Tyranny

Tyranny (tyrannis) meant rule by a single man who took power unconstitutionally, usually by a coup, as opposed to a lawful hereditary king. The word tyrannos is not Homeric; it enters Greek in the 7th c. BCE, with the poet Archilochus among the earliest to use it, of Gyges of Lydia. Real 'tyrants' such as Peisistratus of Athens and Periander of Corinth often ruled effectively, and even popularly. Later philosophy turned the term sharply negative. Plato, in the Republic (4th c. BCE), painted the tyrant as the most enslaved and unhappy of men, and Aristotle, in the Politics, classed tyranny as the corrupt counterpart of kingship — rule by one man in his own interest rather than for the common good — fixing it as the worst of the regimes in Western political thought.