Word Finder - tyrants

definition

A usurper; one who gains power and rules extralegally, distinguished from kings elevated by election or succession.

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Any monarch or governor.

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A despot; a ruler who governs unjustly, cruelly, or harshly.

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(by extension) Any person who abuses the power of position or office to treat others unjustly, cruelly, or harshly.

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(by extension) A villain; a person or thing who uses strength or violence to treat others unjustly, cruelly, or harshly.

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The tyrant bird, members of the family Tyrannidae, which often fight or drive off other birds which approach their nests.

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To act like a tyrant; to be tyrannical.

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To tyrannize.

Earlier tyrants were well pleased to be spoken of as kings; but no earlier rulers of Sicily put either their heads or their names on the coin.

On the death of Agathocles tyrants sprang up in various cities.

And now in all the Greek cities of Aeolis and Ionia the oligarchies or tyrants friendly to Persia fell, and democracies were established under the eye of Alexander's officers.

He was honoured as a hero, and his memory was held in such respect that when all the brazen statues of tyrants were condemned to be sold in the time of Timoleon (150 years later) an exemption was made in favour of the statue of Gelo.

The nobility of France, keeping the most oppressive social and personal privileges, had been shorn of all political and even administrative power; the tyrants of the people were the slaves of the king.

Plutarch's statement that the Thirty Tyrants removed the bema so as to face the land instead of the sea is probably due to a misunderstanding.

The equalization of classes was already far advanced when towards the end of the century a nobleman of the Alcmaeonid family, named Cleisthenes, who had taken the chief part in the final expulsion of the tyrants, acquired ascendancy as leader of the commons.

The most stirring episode in the history of the Peiraeus is the seizure of Munychia by Thrasybulus and the exiles from Phyle, and the consequent destruction of the "30 tyrants" in 404 B.C. The three chief arsenals of the Peiraeus were named Munychia, Zea and Cantharus, and they contained galley slips for 82, 196 and 94 slips respectively in the 4th century B.C.

The old Calvinist nobility of Lithuania were speedily reconverted; a Uniate Church in connexion with Rome was established; Greek Orthodox congregations, if not generally persecuted, were at least depressed and straitened; and the Cossacks began to hate the Pans, or Polish lords, not merely as tyrants, but as heretics.

This struggle between spiritual and secular powers, owing to the tremendous sensation which it created throughout Christendom, showed the nations that at the head of the Church there was a great force for justice, always able to combat iniquity and oppression, and sometimes to defeat them, however powerful the evil and the tyrants might seem.

The latter, through their general Phocion, rescued it from the tyrants suborned by Philip of Macedon (354 and 341).

Ever anxious to extend the league, in which after 245 he was general almost every second year, Aratus took Corinth by surprise (243), and with mingled threats and persuasion won over other cities, notably Megalopolis (233) and Argos (229), whose tyrants abdicated voluntarily.

It fell with the coming back of the xile Dion in The tyranny had lasted so long 3 5 7 Y Y g that it was less easy than at the overthrow of the elder tyrants to fall back on an earlier state of things.

The cities, Greek and Sicel, were occupied by tyrants.

He succeeded in so far that 15,000 Kufians swore to fight with him for the maintenance of the commandments of the Book of God and the Sunna (orthodox tradition) of his Prophet, the discomfiture of the tyrants, the redress of injury, and last, not least, the vindication of the family of the Prophet as the rightful caliphs.

His deposition by the Thebans and subsequent murder freed Sicyon for a season, but new tyrants arose with the help of Philip II.

The only really brutal tyrants were Darius II., who was completely dominated by his bloodthirsty wife Parysatis, and Artaxerxes III.

Italy and expelling the foreigner, and told that he was free to choose whether he would be the first of men or the last of Italian tyrants.

Later he took refuge in Paris, where he pleaded for a national reunion of all parties against the Red tyrants.

Its fortifications, though not increased, were apparently strengthened by the Tyrants.

His generals rebelled against him in almost every province of the empire, and this period of Roman history came to be called the reign of the Thirty Tyrants.

But from both the racial and religious standpoint, the Arab and Persian Shi`as, who constitute the vast bulk of the population, regard the Turks as foreigners and tyrants.

In 403 he came forward as the accuser of Eratosthenes, one of the Thirty Tyrants.

Their political constitutions were aristocratic; that is, the franchise was confined to the descendants of the original settlers, round whom an excluded body (Ffflos or plebs) was often growing up. The ancient kingship was perhaps kept on or renewed in some of the Siceliot and Italiot towns; but it is more certain that civil dissensions led very early to the rise of tyrants.

Art, science, poetry had all been encouraged by the tyrants.

Pyrrhus is said to have dreamed of kingdoms of Sicily and of Italy for his two sons, the grandsons of Agathocles, and he himself reigned for two years in Sicily as a king who came to be no less hated than the tyrants.

None the less Amasis employed Greeks in numbers, and cultivated the friendship of their tyrants.

They passed instead into the power of Antigonus Gonatas of Macedonia, who maintained his control by means of tyrants.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

On the 17th of March he delivered a speech in the senate urging a general amnesty like that declared in Athens after the expulsion of the Thirty Tyrants.

For the most part it remained Guelph, though at times, as when it called in Galeazzo Visconti, it was glad to appeal to a powerful Ghibelline for aid against its domestic tyrants.

In the city of tyrants it would have been dangerous to present comedies like those of the Athenian stage, in which attacks were made upon the authorities.

These men, in their turn, became tyrants.

It was the rule of some thirty-five or thirty-six petty tyrants, under whose oppression and private wars even the invaders suffered.

Tughlak, who reigned from 1325 to 1351, and is described by Elphinstone as "one of the most accomplished princes and most furious tyrants that ever adorned or disgraced human nature."

In 1792 he placed 12,000 livres at the disposal of the Republic - "for the arming of forty or fifty fighters in the sacred cause of man against tyrants."

The house of Spartocus was well known as a line of enlightened and wise princes; although Greek opinion could not deny that they were, strictly speaking, tyrants, they are always described as dynasts.

His eloquence on behalf of the tyrants of Verona was successful.

It was in vain that his correspondents pointed out the discrepancy between his professed zeal for Italian liberties, his recent enthusiasm for the Roman republic, and this alliance with tyrants who were destroying the freedom of the Lombard cities.

The tyrants of Milan were aspiring to royal alliances; Gian Galeazzo Visconti had been married to Isabella of France; Violante Visconti, a few years later, was wedded to the English duke of Clarence.

His relations to the Lombard nobles were equally at variance with his professed patriotism; and, while still a housemate of Visconti and Correggi, he kept on issuing invectives against the tyrants who divided Italy.

Herodotus, in the spirit of 5th-century Greeks, which conventionally regarded the tyrants as selfish despots, says he ruled harshly, but he is generally represented as mild, beneficent and so popular as to be able to dispense with a bodyguard, the usual attribute of a tyrannis.

He cultivated friendly relations with the tyrants of Miletus and Mytilene, and maintained a connexion with the kings of Lydia, of Egypt and, possibly, of Phrygia.

This caused a miniature rebellion, and on its suppression five ringleaders were publicly hanged at the spot - Slachters Nek - where they had sworn to expel " the English tyrants."

The names of two tyrants, Amphiclus and Polytecnus, are mentioned.

He had been wayward, unwise and occasionally revengeful; but his provocation had been great, and if few tyrants have used more violent and offensive language, few have committed such a small list of actual crimes.

He treated the struggle as one simply for the establishment of free institutions; and when at last the crimes of the leaders became patent to the world, he contented himself with lamenting the unfortunate fact, and fell back on the argument that though England could not sympathize with the French tyrants, there was no reason why she should go to war with them.

In the autumn of 1851 the queen was much annoyed at hearing that he had received a deputation at the foreign office, which had waited on him to express sympathy with the Hungarian refugees, and to denounce the conduct of the despots and tyrants of Russia and Austria, and that he had, in his reply, expressed his gratification at the demonstration.

Three roads lead to Athens from the Boeotian frontier over the intervening mountain barrier - the easternmost over Parnes, from Delium and Oropus by Decelea, which was the usual route of the invading Lacedaemonians during the Peloponnesian War; the westernmost over Cithaeron, by the pass of Dryoscephalae, or the "Oakheads," leading from Thebes by Plataea to Eleusis, and so to Athens, which we hear of in connexion with the battle of Plataea, and with the escape of the Plataeans at the time of the siege of that city in the Peloponnesian War; the third, midway between the two, by the pass of Phyle, near the summit of which, on a rugged height overlooking the Athenian plain, is the fort occupied by Thrasybulus in the days of the Thirty Tyrants.

Moreover, she had no share in the expansion of Greek commerce and Greek culture; and, though she bore the reputation of hating tyrants and putting them down where possible, there can be little doubt that this was done in the interests of oligarchy rather than of liberty.