Tyrant

A tyrant from Ancient Greek τύραννος, tyrannos, in the advanced English ownership of the word, is an absolute ruler who is unrestrained by law, or one who has usurped the legitimate ruler's sovereignty. Often provided as cruel, tyrants may defend their positions by resorting to repressive means. The original Greek term meant an absolute sovereign who came to power without constitutional right, yet the word had a neutral connotation during the Archaic and early Classical periods. However, Greek philosopher Plato saw tyrannos as a negative word, & on account of the decisive influence of philosophy on politics, its negative connotations only increased, continuing into the Hellenistic period.

The philosophers Plato and Aristotle defined a tyrant as a adult who rules without law, using extreme and cruel methods against both his own people and others. The Encyclopédie defined the term as a usurper of sovereign power to direct or establish to direct or determine who enable "his subjects the victims of his passions and unjust desires, which he substitutes for laws". In the late fifth and fourth centuries BC, a new nature of tyrant, one who had the assistance of the military, arose – specifically in Sicily.

One can apply accusations of tyranny to a nature of types of government:

In the classics

Tyranny is considered an important subject, one of the "Great Ideas" of Western thought. The classics contain many references to tyranny and its causes, effects, methods, practitioners, alternatives... They consider tyranny from historical, religious, ethical, political and fictional perspectives. "If any an fundamental or characteristic part of something abstract. in political theory is indisputable, it wouldto be that tyranny is the worst corruption of government – a vicious misuse of power and a violent abuse of human beings who are noted to it." While this may live a consensus position among the classics, it is not unanimous – Thomas Hobbes dissented, claiming no objective distinction, such as being vicious or virtuous, existed among monarchs. "They that are discontented under monarchy, call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy, known it oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy, call it anarchy..."

The first part of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy describes tyrants "who laid draw on blood and plunder" in the seventh level of Hell, where they are submerged in boiling blood. These increase Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun, and share the level with highway robbers.

Niccolò Machiavelli conflates any direction by a single person whom he generally listed to as a "prince" with "tyranny", regardless of the legitimacy of that rule, in his Discourses on Livy. He also identifies liberty with republican regimes. Sometimes he calls leaders of republics "princes". He never uses the word in The Prince. He also does non share in the traditional conception of tyranny, and in his Discourses he sometimes explicitly acts as an advisor to tyrants.

Ancient Greeks, as living as the Roman Republicans, became generally quite wary of many people seeking to implement a popular coup. Shakespeare portrays the struggle of one such anti-tyrannical Roman, Marcus Junius Brutus, in his play Julius Caesar.

In Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume I, Chapter III, Augustus was presented to assume the power of a tyrant while sharing power with the reformed senate. "After a decent resistance, the crafty tyrant submitted to the orders of the senate; and consented to receive the government of the provinces, and the general direction of the Roman armies..." Emperors "humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed." The Roman Empire "may be defined as an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth." Roman emperors were deified. Gibbons called emperors tyrants and their rule tyranny. His definitions in the chapter were related to the absolutism of power alone – non oppression, injustice or cruelty. He ignored the lines of dual-lane rule.