[1311a]
[1]
to protect the owners of estates from suffering injustice and
the people from suffering insult, but tyranny, as has repeatedly been said, pays
regard to no common interest unless for the sake of its private benefit; and the
aim of tyranny is what is pleasant, that of royalty what is noble. Hence even in
their requisitions money is the aim of tyrants but rather marks of honor that of
kings; and a king's body-guard consists of citizens, a tyrant's of foreign
mercenaries. And it is manifest that
tyranny has the evils of both democracy and oligarchy; it copies oligarchy in
making wealth its object （for inevitably that is the only way in which
the tyrant's body-guard and his luxury can be kept up） and in putting
no trust in the multitude （which is why they resort to the measure of
stripping the people of arms, and why ill-treatment of the mob and its expulsion
from the city and settlement in scattered places is common to both forms of
government, both oligarchy and tyranny）, while it copies democracy in
making war on the notables and destroying them secretly and openly and banishing
them as plotting against it and obstructive to its rule. For it is from them
that counter-movements actually spring, some of them wishing themselves to rule,
and others not
[20]
to be slaves. Hence
comes the advice of Periander to Thrasybulus,1 his docking of the prominent cornstalks, meaning
that the prominent citizens must always be made away with.Therefore, as was
virtually stated,2 the causes of revolutions in
constitutional and in royal governments must be deemed to be the same; for
subjects in many cases attack monarchies because of unjust treatment and fear
and contempt, and among the forms of unjust treatment most of all because of
insolence, and sometimes the cause is the seizure of private property. Also the
objects aimed at by the revolutionaries in the case both of tyrannies and of
royal governments are the same as in revolts against constitutional government;
for monarchs possess great wealth and great honor, which are desired by all men.
And in some cases the attack is
aimed at the person of the rulers, in others at their office. Risings provoked
by insolence are aimed against the person; and though insolence has many
varieties, each of them gives rise to anger, and when men are angry they mostly
attack for the sake of revenge, not of ambition. For example the attack on the
Pisistratidae took place because they outraged Harmodius's sister and treated
Harmodius with contumely （for Harmodius attacked them because of his
sister and Aristogiton because of Harmodius, and also the plot was laid against
Periander the tyrant in Ambracia3 because when drinking
Aristotle. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 21, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1944.
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