TYRANNY AND TYRANNICIDE. – Tyranny (τύραννος) and tyrant are related terms, the former indicating a form of government and the latter the person who establishes it or directs his political action within II. Their meaning has not always been identical.
I. MEANING OF THE WORDS
Among the earliest Greeks, the term “tyrant” was applied to anyone who usurped supreme power in a city against the will of the people. The meaning of the term thus tended to emphasize the illegitimate origin of power and the absence of any legal title, regardless of how the usurper exercised political authority. Even if he administered public affairs and promoted the welfare of the citizens, he remained a tyrant. Thus, in ancient Greece, there were tyrants who proved to be benevolent despots, such as Pisistratus in Athens and Polycrates in Samos, and others who left a grim reputation for cruelty, such as Dionysius of Syracuse.Soon, however, the term expanded—without explicit reference to the legal or illegal origin of power—to denote a ruler who exercises authority solely for personal gain, in accordance with the definition left by Aristotle (Eth. Nic., VIII, 10), whose political actions degenerate into despotism through violence, oppression, and a system of privileges.
Plato (Rep., IX) describes the tyrant as a man full of himself, who becomes frenzied and incapable of love. Tyranny thus comes to coincide conceptually with that form of government in which the will of the sovereign—whether legitimate or illegitimate matters little—is the absolute law and criterion of governance, i.e., with despotism and autocracy. This conception, grounded in a moral evaluation of political action, remained unchanged in the centuries that followed. In the Middle Ages, the two aspects of tyranny outlined above were expressed in the distinction between the *tyrannus tituli* or *usurpationis*, which partly reflects the original Greek sense of the term, and the *tyrannus regiminis*, which refers to the second. This distinction is already clearly delineated in St. Thomas Aquinas (Sum. Theol., 1.2.2ae, q. 105, a. 1 ad 2) and, after him, dominates the debate over the lawfulness or unlawfulness of resistance to a tyrant, which is resolved differently depending on the two concrete cases it theoretically represents. Indeed, the presence of tyranny posed, both for political science and for moral theology, a cluster of difficult problems, including that of resistance to monarchical despotism and that of the killing of the tyrant or tyrannicide. For the former, see REVOLUTION.
II. JUDGMENT ON TYRANNICIDE
Opinions on tyrannicide have often been shaped by the political conditions of the time.1. In the Greco-Roman world
Among the Greeks, who cherished freedom and popular institutions, the killing of a tyrant was regarded as a deed worthy of high praise, and its perpetrator was elevated to the heavens of heroes. Xenophon bears witness to this custom (Hieron., 4), and Plato (Rep., X) condemns tyranny in such scathing terms that one can easily infer his approval of tyrannicide. Aristotle (Polit., IV, 1; VIII) is no less severe, though he does not explicitly assert its lawfulness. The same attitude prevailed among the Romans: Cicero (Ad Att., XIV, 6; De officiis, III, 4) praises Brutus and Cassius for the killing of Caesar and glorifies them as heroes, and Quintilian sees in tyrannicide a demonstration of courage and piety (De inst. orat., XII, §§ 1, 36).2. From the beginning of the Christian era to the Middle Ages
In the teaching of the early Church and among the Fathers, there prevailed exhortations to obedience toward public authority, already implicit in the Gospel (Mt. 20:25; 22:21) and more explicitly expressed by St. Paul (Rom. 13:1–2) and St. Peter, who in his first letter (1 Pt. 2:13, 18) advises submission even to wicked rulers, *etiam discolis*. The question of tyrannicide resurfaced in the 12th century with John of Salisbury (Polycratius, III, 15; PL 199, 572), who appears to have been the first to raise it again, albeit not systematically, by arguing for the lawfulness of the killing of a tyrant even by private citizens, basing his argument on the rights of the community and its power to act against those who unjustly violate them. Between him and John Parvus (cf. the condemned propositions, in Hefele-Leclercq, VII, p. 293, n. 3), who in the 15th century upheld the same thesis, stands St. Thomas Aquinas, who merits the credit for formulating the problem more precisely and proposing a more moderate solution, though he did not address it systematically (De regimine principum, I, 6; Sent., II, dist. XLIV, q. 2, a. 2).According to Aquinas, a tyrant who abuses his rule (*tyrannus regiminis*) cannot lawfully be killed by a private individual; however, if no higher authority exists to which recourse may be had, the entire nation, represented by its leading citizens, may rise up against him and decree capital punishment if this is deemed necessary for the common good. In this case, according to Aquinas’ thought, it seems that a private individual may be commissioned to carry out the sentence. Regarding the tyrant by usurpation (*tyrannus usurpationis*), he appears to admit the faculty of killing him, since the usurper possesses no legitimate title to rule and may be considered an enemy of the people, in accordance with the principle that makes the use of force lawful against unjust force, even to the point of causing the death of the unjust aggressor. In both cases, the tyrant is an unjust aggressor against the community, against whom the community may react in collective self-defense as a society in its corporate capacity, thereby excluding tyrannicide by private initiative.
From these general principles, John Parvus departed when, after the assassination of Duke Louis of Orléans (23 Nov. 1497), he defended the killing and upheld the thesis of John of Salisbury, which had been condemned in general terms, though not directed against the defender, by the Council of Constance in 1415 (Mansi, XXVII, 765).
3. Among the great masters of the 16th century—Bellarmino, Suárez, Molina, Lessio—the doctrine returns to the positions of St. Thomas, enriched by some new determinations. The principal exponent of this is Suárez, who, while maintaining the now-established distinction between a tyrant by usurpation and a tyrant by abuse of power, resolves the two cases differently, remaining within the Thomistic line. Regarding the first, by appealing to the principle of the lawfulness of active resistance against an unjust aggressor, he maintains that both the people and any private citizen have the faculty to kill him, since society exercises against him the right of legitimate defense, and in fighting him no sovereign right is violated. However, recourse to such killing is licit only when the common good necessarily requires it, and no other means exists. Regarding tyrannicide for abuse of power, he makes two suppositions. If the tyrant attacks the life of a private citizen, he may be repelled by force, like any unjust private aggressor, and may even be killed, always with moderation in defense and excepting the case in which serious harm to the public good might be feared from his death. The private citizen, however, cannot of his own initiative arrogate to himself the rights of society by putting an end to the abuse of power through the killing of the tyrant, since he has no faculty to judge the legitimate possessor of sovereign power. The state, however, can declare war on him, because in this case society is superior to the king, having conferred power on him on the condition that he govern politically, not tyrannically. But action against a public person as such must be exercised by a public person, that is, by the community. He does, however, hint at a supposition in which private action would seem licit. This would occur when the king becomes an actual aggressor against the community, working toward its ruin and killing a multitude of citizens. A borderline case, certainly, and yet not entirely hypothetical, in which any citizen threatened by the caprice of the despot could provide for his own safety (De virtutibus, disp. XIII, sect. VIII, concl. 4; Defensio fidei, VI, 7; in Opera omnia, ed. Vivès, De Virtutibus, XII, p. 759; XXIV, pp. 677-78).
MARIANO, (v.), who has passed into history as the foremost advocate of regicide, does not depart far from the theoretical lines described above. Apart from some rather bold expressions and the faculty granted to the private citizen to interpret public opinion by taking the initiative to kill the tyrant, he follows the tradition that goes back to St. Thomas. Only particular historical contingencies have conferred upon him a celebrity that goes beyond the merit of his work, which is more literary than scientific. More extreme in advocating the lawfulness of tyrannicide were the Protestants Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Calvin.