As has been seen, one of Cleomenes’ expeditions, that of 510, was to overthrow the Peisistratid tyranny in Athens. Athens was to be the focus for Sparta’s hostility for over a century, first as a tyranny and then as the Greek world’s leading exponent of democracy. Both were inimical to the eunomia, good order, sustained by an oligarchical government, which was the ideal of Sparta and her allies.
Archaeologists have found signs of the occupation of the Acropolis, which dominates the city of Athens, as early as 5000 bc, and the rock had been a stronghold of the Mycenaeans. As Mycenaean civilization collapsed in the twelfth century, Athens and its surrounding area, Attica, survived the worst of the turmoil. Occupation of the Acropolis was uninterrupted, and the inhabitants of Attica later prided themselves on their pure and undisturbed racial heritage. The area was also the springboard for the Ionian migrations (see p. 128), and links, real or imagined, with the Ionian communities of Asia Minor continued to be a factor in Athenian foreign policy well into the fifth century.
Although not nearly as extensive as Sparta, Attica was an unusually large area for one Greek city-state to control. Its 2,500 square kilometres were made up of three plains, divided by mountain ranges. These were shut off from the rest of Greece by the sea and, in the north-west, by the mountains of Cithaeron and Parnes, but unity was never achieved easily. There had been struggles between Athens and Eleusis, the largest town of the western plain, at some point in the past, and it may not have been until the early seventh century that Athens emerged as the dominant city in Attica. Even then Athens was comparatively undeveloped as a city. Although she had been one of the leading centres of Greece in the age of Geometric vase painting (see p. 131 above), by 750 she had been eclipsed as an overseas trader by emerging city-states such as Corinth and Sparta. The city faced strong competition from Argos, with its fine position on the eastern seaboard of the Peloponnese, and Aegina, an island visible from the Attic coast, which had become an important trading and naval power. Aegina was able to dominate the Saronic Gulf between the island and the Attic coast and proved a serious rival to Athens as late as the fifth century.
In compensation the people of Attica looked inwards. By the sixth century there are signs of dramatic increases of population in the countryside. Attica was not particularly rich (Plato talked of ‘the skeleton of a body wasted by disease; the rich soft soil has all run away leaving the land nothing but skin and bone’), but there was variety—timber (for shipbuilding as well as charcoal), grazing land, and the more fertile soil of the plains. Studies of land use in the sixth century show that the upland townships were particularly prosperous. One major centre, the largest settlement in Attica after Athens, was Acharnai, which exploited the local woodland for charcoal, the only fuel suitable for cooking and heating in the city. The wealth of Acharnai was such that she provided many of Athens’s hoplites. On the lowlands the most successful crop was the olive, which by the early sixth century produced a surplus that Athens was able to spare for export. Attica also had good clay, used to make her fine pottery. Two assets still to be exploited at this date were her marble, the finest coming from the slopes of Mount Pentelicus, and, most important of all, the rich silver mines of Laurium, only mined successfully from the late sixth century (although they had been exploited in a modest way as early as Mycenaean times, see earlier p. 122). The Athenian economy was thus a complex one, and it operated at several different levels, with farmers and craftsmen producing for their own needs, for those of her neighbours, and, increasingly, as it became more sophisticated, for overseas markets.
The legendary founding king of Athens was the hero Theseus. He was credited, like many heroes, with a range of great feats but he was also a cunning and resourceful operator. For the Athenians his most heroic achievement was to rid the city of the imposition of sending fourteen young men in tribute to king Minos of Crete where they were offered as sacrifice to the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull that lurked in the cellars of Knossos. Theseus killed it and the scene is often found on coins and vases, a truly identifying moment of Athenian independence. Back in Athens, Theseus established himself in a palace on the Acropolis and insisted that all the surrounding villages of the Attic plain subjugate their assemblies and magistrates to a single assembly meeting in Athens. There is no archaeological or other literary evidence to support this move, let alone even the existence of Theseus, but later Theseus was honoured as the founding father of Athenian democracy.
In truth, in the eighth and seventh centuries Athens remained a state controlled by the aristocracy. Some sixty different aristocratic clans are known by name and noble birth counted as much as landed wealth. Between them the clans selected the three ruling magistrates (the archons), who after their one-year term of office joined a council that took overall responsibility for affairs of state. It was known as the Council of Areopagus, after the hill on which it met in Athens. As each clan had its own territorial base, conflict between them was probably inevitable as attempts to create a more stable government took place. In about 632 one aristocrat, Cylon, tried to seize power with the help of the neighbouring city of Megara (whose tyrant, Theagenes, was his father-in-law). He challenged the integrity of the polls by taking over the Acropolis itself but failed to win any wider support from the citizen community and his supporters were massacred at the instigation of a rival clan, the Alcmaeonids, despite a promise that they would be spared. The Alcmaeonids were expelled from Attica for this insult to the gods, and the bodies of their ancestors were dug up and thrown over the state boundaries. A curse remained attached to the clan.
So the aristocracy could never offer a stable government on the model, for instance, of the Bacchiadae in Corinth and, rather later than many other cities of Greece, the class was threatened by new economic and social pressures. The authors who describe these pressures, Aristotle and Plutarch, were both writing very much later and a great deal about them remains obscure. At one level they appear to reflect conflict between the citizen community in Athens, which was most open to outside influences, and the more isolated countryside. There were other pressures building up over land use. The Athenians followed the Greek custom of splitting inheritances among sons so that land was continually subdivided and the smaller landowners marginalized. These appear to have been bound in some kind of feudal relationship with the aristocracy. It involved surrendering a part of their produce, possibly a sixth, perhaps even five-sixths, of the total annually. This may have been a traditional payment offered in return for protection. It was clearly deeply resented. Even worse off were those who fell into debt. This was attached to their person so that they could end up as slaves and then could be sold abroad by their creditors. Athenian society was locking itself into a framework that excluded the majority
From free personal or economic enterprise and so stifled any chance of political development.
The Athenian crisis was, thus, a serious one involving tensions on a variety of levels, between different aristocratic factions and between the aristocracy and a mass of poorer landowners. One clumsy attempt to deal with the tensions came in 621 when one Draco was commissioned to draw up a law code. The tradition is that this was particularly harsh (hence the term ‘draconian’), and biased in the interests of the aristocracy. There is some truth in this. Minor thefts could be punished by death and a debtor could become the personal possession of his creditor. However, it was a step forward that the code was published (making it harder for aristocratic judges to manipulate it in their favour). Moreover Draco’s statutes distinguished between various forms of killings, between those done wilfully and those that were accidental—in other words, accepting the necessity to prove fault. The traditional custom had been that a killer had to bear responsibility for killings of any sort. Now a committee of fifty-one grandees judged each case and acquitted those who had caused a death without any intention to do so. If the killing had been intentional the offended clan could seek revenge. The pause while the issue was resolved seems to have helped avoid a tit-for-tat bloodbath that had been a common feature of previous aristocratic infighting.
World History
