Political Murder in Classical Greece

This paper intends to examine three different aspects of political murder in the Greek classical world: a)justifiable killing of aspiring tyrants; b)“judicial” murder as an alternative kind of political killing, i.e. the habit of eliminating (directly or by death sentences) politicians who were considered to be dangerous; c)murders in civil strifes. Since murder seems to have been rather infrequent in Athens, where political confrontation was particularly fierce, one of the points that will be addressed in this paper is a consideration of the reasons for this ‘anomaly’.