In light of the relative availability of evidence for sixth-century Athens as well as the city’s illustrious destiny in the succeeding century, it is inevitable that treatments of Archaic Greece tend to devote more space to Athens than to any other polis. In earlier studies, the better documented case of Athens was often assumed to be representative of conditions in other cities for which the evidence is less abundant. More recently, however, the tendency has been to regard Athens as the exception rather than the rule. Comparative analysis is always difficult when the evidence is unevenly distributed but, in the case of Athens, matters may have been complicated further by assumptions that must now be regarded as, at the very least, questionable.
One of the complicating factors in many studies of sixth-century Athens is what might be termed a “hyperperiodization.” Much scholarly effort has been expended in determining whether certain events occurred before Pisistratus’ first attempt at the tyranny, in the course of one of his two failed attempts at power, during his reign or that of his sons, or after Hippias’ expulsion. The underlying assumption is that determining agency will reveal policies and counter-policies linked to tyrannical objectives or anti-tyrannical reactions. As far as the early phases of the tyranny are concerned, the whole exercise is not particularly fruitful since the chronology of Pisistratus’ early career is not as securely established as we might like. More importantly, however, the assumption that the period of tyranny was qualitatively different from what preceded and succeeded it ignores the unmistakable continuities that run throughout the entire sixth century.
Given Pisistratus’ appointment to an important command during the war with Megara (Herodotus 1.59.4; Aristotle, AC 14.1), it is clear that he was participating in aristocratic factional politics well before his attempt to concentrate authority in his own hands. Even then, it was probably only certain aristocratic families that were unduly affected by the establishment of Pisistratus’ autocracy. The author of the Athenian Constitution (16.2; cf. 14.3) insists that Pisistratus’ administration of the state was “more constitutional (politikos) than tyrannical” and Thucydides (6.54.6) says that “in other respects, the city itself continued to employ the laws that had previously been laid down, except that they [the Pisistratids] always took care that one of their own held the chief magistracies.” Hippias’ expulsion led not to democracy but to a return to aristocratic factionalism, and the popular riot that ushered in Cleisthenes’ reforms was probably provoked more by the presence of Spartan troops in the city than by mass opposition to Isagoras. Full democracy was still several decades away at the end of the sixth century.
So, how typical was Athens’ development throughout the Archaic period? In the eighth century, with what appears to be the physical coalescence of formerly distinct village communities (p. 79), the city seems to have been relatively prosperous. It had a flourishing and pioneering ceramic industry and evidently attracted skilled craftsmen from abroad - including the Levant - but eighth-century Athens was hardly exceptional when compared to contemporary settlements such as Corinth, Argos, or Eretria and even somewhat underdeveloped when compared to some of the cities on the coast of Asia Minor - especially Old Smyrna. The seventh century is a different story, as we have seen in Excursus II, and, while it is unrealistic to expect material culture to reflect directly or unproblematically the conditions of its production, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that seventh-century Athens was something of a backwater compared with other poleis of the period.
By ca. 600, growing divisions between the wealthy and the poor and the risk of enslavement for the latter erupted into open conflict (pp. 217-20). Solon’s reforms provided only limited relief to the problems of disorder, though their longer term significance was that they sharpened the category of citizenship and guaranteed to citizens the right to attend the assembly and sit on judicial appeal panels. Furthermore, a law attributed to Solon that prescribed disfranchisement for anybody who did not take sides during civil strife (Aristotle, AC 8.5) - a law that struck Plutarch (Sol. 20.1) as so paradoxical that it stands a good chance of being genuine - could be taken as prefiguring the potential interventionist role that the demos could perform in aristocratic factional politics, even if it was not until 508/7 that this potential was realized.
There are, however, reasons to suppose that the citizen body so defined was limited to the city of Athens and its immediate hinterland, the pedion, divided into forty-eight wards or naukrariai, twelve for each of the four “Ionian” phylai. If this is right, early sixth-century Athens was hardly exceptional in terms of the size of the territory over which it had direct control. The Classical cities of Argos and Corinth, for example, are estimated to have controlled territories of 600 and 900 square kilometers respectively. The phyle-trittys-naukraria system overlapped, however, with another system based on phratries, and the fact that the latter continued to remain important for evaluating claims to citizenship long after the reforms of Cleisthenes may suggest that they were a primary mode of sociopolitical organization throughout Attica, both beyond the pedion and - before the advent of the naukraria system, perhaps in the early seventh century - within it. Because phratries were formed and reformed through agglutination rather than repartition, their appearance in the Attic countryside does not presuppose the kind of act of civic definition required by an organization based on phylai.
How should we imagine the relationship between Athens and the rural settlements beyond the pedion? When invited to settle affairs at Cyrene, Demonax enrolled the Libyan perioikoi in the newly reconstituted citizen body and it is entirely possible that the rural Attic settlements of the paralia and mesogaia were regarded as perioikic communities - that is, communities with nominal internal autonomy but in some relationship of dependency upon the city of Athens. In this sense, the situation in early sixth-century Attica may have been fairly close to the situation in contemporary Laconia, although there is no suggestion that the relationship was based on force, as is normally supposed for the Spartan perioikoi. We should probably imagine a more symbiotic rapport: the city offered a valuable market for rural communities and perhaps also a more accredited system for pursuing judicial complaints; the rural communities offered valuable agricultural and mineral resources for Athens as well as manpower should the situation require. The intermediaries in this relationship are likely to have been those aristocrats such as Megacles and Pisistratus, who competed on the Athenian political stage but whose families owned property beyond the pedion.
There was one region over which Athens was more anxious to exert direct control. Possession of Eleusis and the offshore island of Salamis were so vital for guaranteeing free passage in the shipping lanes of the Saronic Gulf that the lengthy hostilities between Athens and Megara for control of them were retro-jected in the myth that told of the epic war between King Eumolpus of Eleusis and the Athenian ruler Erechtheus. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, thought to date to the late seventh century, appears to suggest an Eleusis that is not fully part of the Athenian sphere, while Solon (frs. 1-3) testifies that Salamis was in Megarian hands ca. 600. Within a generation, however, the Athenians had gained the upper hand, culminating in Pisistratus’ capture of the Megarian port of Nisaia, probably in the 560s (Herodotus 1.59.4). Solon is said to have promoted manufacture at Athens, offering citizenship to those who came to Athens to ply a trade and prohibiting the export of any agricultural product save for olive oil (Plutarch, Sol. 24), but it was the dissipation of the Megarian threat that really paved the way for Athens’ commercial revival. The second quarter of the sixth century sees a sharp rise in the production and exportation of Attic ceramics - and, of course, their contents - which effectively drive the previously popular Corinthian wares out of the overseas markets. Of particular interest are Attic-produced ceramic wares that are found almost exclusively at sites in Italy and seem to have been primarily targeted at Etruscan markets. These include the gaudy and sometimes graphically explicit “Tyrrhenian” amphorae produced between 560 and 530, and the “Nikosthenic” amphorae of the 530s and 520s, which are adaptations of Etruscan bucchero pottery (see pp. 274-5).
In Laconia, the citizens of the perioikic cities were named “Lakedaimonioi,” the same ethnonym that the Spartans used to identify themselves. The term is used in contexts that seem to indicate a political affiliation that only really makes sense if the perioikoi were regarded as citizens of a Spartan state even if they did not enjoy the same full civic rights as their Spartan counterparts. There is reason to believe that the appellation was endowed with a more politicized content in the sixth century when it makes its first appearance in the epigraphi-cal record. In Attica, something similar may have occurred with the establishment, probably in the 560s, of the Great Panathenaea. Some scholars have been troubled by the apparent hyperbole in describing a festival of Attic unity as a festival of “all the Athenians” but, by analogy with the term “Panhellenes” (pp. 306-7), the pan - prefix actually emphasizes the diversity rather than the unity of the Athenians. On this reading, the establishment of the Panathenaea was designed to foster among all the communities of Attica a sense of affiliation to a state centered on Athens, though the franchise may have continued to be restricted to free-born residents of the pedion.
The actions attributed to the Pisistratids - the establishment of rural circuit judges, the systematization of a road-system centered on Athens, and the introduction of festal processions linking the urban center to rural sanctuaries - can then be seen as further attempts to construct a pan-Attic Athenocentric consciousness that built on, rather than repudiated, the objectives behind the institution of the Panathenaea, a festival to which Pisistratus’ sons are said to have added their own innovations. This might explain why, in its plan and exterior decoration, the Archaios Neos actually incorporates echoes of its earlier sixth-century predecessor. Ultimately, however, full political unification had to wait until the time of Cleisthenes’ reforms: the incorporation of new citizens and their territory necessitated a complete overhaul of the tribal system so that the newly-enrolled members of the citizen body would not be at a disadvantage compared with their longer-enfranchised neighbors.
The reader should be warned that the reconstruction offered here is highly conjectural. Nevertheless, one thing is clear. The gradual repopulation of the Attic countryside in the Dark Age could not have resulted in a situation where the entire population of Attica was distributed evenly across a tribal repartition of the citizen body. Nor can full political unification be diffused piecemeal across so large a territory. A situation whereby a resident of Marathon or Sunium or Brauron - let alone Halai Araphenides - could consider himself the political equal of an Athenian resident could only come about as the result of a major, deliberate reform, and the only candidate that meets the criteria is the legislation attributed to Cleisthenes. If this reconstruction is correct, then, sixth-century Athens was hardly atypical compared with Archaic poleis elsewhere. In fact, the parallels with sixth-century Sparta may have been closer than fifth-century Athenian patriots or Spartan apologists were willing to concede. In the final decade of the sixth century, however, the city made a choice concerning its perioikic neighbors that was not taken by Sparta. And it was that choice that marked the commencement of Athens’ truly amazing ascendancy in the fifth century.
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