Violence and the Thirty Tyrants

Let us conclude this discussion with a more detailed look at the most infamous episode of mass violence at Athens, which was for those who remembered it (and won) the reign of the Thirty Tyrants in the immediate aftermath of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 bce).

According to our sources the oligarchs killed about 1,500 citizens and residents of the city. Thus Wolpert wrote that ‘The Thirty carried out a systematic campaign of political murder unparalleled in the history of classical Athens.'^[1070] As I noted at the start of this chapter, in Athenian democratic ideology democracies killed in public and in law, tyrannies and oligarchies murdered secretly and extra-legally. The murders by the Thirty reinforced this belief. Indeed, Ostwald thought that Athens could not have been, presumably in the minds of the Thirty, ‘Laconised without violence', thus the murders were part of the political programme of those in ‘charge'.³⁵ As Wolpert noted, ‘violence was a necessary and integral part of their rule that was inevitable once the Thirty plotted to overthrow the democracy and replace it with a narrow oligarchy'.³⁶ Whatever the realities of the Thirty's real aims or actions, their failure determined that the legacy of their tyranny would be remembered as one of violence and secrecy in the democratic state that re-emerged in the fourth century. Our evidence reflects this image. In such an environment, therefore, tyranny, oligarchy and extra-legal murder became intricately inter­connected in democratic tradition.

More on the topic Violence and the Thirty Tyrants:

1. THE CANONICAL SET OF THIRTY-THREE GODS
2. Thirty Years Wars: ‘A Bellicose People'
3. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Confucius
4. CHAPTER THIRTY The Aryans of India
5. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE Caesar the Hero
6. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX The First Roman Prince
7. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN The Beginning of Christianity
8. CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Rome and the Christians
9. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE The Mauryan Empire of India
10. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO China: Writing and the Qin
11. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR The Rise of Julius Caesar
12. CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT The End of the Ancient Jewish Nation
13. Violence against the Self, State Violence and Interpersonal Violence
14. Within the world history of violence the Bible is relevant for our reconstructions of the lived experience of violence among ancient Israelites and Judeans;
15. The theme ‘religion and violence' or ‘religious violence' gained worldwide attention after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2001.1
16. The Interwar Moment: Violence versus Non-Violence
17. Nearly thirty years ago, H. L. A. Hart observed that American jurisprudence “is marked by a concentration, almost to the point of obsession, on the judicial process, that is, with what courts do and should do, how judges reason and should reason in deciding particular cases.”[229]
18. Violence and representations of violence abound in the literature of ancient and late antique Judaism and Christianity.