyranny has run its course, there’s no turning back. The tyranny is replaced by a broader form of oligarchy, and some places are on the road to democracy. In general, once a city has shaken off a tyranny, it never has one again.

 And that concludes Episode 16. If you’d like to see some visuals to supplement this episode, you can find them at epigreekhistory.substack.com. If you have comments, questions, additions, or corrections, I’d love to hear from you at scott@epicgreekhistory.com. Or you can leave a comment on Facebook or Instagram. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork were created by Chris Harding. Until next time, happy New Year, and as always, εὐτυχεῖτε, be well.