Talk:Tyrant - tyrannous

David W, e-mail 03/12/09:

You are right. Sometimes turannos does seem to mean much the same as king (basileus): LSJ quote a passage from Isocrates where the two words seem to be used interchangeably. However, this is true only of some uses of turannos. The turannoi of the so-called 'Age of the Tyrants' in the 7th and 6th centuries BC were absolute rulers who had usurped power (i.e., somewhat like tyrants in our sense); but by and large they were beneficial for the city-states they ruled over. And so, especially in the earlier part of the classical period, the word turannos did not have the negative connotations of our word 'tyrant'. Later, with the establishment of democracy in (some of) the Greek cities, the word did begin to acquire negative connotations. Aristotle, e.g., in his classification of types of constitution in Politics III 7 contrasts kingship (basileia), which he defines as the rule of one person in the common interest and is one of the good types of constitution, with 'tyranny' (turannis), which he defines as the rule of one person in his own interest and is one of the bad or 'deviant' types of constitution. So turannis for Aristotle clearly has negative connotations, though I'm not sure that his definition of turannis quite fits our 'tyranny'.

So it seems that a turannos can be contrasted with a basileus in some of the ways in which we contrast a tyrant and a king, though sometimes the gap between the two words is not felt to be great. And, unlike our 'tyrant', turannos is not always used with negative connotations, though increasingly it came to be.

PeterWilson 22:29, 3 December 2009 (GMT)