The Crooked Kings of Ancient Greece

By comparing traditional narratives concerning archaic colonists and tyrants, with particular attention to the 'speaking names' within them, Daniel Ogden shows that monarchic rulers in archaic Greece were often paradoxically conceptualised as deformed scapegoats or as evil deformed babies of sinister birth. This way of thinking helped to explain their extraordinary power, for they embodied in their twisted limbs a terrible pollution that enabled them to overthrow their communities. Moreover, once the traditional nature of origin-narratives for tyrants is understood, little reason remains for considering seventh-century tyranny a distinctively new phenomenon. In the course of the investigation a diverse range of subjects is encountered, including the myth of Oedipus, the fables of Aesop, the meanings attached to monkeys, pigs and mice, voodoo dolls, demonic cooks, magic rings, the characters of early farce, Spartan hairstyles, the beginnings of Greek democracy and ostracism at Athens.