The drafting of the Great Rhetra probably formalized a procedure of popular consensus that had a much longer history. Popular participation in governance should not, however, be confused with egalitarianism: at the same time as the Rhetra endorsed the final decision-making authority of the demos, it also made it fairly explicit that its role was primarily that of ratifying proposals formulated by the kings and the aristocratic council. Evidence for broader competences - be it drafting agendas for assembly discussion or acting as a court of appeal - does not appear until approximately a century later. This could always be due to the normal vagaries that govern the survival of evidence but it is also clear that the demos could not have emerged as a force in politics before it had acquired collective recognition of itself - before, in other words, it had defined its boundaries, establishing who belonged to the political community and who did not. The upper boundary, which divided the kaloi and agathoi from the demos, was relatively well defined from an early date, even if it was porous; the lower boundary, by contrast, was not.
Civic organization is relevant to this question. As we have seen (pp. 47-8), the phylai or “tribes” that are attested in various Greek poleis are unlikely to be the relic of a premigratory form of social organization. The reason for this is that phylai served as the principal subdivisions of the citizen body for the purposes of political, social, and military organization and this necessitated a rough parity in size that would simply not have been achieved through natural evolution. It is, then, hardly surprising - as Max Weber once observed - that phylai are not attested in regions that were not settled in poleis. More importantly, the decision to divide the political community into approximately equal units presupposes some rough conception of that community and its boundaries in the first place.
The best known case of civic reorganization is that carried out at Athens by Cleisthenes in the final decade of the sixth century. According to Herodotus (5.66, 69), Cleisthenes established ten phylai with new names taken from predominantly local heroes. Each phyle was placed under the command of a phylarkhos or tribal leader and all of the Attic demes (or villages) were distributed among the ten phylai. The author of the Aristotelian Athenian Constitution (21) adds that the ten eponymous heroes were chosen from a pre-selected list of one hundred heroic figures, submitted to Delphi (see further pp. 238-9). Prior to Cleisthenes’ reforms, the Athenians had been divided among only four phylai - the Hopletes, the Argadeis, the Geleontes, and the Aigikoreis.
World History
