Understanding the rise of the tyrants of Archaic Greece

Professor Rosalind Thomas, Professor of Greek History at Balliol College, Oxford University, will be the guest speaker at this year’s Annual Percy Ure Lecture.

The lecture will examine the traditions found in the later local histories of the Greek city states about the Greek tyrants of the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, and what they reveal about the collective memories of the ancient past.

Greek tyrants were the stuff of legend, but later generations often held them in contempt. Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, was remembered through vivid and colourful tales and proverbs, while others were associated with cruelty and indulgent excess.

City states were keen to remember how they got rid of their tyrants, and it is hard to understand the political or economic background to their rise. The indications in the later histories of Greek city states are distinctly paradoxical, and they were often associated with magnificent buildings and proverbs.

Despite tyranny being regarded as abhorrent by later generations, later city states and local histories were not averse to giving them a role in their vision of imagined communities in the Greek world of the late classical and early Hellenistic periods.

Now in its 12th year, the Ure Lecture celebrates the legacy of the University of Reading’s first Professor of Classics and founder of the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology, Percy N. Ure.

The lecture, entitled ‘Polycrates assigns a mother’: Greek Tyranny in proverb, collective memory and the local ‘polis histories’, will be held on 25 January 2023, 16:00 – 17:00 at the Van Emden Theatre, Edith Morley Building, Whiteknights Campus. All are welcome to join. Register here to attend.

For any further questions, please contact Professor Amy C. Smith, Joint Head of Department.