From the Beginning to Plato

THE POLIS AND ITS CULTURE 27
particular offices and officials was a crucial one. The situation which is imagined
in the Dreros law, that a magistrate takes advantage of the possibilities for
popular support which an office with a judicial role offers in order to ignore the
time limit set upon the holding of that office, is precisely the situation which one
late source alleges enabled Cypselos to become tyrant in Corinth: he gained
popular support by the way in which he settled the cases which came to him as
polemarch and then refused to hand on the office. Such seizures of power by
individuals are a mark of the archaic period in the Greek cities, but tyrants were
not at all restricted to the archaic period; they can be found, and not just in
Sicily, throughout the classical period. Greek tyrants were not necessarily
despotic, though most later accumulated some tales about a ‘reign of terror’, and
they did not necessarily take all powers into their own hands, many simply
overseeing the continued functioning of the existing constitution but controlling
access to and the execution of magistracies. 35
It was not simply magisterial authority which gave the opportunity to the
ambitious individual to seize power. Disputes between groups within a city
might equally give an individual a chance to insert himself as a person who could
bring stability. At Athens factional disputes, fuelled by popular discontent with
the unequal distribution of resources, not only produced an attempted coup in the
late seventh century, when an Olympic victor endeavoured to cash in that glory
for political power, but led in the first decade of the sixth century to the granting
of extraordinary powers to one man, Solon, to reform the laws and the
constitution. So much is later falsely ascribed to Solon that it is unclear what
exactly the limits of his legal reforms were, but there is no reason to doubt that
he not only took a stand on major social and economic issues such as debtbondage,
but also reformed legal procedure to make recourse to law more
practical, and regulated all aspects of citizens’ lives, including agricultural
practice, verbal abuse, testamentary disposition, and funerals. Although even in
the case of Solon it is probably an exaggeration to talk of a ‘law code’, he seems
to have attempted to deal with sources of discontent over a very wide range.
Without success. Within a few years one magistrate had attempted to keep his
powers beyond their allotted span, and within half a century protracted factional
disputes gave an opportunity for Peisistratos, backed by mercenary troops, to
establish himself as tyrant.
Possession of overriding power by a particular individual was rarely popular
with all, and much of the continued foundation of settlements elsewhere by
Greeks should probably be seen as prompted by dissatisfaction with the regime
in the home city, if it was not occasioned by actual expulsion of a group. Two
episodes of colonization by Sparta, the colonization of Taras in south Italy c.700
and the two attempts to found a city by Dorieus at the end of the sixth century,
are traditionally held to belong to these categories. Taras was founded by a group
called the Partheniai whom the Spartans had expelled; Dorieus went off to
colonize of his own accord to get away from his half-brother Cleomenes when the
latter succeeded to the throne.