There were few leading cities anywhere in the Greek world that did not at some point during the seventh and sixth centuries BC fall into the hands of a high-aiming strongman – with Sparta, as ever, the exception that proved the rule. ‘Tyrannides’, the Greeks called such regimes – ‘tyrannies’. For them, the term did not have remotely the bloodstained connotations that the English word ‘tyrant’ has for us. Indeed, a Greek tyrant, almost by definition, had to have the popular touch, since otherwise he could not hope to cling to power for long.
