Solon had broken the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracy of Athens and established a state in which, in theory at least, citizens were equal before the law. Cleisthenes’ newly created tribes provided members for the Boule, the council which had the role of drawing up the business to be set before the Assembly. However, the power of this Assembly was still restricted by the Areopagus, a council made up of former archons (magistrates) who were drawn largely from the aristocracy. There were now also the ten generals, the strategoi, introduced in 501 and elected by the citizen body. Their status was enhanced by the Persian Wars, and generalship, which, unlike other offices, could be held from year to year, now became the goal of any ambitious politician. The generals, too, tended to be drawn from the richer classes and so, in the early part of the fifth century, Athens remained under strong aristocratic influence.
Aristocratic patronage was not confined to the privacy of the symposia. Leading Athenian families glorified their city’s name by providing fine buildings both at home and abroad. The distinguished family of the Alcmaeonidae rebuilt a temple to Apollo in Delphi in marble, while in Athens itself Cimon was an important patron of the city. Cimon identified himself with the hero Theseus by bringing back his bones to Athens to be housed in the Theseion in the centre of the city. The Stoa Poikile, a colonnade filled with paintings of Athens’s military successes by the celebrated Polygnotus of Thasos, was the gift probably of Cimon’s brother-in-law. (Its foundations were discovered as recently as 1981.)
Even though aristocratic forces remained influential in the city, there were bubbling popular pressures. The records survive of the annual ostracism, the right of citizens to vote, by writing on a shard of pottery, the name of any citizen they wanted exiled. The exile lasted for ten years. Numerous ostraka survive and the names of virtually every aristocratic leader, including Cimon, can be found on them. Piecing the evidence together, it can be seen that anyone adopting a soft line towards Persia was soon unpopular.
There was another new force at work. The rowers who had triumphed at Salamis were largely drawn from the poorest of the citizen class, the thetes. Tribute and the silver from the Attic mines kept the navy financed with hundreds of men, cooped up and sweating below decks as they learned to manoeuvre the cumbersome triremes. It can be assumed that the thetes now recognized their potential political strength. (Aristotle acknowledged this link when he wrote that the Athenian leader Pericles, see below, later ‘turned the state towards naval power, with the result that the masses had the courage to take more into their own hands in all fields of government’.)
It is not surprising, therefore, that Themistocles, founder of the navy, was closely linked to the move towards greater democratic rights but the aristocracy may have attempted to force a campaign of ostracism against him. On ostraka dating from the 480s and 470s no name appears more frequently than Themistocles’, but a chance find of 170 ostraka all with his name on but written in only fourteen different hands suggests that voters, perhaps illiterate, were simply being handed out the shards. The campaign succeeded. Themistocles was finally removed from the city in 471 after a trumped-up charge of his being pro-Persian had been upheld by the Areopagus.
World History
