While it is certainly the case that it is not until the end of the sixth century that representations of Theseus and his exploits on the road from Troezen begin to multiply, he is hardly absent from Athenian art prior to this date. On the Frangois Vase, an Attic Black Figure volute krater found at the Etruscan site of Chiusi and dated to ca. 570, Theseus is portrayed battling centaurs and instituting the geranos or “crane dance” on Delos. From around the middle of the sixth century, he is often depicted fighting the Minotaur while a Black Figure amphora, now in Paris and dated to ca. 530, may show him battling the Bull of Marathon. A Red Figure cup, on which Theseus’ abduction of the Amazon Antiope is represented, has been ascribed to the potter-painter Euphronios, thought to have been active between ca. 520 and 505. Dating to the same period, a Red Figure cup, found at the Etruscan site of Cerveteri, portrays Theseus in combat with the Sow of Krommyon. The common assumption that the Pisistratids cannot have been responsible for the promotion of Theseus as an Attic hero because they had championed the figure of Heracles is far from self-evident. Heracles was useful for staking Athens’ new pretensions to Panhellenic status, but Theseus was better suited for internal consumption. At any rate, the iconographic evidence suggests that Theseus’ rise in popularity may initially have been instigated by the Pisistratids. Indeed, his iconic importance to early fifth-century Athens was probably guaranteed by the fact that the post-Pisistratid regime co-opted and reinvented an existing figure from the mythological repertoire rather than plucking an entirely new personage from relative obscurity.
There are, in fact, several interesting parallels between the stories told of Theseus and the traditions - factual or otherwise - associated with Pisistratus. Theseus’ ordeals on the road from Troezen could be considered a metaphor for Pisistratus’ own repeated efforts to seize power (Herodotus 1.59-62). According to a probably Troezenian tradition, Theseus was the son of Poseidon, as was Neleus, the Pylian king from whom the Pisistratids claimed descent (Hellanicus fr. 125). Theseus is said to have instituted the geranos on Delos - the island that
Pisistratus “purified” before reorganizing the festival of the Deleia (Herodotus 1.64.2; Thucydides 3.104.1) and, according to one scholar, the theoria or sacred embassy that was sent from Athens to Delos in anticipation of the festival passed through the ancient Pisistratid home of Brauron. Furthermore, Theseus’ celebrated friendship with Peirithous, king of the Thessalian Lapiths, could have served as a charter for the Pisistratids’ alliance with the more powerful families of Thessaly: one of Pisistratus’ sons was named Thessalos and, at the time of Ankhimolios’ naval invasion, Hippias was able to rely on the aid of 1,000 horsemen under the Thessalian Kineas (AC 17.3, 19.5).
One of Theseus’ better-known exploits brought him to Marathon - another area where the Pisistratids seem to have held influence, which is presumably why the exiled Hippias led the Persians there in 490 (p. 284). Across the straits from Marathon, on the island of Euboea, lay Eretria, which was a particularly close ally of the Pisistratids. One of Pisistratus’ wives is said to have been an aristocratic Eretrian named Koisyra (Scholiast to Aristophanes, Clouds 48), and the city served as a base for Pisistratid operations immediately before Pallene (Herodotus 1.61.2). It is almost certainly this Pisistratid connection that accounts for a scene depicting Theseus’ abduction of Antiope that features on one of the pediments of the late sixth-century limestone temple of Apollo Daphnephoros in the center of the city.
Theseus was, however, remembered most for the synoecism of Attica and there are indications to suggest that some initial steps towards the unification of the peninsula were in fact taken by the Pisistratids. According to the Athenian Constitution (16.5), Pisistratus “instituted the village judges (dikastai kata demous) and he himself often went out into the khora to investigate and resolve differences so that they [the rural residents] should not neglect their work by coming into the astu.” Whether a strong inclination to promote agricultural productivity was really the reason for the institution of the traveling judges, the decision to dispense the same standards of justice throughout the countryside as in the city could well have served to promote a feeling of solidarity between urban center and rural periphery. Unfortunately, it is impossible to determine whether these judges served the whole of Attica or just the pedion, though it is unlikely that Pisistratus would have abandoned his supporters “beyond the hills.” More certainty is possible in the case of the herms - ithyphallic pillars supporting a bearded bust of the god Hermes. Hipparchus is said to have set these up on the major thoroughfares of Attica as milestones, each indicating its distance from the Altar of the Twelve Gods, dedicated in the center of the Athenian agora by Pisistratus’ homonymous grandson, probably in 521 (Plato, Hipp. 228b-229d; Thucydides 6.54.6; ML 11). The fact that an example has been unearthed at Koropi, on the further side of Mount Hymettus, offers clear evidence that the mesogaia was included within this network of arterial roads radiating from the city of Athens.
It is often also believed that the Pisistratids sought to unite city and countryside through the institution of festivals and cultic processions. In an earlier chapter (pp. 88-9), we considered the theory that the establishment of “extraurban” sanctuaries served to mark out the territorial limits of the nascent polis. Although doubts were expressed there about the theory’s applicability to the eighth-century polis, the hypothesis is far more credible in the case of sixth-century Attica. At Eleusis, a large square limestone telesterion (initiation hall) with marble decoration may have been built in the second quarter of the sixth century to replace an earlier sixth-century predecessor - though the dating has recently been challenged - while on the northwest slopes of the Athenian acropolis, a new temple was constructed at the City Eleusinion - the starting point for the procession that set out along the Sacred Way for Eleusis on the occasion of the Great Mysteries. At Brauron, on the east coast of Attica, architectural fragments incorporated in later buildings suggest the existence of a late sixth-century temple in the sanctuary of Artemis; finds of pottery and sculpture from the sanctuary’s urban counterpart on the Athenian acropolis suggest an approximately contemporaneous arrangement there. Similarly, the first temple of Dionysus Eleuthereus on the southern slopes of the acropolis, the destination of a procession from the god’s native sanctuary at Eleutherai that initiated the festival of the Great Dionysia, probably predates the end of the sixth century.
Trying to establish precise dates for these various sanctuaries is more difficult. Originally, all were confidently dated to the tyranny of Pisistratus; then, many of them were cautiously downdated to the reign of Pisistratus’ sons, Hippias and Hipparchus, while, in recent years, nearly all of them have been reassigned to the Cleisthenic regime of the final decade of the sixth century, even though an admittedly late source credits Pisistratus with the dedication of the temple at Brauron (Photius s. v. Brauronia). A case in point is the Archaios Neos or Old Temple of Athena Polias, constructed on the acropolis immediately south of where the Erechtheion now stands. Built of limestone, but with a marble roof and marble sculptural decoration, the pediments depicted, on one side, two lions savaging a bull and, on the other, the mythical battle between the Olympian Gods and Giants. The temple was for a long time dated to the last quarter of the sixth century and ascribed to Hippias and Hipparchus; more recently, however, arguments have been advanced that it should more properly be assigned to the decade 510-500.
Yet this tendency to downdate monuments previously attributed to the Pis-istratids raises awkward historical problems. For one thing, it compresses a flurry of frenetic building activity into an extremely narrow chronological “window.” For another, it leaves us wondering exactly what it was that the Pisistratids did during their thirty-six years of uninterrupted power. After all, Thucydides (6.54.5) explicitly says that the Pisistratids “beautified the city. . . and made the sacrifices in the temples” - the final detail implying, perhaps, that temples were among the monuments that they commissioned for the city. The fact is that the act of building monuments was indelibly associated in Greek thought with autocrats. When, shortly after the middle of the fifth century, the Athenian democracy, on the initiative of Pericles, embarked on its ambitious building project on the Athenian acropolis, detractors are said to have compared it not with a program executed half a century earlier by the post-tyranny regime but with the acts of a tyrant (Plutarch, Per. 12). The Periclean project was largely financed by the tribute the Athenians exacted from their empire. It is difficult to comprehend how the Athenian state in the final decade of the sixth century could have funded the major works with which it has been credited. The spoils won in victory against a joint attack by Chalcidians and Boeotians in 506 (ML 15) are unlikely to have been sufficient and, in any case, Herodotus (5.77) describes a bronze four-horse chariot group that stood on the acropolis as a commemoration of the triumph but does not add that the Old Temple of Athena, whose ruins were almost certainly still visible after its destruction by the Persians in 480, was also dedicated from confiscated booty. In the end, it was tyrants who were particularly well equipped to mobilize resources and manpower and it is for this reason that literary sources consistently credit them with building projects.
In fact, the dates attributed to sixth-century Athenian monuments should be approached very cautiously since they are based almost exclusively on stylistic considerations. Such a chronological scheme is predicated on the probably erroneous fallacy that stylistic evolution is unilineal, uniform and universal, but is also anchored by “fixed points” (pp. 37-9) that are very often little more than guesses. A stylistically-based chronology that assigns buildings to a particular decade can never be understood too literally, especially in cases where no more than a couple of years separate political regimes as is the case with the expulsion of Hippias and Cleisthenes’ reforms. Furthermore, attempts to assign a precisely circumscribed date to a building fail to give due attention to issues of planning and execution. Both the Temple of Zeus at Olympia and the Parthenon took about fifteen years to build. Not all buildings took so long, but the fact that the sculpture of the Archaios Neos seems fairly advanced is not entirely surprising given that architectural sculpture was normally the last part of a building to be executed. Even if the dating is correct, the likelihood is that a building completed after 510 must originally have been conceived and commissioned before Hippias’ expulsion.
The altar in front of the temple of Athena Polias was the focal point for the sacrifices that constituted the most important element of the festival known as the Great Panathenaea. A fragment, supposedly attributed to Aristotle (fr. 637), associates Pisistratus with a reorganization of the Panathenaea, but most scholars prefer Eusebius’ statement (Chron.) that the Panathenaic athletic contests were established in 566/5 since this is approximately the date at which Black Figure Panathenaic amphorae, filled with Attica’s prized olive oil and awarded to victors, first appear in the archaeological record. This is probably also the date that should be assigned to architectural and sculptural fragments that have been associated with what is called the “Bluebeard Temple,” named on account of a brightly painted three-bodied monster that features in the right angle of one of its pediments. It is often assumed that the Bluebeard Temple occupied that part of the acropolis where the Parthenon stands today, but it is far more likely that the southern part of the rock housed an open terrace supporting small treasurylike buildings until the construction of the unfinished “Pre-Parthenon” after the Battle of Marathon. In this case, the Bluebeard Temple would have stood on the same foundations as the Archaios Neos which replaced it.
If the construction of the Bluebeard Temple was conceived in conjunction with the reorganization of the Great Panathenaea, it is reasonable to infer that its replacement by the Archaios Neos coincided with a further reorganization. Indeed, a dialogue attributed - almost certainly erroneously - to Plato informs us that Pisistratus’ son Hipparchus “was the first to convey to this land the epics of Homer and he compelled the rhapsodes at the Panathenaea to recite them, one after another in succession, as they still do today” (Hipp. 228b). It is tempting to suppose that it was in this context that the verses describing the Athenian contingent in the Catalogue of Ships were modified to reflect a more unified Attica and, although the source is late, it is not without interest that Plutarch (Thes. 20.2) accused Pisistratus of tampering with verses by both Homer and Hesiod in order to cast Theseus in a better light for the Athenian people.
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