I analyze the excursus on the would-be tyrannicides Harmodios and
Aristogeiton in Thucydides book 6, which interrupts the crisis surrounding the mutilation
of the Herms and profanation of the Mysteries before the Sicilian campaign.
Thucydides’ attention to the sexual motivations and distorted ideation of the tyrannicides
was in deliberate opposition to a hagiographical tradition, enshrined in popular
song, art, oratory, and Atthidography. Thucydides recognized that this affair originated
in a quarrel over pederastic relations but was reluctant to see in pederasty an
organizing principle for archaic politics, unlike [Plato] Hipparchus (which considered
the tyrannicides culpable as aggressors). Thucydides’ hesitancy also reacted against an
elite tradition which not only glorified pederastic lovers (with Harmodios and Aristogeiton
as paradigmatic) as natural opponents of tyranny but also even considered
opposition to pederasty an outgrowth of tyranny. First witnessed in Plato’s Symposium,
this interpretation is attested by Phainias, Heraclides Ponticus, and Hieronymos
of Rhodes, authorities preserved or supplemented by Athenaeus and Plutarch. Thucydides
digressed because of his distaste for the irruption of the personal, especially
the sexual, into politics, a trait shared by the tyrannicides and the demos in its reaction
against Alkibiades.