The Peisistratids had preserved some sense of Athens as a community and enhanced the prestige of the city itself with its magnificent central rock. They had controlled the aristocracy, but not destroyed it. In the countryside its network of support lay in the phratries. Although much about the nature of the phratries is disputed, they appear to have been associations of adjoining landowners, usually members or supporters of one aristocratic clan. Membership of a phratry provided the only proof of citizenship, so it was a closely guarded privilege. When the tyranny was overthrown, there appears to have been an immediate aristocratic reaction, partly sustained by nobles returning from exile, in which the phratries were purged of any members considered sympathetic to the tyrants. They lost their citizenship, and the state appeared once again to be falling under aristocratic control with all the rivalries that entailed. The leader of the aristocrats was one Isagoras who had a plan to restore traditional control through punishing the supporters of the tyrants and disenfranchising those who had recently emigrated to Attica.
Isagoras soon faced a challenge from Cleisthenes, a member of the Alcmaeonid clan (and a grandson of the Cleisthenes of Corinth). Cleisthenes had spent the last years of the tyranny in exile, returning to the city with the Spartans in 510. With the ancient curse still on his family, he had little support from among the traditional aristocracy, but he was clearly an ambitious man, a good speaker, and he began to
Mobilize the citizenry in his support. Isagoras called on the Spartan king, Cleomenes, to help him. Cleomenes arrived, in 508, Cleisthenes and his supporters were exiled, and the invaders tried to engineer a coup in which power would be handed to 300 of Isagoras’ supporters. The Athenians were outraged. They stood firm and drove Cleomenes and Isagoras up onto the Acropolis where they were soon forced into surrender. It was a genuine popular revolution but it could never have been transformed into a stable government without the genius of Cleisthenes who returned in triumph with a plan to break the political power of the phratries and establish genuine equality among citizens. He had an intuitive grasp of how to mould the intense patriotism of the Athenians into a new system that would enshrine democratic power at the core of the constitution while reasserting the power of the Alcmaeonides.
What is impressive about Cleisthenes’ reforms is their radical nature. He knew that the danger lay in allowing the countryside to reassert their conservatism against the more radical city population that had been so enraged by the Spartan invasion. He moved fast, over the year 508-507. He appears to have simply bypassed the phratry system, creating a completely new set of political units, the demes, some 140 of them, probably based on local descent groups. (There was also some correlation with the place of residence when the demes were first established—the word deme is often translated as village. However, when a member of a deme moved, he did not lose his membership of that deme no matter where he later took up residence.) Demes were given responsibility for local order and thus their members were involved directly in administration. They drew up the citizen lists, enrolling young men at the age of 18. To break down regional power groups, Cleisthenes then divided Attica itself into three areas: the city itself, the coastal region, and the interior. Each area had its demes grouped into larger units known as trittyes. The culmination of the process was to take one trittyes from each region and form the three into one tribe, making ten tribes in all for the whole of Attica. These ten tribes replaced four traditional Ionian tribes. The ten tribes selected (annually, by lot) fifty members each to sit on the council of 400 founded by Solon, which was thus enlarged to 500 members. The Council (also known as the Boule) kept its role as supervisor of the business of the Assembly. Its power grew inexorably as it could offer flexible responses to crises between meetings of the Assembly.
Through his new tribes Cleisthenes also produced the means by which a state army could be raised. Little is known of the sixth-century Athenian army, but, based as it was on the phratries, it must have preserved some elements of the aristocratic war-band. Now men had to train in their new tribes alongside men from other regions. A thousand hoplites and a few horsemen (land in Attica was not rich enough to sustain many horses) were required from each tribe. The city was their only common bond and morale was vastly improved. Herodotus notes how the energies of a free people were unleashed in a way unknown under the Peisistratid tyranny. ‘As soon as they got their freedom, each man was eager to do the best he could for himself.’ Settlers were moved out onto Salamis and Euboea in a precedent for the much more extensive empire of the later fifth century. From 501, in a reform that was not Cleisthenes’, each tribe had to provide a general, strategos, elected by
The Assembly from those candidates who put themselves forward. The generals, who, unlike other state officials, could hold their appointment from one year to the next if re-elected, became the most prestigious figures in the city, gradually coming to overshadow the archons. Their growing status emphasizes, in fact, the relative lack of power enjoyed by the other magistrates in Athens (the contrast can be made with the enduring influence over the citizenry of Sparta by the kings and ephors). This is one reason why the Assembly and the Council were able to consolidate their own power.
There are many gaps in the evidence that survives for Cleisthenes’ reforms, and it may be that the accounts shape them so that they appear to be a stepping-stone for the democratic revolution of 461 (see p. 251). It can be argued, however, that Cleisthenes was that rare figure in political history, the reformer with a rational plan for a fairer society that was successfully implemented and sustained. Any less far-seeing populist reformer might well have stirred up the urban population against the country-based aristocracy. The result would almost certainly have been a civil war. By introducing democracy in the countryside, Cleisthenes gave citizens the opportunity to build up administrative experience locally and also ensured that the countryside would be fully integrated into the Athenian democracy. (Evidence from inscriptions shows that they took up the challenge with enthusiasm.)
The Assembly was the main beneficiary. The procedure for selecting its members, the citizens of the state, was now under democratic rather than aristocratic control. Even though confident aristocratic speakers continued to dominate debates they were unable to build up a supporting faction from the minority of their class. With the end of the influence of the phratries and the old tribal system, citizens were now able, through the Assembly and Council, to participate in city affairs as equals (although the archons were still selected from the richest class). The word isonomia was coined to describe the system of equal balance that now prevailed. Shared experiences in the armed forces must have strengthened the sense of shared brotherhood. The next development, although not one necessarily envisaged by Cleisthenes, was to proceed to full democracy, with decision-making concentrated in the Assembly. (See Chapter 16 for the process.) Yet it was Cleisthenes’ reforms that were chosen in 1993 as the starting point from which to celebrate 2,500 years since the founding of democracy in Europe. (See the chapters on Solon and Cleisthenes in Paul Cartledge, Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice, Cambridge and New York, 2009.)
Craftsmanship and Creativity in Archaic Greece
When specialists began classifying the pottery of Greece, they labelled the material produced between 620 and 480 Bc, the period between the Orientalizing and the Classical period, as Archaic (from the Greek archaios, old). The term has gradually been extended, first to describe the wider cultural developments of the period and then as one for the age as a whole. Conventionally, the Archaic age has been seen as a prelude to the Classical period, offering hints of what was to come, but this is a misleading way to write history. The achievements of this period had no inevitable outcome and deserve to be valued in their own right.
Although they continued to draw on influences from the east, the Archaic age was one in which the Greeks increasingly determined their own patterns of development. Perhaps the dominant feel of the period is the gradual coming of order and control. ‘The overriding and enduring impulse of Archaic art’, writes Jeffrey Hurwit, ‘was to formalise, to pattern, to remake nature in order to make it intelligible.’ This can be seen in the growing naturalism of statues and the increasing control over subject matter in vase painting, with the chaotic animal parades of the Corinthian vases replaced by ordered depictions of myths. On the Ionian coast there is an intellectual revolution, with the first systematic application of rational thought to the physical world. These changes run alongside those political developments described in Chapter 11. Solon and Cleisthenes, for instance, were both applying abstract principles of justice to the practical problems of human beings living in society, very much in the spirit of the cultural changes that will be described here.
World History
