What should we do with a tyrant?
A timeless question, for at least the past two and a half millennia
It’s hard to be in beautiful Syracuse, Sicily, as I was while writing this, and not think of tyrants. As I explained in a previous post, discussing Plato’s adventures in the city, it seems that for a long while Syracuse was bent on exchanging one tyrant for another. But the prompt for the current essay was actually composed several centuries later, in March 49 BCE, to be precise.
Marcus Tullius Cicero was writing to his lifelong friend Atticus because he was trying to make up his mind whether to support Julius Caesar — whom he perceived to be a potential tyrant — or Gnaeus Pompey, who was nominally defending the Republic, but in fact had a good chance of himself becoming a tyrant, if given the opportunity. Here is what struck me forcefully in what Cicero writes:
[In order] not to surrender myself wholly to sorrowful reflexions, I have selected certain theses, so to speak, which have at once a general bearing on a citizen’s duty, and a particular relation to the present crisis: Ought one to remain in one’s country when under a tyrant? If one’s country is under a tyrant ought one to labour at all hazards for the abolition of the tyranny, even at the risk of the total destruction of the city? Or ought we to be on our guard…