"If more than once": Tyranny and "Timoleon"

Abstract: The title poem of Timoleon returns to a theme Herman Melville developed across his long career—the regular emergence of tyranny. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's juxtaposition of the tyrant and the martyr in The Origin of German Tragic Drama , this article shows that Melville's incisive analysis of a key challenge democracy always faces—the possibility that tyranny will prevail—and links the poem to another late work, Billy Budd . Melville's wariness about the ability to assert knowledge of the common good links these works.