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4 - The tyranny of the Pisistratidae

from PART II - THE GREEK STATES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

D. M. Lewis
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Pisistratus died in spring 527, but tyranny survived at Athens until 510. For most of these seventeen years we have no connected narrative source and a disproportionate amount of our direct evidence is concerned with one day in 514, the day on which Hipparchus was assassinated, and the implications of its events. On these, differing views were held from an early date, most strongly by Thucydides in his most combative mood. A further difficulty is caused by occasional uncertainty as to whether the sources, in statements about ‘the tyrants’ or ‘the Pisistratidae’, intend to exclude or include Pisistratus. This and other ambiguities of the evidence go to obscure the question of whether the tyranny changed its character after Pisistratus' death.

Pisistratus left three legitimate sons, Hippias, Hipparchus and Thessalus (Thuc. VI.55.1 as against Arist. Ath.Pol. 17.3). Of Thessalus little was known and the accounts of his character are contradictory and worthless (Arist. Atb.Pol. 18.2, Diod. X.17.1). There is now general agreement that Hippias and Hipparchus were well into their forties at their father's death, but no certainty is possible as to which was the elder. Thucydides (1.20.2, VI.55.1–2) was sure that it was Hippias and that the general Athenian belief, preserved only by Plato (Hipparch. 228b) and possibly by the Parian Marble (45), that it was Hipparchus was mistaken. The evidence with which he supported the oral tradition which had reached him is not convincing, and a further difficulty arises from the archon-list fragment, shortly to be considered, which shows Hippias as archon in 526/5.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1988

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