Xenophon by Fiona Hobden

Author:Fiona Hobden [Hobden, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

Happy tyrants make happy cities

Where the well-being of Athens and Sparta depend, in different ways, upon their citizens’ positive participation, under tyranny the prosperity of the city depends upon the disposition of its ruler. This is the premise that emerges through the dialogue between Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse (ruling 478–466 BC), and Simonides, the elegiac poet. Hiero opens as an interrogation of the pleasures experienced by the tyrant by contrast to a private citizen, and ends with the poet revealing the means by which he might achieve happiness, ‘the most beautiful and blessed possession known to humankind’ (Hiero 11.15). In developing this approach, Xenophon utilizes the figure of the happy tyrant, familiar to Plato’s Republic, and echoes Isocrates’ concern with what makes a good king in his letters to Nicocles, the ruler of Cyprus (Isocrates Letters 2, 3 and 9). However, the execution is uniquely Xenophon’s. Constituting yet another imagined encounter set in the past (‘then’, 1.1) and between persons long deceased, Hiero reworks a longer literary-philosophical tradition that sets a wise man in conversation with a ruler at his court into a format akin to his Socratic dialogues. A further frame might be found in Xenophon’s Hellenica, where tyranny is associated repeatedly with injustice (see Chapter 1), especially in light of Hiero’s self-excoriation over the fact that a tyrant ‘lives day and night like one condemned by the judgment of all men to die for his wrongdoings’ (7.9–10). However, the Oeconomicus also ends with an assessment by Ischomachus to Socrates that the ability to command willing men is a gift from the gods to those that possess moderation, whereas tyranny over the unwilling is a reward for men who lead their lives so that, like Tantalus, they remain in perpetual fear of dying twice over (21.12). Matching this, death is Hiero’s constant fear. It is in resolving this fear that Simonides provides a solution to the tyrant’s deficit in pleasure and his surfeit of pain (Hiero 1.2). A series of short measures that also direct the tyrant away from injustice will transform the polity into willing subjects.

Key to Simonides’ proposal is the cultivation of affection between the tyrant and his subjects through measures that benefit the wider community. After all, it is their presumed antagonism that lies at the root of Hiero’s negative appraisal of the tyrant’s life. For on the one hand, the tyrant lives in constant fear, to the extent that he constrains his movements (1.11–12), he is permanently on guard against attack (2.9–11, 18; 4.11; 6.7–8), he eliminates the best of citizens who might oppose him (5.1–2), and he even worries over the loyalty of his hired guards (6.11). On the other, his pleasures are ruined because praise may be false (1.15), love may be feigned (1.29–38), friendship may hide contempt (3.8–9, 6.12–13) and honours are forced (7.7). Indeed, fear is not only a source of pain, but corrupts every pleasure (6.6). As Hiero reveals, his response to the dilemmas raised by these anxieties lead him to murder conspirators (2.

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