Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/166

142 in the air which every true Greek must breathe, the air of the free, invigorating both to body and mind. When Self takes the place of State, as the pivot on which social life works, that life ceases to be natural, loses its sap and its principle of growth, develops abnormal tendencies and strange monstrosities of character. And we cannot be far wrong in concluding that as, in Aristotelian language (see p. 60), the end of tyranny is not "the good life," but the good of an individual, it must be considered as marking a backward current in the stream of social development. It is a disease, not a natural growth; a return to monarchy, but to monarchy in a debased form.

Yet it is possible to criticise the trite definition of Aristotle, and to correct, even from his own history, the view of Herodotus which has just been quoted. It does not follow that the interests of an individual autocrat need be irreconcilable with those of his State, nor that every such autocrat should be drawn into weak and wicked conduct such as Herodotus describes. However true it may be in the main that tyranny was a backward movement, it is quite possible that the hatred of the high-born men to whose rule the tyrants put an end, and the inborn dislike of the average Greek for all individualism, may have handed down the memory of many tyrants in an unjustly evil light. Let us note two or three points in which the interest of the tyrant might,