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*Includes pictures *Includes ancient Greek accounts of the tyrants and democracy in Athens *Includes a bibliography for further reading "States are as the men are; they grow out of human characters. Like State, like man." - Plato, The Republic Tyranny in ancient Greece was not a phenomenon limited to any particular period. Tyrants could be found in power throughout Greece, ruling poleis from the 7th century B.C. right through to the 2nd century B.C., when Roman domination effectively put an end to this form of government throughout the Hellenistic world. That said, the heyday of tyranny was undoubtedly the 7th and 6th centuries B.C., and it is in this period, known as the "Age of Tyrants," that large numbers of tyrannies arose, particularly in the Peloponnese. The "Age of Tyrants" ended on the Greek mainland with the expulsion of the Peisistratidai in 510 B.C., but it continued in other parts of the Greek world, particularly in the Greek cities of Sicily, where tyranny did not finally end until the removal of Dionysius II of Syracuse in 344 B.C. In Asia Minor, tyranny survived the Persian conquest until the days of the Roman conquest. The governments of the majority of the Greek states in the Archaic and Classical periods were in the hands of local aristocrats, and it is a modern preoccupation with the Athenian democracy or Sparta's unique system that has tended to obscure this fact. Oligarchy was the norm, and political power derived from wealth and birth. As the wealth of city states grew, so, too, did the number of citizens who, despite personal wealth, found themselves outside the very limited aristocratic elite that conspired to maintain the political power of the few. In today's modern world every political regime, even the most authoritarian or repressive, describes itself as democracy or a Democratic People's Republic. The concept of rule by the people, on behalf of the people, has come to be accepted as the norm, and very few would overtly espouse the cause