Right down in the days of Demosthenes, nearly two hundred years later, these two men were still mentioned in most of the public decrees, because immunities had been granted to their descendants for ever. They are the only private individuals who had statues erected to them for more than a hundred years. All this extraordinary honour was theirs because they had killed a tyrant. Although we can see the blessings that the tyrants of Greece had brought to their cities, it is to the credit of the Greeks that they could not. They much preferred to govern themselves badly than to be governed ever so efficiently by some one else. A tyrant might give them wealth, peace, culture, and happiness, but no Greek ever lost sight of the tyrant’s _telos_, or goal. The tyrant governed, as Aristotle says, “for his own advantage, not that of his subjects.” Hence their execration of tyranny and the extraordinary honour they paid to tyrannicides. Such a sentiment has had an enormous influence in history. The Greeks taught it in their schools, their orators embroidered the theme, the Roman schoolboys learnt declamations against tyrants from their Greek teachers of rhetoric, until finally this old legend of Harmodius and Aristogeiton whetted the daggers of Brutus and Cassius against Cæsar. It was a legend, I am afraid. The Athenian tyranny was put down by a Spartan army persuaded by a bribed oracle at the bidding of the Alcmæonids. All that Harmodius and Aristogeiton had done was to kill Hipparchus, the younger brother of Hippias, by surprise, as he was marshalling the Panathenaic procession. Apparently, too, the motive was merely a love affair of a kind that we consider disreputable; but that only added the necessary touch of romance to the story. No ancient historian supports the belief of the common folk at Athens that Harmodius and Aristogeiton had set Athens free. This story provided the subject of one of the most famous of archaic statues, the “Harmodius and Aristogeiton” of Antenor. It was carried off by Xerxes to Persia when he sacked Athens in 480, but returned eventually by Antiochus the Great. Meanwhile two other sculptors had been set to reproduce Antenor’s group. It is probably this reproduction from which our many copies have been made. We have them on coins, on vases, on a marble throne, and above all in two separate statues in the Naples Museum, where unfortunately Aristogeiton, who should have been the bearded elder, has been degraded by the addition of one of the pretty curly-haired heads of the fourth or third century. But the Harmodius is a fine type of archaic work, even though it has been freely restored and is of course only a copy. We note how much more successful is the body than the head. But uncouth as the head is it is full of dignity and virility.[36] From Aristophanes it would appear that it was the mark of a jingo democrat at Athens to sing “the Harmodius” on every possible occasion.