Achilles was in many ways the original Greek ideal of youth and manhood, a beautiful man with a divine aura, born of a sea goddess and a mortal king. Real conquerors and rulers including Alcibiades, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon took inspiration from him. And yet his primary passion was rage. The rage of Achilles is what sets Homer's great epic, the Iliad, into motion, a rage born of competition with his overlord, the older Agamemnon, which eventually left thousands of Greeks and Trojans dead in steaming heaps on the blood-soaked field before the great city.

The feud between the younger man and his elder is over who should rightfully be given the captive Trojan woman Briseis as a trophy of war. Achilles believes she is his by right because he has been by far the bravest warrior on the Greek side. But Agamemnon claims her for his own because he is not merely a king, but the King of Kings, the commander of the entire Greek force including Achilles. The mixture of erotic jealousy over the possession of the unfortunate woman and their resentment for each other over their status and prestige – Achilles thinks Agamemnon is a coward and a lightweight gaining glory through what are really his own achievements, while Agamemnon finds Achilles insufferably arrogant and insubordinate – boils over in their accusations of each other. You can fairly hear the words spitting through clenched teeth of these two kings clashing:

On the first page of this book, I suggested that you might not find it worth reading any further if you were confident that the progress of history was making tyranny a thing of the past – that, despite a few bumps in the road like ISIS or Putin, we were heading inevitably toward the spread of American-style democracy around the world. If you've made it this far, that means you're willing to entertain the possibility that the danger of tyranny is a permanent feature of the human and political landscape, as much now as ever. It's never going away, and neither is the need to defend free self-governing societies against it.

How does the world look when we remove our rose-colored “end of history” glasses and view it straight on? The world is what it has always been. But we will see it rather differently. Let's do a world tour with our three main varieties of tyranny as the guidebook.

ALL ABOARD FOR THE TYRANNY TOUR

Garden-variety kleptocratic tyrannies have been alive and well all along. Sometimes they are dressed up with the tired principle of belonging to “the developing world” (examples include much of Africa, the Arab Baathist dictatorships, Haiti's Duvaliers) as a lure for foreign aid to be filched (Malawi's former president Bakili Muluzi has been accused of embezzling twelve million dollars of foreign-aid money, one on a long list of such scandals), sometimes used to cobble together made-up countries (Jordan, for example, the original intended Palestinian state, with its British-backed Hashemite monarchy), sometimes masked with a pretense of piety (the Saudis, who hide in their luxurious compounds while their subjects are left to the tender mercies of the harshest Salaafist version of Sharia law). Fidel Castro is, as I write, the last of the club of satellite Soviet dictators. By allowing his brother to lift a few restrictions on business and travel in pursuit of normalizing relations with the U.S., he apparently hopes to stave off the fate of Ceausescu and other long-gone communist dictators while holding onto supreme control for his prosperous clan.

As the mass executions during the Jacobin Terror of the French Revolution spiraled toward their bloody peak between 1792 and 1794, at the same time, ever more elaborate “Festivals of Virtue” were being staged. These pageants were a curious attempt to create a secular political religion with ancient Greek and Roman overtones, the beginning of the operatic spectacles we associate with subsequent totalitarian movements and regimes from the Bolsheviks’ May Day parades and the Nazis’ Nuremberg Rallies to the massing of hundreds of thousands of human puppets in the North Korean stage-set “capital” of Pyongyang.

The French Revolution's festivals emphasized a purity and innocence that played in bizarre counterpoint to the daily scenes of unbelievable savagery and sadism unfolding alongside them, and featuring the same players. Alternating with these sentimental and bucolic idylls were intervals of organized horror that even today cannot be read about without amazement. Christopher Hibbert writes about the executions in Paris: “As the heaps of corpses mounted, carts drawn by horses ... were obtained to take them away to the Montrouge quarries. Women helped to load them, breaking off occasionally to dance the Carmagnole, then stood laughing on the slippery flesh ... some with ears pinned to their dresses.” He quotes an eyewitness account: “The carts were full of men and women who had just been slaughtered and whose limbs were still flexible because they had not had time to grow cold, so that legs and arms and heads nodded and dangled on either side.” Hibbert goes on: “Men were reported by reliable witnesses to have been seen drinking, eating and smoking amidst the carnage, using for tables and chairs the naked bodies of their victims whose clothes had been removed ... ” A special public spectacle was designed for the Princesse de Lamballe, Queen Marie Antoinette's closest friend – she “had been stripped and raped; her breasts had been cut off; the rest of her body mutilated” and exposed to the public's jeering. “A man was later accused of having cut off her genitals which he impaled upon a pike and of having ripped out her heart which he ate ‘after having roasted it on a cooking-stove.’”

High above the island of Capri, overlooking the Bay of Naples, stand the ruins of the Roman Emperor Tiberius’ summer villa. It's a two-hour hike up a winding narrow roadway to the top, and when you finally make it, the vistas are stunning. Even more impressive, however, is the villa itself, really a gargantuan palace that, even in its fragmented condition, creates a powerful impression of majesty, might, and fear. Vaulted paths lead you through a winding labyrinth of chambers, until you emerge on what would have been a shaded, colonnaded terrace onto which the main rooms of the palace opened – a terrace that was an entire mile in length, capturing and funneling the breezes off the Bay. Here the Emperor, his family, and his entourage would have relaxed in the shaded cool. Even higher up, and the crown of the whole site, is a huge circular platform where Tiberius received delegations from his throne. Preserved intact because a Christian church was built there, with the entire Bay of Naples and the Neapolitan coast as its backdrop, standing there you truly feel you are on the top of the world – on top, in fact, of Mount Olympus. Not coincidentally, the villa was called The Villa of Jupiter, and trembling officials and ambassadors brought into the Emperor's presence in the clouds must truly have felt they were in the presence of the King of the Gods. It was a calculated effect. And Tiberius was fully capable of a god's capricious wrath. It was said that when someone displeased him (and that didn't take much), he would order him thrown off there and then, plunging to his death in the rocky surf far below.

The Roman Empire was in many ways the greatest state the world has ever known. Most historians would agree that it was well into the modern era before Europe even approached its architectural sophistication and city planning. But the greatness of Rome was based on a thinly disguised tyranny. The Emperor was the apex of all power, the source of all strength, patronage, and honor.

In 410 AD, Rome, the Eternal City was sacked by Alaric the Visigoth and his forces. They didn't do tremendous damage. Alaric had been a Roman ally and general. He felt the imperial government had welched on their deal – occupying the city was meant to apply bargaining pressure. Rome at this point was not even the capital of the western empire – it had moved to Ravenna. Yet so famous was her name and history that the entire Roman world was traumatized. The city had not been invaded for eight hundred years. As Saint Jerome wrote, “if Rome can perish, who can be safe?”

The psychological impact was akin to the German occupation of Paris in 1870 or the attack on New York on September the 11th – a devastating blow from without that was felt by many to be the earned comeuppance for years of moral drift and corruption. Many believed that the newly dominant religion of Christianity was responsible for sapping the manly fiber of old Roman virtue. Christianity, they claimed, was pacifistic, whereas Rome's glory was based on her strength of arms. Christians had divided loyalties, and placed their otherworldly salvation above their loyalty to the state. Far from honoring Rome's unmatched success in war, Christians actively disapproved of it. The Christian emperor Constantius II ordered the removal from the Senate of the famous Altar of Victory, containing a magnificent gold statue of the goddess Victory holding a palm branch (peace for the defeated) and offering a laurel wreath (glory to the victors). Captured during the Romans’ wars of subjugation against Greece, Augustus had it placed on the Altar of Victory in the Senate to commemorate his defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. Its removal by Constantius could not have been a more stinging repudiation of the first Emperor and Rome's entire tradition of military honor. Now, pagans believed, we are paying the price for turning our back on the martial virtues that made us great.

St. Augustine wrote his classic The City of God to refute the charge that Christianity had weakened Roman virtue and so invited the barbarian invasion of the legendary and hitherto invulnerable capital. Christians, he argued, have high moral standards, higher than those of the pagans (worshipping gods who are sex fiends), and these virtues of moderation, chastity, and decency make them good citizens.