Tyrants and demagogues are, by turns, equally fascinating and equally elusive. Like all adventurers and anti-heroes, they can elicit in different people entirely contrary feelings of bitter antipathy, guilty admiration or even undisguised love. Ancient Greek authors appear to have had little doubt as to who was a demagogue and who was a tyrant. But for modern readers the rationale behind these judgements is often obscure. How to distinguish a tyrant like Pisistratus from a lawgiver like Solon? Or Cleon the demagogue from Pericles the statesman? Though much maligned, tyrants and demagogues are assumed to have had sufficient popular support to wield power in their communities. But the differences between the types of support a statesman, demagogue or tyrant could command, and the means by which it was elicited, remain understudied. Their various contributions to the history of the polis, and indeed democracy, are likewise still open for debate.

Two recent volumes, both published by Bloomsbury, make valuable and thought-provoking contributions to this subject. For the tyrants, Duncan addresses the relationship between tyranny and theatre. She examines both the role of theatrical performances in autocracies and the character of the tyrant in ancient drama. The scope is broad, encompassing both Greek and Roman tragedy as well as the historical tyrants and tragedians themselves, from Hieron and Aeschylus to Nero and Seneca. As such, the book is an ideal handbook for students and scholars interested in exploring the various ways in which dramatic poetry and monarchical power interact throughout antiquity. This topic remains comparatively understudied (though see also E. Csapo et al. [edd.], Theatre and Autocracy [2022]); thus Duncan’s contribution is especially welcome. On the other hand, her book can equally be viewed as part of a continuing trend in research (developing over the last two decades or more) into the context of Greek dramatic performance beyond democratic Athens. For such a project an understanding of the place of theatre in ancient tyrannies is clearly essential.

And yet, in certain respects, the book represents something of a missed opportunity. For Duncan tyrants used theatre and theatrical displays both to gain popular support and to demonstrate the legitimacy of their rule. Duncan sees the role of theatre in autocracies as to some extent analogous to its function in democracies: ‘just like democratic Athens, tyrants believed theater was useful for their regimes and supported it accordingly’ (p. 8). A tyrant or king, such as Dionysius or Alexander, undertakes ‘concerted campaigns’ (p. 67) to persuade the demos of his status as a virtuous prince, and in so doing is ‘using theater to support his regime’ (p. 85). While Duncan provides an insightful critique of Athenocentrism (especially in Chapter 2), Athenian democracy remains nonetheless the key paradigm by which theatre’s place in autocracies is to be understood. Duncan’s tyrants appear in this way more like demagogues, who must persuade, flatter and cajole the people. Ancient authorities, such as Aristotle (Pol. 4.1292a25–7; 5.1313b39–1314a1), on the contrary point to a radical difference between tyrants and demagogues: in democracies it is the demagogues who flatter the sovereign demos, but in a tyranny the tyrant is sovereign, and there he is the prime object of flattery. In other words, ancient tyrants, as supreme autocrats, had no need to issue propaganda, but rather desired to receive affirmation from their subjects instead. They wanted, that is, to receive thanks and praise in return for their gift of theatrical displays.

Duncan similarly struggles with the fact that a medium that is (according to her argument) ‘ideologically flexible’ must inevitably prove a poor basis for political campaigning. There is in drama, Duncan suggests, the possibility of a ‘public transcript’ (i.e. the message the authorities want audiences to take on board) and a ‘hidden transcript’ (the alternative interpretation of dissidents). ‘Real tyrants saw their counterparts on stage as the stars of the show, and banked on their subjects seeing things the same way’ (p. 9). If so, this was a pious hope indeed. Dionysius’ tragedies convinced no one in antiquity that he was a just king. Indeed, Duncan admits that his ‘campaign met with resistance, mockery, and even abject failure’ (p. 67). Why then did Dionysius make such efforts to compose and perform plays? Surely, he was not completely blind to the difficulties. A more likely solution is that Greek tyrants liked theatre because of the opportunities it offered not for propaganda, but for patronage. Theatrical displays are intended to shock and awe audiences. They show, in brief, the capacity of a ruler to benefit his friends, something that Simonides in Xenophon’s Hieron claims tyrants are especially well placed to do (ἱκανώτατοι δ᾽ ἐστὲ κακῶσαι μὲν ἐχθρούς, ὀνῆσαι δὲ φίλους, 2.2). Displays of raw power and wealth, I suggest, were more important to tyrants than arguments over political legitimacy.

Terminology poses another difficulty, especially given the broad scope of Duncan’s inquiry. For Duncan the term ‘tyrant’ is ‘inherently slippery’ (p. 5). She begins with the common premise that in origin tyrannos simply signified ‘a politically dominant big man’ (p. 4, citing in particular G. Anderson, ‘Before turannoi were tyrants’, CA 24 [2005], 173–222). For Plato and Aristotle, we are told, the word later came to signify ‘an illegitimate usurper’ who seized power violently. But this is incorrect. No ancient Greek author specifies illegitimacy or usurpation as a defining trait of a tyrant (see M. Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide de l’Antiquité à nos jours [2013], pp. 32–3). Usurpers certainly existed, such as Archelaus of Macedon, but Plato regards Archelaus as a tyrant not because he took power violently, but because he commits crimes with impunity (Gorg. 469c5–7). Tyrants, for the Greeks, are rulers (legitimate or not) who have a monopoly of power in the polis and therefore are effectively unrestrained by law (see E. Stewart, ‘The Tyrant’s Progress’, Polis 38 [2021], 208–36). Legitimacy became an important criterion for identifying the tyrant only in medieval and early modern political thought.

For the ancient Greeks, including the tragic poets, tyrannos was by no means a ‘slippery term’. Duncan, however, adopts L. Edmunds’s theory (‘Oedipus as Tyrant’, SyllClass 13 [2002], 63–103) that the tragedians effectively flip-flopped between a negative ‘Athenian’ and a more neutral ‘panhellenic’ ideology of tyranny. And yet antipathy towards tyrants was widespread outside Athens and longstanding (cf. Hdt. 4.137.2). I have argued elsewhere that tyranny in tragedy is consistently associated with excessive power and wealth, which are understood to tend towards gradual moral corruption in a ruler (E. Stewart, ‘Tyranny in Tragedy’, Polis 40 [2023], 234–58). That said, ancient authors draw a clear distinction between the tyrant and the king (basileus). The latter is not merely an ideal good ruler, but rather one whose power is limited to defined prerogatives (see P. Carlier, La Royauté en Grèce avant Alexandre [1984], esp. pp. vii–viii). These distinctions are blurred or absent in Duncan’s study. The Persian kings are thus ‘cruel tyrants’ in tragedy (p. 19), even though the Greeks consistently regarded them as basileis, though of an admittedly despotic kind (M. Reising, ‘The King’s House or the Tyrant’s Palace?’, Polis [2024], 203–26). By contrast, Oedipus, a ruler whom Sophocles repeatedly designates as tyrant, becomes, in Duncan’s analysis, ‘the established king of Thebes’ (p. 99). While Duncan assigns different titles to rulers based on their supposed legitimacy (i.e. Oedipus has a good title as an elected ruler and is therefore a king), for Sophocles tyranny in Thebes means a monopoly of power (cf. Ant. 173, ἐγὼ κράτη δὴ πάντα καὶ θρόνους ἔχω). Duncan labours to differentiate ‘stock’ (morally bad) tyrants from the more sympathetic ‘mad kings’, but these labels are misleading and unnecessary.

For the demagogues Simmons has produced a stimulating discussion of the means by which these Athenian politicians obtained popular support. Again, the focus is partly on drama (specifically Aristophanes and Euripides), but less on the use of theatre as a tool for generating support and more on what these texts can tell us about how demagogues ‘made friends’ with the demos. Simmons utilises sociological studies of campaigning techniques employed by modern politicians (especially Chapter 3). Candidates should be active and accessible in a particular constituency (the ‘propinquity effect’), demonstrate similar backgrounds and traits with constituents (the ‘homophily effect’) and exploit social networks to reach friends of friends (‘transivity’). Simmons convincingly shows that much the same considerations applied in the ancient world. His conviction that we should understand political support in terms of friendship also appears to be correct. Here he makes a useful contribution to the understanding of ancient politics.

Simmons is less successful in demonstrating that this habit of ‘making friends’ with the demos was a trait specifically associated with demagogues. Here again we confront the problem of definition. Simmons argues that there was something ‘new’ that distinguishes the demagogues of the late fifth century. In this he follows W.R. Connor’s classic study (The New Politicians of Fifth-Century Athens [1971]). What then was new? Simmons suggests it is precisely this habit of making friends with the demos. This is most unlikely. Cleisthenes, for one, made friends with the demos as early as 507 bce (Hdt. 5.66, τὸν δῆμον προσεταιρίζεται). Simmons suggests that Cleisthenes was merely ‘laying the foundations’ for Cleon’s innovations (p. 9), but then again is there anything really new under the sun? Making friends with the demos is also essentially what the tyrant Pisistratus appears to have done in his tours of rural Attica ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 16.5). That many different types of rulers, and not just demagogues, put a premium on ‘making friends’ with their inferiors is in fact suggested by Simmons’s analysis of Euripides and Xenophon in Chapter 5, where a god (Dionysus), a Persian king (Cyrus the Great), a Spartan general (Clearchus) and even Xenophon himself apparently behave rather like demagogues. We are meant to conclude that these authors betray the influence of the new post-Cleon politics, but we could as easily suppose that they are describing common traits of political leadership of all kinds.

Simmons’s argument that friendship with inferiors was a new development rests on the assumption that aristocrats in the sixth and early fifth centuries only made friends with their equals. Their ‘primary loyalty … was to other aristocratic allies’ and not the polis. Cleon therefore did something new in putting the polis first and making individual demesmen of the lower orders his friends. The evidence for this, however, is weak. Sophocles’ Antigone is cited as a text where loyalties to philoi and polis are in conflict (pp. 6–11), but this is in fact not the case. Antigone does not deny the polis its rights, but rather defies Creon’s attempt to assert his authority beyond what is proper in terms of ‘unwritten’ natural law. Creon is a tyrant who threatens both polis and philoi. A well-ordered state should, in fact, encourage good friendships, since such associations are crucial if its citizens are to grow in virtue. By contrast, tyrants, as Aristotle knew (Pol. 5.1313b), distrust the virtuous and, at the same time, attempt to prevent citizens from associating freely or having private lives. The only friendship encouraged in a tyranny is the one between the tyrant and his followers.

Simmons enlists Aristotle’s ethical works to demonstrate that friendship should usually be understood as a relationship between equals. Cleon broke new ground, therefore, in showing how a politician could make friends with the poor. Yet a closer reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachaean Ethics 8 shows that friendship can exist between those of different economic statuses. While it is true that the highest form of friendship, between the good, does presuppose equality (1157b37), Aristotle differentiates (as Simmons does not) between this kind of friendship and that made for the sake of pleasure or utility. Friendships between unequals, including between rich and poor, are most commonly made for the sake of utility (1159b12–13). This is essentially patronage, a topic that Simmons ignores. Yet he cites the examples of Crito’s patronage of Archedemus (Xen. Mem. 2.9.4–7) and Cimon’s benefactions to his fellow demesmen ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 27.4) precisely as cases of philia between individuals of unequal status. Patronage is clearly a way of ‘making friends’, but it is not unique to the demagogues of the late fifth century.

Simmons would counter by arguing that the demagogues are (as Connor believed) a new breed of politicians due to their economic status. They are new men, whose fathers gained a fortune in developing urban craft workshops staffed with slaves. This is why Paphlagon and the Sausage Seller in Aristophanes’ Knights (217–18, 293) are ‘men of the agora’. These ‘connections to backgrounds and occupations in common with the majority of Athenians’ (p. 50) are what enabled Cleon et al. to make friends so successfully with the demos. Pericles, with his aristocratic family connections, merely ‘opened up prospects for his successors, who were of a more modest social profile’ (p. 15). And yet the differences between aristocrats and demagogues in terms of economic class are fairly superficial. Investments in artisan businesses require capital, and Cleon’s father Cleaenetus (APF 8674) is unlikely to have come from nothing, especially if he were already a choregos in 460/59 bce.

The main distinction is not economic but moral. Pericles is a statesman, and not a demagogue, because of his virtue: he was able to lead the demos, according to Thucydides (2.65.8), because of his reputation, ability and integrity (δυνατὸς ὢν τῷ τε ἀξιώματι καὶ τῇ γνώμῃ χρημάτων τε διαφανῶς ἀδωρότατος γενόμενος). His successors were more ‘equal to each other’ (2.65.10), not in terms of class background but virtue. This explains the prominent emphasis on Cleon being a ‘man of the market’, since the market is understood to be the abode of cheats, liars and belligerent hucksters. The demagogues are not criticised for lower-class associations, but rather for pursuing occupations that do not allow for the development of virtue. Tanning and lamp-making were by no means occupations typically pursued by ‘the majority of Athenians’ (as Simmons assumes), since most citizens lived and worked in the countryside, even in the case of demes situated relatively close to the city (e.g. Halimous, Dem. 57.10). While the Old Oligarch ([Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.10) suggests that citizens are often indistinguishable from the types of slaves who would have staffed the factories of Cleon and Hyperbolus, most Athenians would have likely bristled at any such association. This emphasis on the moral differences between ‘statesmen’ and ‘demagogues’ can explain how the Greeks were able to differentiate between the two, even though their economic status and political practices were by no means dissimilar.

All kinds of political leaders in the Greek world attempted to ‘make friends’, including tyrants (who were capable of making friends on the grandest of scales by funding theatrical entertainments). Regardless of the reservations raised above, these studies are to be commended for their innovative and thought-provoking discussions of what it means to be a tyrant and a demagogue.