Why Is Tyrant... Tyrant?

I get that Tyrant started out as this main villain, who was cruel to everyone, screwing his Granddaughter, etc... But he's evolved since then, with the upcoming expansion; Going Rogue.

Why, oh why, is Tyrant still called 'Tyrant'? If you ask me, it seems so out of character. While Emperor Cole may be a dictator and an Emperor, he still casts himself to the public as a pretty alright guy... I mean, he's got his own city.

So why is he called 'Tyrant'? Wouldn't something less-villainous suit him better, considering he's not quite so villainous (to some) now?

Just a thought thrown out there.

we'll find out when Going Rogue launches.

It's quite possible that he'll not use that name. That's just what we Primal Earthers know him as.

It might be his secret identity

Like when he wants to be really evil, but not harm his image as Emperor

A tyrant is not necessarily evil.

In classical politics, a tyrant is one who has taken power by their own means as opposed to hereditary or constitutional power. This mode of rule is referred to as tyranny.
The word derives from Latin tyrannus, meaning "illegitimate ruler", and this in turn from the Greek τύραννος, týrannos, meaning "sovereign, master",[1] although the latter was not pejorative and applicable to both good and bad leaders alike.


-- Wikipedia, of course

Also, it makes the retcon seem less of, well, a retcon.

It might be opinions also...just think of politics in rl.

Emperor Cole is being besmirched and the name is one given to him by the war criminal Statesman and his 'elite' inner circle of toadies and yes men.

I would be proud to call myself a tyrant if I had ripped the position from the undeserving and taken it for myself by my own power.

There's nothing nice about being a tyrant

There's plenty nice about being a tyrant. People do what you say, girls in togas feed you grapes...well there's two things nice about being a tyrant.

I'm glad somebody got most of the classical references out of the way; this is the point to cue the original poster that the original writers behind this game were amateur classics scholars, very "into" ancient Greece and Rome, so they used an ancient Greek political term for a superhero who's conquered the world as an absolutely dictator in the name of good.

Here's the thing to understand about the original tyrants. Athenian democracy lasted from roughly 775 BCE to roughly 300 BCE, from the constitution that the divinely-inspired Solon (as they came to call him) tricked Athenian warlords and landholders into signing until right before the Macedonian conquest. In that 475 years, probably as many as one out of any four given years, on average, was under the rule of a "tyrant." There was no legal justification given in the constitution of Solon, but there was a theoretical and practical justification, and it worked like this: every once in a rare while, some political or economic crisis would hit and the Athenian forum couldn't achieve consensus fast enough to solve the problem. At such times, any citizen could take the risk of declaring himself the tyrant, the absolute ruler. But if he did so, he faced two risks. First of all, if the public didn't agree that the situation called for a tyrant, or didn't agree with his self-appointment, he would be (and frequently was) slaughtered by an angry mob. It was suicidal to declare yourself a tyrant unless what you were hearing from everybody in the forum, from everybody in the streets, was that there was no other way to do it and everybody wished you, in particular, would just take over. Secondly, your mandate to rule was informally very time-limited. Most tyrants met bloody deaths, when the democracy had had enough of them and wanted their government back. One such counter-coup, the murder of the tyrant Hipparchus by the rebels Harmodius and Aristogeiton, was still being sung as a popular hymn before every meal 250 years after it happened.

(You can see an echo of this in "Kemalist democracy," the political system of modern-day Turkey, which openly permits a junta of military leaders to displace the parliament during any parliamentary crisis ... but which openly calls for a mass uprising of the people and mutiny by lower-level soldiers if the junta doesn't restore democratic rule within at most a year or two. This system of government has also been tried in Egypt and Pakistan, where the results have been, well, to put it mildly, significantly less successful.)

In Greece, the system completely failed after Athens lost the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans, blaming democracy as a political system for the Athens' militarist looting of her colonies and former Persian-War allies that drove them into Sparta's embrace, swept aside the constitution of Solon and attempted to replace it with The Thirty Tyrants, a hereditary oligarchy where the heads of the 30 wealthiest families in Athens would rule as a permanent council. The resulting civil war created such slaughter and chaos that Alexander the Great conquered them as an act of mercy, and the Greeks didn't get back their independence and their freedom for over 2200 years. (By the end of which time, if you compare the ethnicity of modern day Greeks to the portraits and statues from before the Macedonian conquest, there were no actual Greeks left. Allowing democracy to fail cost them 2200 years of slavery and ultimately extermination for them and nearly all of their descendants.)