Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/369

 -CHAP. VII. THE PLEBS ENTER THE CITY. 363 pie supported the government of the Bacchiadoe very unwillingly; Cypselus, understanding this hatred, and seeing that the people sought a chief to conduct them to freedom," offered himself to become their chief. Tiie people accepted him, set him up as their tyrant, drove out the BacchiadaB, and obeyed Cypselus. Mi- letus had as a tyrant a certain Thrasybulus; Mitylene ob^^yed Pittacus, and Samos Polycrates. We find tyrants at Argos, at Epidaurus, and at Megara in the sixth century ; Sicyon had tyrants during a hundred and thirty years, without interruption. Among the -Greeks of Italy we see tyrants at Cuniae, at Crotona, -at Sybaris — indeed everywhere. At Syracuse, in 485, the lower orders made themselves masters of the city, and banished the aristocratic class; but they could neither maintain nor govern themselves, and at the €nd of a year they had to set up a tyrant.' Everywhere these tyrants, with more or less violence, had the same policy. A tyrant of Corinth one day disked advice concerning government of a tyrant of Miletus. The latter, in reply, struck off the heads of grain that were higher than the others. Thus their rule of conduct was to cut down the high heads, and to strike at the aristocracy, while depending upon the people. The Roman plebs at first formed conspiracies to restore Tarquin. They afterwards tried to set up ty- rants, and cast their eyes by turns upon Publicola, Spurius Cassius, and Manlius. The accusation which the patricians so often addressed to those of their own order who became popular, cannot have been jjure ' Nicholas of Damascus, Fragm. Aristotle, Pol., V. 9. Thucydides, I. 126. Diodorus, IV. 6.