effort of resistance. For them, now, everything is at stake — the heroic and the saintly, the old law, rank, blood — and, from their point of view, against what?
In the West this struggle of the old Estates against the State-power took the form of the Fronde. In the Classical world, where there was no dynasty to represent the future and the aristocracy alone had political existence, we find that a dynastic or quasi-dynastic embodiment of the State-idea actually formed itself, and, supported by the non-privileged part of the nation, raised this latter for the first time to power. That was the mission of the Tyrannis.
In this change from the class-State to the absolute State, which allowed no measures of validity but its own, the dynasties of the West — and those of Egypt and of China likewise — called the non-estate to their aid, thereby recognising it as a political quantity. Herein lies the real importance of the struggle against the Fronde, in which, initially, the powers of the greater cities could not but see advantage to themselves, for here the ruler was standing forth in the name of the State, the care of all, and he was fighting the nobility because it wanted to uphold the Estate as a political magnitude.
In the Polis, on the contrary, where the State consisted exclusively in the form and embodied no hereditary head, the necessity of bringing out the unclassed on behalf of the State-idea produced the Tyrannis, in which a family or a faction of the nobility itself assumed the dynastic rôle, without which action on the part of the Third Estate would have been impossible. Late Classical historians were too remote from this process to seize its meaning, and dealt with it merely in terms of externals of private life. In reality, the Tyrannis was the State, and oligarchy opposed it under the banner of class, it rested, therefore, upon the support of peasants and burghers — in Athens (c. 580) the Diakrii and Paralii parties. Therefore, again, it backed the Dionysiac and Orphic cults against the Apollinian; thus in Attica Pisistratus forced the worship of Dionysus[1] on the peasantry, in Sicyon Clisthenes forbade the recital of the Homeric poems,[2] and in Rome it was almost certainly in the time of the Tarquins that the trinity Demeter (Ceres)-Dionysus-Kore was introduced.[3] Its temple was dedicated in 483 by Spurius Cassius, the same who perished later in an attempt to reintroduce the Tyrannis. The Ceres temple was the sanctuary of the Plebs, and its managers, the ædiles, were their trusted spokesmen before the tribunate was ever heard of.[4] The Tyrants, like the princes of the Western Baroque, were liberals in a broad sense of the word that ceased to be possible for them in the subsequent stage of bourgeois dominance. But the Classical also began at that time to pass round the word that
- ↑ Gercke-Norden, Einl. i.d. Alt.-Wiss., II, p. 202.
- ↑ Busolt, Griech. Geschichte, II, pp. 346, et seq.
- ↑ Cf. pp. 282 and 305. Fronde and Tyrannis have as intimate a connexion with Puritanism — the same epochal phase, but in the religious instead of the political world — as the Reformation with the aristocratic State, and the "Second Religiousness" with Cæsarism.
- ↑ G. Wissowa, Religion der Römer, pp. 297, et seq.
