Ten years later, in 461, the democratic party had its chance of revenge. In 464 Sparta had suffered a devastating earthquake that was followed by a helot revolt. Cimon, determined to maintain good relations with Sparta, arrived in the Peloponnese with some 4,000 hoplites to offer help. Something went drastically wrong. It seems that the Spartans feared the Athenians might actually support the helots and sent them home. It was a massive humiliation. In Athens itself a radical orator Ephialtes, of whom almost nothing is known, whipped up feeling against Cimon, aristocrats in general, and the policy of offering aid to Sparta. When Cimon arrived home, he was the one who was ostracized. This was a turning point. The relationship with Sparta was broken—and the seeds were sown for the great conflict that was to break out between the cities thirty years later, in 431.
Ephialtes was determined to go further and shift power in Athens more decisively away from the aristocrats and towards the mass of citizens. He put about a myth that Athens had originally enjoyed a democracy but that this had been subverted by the growth of aristocratic power. Now democracy had to be regained. Ephialtes’ target was the Areopagus, the ancient council that supervised the constitution. He accused some of its members of corruption and managed to get it stripped of most of its powers. Its traditional role of impeaching citizens accused of treason against the state was then transferred to the Assembly, the popular juries, and the Boule. (One power it retained for centuries was the right to assess new cults that were being introduced into the city and so 500 years later the apostle Paul had to come before the Areopagus to argue, without success, for the toleration of his faith.) Yet now power had passed to the Assembly and most business of the city was decided through a majority vote with the Boule running the day-to-day administration when the Assembly was not sitting.
Ephialtes did not live to see his achievement. He died violently, probably at the hands of disgruntled oligarchs, and room was left for one of the most remarkable men in Athenian history to emerge as the leader of democratic Athens. Pericles came from a wealthy and aristocratic family—he was rich enough to finance the production of Aeschylus’ play The Persians, which glorified the defeat of the Persians, when still in his early twenties. Quite what made him a radical is hard to know. There were certainly personal rivalries involved: in 463 Pericles led a prosecution case against Cimon, twenty years his senior. On his mother’s side, his great-uncle was the democratic Cleisthenes so he had a tradition to follow here. His mother’s clan, the Alcmaeonids, had been cursed as outsiders in the seventh century and so perhaps a sense of isolation from mainstream society lingered. We know too that in his youth he was influenced by the philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, a visitor to Athens from Asia Minor, although it is not known how far the experience radicalized him. Wherever the impulses came from, Pericles simply appears to have believed that power could be shifted further to the people.
The year 461 gave Pericles his chance. He was now in his mid-thirties and already a strategos, one of the ten generals. This gave him the opportunity to move into the power vacuum left by the death of Ephialtes. The challenge was how to manipulate to his advantage the volatile Assembly that was all too conscious of its new powers. (Donald Kagan, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy, New York, 1991, explores the many roles played by Pericles during his years of power.)
World History
