Talk:Cylon of Athens

Meaning of "Cylon"
What is the meaning of "Cylon"?--80.141.184.244 (talk) 17:02, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

The Full Term is Cyclonan — Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.188.102.110 (talk) 01:58, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Cylon of Athens as a historical figure
In an unrelated conversation, someone made the following claim:

"Actually, I would say that many serious scholars take the existence of Cylon of Athens as a historical figure as a fact, despite no contemporary evidence, and no mention at all until Herodotus, writing almost two centuries after Cylon"

None of this is referenced in this article, so we need to find citations that establish whether, indeed, serious scholars do or do not take the existence of Cylon of Athens as a historical figure as a fact. Does anyone have a cite that establishes that? --Guy Macon (talk) 06:09, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * (Sound of Crickets...) --Guy Macon (talk) 08:17, 17 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Well, the silence has been deafening for some time, but I happened to be looking at this talk page today (more than three years after the question was first proposed!), and I can confirm that at least some serious scholars do in fact take the existence of Cylon as historical fact. Andrewes, writing in Volume III part 3 of the Cambridge Ancient History, calls Cylon's attempted coup "the first clearly attested event in Athenian history" (p.368-9).  There has been some debate about precisely when Cylon's attempted coup was (Andrewes thinks 636 or one of the Olympic years soon after), but it seems fairly well agreed that it happened. (Further back, John Henry Wright, in 1892, published a 70+ page paper on the question, which among other things lists no fewer than 22 scholars who had put forth a theory on the dates up to that time, and in French Edmond Levy tackled the question in the 70s (though my French isn't good enough to actually follow the paper with the cursory glance I gave it).  This is by no means an exhaustive account, because the question of Cylon's dates are very much peripheral to what I'm actually currently looking at.) Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 20:28, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

It's not the kind of thing that someone would make up, imho- the whole story is too commonplace and boring for that. An attempted political rebellion which fails and everyone dies? Meh. Happens all the time. It's so dull it's probably real. Not my field, though,  I could be wrong. It just seems to boring to be worth the trouble to make up. Tabbycatlove (talk) 22:30, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: History of Ancient Greece
— Assignment last updated by Johnstoncl (talk) 20:41, 20 May 2023 (UTC)