Thucydides and the sexual politics of tyrannicide

Abstract

I analyze the excursus on the would-be tyrannicides Harmodios and Aristogeiton in Thucydides book 6, which interrupts the crisis surrounding the mutilation of the Herms and profanation of the Mysteries before the Sicilian campaign. Thucydides’ attention to the sexual motivations and distorted ideation of the tyrannicides was in deliberate opposition to a hagiographical tradition, enshrined in popular song, art, oratory, and Atthidography. Thucydides recognized that this affair originated in a quarrel over pederastic relations but was reluctant to see in pederasty an organizing principle for archaic politics, unlike [Plato] Hipparchus (which considered the tyrannicides culpable as aggressors). Thucydides’ hesitancy also reacted against an elite tradition which not only glorified pederastic lovers (with Harmodios and Aristogeiton as paradigmatic) as natural opponents of tyranny but also even considered opposition to pederasty an outgrowth of tyranny. First witnessed in Plato’s Symposium, this interpretation is attested by Phainias, Heraclides Ponticus, and Hieronymos of Rhodes, authorities preserved or supplemented by Athenaeus and Plutarch. Thucydides digressed because of his distaste for the irruption of the personal, especially the sexual, into politics, a trait shared by the tyrannicides and the demos in its reaction against Alkibiades.