Death to Tyrants! Read Free Page B

the citizens were victims either directly or indirectly of the alleged crimes, it is reasonable to suppose that virtually all of them wanted to sit in judgment of the accused. 4
    Second, Agonippos and Eurysilaos were likely accused (inter alia) of breaking a law against tyranny. Again, this is not explicitly stated in the dossier. However, as text 6 makes clear, the Eresians conceived of the trials against Agonippos and Eurysilaos as trials against tyrants: the two are explicitly called tyrants (lines 6–7, 29–30) and reference is made about the “votes against the tyrants” (line 35). In addition, the Eresians clearly had a “law against tyrants”—it is mentioned in the dossier three times. 5 And finally, text 6 states that the law against tyrants played a role in the trial of Agonippos and Euysilaos: it states (lines 15–17) that “their descendants should be liable to the law on the stele” (i.e., the law against tyrants). One thus might conclude that the Eresians recorded Agonippos’s and Eurysilaos’s crimes in texts 1 and 2 in order to support the charge that those two men actually did rule as tyrants and thus violated the anti-tyranny law.
    Very little is known for certain about Eresos’s law against tyranny. Since it is mentioned in the indictment of Agonippos (text 2, lines 24–25), it must have been promulgated sometime before his trial (i.e., before 332). 6 A reasonableguess would be 336, just after Eresos joined the Korinthian League: (1) cities that joined the league were obliged to maintain the regime that was in power when they joined ([Dem]. 17.10); (2) anti-tyranny legislation was promulgated in order to preserve (democratic) regimes; (3) anti-tyranny legislation appears to have been somewhat popular on the Greek mainland at that time. 7 With respect to the law’s content, all that can be said definitively is that it mandated both that the descendants of tyrants be exiled and that the property belonging to the tyrants and to the descendants of tyrants be confiscated (text 6, lines 14–18, 23–28; text 2, lines 20–26). 8
    One might speculate about the content of the Eresians’ anti-tyranny law. First, the law likely was against tyranny in general and not only against particular individuals who ruled Eresos as “tyrants” before the law was promulgated. It is true that the law is referred to in the dossier as the law against “the” tyrants ( τόν τε νόμον τὸμ περὶ [ τ ] ῶν τυράννων : text 6, line 31; τόν τε ν [ ό | μο ] ν τὸν κατὰ τῶν τυράννων : text 6, lines 26–27). One might be tempted to conclude, therefore, that the law from Eresos was roughly similar to the well-known mid-fifth-century decree from Miletos ( ML 43). That decree outlawed at least three named men—almost certainly for political crimes—and offered a reward to anybody who might kill them. But several points argue against comparing too closely the law from Eresos and the decree from Miletos. To begin with, there is no reason to suppose that the law from Eresos contained the names of particular men: it is always referred to simply as the law against the tyrants. Second, all known laws against tyranny—that is, laws that explicitly use the word tyranny or tyrant—are against tyranny in general. Third, the decree recorded as text 6 of the dossier—a text that dates to circa 300—states (lines 29–32) that the law against the tyrants shall remain kurios (permanently valid): that certainly could suggest that the law was of a general nature, not just aimed at men who perhaps were dead in 300. And finally, the Ath. Pol . refers (16.10) to Athens’s earliest anti-tyranny laws as (literally) “the laws concerning the tyrants” ( οἱ