Title: Tyranny - Greek tyrants | Britannica
Headings: Greek
tyrants

Greek tyrants
Tyranny in Rome
Tyranny and the people
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Content: the other suggests that tyrants were representative of a newly politically conscious dēmos (people) who supported their rise in the hope of improving their position within the state. Although the idea of any political consciousness on the part of the dēmos in the 7th century is optimistic, it is true that early tyrants tended to have popular support. Figures such as Cypselus at Corinth and Cleisthenes at Sicyon offered an alternative to exploitation by the aristocrats, and certainly tyrants introduced reforms intended to please the dēmos, codifying the laws and establishing justice—Peisistratus in Athens set up traveling courts—and gathering resources for public projects, such as fountains to supply water and grand temples. Thus, the tyrants of the Archaic age of ancient Greece ( c. 900–500 bce )—Cypselus, Cleisthenes, Peisistratus, and Polycrates —were popular, presiding as they did over an era of prosperity and expansion. But those attitudes shifted in the course of the 5th century under the influence of the Persian invasions of Greece in 480–479 bce. Most sources for Greek history are Athenian, and for them the defining moments of the Athenian state were the establishment of the democracy in 510 bce and the Greeks’ astonishing defeat of Persia in the next generation. The outcome of the Greco-Persian Wars was interpreted as the success of the free and democratic Greeks against the autocratic and tyrannical Persian king; consequently, in Athenian writing after 480 bce tyranny became the hated opposite of democracy. That coloured attitudes toward tyranny in the past as well; rulership that had previously seemed positive and acceptable was condemned as oppressive and self-serving.