Athenian coup of 411 BC state of Athens remained an anomaly, however, as the rest of the Greek city states were run either as tyrannies or, most often, by oligarchies. Both Thucydides and Aristotle wrote that "the revolution was provoked by defeat in Sicily." Despite the democracy in Athens, Greek tradition remained aristocratic, and the works of Homer celebrated an aristocratic world view, where the nobles made decisions and the commoners obeyed. The poems of Theognis of Megara (from the sixth century BC) and the Theban poet Pindar (of the fifth century BC) were popular among the Athenian nobles at this time, casting democracy as
Ulysses (poem) the argument that ideology is ahistorical, finding that Tennyson's poem "comes before an ideological construction for which it nonetheless makes people nostalgic". In a 1929 essay, T. S. Eliot called "Ulysses" a "perfect poem". An analogue of Ulysses is found in Eliot's "Gerontion" (1920). Both poems are narrated by an aged man contemplating life's end. An excerpt from "Gerontion" reads as an ironic comment on the introductory lines of "Ulysses": <poem> </poem> The Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) stated that his long lyric poem "L'ultimo viaggio" was an attempt to reconcile the portrayals of Ulysses in Dante and Tennyson with