The fall of the Athenian turannoi was symptomatic. Nowhere in the Greek motherland after around 500 BC did “tyrants” manage to hold on to power. It was different in Asia Minor or in the world of the Greek colonies, but there as a rule turannoi succeeded in remaining in power only with the help of mercenary armies and the support of powerful foreign friends, for example, in Asia Minor, the Persians. In the Greek motherland, the turannis remained an aberration, an exception to the rule of the polis. After a while, the turannoi met with resistance everywhere, and in the second half of the 6th century BC that resistance could often reckon on the support of Sparta. In many cities, after the expulsion of the turannoi, aristocracies returned to power, as happened, for instance, in Corinth in the middle of the 6th century BC. In Athens, however, history took
(a)
Figure 12 A Roman copy and a contemporary depiction of the Athenian sculpture group of the Tyrannicides (originally c. 475 BC). To the left, a Roman copy of the sculptural group of Harmodius and Aristogiton, the men who in 514 BC killed the brother of the Athenian tyrant Hippias. The background to this assassination may not have been political at all, but in 5th-century Athens, Harmodius and Aristogiton came to be honored as turannoktonoi, “tyrant slayers,” heroes of Athens’ democracy. The original sculptures were bronzes of about 475 BC, which have been lost, as have so many Greek originals. The large industry of Roman days devoted to turning out numerous copies of famous statuary for philhellenic Roman patrons helps us to visualize many lost works of art. How this group was originally displayed can be seen in 5th-century Athenian vase paintings, as in the Panathenaic prize amphora (an amphora that, filled with olive oil, was once a prize in the Panathenaic Games) shown on the right. On one of its sides, the amphora carries the image of the goddess Athena in full panoply; the shield she holds up carries the tyrant slayers as its device. In democratic Athens, this choice was very deliberate: to show the city’s goddess in this way says something about the popularity of the turannoktonoi. Photos: a) Photoservice Electa/Universal Images Group/SuperStock; b) © The Trustees of the British Museum
(b)
Another turn. Admittedly, there too in 510 BC conflicts immediately broke out between rival aristocratic lords and their supporters, but the period of the turannoi had profoundly changed the social structure of the polis. For the zeugitai had in the meantime developed into a “middle class” of small landowners with a new sense of self-esteem. Among them were also those Athenians who had served the turannoi as hoplites. Both politically and militarily, they could now influence the political balance to a greater degree than had been possible before the turannis. One of the ambitious Athenian aristocrats in the struggle for power in 510 BC and the next few years understood this: Cleisthenes, who became archont (archon) in 508/507 BC, allied himself with the people (the demos) of Athens and thereby
Succeeded in ousting his main rival. When the latter again invoked the help of the Spartan king, that king also, together with his Athenian friends, was driven from the city of Athens by the demos. We may infer from these events that under Cleisthenes the class of the zeugitai, which must have been many times larger than the elite, indeed had begun to equip themselves as hoplites. From then on, the non-aristocratic demos had become the decisive power in Athenian society and politics. Cleisthenes, after getting rid of his rivals, therefore, could not in his turn establish his own “monarchy” but on the contrary was obliged to reorganize the Athenian state in such a way that henceforth the demos would really rule the polis of Athens. With that, a new period in Athenian history began: that of democracy.
In this development, Athens was ahead of other poleis, for elsewhere in Greece democracies made their appearance only later. But everywhere in Greece the demos had toward the end of the 6th century BC gained in self-respect. Even in those states in which aristocracies still ruled or had returned to power, it was found necessary to induct all those who were able to pay for the hoplite equipment into the citizen armies, so that the ruling aristocracies were forced to look after the interests of these “middle” groups of free citizens a little better than they had been used to doing. At the same time, and because of this, warfare between the city-states in the second half of the 6th century BC changed and became more serious in character. Armies became larger now than the elitist war bands of a former period and battles costlier. Power politics between the more important poleis became more serious as a consequence. In this constellation of affairs, Sparta emerged as the state that for the time being seemed to eclipse the others militarily.
World History
