The reforms of Ephialtes, as discussed earlier, removed one of the antidemocratic checks (the retention by the Council of the Areopagus of the “guardianship of the laws”) which Cleisthenes had retained in his constitutional reforms (see chap. 8). At about the same time as these reforms (462/1) another constitutional reform took place. Its instigator this time was not Ephialtes - who fell victim to an assassination shortly after his reforms’ passage ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 25) -, but a younger associate of his, Pericles.
Pericles’ reform seems modest: pay for jury duty ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 27; Plut. Per. 9). The pay was initially set at two obols per day (Schol. Aristoph. Wasps, 88a), evidently a standard daily wage back then. With this he introduced the concept of pay for public office, and although no source explicitly attests it, the concept was quickly expanded to include the other offices. As soon as people began receiving a daily wage for holding an office, everyone could serve, because now no one suffered financially for being away from work, and another antidemocratic check in the Cleisthenic constitution fell away.
One, however, remained. The ten generalships were filled each year by election. Originally, each tribe elected one general, but eventually the voters as a whole elected ten generals ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 61). Elections in ancient Greece always counted as undemocratic for the simple reason that the rich and famous could and did manipulate them. Securing election to a generalship required money and organization. Moreover, unlike with other offices in Athens, there was here no prohibition against serving more than one year in a row. The politically ambitious and wealthy Athenian aristocrats concentrated on the generalship and spurned the other offices which could be held for just one year and were filled by lot. As a consequence the generalship was the most important office in Athens from the mid-fifth century on, and the aristocrat Pericles held this office again and again (Plut. Per. 18sqq.). It functioned as the concrete base of his power and allowed him to dominate politics in Athens to such an extent that Thucydides could later write that under Pericles “what was in name a democracy was in reality rule by the best man” - Athens under Pericles was practically a monarchy (Thuc. II 65). No matter how hyperbolical Thucydides’ comment may be, the dominance of the generalship by the wealthy made for a strong antidemocratic element in the Athenian constitution during the fifth century (see also Box 13.1).
This is not to say that the Athenian government was fully undemocratic, and from Thucydides’ narrative it emerges clearly enough that the Assembly, at which in theory all adult male citizens were present and had an equal voice, had the final say in all major questions in the second half of the fifth century. The Boule (the Council of 500) and the jury-courts for their part were filled with a random cross-section of adult male citizens. In fact, routine participation in the Assembly, in the jury-courts, and in the Boule as well as the occasional holding of magistracies in these days became an important part of the lives of many male citizens who viewed it as their patriotic duty to do their part in the governance of their city. Aristophanes, in his comedy the Wasps, parodies the ideal of the dutiful male citizen with an hilarious portrait of an obsessive-compulsive juror, a meddler, who simply cannot stop attending the law-courts. Aristophanes’ audience must have recognized the character type instantly, an officious busybody who took this sort of thing far too seriously. Behind the parody, though, one can still discern the civic ideal. However, many people in the state of Athens lived in the countryside, away from the city proper. For them this sort of regular participation at the Assembly or in the jury-courts was impossible owing to the distances involved. Granted, there was still the possibility for participation at the level of the deme where regular deme assemblies and the like took place ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 42 and 59).
Next, even if female citizens could not participate in the Assembly or hold most offices, they could hold some, in particular those of a religious nature. An inscription from 424 BC. (Fornara, Nr. 139) shows what arrangements the Athenians made for the appointment and pay of the Priestess of Athena Nike, whose temple lay on the Acropolis to the south of the entry-way. That this priestess received a salary at public expense shows that she held a public office just as any man did who served on the Boule. In fact, one of the most important and visible public officials in Athens was the Priestess of Athena in the Parthenon, the chief temple on the Acropolis. When the Athenians decided to evacuate Attica in 480 as the Persian army entered central Greece, it was she who gave the final all-clear for the evacuation to begin - a highly public act with far-reaching consequences (Hdt. VIII 41).
Finally, the discussion of citizens’ duties under the democracy in the second half of the fifth century raises the question of how in Athens the body of citizens was defined in those days. In 451 Pericles arranged for a new law, by which citizenship was restricted to those whose parents were both Athenian citizens ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 26; Plut. Per. 37 - previously just an Athenian father had sufficed). Male citizens were registered in their deme on a roll kept by the demarch (Demosthenes, XLIV 37 and LVII 60), so in cases of doubt this document attested one’s father’s citizenship. One proved one’s mother’s citizenship with a document as well, the engyesis-contract which recorded her father’s transfer of a dowry into her fiance’s possession (Isaeus, III 8 and 53; VIII 9). Since as a general rule Greek states restricted marriage to citizens, the engyesis-contract showed that one’s mother, since she could enter into a legal marriage, was indeed a citizen.
Pericles’ law of citizenship enforced this general rule in Athens. Before the rise of the Athenian “empire,” with few exceptions, Athenian men almost always married Athenian women for reasons of simple practicality. Exceptions were rare and therefore negligible. But in the time of the “empire,” when people from abroad were coming to Athens in droves and Athenians were constantly traveling abroad on business and even living there as cleruchs or stationed in garrisons, marriages between Athenians and non-Athenians became too frequent to be overlooked. At Pericles’ instigation a law was made which deprived of citizenship the children of any such marriage and so made them illegitimate. As Demosthenes (LIX 122) remarked in a famous passage, “marriage is this, that a man begets children and enrolls his sons in a phratry and a deme and gives his daughters as his own to men in marriage” (i. e., both sons and daughters are publicly and officially acknowledged as legitimate and as Athenians). The Athenians thus maintained a distinct civic identity rather than merging through intermarriage with the other peoples in the “empire.”
World History
