Hippias and tyranny

Use in the book

At 229b Socrates makes Hipparchus’ death the dividing line in Athenian political experience. He says that the Athenians were then ruled by his brother Hippias for three years, and presents the men of old as witnesses that these alone were the years of tyranny. The statement lends retrospective authority to Hipparchus: losing him is made to mean losing an almost golden-age way of life.

This is stronger than saying that an existing tyranny became harsher. The dialogue’s “only” restricts the name tyranny to the last period. Its political description depends on the character of the regime, or at least on the approving vocabulary used of it, more than on a supplied constitutional definition. Nothing in the passage explains institutions that would distinguish Hipparchus’ earlier rule from Hippias’ later rule. Calling the earlier life nearly Cronian is a eulogy, not an institutional analysis.

The edition’s historical controls matter here. Thucydides gives Hippias the succession from Pisistratus and reports a harsher regime after Hipparchus’ assassination; the Aristotelian Constitution similarly distinguishes earlier and later conditions. Those accounts allow a change of severity without requiring a change from non-tyranny to tyranny. Consequently, agreement over an interval of approximately three years cannot be used to harmonise the whole narrative.

Within the conversation, this retrospective political praise completes the credentials of the man whose command Socrates claims to obey. Yet the argument about gain has not supplied a criterion for evaluating political rule, and the companion has not assented to the historical claims one by one. Their persuasive effect and their evidential status therefore remain distinct. The later language of being “compelled” by the argument may invite comparison with authority and rule, but the text does not equate Socrates with Hippias or identify dialectical pressure as literal tyranny.

Places to read

1. 229bτρία ἔτη ἐτυραννεύθησαν Ἀθηναῖοι — The three-year period is explicitly placed after Hipparchus’ death.
2. 229bταῦτα μόνον τὰ ἔτη — “Only these”: the restriction makes the claim more than a change in harshness.
3. 229bτυραννὶς ἐγένετο ἐν Ἀθήναις — The noun names the political condition restricted to those years.

Translation in this edition

The edition renders the verb “were ruled by a tyrant” and the noun “tyranny,” keeping the verbal action and the named condition audible. Its note cites Thucydides 6.59 and the Constitution 16.7. Those references qualify the dramatic claim; they do not license rewriting Socrates’ account into the historians’ version.