HARMODIOS AND ARISTOGEITON (514 BC)

Daemonic Rise   Friday, 29 December 2017

Harmodios and Aristogeiton weren't tyrannicides and could fairly be charged with causing a beneficial tyranny to turn nasty. The later popular will to mythologise them must have been due to reasons other than their historical role.

The true hero of Athenian democracy, worthy of a commemorative statue, is Cleisthenes. He invented and implemented a democratic system that the Greeks desperately needed but couldn't stop fighting long enough to realise they wanted. Harmodios and Aristogeiton gave history nothing more than a reckless dice-throw in a dangerous game of Who's-Up-Who-And-Who's-Paying-The-Rent.

But it was Harmodios and Aristogeiton who were chosen to represent the democratic ideal. This committed man-boy couple represented the freedom and daring, the pedagogic Greek love, and the barely restrained hubris, that was to drive the astonishing creativity of the Classical era. They also linked an urbanised people with the arete of the earlier fiercely martial and pederastic Dorian tribes. The very idea of a free-standing statue was born of archaic Greek idolisation of the boy. Classical Greeks mythologised themselves in a dizzying feedback loop of inspiration and achievement.

Shift this tyrant-slaying scene a few hundred miles east, and Harmodios and Aristogeiton wouldn't even rate a footnote. Instead we'd have today a few clunky Cleisthenic tablets telling us when to vote and how many hairs to split in the process. Amen to the Greeks, I say.