Hurrah for the Pirate King! Polycrates and the Tyranny of Samos

The tyrant Polycrates of Samos impressed classical authors by building the first naval empire in the Aegean since the legendary king Minos of Crete. He dominated island cities, employed his navy for piracy, dedicated an island to Delian Apollo, and forged a strong alliance with the Egyptian pharaoh Amasis II in the face of growing Persian power. The unraveling of that alliance gives us one of the classic Greek cautionary tales on the fragility of human glory. In this episode, host Scott Emmons guides you through Polycrates’ rise to power, his accomplishments as tyrant, and his inevitable downfall.    

For images illustrating parts of this podcast, check out Episode 25 at epicgreekhistory.substack.com. 

Reading Suggestions:

Herodotus, Histories 3.39-47; 3.122-125
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 1.13.6
Oswyn Murray, Early Greece
Anthony Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment
Robin Osborne, Greece in the Making 1200-479 BC

Transcript

Hello, Χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History Episode 25, “Hurrah for the Pirate King! Polycrates and the Tyranny of Samos.” I’m Scott Emmons.

Before I launch into the main topic, I want to give a shout-out to Matt Hobbs, who set my lyrics to music for the new theme song you just heard. I’d been feeling a need for a slightly bigger intro for these mid-month episodes, and Matt and I crossed paths at just the right time. He’s an accomplished songwriter, composer, and creator of the viral series, “Puppy Songs.” If you go to YouTube and search “The Cheese Tax,” you’re sure to get a laugh and quite possibly a new earworm. You can check out Matt’s work at heymatthobbs.com. I’ve included the link in the show notes. 

With that, let’s dive into some Greek history. In the last episode, we saw how Sparta went out of its comfort zone in about 525 BCE and sent a force across the sea to support a rebellion against the tyrant Polycrates of Samos — one that ultimately failed. So this time I wanted to take a closer look at Polycrates and the empire he built in the Aegean islands. Polycrates strikes me as a perfect subject for one of these sidebar episodes, because his reign didn’t really have a lasting impact on the course of Greek history. But in his time, he was a big deal, and his story gives us a good snapshot of the power struggles going on in the eastern Mediterranean. 

The island of Samos sits at the far eastern end of the Aegean, only about a mile off the coast of what’s now Turkey. The region just across the straits in the period we’re talking about was Ionia, with important Greek cities like Miletus, Ephesus, and others. In the mid to late sixth century, this area was, to say the least, turbulent. In 546 BCE, the forces of Cyrus, the Great King and founder of the Persian Empire, conquered Lydia and captured its king Croesus. Shortly after that, the Greek cities in that part of the world — those that tried to resist, anyway — fell one by one to the superior Persian forces. I’ll save the details of that conquest for a later episode, but suffice it to say that before long, virtually all the Greek cities on that Asian seaboard were subjects of the Great King.  

And those were just the Greeks. The Persians went on to conquer the neo-Babylonian Empire and kept adding to their territory. Cyrus died in 530 and was succeeded by his son Cambyses. But that didn’t slow Peria’s roll. The new king was poised to invade Egypt and bring it into the empire. Which brings us to another interesting character, Amasis II who was the Egyptian pharaoh at this time. Amasis is what the Greeks called him. His Egyptian name was something more like Ahmose. But since this is a Greek history podcast, I’ll stick with their version of his name. Amasis had come to power as a military leader, overthrowing the pharaoh Apries in 570, after which he had a long, prosperous reign of about 44 years.   

A striking thing about the pharaoh Amasis is his enthusiasm for cultivating good relations with Greeks. He was known for giving lavish gifts to Greek sanctuaries, and he even contributed generously to the rebuilding of Apollo’s temple at Delphi after the devastating fire in 548. He married a Greek woman from the royal family of Cyrene on the north African coast. Under Amasis, the Greek settlement of Naucratis — the only place in Egypt where Greeks were allowed to trade — grew from a trading post into a full-blown city. A lot of this pro-Greek policy probably came down to needing allies in the face of Persian aggression. But Herodotus tells us he was a philhellene, a lover of Greeks and Greek culture. And one of his closest friends and allies in Greece was Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos. 

So who was Polycrates? We’ve seen his type before. He was a Samian from a prominent family with a lot of talent and ambition, which he used to stage a coup and seize power sometime around 535 BCE. At first, he didn’t act alone. His two brothers, Pantagnotus and Syloson were his co-conspirators, and the deal they made was that they were to share power. But that arrangement didn’t last long. Polycrates had Pantagnotus put to death and exiled Syloson, making himself the sole tyrant. Greek authors often emphasize the accomplishments of tyrants and the great things they did for their cities. But let’s face it, they had to be pretty ruthless just to get power and hold onto it. We hear of a time during Polycrates’ reign when there was a faction trying to overthrow him, and as a precautionary measure, he took the wives and children of Samian citizens as hostages and imprisoned in boathouses, threatening to set fire to them if the men joined the rebellion. So, not the kind of character you want to get on the wrong side of. 

Well, it was one thing to take over Samos. But Polycrates was just getting started. He built up a navy of a hundred penteconters, 50-oared ships designed for use in sea battles, and manned them with a thousand archers. And with that fleet, he dominated a good part of the Aegean. Much of that naval activity amounted to straight-up piracy. If Samian sailors met with a merchant ship carrying something of value, they’d plunder it. But it was more than just marauding. Polycrates conquered Lesbos after a major sea battle, and he brought many of the other islands under his control. Herodotus observes that Polycrates was the first Greek to build a “thalassocracy,” that is, an empire based on sea power, since king Minos of Crete way back in the legendary past.

Commanding the islands as he did, he had great influence on Delos, the island sacred to Apollo and Artemis. Delos was an especially important Ionian religious center, so a tyrant who had clout there could position himself as a leader of the Ionian Greeks. You may remember that the tyrant Pisistratus of Athens had purified the island by moving all graves out of sight of the sanctuary. Polycrates’ big religious gesture was to dedicate the tiny island of Rheneia, just off the coast of Delos, to Apollo. And he did this by stretching a chain across the water to connect the little island to the main one. This practice pops up here and there in Greek history. If you stretch a rope or a chain from a sanctuary to some other place, it acts as a kind of conduit for the divine power, so that whatever the other end connects to becomes sacred too.  

So, boosting his image at Delos was right out of the Greek tyrant’s playbook.  So was another aspect of his reign, his extensive building program. Like Periander in Corinth and Pisistratus in Athens, he wanted to leave his mark on the city. Now, full disclosure, determining the dates of the great Samian monuments is tricky, and Polycrates probably didn’t initiate all of them, but it’s likely he played a big part in them. One of the most impressive was an aqueduct in the form of a kilometer-long tunnel cut through the solid rock of a mountain, now known as Mount Kastro. Herodotus makes a point of identifying the engineer who directed the project as Eupalinos of Megara. Which I think is a good example of how the Greeks valued arete, excellence, in all its forms. When there was a magnificent feat of engineering like this, they wanted to know, “Who built that?” I’ve never been to Samos myself, but the tunnel of Eupalinos is still there, and in fact it’s a UNESCO World Heritage site. Another architectural marvel from this time was the temple of Hera, which was famous as one of the biggest temples in the Greek world. 

Aside from public works, tyrants were known for living in high style, and Polycrates was right up there with the most extravagant. We don’t have a full description of the house he lived in, but we hear that his dining room was fitted out with the most magnificent furniture, which was dedicated in the temple of Hera after his death. Herodotus remarks that he was the most splendid of all Greek tyrants except those of Syracuse in Sicily. Which is saying something! One piece of that magnificent lifestyle was being a patron of the arts, and Polycrates had some of the most renowned Greek poets at his court. The best known of those was Anacreon, whose lyrics on love and convivial drinking inspired many later imitators, even into the early modern period. In the 18th century, there were Anacreontic Societies in London and other European cultural centers. 

Well, as we get to the later part of Polycrates’ reign, we see a shift in his political alignments. He was an opportunist, so of course he was going to do whatever gave him the greatest advantage. We’ve seen that he had a very close alliance with Amasis of Egypt. They had even formed bonds of guest-friendship, which was a serious commitment — sort of an ancient Mediterranean equivalent of becoming blood brothers. But at some point, they seem to have had a falling out. Herodotus has a classic story about how it happened, but I’ll come back to that at the end. The truth is that Polycrates could see the writing on the wall. The Persian forces were inevitably going to conquer Egypt. One contributing factor was that the Persians by now controlled the Phoenician territory, which meant they had the very powerful Phoenician navy. The Phoenicians were renowned for being some of the best sailors in the Mediterranean. It would have been very risky for Polycrates to go up against that. So when the Persian king Cambyses was ready to move against Egypt, Polycrates offered to send 40 ships to aid in the invasion. That happened just a few months after Amasis died, so his son Psammetichus was the one who had to suffer the defeat.

But those 40 Samian ships never got to Egypt. Polycrates had used that expedition as an opportunity to get rid of potential enemies. The men he picked for the mission were those he suspected of being disloyal to him. At one island stop on the way, they decided to turn back and launch an attack against Polycrates. Their revolution failed, and these were the Samians who then went to Sparta to ask for help. We’ve seen how the Spartans and the Corinthians both sent forces, but nothing came of it. 

Ultimately, as you might expect, Polycrates came to a bad end. The Persian satrap — that is, the regional governor — of Lydia was a man named Oroites, or Oroetes, however you want to pronounce it in English. According to Herodotus, he planned to murder Polycrates by  tricking him into coming over to the mainland to meet with him. He claimed his life was in danger because he’d angered the Great King in some way, and he offered to help finance Polycrates’ naval expansion in the Aegean if the tyrant would take him away to safety. Polycrates took the bait, and as soon as he arrived, Oroites had him killed, as Herodotus puts it, “in a way not fit to be told.” And after putting him to death, he had his body impaled on a stake and displayed for all to see.  

That’s most of what we know about the historical Polycrates. When I say “historical,” keep in mind that there’s always a good deal of debate as to how much of it is actual fact. What I’ve told you is what you’d be likely to read in an introductory college textbook or a book for a mass audience. Among scholars, opinions vary widely. If you read the section on Polycrates in Robin Osborne’s book Greece in the Making, you’ll find he’s very cautious about accepting anything but the broadest outlines of what Herodotus tells us. For the purposes of this podcast, I like what Professor Donald Kagan called the “higher naivete.” Which means you accept what the ancient authors tell you unless there’s a compelling reason not to. That’s obviously not a foolproof way of getting at the facts, but I think it is a good way to get a basic understanding of events — and of the way the ancient Greeks perceived their own history. 

Ironically, though, the thing Polycrates is best known for is something that can’t possibly be historical. This is the story I promised earlier, about the falling out between Polycrates and the pharaoh Amasis. At the time they became friends and allies, Polycrates’ fortunes were on the rise. As Herodotus tells it, everything was going his way. He won every battle. The money from piracy and conquests kept rolling in. His life was just success after success after success. And after a while, Amasis looked at what was going on and thought, “This is unsustainable.” The human condition is a mix of good and bad fortune. If your life is just one win after another, eventually something terrible is going to happen to balance the scales. So Amasis wrote a letter to Polycrates urging him to take a preventative measure. To inoculate himself against disaster. He said, “Take your most prized possession, something that will really cause you pain to lose, and cast it into the sea where you can never recover it.”  

Polycrates read the letter and thought it made a lot of sense. The item he chose to sacrifice was a very valuable gold ring that had been exquisitely crafted by Theodorus of Samos, one of the greatest names in Greek art. So he got on board a ship, had his sailors row him out to the open sea, and threw the ring overboard, where it sank to the bottom. After that, as Herodotus says, he went home to mourn his loss. 

Well, a few days later, a fisherman caught an unusually big and beautiful fish, and he thought, “It would be a waste to take this to the market. This is a fish fit for a king.” You can see where this is going. The fisherman took it and handed it over to Polycrates’ servants as a gift for the tyrant. And when the cooks cut it open to prepare it for the master’s dinner, lo and behold, there was the ring! They took it to Polycrates, who was delighted to see it again, and he dashed off a letter to Amasis telling him the whole story. As soon as Amasis read the letter, he realized Polycrates was doomed. He was fated to come to a bad end, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. And so he severed his ties with Polycrates.

When Herodotus tells stories like this, he sometimes tells us whether or not he thinks it’s true. In this case, he doesn’t offer an opinion one way or the other. My guess is that if we could ask him, he’d say, “This is what I heard from the Samians or the Egyptians, but I don’t believe it myself.” At the same time, it shows a world view that informs Herodotus’ whole understanding of history. Boiled down to its essence, it’s a belief that overreach inevitably leads to backlash. There’s a certain balance of power in the world, and if a human being upsets that balance, something will happen to restore it. It’s a view that permeates ancient Greek thought, and it comes out clearly in tragedy, where a person’s hybris inevitably leads to their own destruction — or maybe the destruction of their children or grandchildren. The early philosopher Anaximander expressed it as a physical principle, that opposite forces in the world pay a penalty for injustice to each other according to the assessment of time. That undercurrent runs all through Herodotus’ history, and we’ll see in later episodes how it shapes his treatment of his main topic, the wars between Persia and Greece. 

That concludes episode 25. I think the tyranny of Polycrates is a fascinating interlude in Greek history, and I hope you agree. If you have anything to add in the way of comments, questions, corrections, what have you, I’d love to hear from you at scott@epicgreekhistory.com. Comments are also welcome on my Facebook and Instagram accounts. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for this episode was produced by Matt Hobbs and Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork are by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε — have good fortune. (But maybe not too much.)