The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

with
them seized the opportunity and drove them all out. In the case of
Dionysius, Dion, his own relative, attacked and expelled him with
the assistance of the people; he afterwards perished himself.
    There are two chief motives which induce men to attack
tyrannies—hatred and contempt. Hatred of tyrants is inevitable, and
contempt is also a frequent cause of their destruction. Thus we see
that most of those who have acquired, have retained their power,
but those who have inherited, have lost it, almost at once; for,
living in luxurious ease, they have become contemptible, and offer
many opportunities to their assailants. Anger, too, must be
included under hatred, and produces the same effects. It is often
times even more ready to strike—the angry are more impetuous in
making an attack, for they do not follow rational principle. And
men are very apt to give way to their passions when they are
insulted. To this cause is to be attributed the fall of the
Peisistratidae and of many others. Hatred is more reasonable, for
anger is accompanied by pain, which is an impediment to reason,
whereas hatred is painless.
    In a word, all the causes which I have mentioned as destroying
the last and most unmixed form of oligarchy, and the extreme form
of democracy, may be assumed to affect tyranny; indeed the extreme
forms of both are only tyrannies distributed among several persons.
Kingly rule is little affected by external causes, and is therefore
lasting; it is generally destroyed from within. And there are two
ways in which the destruction may come about; (1) when the members
of the royal family quarrel among themselves, and (2) when the
kings attempt to administer the state too much after the fashion of
a tyranny, and to extend their authority contrary to the law.
Royalties do not now come into existence; where such forms of
government arise, they are rather monarchies or tyrannies. For the
rule of a king is over voluntary subjects, and he is supreme in all
important matters; but in our own day men are more upon an
equality, and no one is so immeasurably superior to others as to
represent adequately the greatness and dignity of the office. Hence
mankind will not, if they can help, endure it, and any one who
obtains power by force or fraud is at once thought to be a tyrant.
In hereditary monarchies a further cause of destruction is the fact
that kings often fall into contempt, and, although possessing not
tyrannical power, but only royal dignity, are apt to outrage
others. Their overthrow is then readily effected; for there is an
end to the king when his subjects do not want to have him, but the
tyrant lasts, whether they like him or not.
    The destruction of monarchies is to be attributed to these and
the like causes.
XI
    And they are preserved, to speak generally, by the opposite
causes; or, if we consider them separately, (1) royalty is
preserved by the limitation of its powers. The more restricted the
functions of kings, the longer their power will last unimpaired;
for then they are more moderate and not so despotic in their ways;
and they are less envied by their subjects. This is the reason why
the kingly office has lasted so long among the Molossians. And for
a similar reason it has continued among the Lacedaemonians, because
there it was always divided between two, and afterwards further
limited by Theopompus in various respects, more particularly by the
establishment of the Ephoralty. He diminished the power of the
kings, but established on a more lasting basis the kingly office,
which was thus made in a certain sense not less, but greater. There
is a story that when his wife once asked him whether he was not
ashamed to leave to his sons a royal power which was less than he
had inherited from his father, ‘No indeed,’ he replied, ‘for the
power which I leave to them will be more lasting.’
    As to (2) tyrannies, they are preserved in two most opposite
ways. One of them is the old traditional method in which most
tyrants administer their government. Of such arts Periander of
Corinth is said to have been the great master, and many similar
devices may be gathered from the Persians in the administration of
their government. There are firstly the prescriptions mentioned
some distance back, for the preservation of a tyranny, in so far as
this is possible; viz., that the tyrant should lop off those who
are too high; he must put to death men of spirit; he must not allow
common meals, clubs, education, and the like; he