Herodotus, Histories 1.60.1 · 1.60.1

Herodotus switches to the vivid present tense for the expulsion, exelaunousi, "they drive out," right after a long run of past tenses, a trick he uses elsewhere to snap the reader's attention onto the moment a plan collapses. The two enemy factions need only one phrase to unite, tōuto phronēsantes, "thinking the same thing," a coalition built on nothing but shared resentment of a third party, which is usually the easiest kind to form and the easiest to break.

The verdict on Peisistratus's first reign is a single image: his tyranny was oukō karta errizōmenēn, "not yet firmly rooted," errizōmenēn built on the word for a plant's root system. A government can grow like a tree, Herodotus suggests, and this one had not had time to put down anything permanent before it was pulled up. The sentence does not even pause to describe the exile; it moves straight to estasiasan, "they quarreled," the same verb used for the original feud three chapters back, so that the story visibly loops back to where it started, two factions at each other's throats, as if Peisistratus had never been there at all.

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