Tyrannical Repression and Solidary Association

In Politics 5.11 Aristotle describes the tyrant’s means of repression in terms of the aforementioned “three heads.” There Aristotle unpacks how the tyrant uses slander and surveillance in order to spread conditions of distrust and stamp out associations in which trust and conviction may be fostered, ultimately aiming to inculcate small-souledness (mikropsuchia) among his subjects (Pol. 1314a15–20). Small-souledness refers to an ethical characteristic grounded in citizens’ acceptance of a deficient share of “external goods,” such as political power, which they might otherwise desire (oregein) and take themselves to merit (axia) (NE 1123b15–20, 1125a20–30).Footnote ⁵

Aristotle’s account of tyrannical repression secures his position as a foundational theorist of what Milan Svolik (Reference Svolik2012) calls the “problem of authoritarian control,” that is, how autocratic rulers mitigate “threats from the masses” by repressing “the majority excluded from power” (1–2). By cultivating small souls, the tyrant pursues a strategy of “preventative repression” that strikes at the psychological and desiderative capacities of would-be dissidents (see Dragu and Przeworski Reference Dragu and Przeworski2019). According to Aristotle, citizens’ argumentative “claims” regarding merit reflect considered beliefs that both mediate passional responses to injustice and motivate action on those beliefs’ behalf (Rhet. 1379a1–20, 1387b10–20; Pol. 1312b25–35; Schofield Reference Schofield1996). Indeed, as indicated by Aristotle’s insistence that the tyrant seeks to undermine phronēma—“thought,” as well as “pride” or “conviction”—(Pol. 1313a35–b5), the tyrant seeks to achieve more than promoting his subjects’ “ignorance of one another’s preferences” (Simonton Reference Simonton2017, 65), for such “preference falsification” leaves the beliefs of the tyrannized psychologically intact, if misrepresented or veiled in public (Kuran Reference Kuran1995, 17). The tyrant aims rather to transform those preferences entirely.Footnote ⁶ By influencing the “strategic considerations” of his subjects (Young Reference Young2019), the tyrant seeks to vitiate the substantive ends motivating dissent—namely, their beliefs in and desires for a just share.Footnote ⁷

Aristotle’s attention to the disempowering effects of small-souledness shines a light on the terrain of struggle between tyrant and tyrannized. The Aristotelian tyrant is infamous for his tendency to acquire and defend what his subjects take to be a disproportionate and unjust share of material and honorific goods, like political power (NE 1134a35–b5). The tyrant thus transgresses citizens’ sense of merit as subjects of distributive justice (NE 5.3).Footnote ⁸ The tyrant’s inculcation of small-souledness thus thwarts in advance his subjects’ attempts at revolutionary mobilization, through which they would seek to transform the distribution of power that defines their constitution.Footnote ⁹ As Aristotle explains earlier, in Politics 5.10, citizens who object to such overreach often “pursue equality (zēteein isos)” through revolution in order to restore or claim a just distribution of power (Pol. 1301b25–30). In Politics 5.11 Aristotle identifies those who are equitable (epieikeis) as particularly dangerous to the tyrant in this regard. They prove dangerous

I return to the relationship between equity and trustworthiness below. My points, for now, are that the tyrant’s attention is squarely fixed on his subjects’ sense of their political worth and on how their self-estimation both reflects their considered beliefs about justice and motivates their hostility to the tyrant’s mastery.

Of central importance to the tyrant’s repressive efforts is fear (phobos), which he spreads throughout the polis in order to prevent his subjects from engaging in frank speech (parrhēsia) and to promote their social and political isolation (Pol. 1313b5–20). At the same time as the tyrant intimidates his subjects, however, he also generates a “fundamental moral hazard” for his own security (Svolik Reference Svolik2012, 124). As Aristotle notes in Politics 5.5, a “common fear (koinos phobos) can bring together even the worst enemies” (Pol. 1304b23–24). In spite of the tyrant’s fearful repression, or, perhaps, because of it, his subjects might move to form associations that threaten his rule.

Such associations pose a significant threat to the tyrant. As Aristotle notes, the tyrant outlaws “clubs, common messes, education, or anything of that sort, instead guarding against (phulattein) anything that generates two things, conviction and trust” (Pol. 1313b1–4). What do these associations have in common? Most notably, they all offer opportunities for sustained contact and familiarization, precisely the features of social life that the tyrant most aims to eviscerate by disallowing leisure (scholē) and informal gatherings (sullogoi) (Pol. 1313b3–4). The tyrant’s concern with leisure may be evidence of an anti-aristocratic orientation on his part, insofar as leisure, as well as clubs, were associated with elites (Jordović Reference Jordović2011, 47–51). Importantly however, common messes were nominally democratic institutions (Pol. 1271a30–35), and sullogoi often refers specifically to gatherings of democratic citizens (War 2.22.1; 3.27.3).Footnote ¹⁰ What these myriad groupings—of different social strata—share is their capacity to generate habits of trust and conviction. Seeking to prevent people from relying on (epitrepein) one another, the tyrant does everything “to make all as ignorant of one another as possible, since familiarity tends to create trust (pistis) of one another” (Pol. 1313b5–7; see Keyt Reference Keyt1999, 172).

Aristotle elsewhere discusses common messes and education as institutions that (correctly instituted) help to preserve existing constitutions (Pol. 1271a25–40, 1264a5–10, 1337a10–20). While attentive in Politics 5.11 to their potential to disrupt tyranny, Aristotle nowhere elaborates on this possibility. Aristotle does not expand on this possibility for clubs either. However, unlike common messes and education, clubs are distinct in belonging to a rich revolutionary history. I turn next to the history of political clubs in Athens in order to clarify the structural dynamics that grant clubs—and club-like associations generally—their anti-tyrannical potential.

Comradeship in Antiquity

The term hetairos, comrade, appears first in Homer as a marker of solidarity among non-elite “masses and crowds,” in which the call of martial comradeship entailed that “each man counts and is taken seriously” in his responsibility for “the success of the whole group” (Raaflaub and Wallace Reference Raaflaub, Wallace, Ober and Robert2007, 25–26). As Oswyn Murray (Reference Murray, Cazzato and Gabriel2018) has shown, the hetaireia, political club, “begins to take on its classical political form” in the context of Archaic symposia, at which elite, all-male social groups sang drinking songs (skolia) and forged their own distinctive norms of in-group solidarity (18). Frank speech (parrhēsia) was a central component of elite conviviality at symposia (Wecowski Reference Wecowski2014, 72). So too were interpersonal expectations of egalitarian treatment, which were enforced in order to prevent single individuals from monopolizing the conversation and “destroying sympotic equality” (66–71). All expected and were given their opportunity to speak and were held accountable for their failures to meet this expectation.

The poetry of Theognis—a mainstay of sympotic recitations from the Archaic period onward—attests to the character of these elite friendships, as well as to the pressures they experienced during this time of aristocratic upheaval. On Theognis’s telling it was the trust (pistis) among hetairoi that was their perhaps most cherished, and also endangered, value (Donlan Reference Donlan, Figueira and Nagy1985, 226). Theognis refers repeatedly to the disappearing trustworthy comrade (Theognidea 415–418, 1243–4), and the rarity of those who remain trustworthy in times of perplexity (Theog. 645–646), in matters of seriousness (Theog. 115–116, 641–644), misfortune and poverty (Theog. 857–860, 903–930), and in myriad other adverse circumstances (see Donlan Reference Donlan, Figueira and Nagy1985, 225). Faced with the potential “disintegration” of a “social universe once integrated by blood, affinal, and close personal ties” (229), Theognis appeals to time as the only sure measure of character and rues instances of misplaced judgment (Theog. 963–970). “A hetairos is not good,” Theognis insists, “if he speaks smoothly with his tongue but thinks otherwise in his mind (phronis)” (Theog. 93–100). Theognis advocates for his own trustworthiness as well-founded, for he had been sufficiently tested (paratribein) and could thus be counted on to be steadfast (Theog. 415–418, 1104a–1106). As we can see, in reflecting on the erosion of elite friendships, Theognis anticipates the solidaristic features feared by the tyrant in Politics 5.11, such as the commonality in mind and persistence in trust that inheres in solidaristic groups.

If the symposium served as a space of elite comity, it also represented a “form of political organization” hostile to the “emergent city-state [and] designed to perpetuate aristocratic control of the state against the dēmos” (Murray Reference Murray, Cazzato and Gabriel2018, 18–23). Insofar as these preoccupations with trust, time, and familiarity emerged in tandem with the eclipse of aristocracy and the emerging dominance of the dēmos, they also speak to a structural problem central to Politics 5.11: how political actors avoiding domination require a “social site … of comparative safety” within which to foster a “dissident subculture” (Scott Reference Scott1990, 114). While it might appear strange to liken victims of tyrannical oppression to aristocratic reactionaries, Mirko Cavenaro (Reference Cavenaro and Grig2017) homes in on why Aristotle might reach for the club as an exemplary safe haven for anti-tyrannists. Within classical Athens, “a society in which the [non-elite] masses had considerable control over the formal institutions of the state, it was elite culture rather than popular culture that tended to articulate itself in unofficial, ‘unauthorized’ forms” (63). As Adeimantus quips in Plato’s Republic, institutions like the club allow people to “escape detection” in private (365d), even as they pay lip service to the egalitarian ideology of the empowered dēmos in public (Ober Reference Ober1989). This capacity to maneuver outside of the eyes of state power is of central importance in Politics 5.11, where Aristotle notes how the tyrant spreads informants and attempts to make his subjects remain “in evidence and pass their time out of doors,” such that they “escape notice least of all” (Pol. 1313b5–10).

Building on the solidarism of earlier symposia, the political clubs of Athens allowed citizens to conspire behind closed doors, to circumvent the domination of the dēmos, and to bend the system to self-serving ends. Among other things, clubs used bribery, intimidation, and jury packing in their efforts to back or oppose policies and other elites (Calhoun Reference Calhoun1913, 58–65). Sometimes members of clubs would preemptively pursue countersuits against fellow citizens planning a future prosecution. In a number of instances where prominent club members were brought to court, their comrades would provide testimony (likely often perjuriously) or appear as advocates (64–89). Referring to the dynamic interplay of extralegal associations and the day-to-day workings of the Athenian public sphere, Alex Gottesman (Reference Gottesman2014, 9–11) describes Athenian clubs as an example of “politics in the street.” In this way the “social” or “expressive” activities of these private clubs were inextricable from their explicitly “political” or “instrumental” pursuits (Calhoun Reference Calhoun1913, 26; Gottesman Reference Gottesman2014, 49; Jones Reference Jones1999, 227). Insofar as members of clubs participated in institutions like the courts, their efficacy depended on a foundation of trust developed over time, behind doors, and without the authorization of the state. Such habits of trust, including the ability to hold steady under pressure and to refuse to denounce one’s fellows, are precisely the ones Aristotle identifies as significant threats to tyranny in Politics 5.11.

As noted, scholars often locate the origin of clubs in a “reactionary” response to the eclipse of the archaic aristocracy (Jones Reference Jones1999, 294), when they organized for “definite political purposes” among those “element[s] which the new political order did not satisfy” (see Calhoun Reference Calhoun1913, 10). As “ideological safe havens,” clubs provided spaces within which elites could foster their antipathy toward the prevailing political order as well as the trust necessary to put that hostility into action (Jones Reference Jones1999, 295). During the lead-up to the oligarchic revolution of 411 BCE, for example, the clubs promoted hostility to the popular constitution and served as a refuge for those who understood themselves to be “repudiated by democratic politics” (Connor Reference Connor1971, 197). The clubs thus provided opportunities for spirited ideological opposition. In this way, too, they fostered habits of mind which Aristotle marks as feared by the tyrant. As loci of trust, conviction, and oppositional revolutionary efficacy, the clubs thus provide resources for conceptualizing the characteristics of solidarity needed to depose a tyrant.

Clubs also housed decisively tyrannical proclivities. As recounted by Thucydides and Xenophon, respectively, the oligarchic comrades of 411 and 404/3 BCE turned to repression as an answer to the democratic attachments of the dēmos. For Thucydides, the repression of the Four Hundred stemmed from their knowledge that it would be “no easy matter” to rule citizens accustomed to freedom and lacking experience in subjection (History 8.68.4). Describing overtures made by Athenian oligarchs to the Spartan King Agis, Thucydides makes explicit his trepidation that Athenian citizens “would not so quickly surrender their ancient liberties,” and would thus need to be “cowed into submission,” regardless of their ruling oligarchs’ efforts to broker a truce (War 8.71.1). In Xenophon’s account of the Thirty, he recounts the defense of their reign of terror by Kritias, the hubristic ringleader, who maintained that “since the people have been nurtured in freedom for the longest time,” there’s no avoiding the fact that “a large number of citizens are and will remain hostile” to an oligarchy (Hellenika 2.3.24). Without “bring[ing] the state under the tyranny of a few men,” Kritias assumed that an oligarchy would be impossible for Athenians to bear (Hell. 2.3.48).

Aristotle was well aware of the tyrannical history of oligarchic coups in Athens. In an unmistakable foreshadowing of the tyrant’s use of “deceit (apatē) and force (bia)” against those not wishing (mē boulomenon) to be so ruled (Pol. 1313a10–15), discussed in Politics 5.10, Aristotle describes in Politics 5.4 how the oligarchic revolution of the Four Hundred relied on force (bia) and deceit (apatē) in imposing its rule over unwilling persons (Pol. 1304b8–20). Strikingly, the political context that Aristotle claims motivates the tyrant’s repression itself echoes Thucydides’s and Xenophon’s treatments of the Four Hundred and Thirty. According to Aristotle, the tyrant’s turn to repression is motivated by his knowledge that, under democratic conditions where no one person merits (axioma) a singular claim to power, force alone can secure his rule (Pol. 1313a8–10). Thucydides and Xenophon highlight precisely this consideration. Force emerges for these authors as a tyrannical response to countervailing desires for a more just political order, namely, one that reflects citizens’ beliefs regarding the proper distribution of power.

Even, then, as comrades might draw lessons from the solidaristic practices that granted oligarchs their dissident potential, anti-tyrannists would do well to avoid such a tyrannical reliance on repression, predicated, as it was, on the ideological hostility of the Athenian dēmos to oligarchic rule. It is not for nothing that Aristotle identifies tyrannies and oligarchies as among the most “short lived” of regimes (Pol. 1315b10–15). The sense of precarity underpinning the tyrant’s rule and motivating his repression is on full display in the conduct of the Four Hundred and the Thirty. To avoid tyrannical violence, revolutionaries need to court, and perhaps expand, the desires of others instead of vitiating them.

Aristotle suggests in Politics 5.4 that such avoidance is possible. Instead of pursuing revolution tyrannically, over those who are unwilling, Aristotle indicates that revolutionaries can sometimes rely on persuasion, so that they rule over or alongside willing persons. Aristotle does not elaborate on what revolutionary persuasion entails, but he is clear that if revolutionaries are to secure the conditions of voluntary rule they must “both persuade at the beginning and maintain the persuasion later on” (Pol. 1304b10–20). Thus, revolutionaries, if they are to avoid tyranny, need sustained time not only to bolster their in-group relations but also to establish requisite trust with non-solidary citizens. If persuasive speech would play a role in such efforts, so, too, would the qualities of character displayed by comrades during their protracted anti-tyrannical struggle. As Aristotle makes clear, echoing Theognis, central to garnering the trust of others is to show yourself to be trustworthy (Rhet. 1377b20–30). This is evidenced in your actions as well as your words (Rhet. 1366a1–20). It is to the actions among comrades to which I turn next, drawing on remarks Aristotle makes regarding hetairoi across his writings on friendship.

The Politics of Comradeship

Aristotle discusses the form of friendship (philia) characteristic of hetairoi at several points in Nicomachean Ethics 8–9 and Eudemian Ethics 7. As we will see in the following, the features Aristotle associates with comradely friendships echo the aforementioned characteristics of sympotic comrades, such as their interpersonal egalitarianism, trust, and frankness. Aristotle also associates comradeship with equity, a central object of the tyrant’s fear in Politics 5.11. As scholars rightfully note, comradeship for Aristotle appears to imply a degree of civic cohesion that Aristotle elsewhere identifies as far from “appropriate to all” (Lockwood Reference Lockwood2003, 14). “The intimacy of comrades,” argues Bernard Yack (Reference Yack1993, 119), “simply cannot be extended to a large number of individuals.” Taken in situ, these passages seem of little political relevance: they evince bonds few citizens can share and appear largely cleansed of the “conflicts of desire” that ordinarily characterize political life (Allen Reference Allen2004, 124). However, as I will show, when interpreted with a view to the demands of anti-tyrannical struggle these passages offer guidance for elaborating the comrades’ in-group relations—how they might practice equality, trust, and frankness as a feature of anti-tyrannical solidarity—as well as how equity might inform comrades’ efforts to court the desires of other, non-solidary, members of the polis. Footnote ¹¹

Tyrannicide and Revolution

In the early years of the tyrant Hippias’s rule, his younger brother, Thessalus, slighted Harmodius, a young member of the Athenian elite. So infuriated were Harmodius and his lover, Aristogeiton, that they, with “many participants,” plotted to assassinate his ruling brother. As we saw at the start of this article, their attempt went poorly. After the would-be tyrannicides spotted one of their fellow conspirators “meeting Hippias in a friendly manner,” they assumed that their plot had been revealed. Frightened, Aristogeiton and Harmodius ran down from the Acropolis “without waiting for others” and assassinated not Hippias but Hipparchus, another brother of Thessalus. Hippias’s guards killed Harmodius and took Aristogeiton prisoner, where, “after being tortured for a long time,” he denounced (katēgorein) the other participants. In contrast to “democratic” accounts that Aristogeiton tricked Hippias by denouncing the tyrant’s allies, Aristotle reports that Aristogeiton may have betrayed his own (Ath. Pol. 18.1–6).

Teegarden (Reference Teegarden2014, 32–45) and Simonton (Reference Simonton2017, 230) argue that these “paradigmatic tyrant killers” exemplify the dissident efficacy of the “bold individual” who, “on his own initiative, ‘goes first’” and thus sparks the “metaknowledge” needed to produce a revolutionary bandwagon. Their focus on “common knowledge” foregrounds the rational and environmental conditions facilitating collective action: how material and/or honorific rewards incentivize revolutionary “first movers” to act, as well as how the public “epistemic context” provided by occasions like festivals makes it possible that someone less brave “sees the act, knows that all of the others have seen it as well, and can therefore join in the attack with the knowledge that others will in all likelihood support him.” Aware of the reputational incentives associated with anti-tyrannical action, Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, identifies Aristogeiton and Harmodius as examples of how deeds exaggerated through public honors might provide lessons in character for others (Rhet. 1368a10–20).

As we know, Harmodius and Aristogeiton’s show of daring misfired. One explanation for this is that the success or failure of any revolutionary strike will always be deeply contingent (Simonton Reference Simonton2017, 246). However brave the first movers, they cannot control the reception of their act by others. At the same time, Aristotle’s description of the event points toward a more specific issue, namely, that the failure of the tyrannicides was a failure of comradeship. This reading becomes legible if we compare his account with that of Thucydides.

According to Thucydides, the attempt failed in large part due to a “sudden panic” brought on by Hippias’s conversation with one of the unnamed participants (War 6.59.1–2). Aristotle does not explicitly name a cause, but he supplements the story told by Thucydides by including Aristogeiton’s likely denunciation of his co-conspirators. Although there can be no guarantee against the pressures of physical or psychological torture, Aristotle, in emphasizing Aristogeiton’s denouncement (katēgorein), seems to be identifying a breach in the solidaristic trust characteristic of comradeship. Another difference between the accounts of Aristotle and Thucydides speaks to precisely this issue. Whereas Thucydides reports that there were not many conspirators (War 6.56.2–3), Aristotle says the opposite, that there were “many participants.” Sara Monoson (Reference Monoson2000) argues that Aristotle’s revision might reflect his understanding that “opposition to the tyranny was brewing” among the broader public in advance of the festival (49). It is also possible that Aristotle marks the high number of would-be assassins to underscore a deficit of trust within a large and unfamiliar group. Perhaps the lovers moved first because they assumed from the outset that their fellow conspirators would be unable to hold their tongues.

Additionally, while Thucydides and Aristotle similarly identify the origin of the plot in Thessalus’s insult of Harmodius, only Thucydides highlights the lovers’ more ambitious plot to ensure “the downfall of the tyranny” (War 6.54.3–4) and their assumption that witnesses would endeavor to regain their own liberty after the initial strike (War 6.56.3). Aristotle, by contrast, stresses the “private origination of the deed” (Monoson Reference Monoson2000, 49), noting in the Politics that the assassins acted against not a form of rule (archē) but a person or body (soma) (Pol. 1311a30–35). Silent on the attention of the assassins to the desires of others for freedom, Aristotle emphasizes instead their personal focus. By highlighting the lovers’ inability to “[wait] for others,” Aristotle casts a critical light on the revolutionary potential of first movers who act without collective support.

After concluding his account of the tyrannicides, Aristotle describes the increasingly repressive turn taken by Hippias, which sets the stage for his eventual overthrow by Sparta and the circumstances of the democratic revolution of 508/7 BCE. Identifying a state of conflict between the Spartan-appointed Isagoras, “a friend of the tyrants,” and Cleisthenes, “of the Alcmaeonid family,” Aristotle reports that Cleisthenes, “being lesser in respect to the political clubs (hetaireiai),” fared badly in the conflict until he “enlisted the dēmos on his side [by] offering to hand over the constitution (politeia) to the majority (plēthos).” Cleisthenes’s ensuing upswell in support gave him the advantage over Isagoras, who, now fearing for his hold on power, turned for assistance to the Spartan king Cleomones, exiled an estimated 700 families—including Cleisthenes—and moved to disband the council and solidify his control by establishing a 300-person oligarchy. The council resisted, however, and, in the wake of their resistance the multitude mobilized, forcing Isagoras and his supporters to flee to the Acropolis for safety, where they were assailed by the dēmos for several days before being forced to surrender. The dēmos then returned Cleisthenes to Athens, where he ushered in a wave of democratizing reforms (Ath. Pol. 20.1–3).

Drawing on Ober (Reference Ober1996; Reference Ober, Raaflaub, Ober and Wallace2007), Simonton (Reference Simonton2017, 157) treats the dēmos’ siege of the acropolis as an example of the epistemic benefits provided by daring acts of public defiance and thus as of a piece with the “blueprint” of anti-tyrannical action first provided by Harmodius and Aristogeiton. While also drawing on Kuran’s account of revolutionary bandwagons, Ober (Reference Ober1996) grants more attention to the non-epistemic factors that have also been the focus of this article, associating Herodotus’s description of the dēmos—that they were “of one mind (phronein)”—with the spirited and long-cultivated form of conviction discussed above, regarding phronēma in Politics 5.11 (Histories 5.72.2; 44), and attributing the mobilization of the dēmos to a complex “aetiology of desire” indebted to prior cultural reforms (51; Reference Ober, Raaflaub, Ober and Wallace2007, 86).

Revealingly, despite insisting that Isagoras and Cleisthenes likely lacked recourse to “ideologically motivated hetaireiai” identified by Aristotle and Herodotus, Ober (Reference Ober1996, 38) repeatedly appeals to the bonds characteristic of comradeship in describing the relationship between Cleisthenes and the Athenian dēmos, maintaining that “Athenian hetairoi were expected to help one another, and to seek to harm their common enemies” (51). Ober speculates that Cleisthenes recognized that comradeship “was a two-way street” in making good on his prior offer of democratic citizenship. Acting “as a good hetairos, well deserving of the pistis (good faith) placed in him ([Ath. Pol.] 21.1) by his new mass hetaireia,” Cleisthenes, Ober maintains, “came up with a constitutional order that both framed and built upon the revolution that had started without him” (51–52).

Ober joins other scholars of the Athenian revolution in focusing on the sequence of events outlined above, which draw variously from the Ath. Pol. and Herodotus’s earlier discussion in the Histories (see Anderson Reference Anderson2003, 76–83; Cartledge Reference Cartledge2016, 61–90; Forsdyke Reference Forsdyke2005, 133–143; and Simonton Reference Simonton2017, 20–25). While Ober (Reference Ober, Raaflaub, Ober and Wallace2007, 85) is right to characterize Aristotle’s treatment as “largely (though not entirely) derivative” of Herodotus, from the perspective of the account of comradeship developed in this article, Aristotle adds details that are of great, if underexamined, significance. Most importantly, in the course of describing Hippias’s repression and Cleisthenes’s return to Athens following the siege, Aristotle interpolates two sympotic drinking songs (skolia) associated with the Alcmaeonids.Footnote ¹⁹ While Ober discerns in the revolution a comradely bond between Cleisthenes and the dēmos, his focus on recovering the agency of the latter remains bound to a mass-elite binary, which occludes the agency of comradely association represented by Cleisthenes’s family. If we recall the origins of comradeship in archaic symposia, as attested to in the poetry of Theognis discussed earlier, we can take Aristotle’s interpolations as assigning to comradeship a more significant role in the revolution than is generally thought.

Commenting on Hippias’s expulsion of rivals following the assassination of Hipparchus, Aristotle identifies the Alcmaeonids as “chief among [the exiles],” who met with repeated failures in their efforts to return home (Ath. Pol. 19.3). Aristotle identifies as especially disastrous their expulsion from the fort of Lypsidrium and quotes from a drinking song that makes explicit the bonds of comradeship running through their defeats:

“After they had failed in everything else,” Aristotle (again) emphasizes, the Alcmaeonids were finally able to enlist the support of Sparta, who helped expel Hippias with “support from the Athenians” (Ath. Pol. 19.4–5).

In the Histories, Herodotus reports that the Alcmaeonids has long been haters of tyranny, (misoturranoi) (Hist. 6.121.1), and suggests that this ideological motivation underwrote their protracted struggle for power (dunamis) since the rule of Peisistratus (Hist. 5.66.2). The Ath. Pol. aligns with this view but grants even greater significance to the revolutionary persistence of the Alcmaeonids. Consider Aristotle’s closing remarks on the overthrow of Isagoras, and the embedded drinking song:

Ober (Reference Ober1996, 51–52) locates the source of the dēmos’ post-revolutionary trust in Cleisthenes’s promises to grant them citizenship. As the above passage suggests, however, Aristotle does not so much emphasize Cleisthenes’s own persuasive abilities as he does those of Cleisthenes’s family, whose long anti-tyrannical struggle apparently convinced the majority of Athenians both of their trustworthiness and of the credibility of their anti-tyrannical commitments. With his invocation of the Alcmaeonids’ encomium to the oft-forgotten Cedon, Aristotle underscores a register of political engagement whose duration and persistence is absent from, if not obscured by, preoccupations with tyrannicidal first movers.

Our preceding discussion of equity and outreach also casts fresh light on the institutional reforms pursued by Cleisthenes. As Aristotle notes in the Politics, the question of who should participate in the constitution—that is, the question of political justice—it at its most urgent “after a revolution,” such as when Cleisthenes enfranchised “many foreigners and alien slaves” (Pol. 1275b33–1276a5). Not only did Cleisthenes and his family show themselves to be responsive to emergent democratic desires—indeed on Aristotle’s telling, they radically expanded them—but they also pursued reforms that allowed relations of trust to develop across the broader community, thus ensuring political stability. Aristotle illuminates how Cleisthenes achieved this goal; namely, by destroying and reorganizing the Athenian tribal system by mixing together (anamisgein) otherwise disparate parts of the polis (Pol. 1319b20–30). In this way Cleisthenes diffused dominant “social castes” that were likely hostile to the nascent democracy and facilitated a “regrouping of [the Athenian] population” (Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet Reference Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet1996, 64). Aristotle’s language of “mixing” here extends the logic of just mixing (mignunai dikaiōs) described above with reference to polities. The substantive upshot also remains the same: how certain institutional reforms might mitigate the potential for faction by joining together those who are otherwise separate and potentially opposed.Footnote ²⁰

It is unlikely that the Ath. Pol. reflects an historically accurate view of the revolution. It is almost certain that Aristotle and Herodotus relayed exaggerated, if not false, details in emphasizing the anti-tyrannicism of the Alcmaeonids. Scholars have long debated to what extent the Alcmaeonids and their supporters sought to bolster their anti-tyrannical bona fides, in contrast with more popular oral traditions focused on the Harmodius and Aristogeiton (Azoulay Reference Azoulay2017, 27–30; Forsdyke Reference Forsdyke2005, 108, 121–123, 134; Jacoby Reference Jacoby1949, 149–226; Lavelle Reference Lavelle1993, 87–125; Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet Reference Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet1996, chap. 3; Thomas Reference Thomas1989, 144–154, 238–282). During Aristotle’s time, it was Harmodius’s song that was sung.

We are now in a good position to offer some additional reasons for why Aristotle may have sided with reports favoring the Alcmaeonids. The solidarity expressed in their drinking songs, the duration of their resistance, and their hatred of tyranny all embody aspects of comradeship that Aristotle identifies as threatening to tyranny in Politics 5.11. The affinities between these discussions across Aristotle’s Ath. Pol. and Politics as well as with Herodotus’s Histories are striking. Embedded in descriptions of political repression and struggle, passages in all three texts refer in parallel fashion to dissident forms of thought (phronēma/phronein) (Pol. 1313b1–2; Hist. 5.72.2), trust (pistis/pisteiuein) (Pol. 1313b2–3, 1314a17–20; Ath. Pol. 21.1), political affairs (pragmata) (Pol. 1314a23; Ath. Pol. 20.4), power and powerlessness (dunamis/adunamia) (Pol. 1314a23–25, 1314a29; Hist. 5.66.2), and political clubs (hetaireiai) (Pol. 1313b1; Ath. Pol. 20.1).

The Ath. Pol.’s inclusion of the Alcmaeonid drinking songs also offers substantial allusions to the politics of comradeship. We know from Aristotle’s references to hetairoi in his ethical writings that he was likely aware of comrades’ solidary characteristics, and Politics 5.11 speaks to their anti-tyrannical potential. These include the abilities of comrades to rely on (epitrepein) each other (Pol. 1313b5–7; EE 1242b36–8), to refuse to flatter and to speak frankly (parrhēsia) (Pol. 1314a1–5; NE 1165a29–33), and to refuse the temptation of denunciation (katagoreuein) (Pol. 1314a15–25; NE 1157a20–25, 1162a14–17). Unnamed but implicit in the tyrant’s repression is his fear of revolutionaries’ pursuit of equality (zēteein isos) (Pol. 1301b25–30), a hallmark of comrades in Aristotle’s thought (EE 1242a36–40) and of political actors who challenge domination and seek justice. Granting that revolutions “never just spontaneously ‘happen,’” Simonton (Reference Simonton2017) is surely right to stress that “[c]ollective action must begin somewhere, and this is with the choices of specific people” brave enough to serve as collective action’s “immediate cause” (246). Aristotle suggests that, in the absence of the mediating cause of comradeship, such immediate causes will often prove insufficient.