A warning from ancient fiction: Tyrants beware!
By Charles Ochen Okwir – 2nd-8th Aug 2010
The Author
Lucian of Samosata was a Syrian-Greek writer who was responsible for the first fictional accounts of extraterrestrial life. He was born at Samosata in Commagene and called himself a Syrian. The exact duration of his life is unknown. But it is probable that he was born not long before 125 A.D. and died not long after 180. He began his career as an apprentice to his uncle who was a sculptor. Soon, he became disgusted with his prospects in that calling and gave it up for Rhetoric, the branch of the literary profession that was most favoured then. The vocation of a rhetorician was to plead in court, to compose pleas for others, and to teach the art of pleading; not too far off from what your typical Lawyer does today. It is believed that Lucian’s vocation was far less important in his own eyes. His avocation; which involved going from place to place and often from country to country displaying his ability as a speaker before the educated classes, was said to be more important to him. The actual historical facts are all clouded somewhat.
What is certain is that something of his life-history is given to us in his writings. For instance, the concluding sentence of the preface to True History, one of his great fictional works, reads: “I give my readers warning, therefore, not to believe me”. It was a warning that his work is all “cooked up” in his rich creative mind.
But I wonder whether the basis of some of his fictional and satirical works was not also premised upon some sort of clairvoyance; a prophecy; an imagined fear of the future if you like; a future that was to unfold in the world of politics long after he had gone! His essay “The Tyrannicide” in particular, makes me wonder whether Lucian wasn’t actually centuries ahead of his time; prescribing as he did, possible solutions, radical ones at that, for today’s citizens faced with political challenges that are borne of a tyrant’s unflinching desire to hang on to power at whatever cost. In the “The Tyrannicide”, Lucian’s mind wonders into an imaginary courtroom where he is defending himself. He writes:
“Two tyrants: A father advanced in years, a son in the prime of life, waiting only to step into his nefarious inheritance, have fallen by my hand on a single day. I come before this court, claiming but one reward for my twofold service. My case is unique. With one blow, I have rid you of [or helped you get rid of] two monsters: With my sword, I slew [killed] the son; grief for the son [then] slew the father. The misdeeds of the tyrant are sufficiently punished: He has lived to see his son perish untimely”.
Lucian, in his fictitious mind of centuries ago, did send some very clear and in fact chilling warnings to the tyrants ruling today’s banana republics. The first is that it is a grave mistake for a leader to prepare his son, as they often do, to take over leadership at some point in future. That would, in Lucian’s view, be a “nefarious inheritance”. Secondly, Lucian didn’t mince his words when he identified a tyrant as someone who deserves to be killed. For him, a tyrant is and must be a legitimate target for an oppressed people!
He further counsels that sometimes, the best way to disable a tyrant is to kill his son; the heir who, as Lucian will say, still has “the strength to resist”. What that means is that the tyrant’s son becomes the number one target. For once he is dead the father may not survive the grief that will grip him thereafter. In the father’s mind, Lucian argues, the dead son represented continuity of the “tyrannical empire”.
And now for the justification! Lucian says “…the tyrant’s own hand has freed us from tyranny. I slew the son and used his death to slay [kill] another. In his life, he shared the iniquities of his father; in his death, so far as in him lay, he was a parricide. Mine is the hand that freed you; mine the sword that accomplished all. As to the order and manner of procedure, there, indeed, I have deviated from the common practice of tyrannicides [meaning people who kill tyrants]”.
“I slew the son who had the strength to resist me, and left my sword to deal with the aged father. In acting thus, I had sought to increase your obligation to me; a twofold deliverance [which] I had supposed would entitle me to a twofold reward; for I have freed you not from tyranny alone, but from the fear of tyranny. By removing the heir of iniquity [the tyrant’s son] I have made your salvation sure”.
Lucian not only thought killing a tyrant was justified murder, he also thought the murderer, a liberator in his view, deserves to be rewarded. So when he wasn’t rewarded, he protested and said: “And now it seems that my services are to go for nothing. I, the preserver of the constitution, I am to forego the recompense [compensation] prescribed by its laws. It is surely from no patriotic motive….that my adversary disputes my claim. Rather, it is from grief at the loss of the tyrants and the desire to avenge their death”.
In Lucian’s view is therefore, anyone who thinks an oppressed man who kills a tyrant to save a nation does not deserve a reward is unpatriotic. Interesting stuff! Next time we start from where we left today.
Mr Okwir is a London based Ugandan Lawyer and Journalist
