What Tyrants Fear in Love
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Pausanias — φιλοσοφία καὶ ἡ φιλογυμναστία· οὐ γὰρ οἶμαι συμφέρει τοῖς ἄρχουσι φρονήματα μεγάλα ἐγγίγνεσθαι τῶν ἀρχομένων, οὐδὲ φιλίας ἰσχυρὰς καὶ κοινωνίας, ὃ δὴ μάλιστα φιλεῖ τά τε ἄλλα πάντα καὶ ὁ ἔρως ἐμποιεῖν. ἔργῳ δὲ τοῦτο ἔμαθον καὶ οἱ ἐνθάδε τύραννοι· ὁ γὰρ Ἀριστογείτονος ἔρως καὶ ἡ Ἁρμοδίου φιλία βέβαιος γενομένη κατέλυσεν αὐτῶν τὴν ἀρχήν. οὕτως οὗ μὲν αἰσχρὸν ἐτέθη
...philosophy, and love of athletics. For I don't think it's good for rulers that great pride arise in the ruled, or strong friendships and partnerships — which everything else and love especially tend, indeed, to instill. And in practice the tyrants here learned this too: for the love of Aristogeiton and the friendship of Harmodius, once it grew steadfast, overthrew their rule. So, wherever it was reckoned shameful—
Continuing Pausanias's list, begun in 182b, of everything a tyranny finds shameful — pederasty, and now philosophy and the love of athletics too — he explains why: it does rulers no good for the ruled to grow proud-minded or to form strong friendships and alliances, and love, more than anything, produces exactly that. He offers Athens's own tyrants as proof: the bond between Aristogeiton and Harmodius, once it hardened, broke the Peisistratid rule. The unit ends mid-sentence, turning to why the custom is judged shameful in some places (182d continues).
Pausanias's political point is specific: a tyranny cannot afford phronēma (proud, high thinking) or koinōnia (partnership, shared purpose) among the people it rules, and eros, more reliably than philosophy or gymnastics, produces both. The claim quietly recasts love as a civic hazard rather than a private or moral matter — the same worry the Republic raises about strong private attachments among the guardians, who are meant to hold everything, including affection, in common precisely so no bond outruns loyalty to the whole city.
Thucydides tells a less flattering version of the story Pausanias treats as settled fact. At 6.54–59 he reports that Harmodius and Aristogeiton acted from a personal grievance, not a plan to liberate Athens: Hipparchus had propositioned Harmodius, been refused, and retaliated by publicly humiliating his sister; the killing that followed took only Hipparchus, not the ruling tyrant Hippias, who governed on afterward more harshly for four more years before Sparta finally drove him out. Pausanias needs the civic legend — the bronze statues in the Agora, the drinking song sung at parties like this one — because his argument depends on love reliably manufacturing the kind of loyalty that can break a government. Thucydides' plainer account of a lovers' quarrel that got out of hand serves his case far less well, which is presumably why Pausanias reaches for the myth instead.
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