poets could make long journeys to visit a large-hearted and open-handed tyrant, and were not ashamed to enjoy his patronage or to sing his praises. It is beyond doubt that both poetry and the plastic arts owed much to the wealth and to the honourable pride of these despots. Here and there, at least, a tyrant's self-regarding aims, so far from hindering the education of the Greek mind, positively did much to advance it.[1]
And once more, the tyrant, in the very fact that he was out of harmony with the true Greek social life, was of some use in widening its boundaries, — always apt to be somewhat confining. He stepped for the moment beyond the limits of the πόλις, and as he rose to fame might venture on alliance or friendship with the despots of distant cities, or even with the great monarchies that lay beyond Hellas. Such startling steps could hardly be taken by the City-State in its ordinary and natural life, which, as we saw, must be as independent as possible of aid from other States.[2] But the great tyrant rose altogether beyond these limits, and modelled himself rather on Eastern than on Greek ideas; he dreamt perhaps of empire, he built a navy, he stimulated
- ↑ Hiero of Syracuse, in the fifth century, is the most splendid example of this tendency of the tyrants. See especially Freeman, Hist. of Sicily, vol. ii. 256-289. Polycrates, Periander, and the Pisistratidæ can all be studied in Herodotus from the same point of view.
- ↑ The contrast between the far-reaching plans of the tyrant and the strict conventionalism of the typical πόλις is expressed with all Herodotus's consummate skill in the interview between Aristagoras of Miletus and Cleomenes of Sparta (v. 49).
