5. The Establishment of Democracy

When Peisistratus died, in 527, he left his power to his sons; his wisdom had survived every test except that of parental love. Hippias gave promise of being a wise ruler, and for thirteen years continued the policies of his father. Hipparchus, his younger brother, was harmlessly, though expensively, devoted to love and poetry; it was at his invitation that Anacreon and Simonides came to Athens. The Athenians were not quite pleased to see the leadership of the state pass down without their consent to the young Peisistratids, and began to realize that the dictatorship had given them everything but the stimulus of freedom. Nevertheless Athens was prosperous, and the quiet reign of Hippias might have gone on to a peaceful close had it not been for the unsmooth course of true Greek love.

Aristogeiton, a man of middle age, had won the love of the young Harmodius, then, says Thucydides,⁹⁰ “in the flower of youthful beauty.” But Hipparchus, equally careless of gender, also solicited the lad’s love. When Aristogeiton heard of this he resolved to kill Hipparchus and at the same time, in self-protection, to overthrow the tyranny. Harmodius and others joined him in the conspiracy (514). They murdered Hipparchus as he was arranging the Panathenaic procession, but Hippias eluded them and had them slain. To complicate the tale a courtesan Leaena, mistress of Harmodius, died bravely under torture, having refused to betray the surviving conspirators; if we may believe Greek tradition, she bit off her tongue and spat it in the face of her torturers to make sure that she would not answer their questions.⁹¹

Though the people lent no visible support to this revolt, Hippias was frightened by it into replacing his hitherto mild rule with a regime of suppression, espionage, and terror. The Athenians, strengthened by a generation of prosperity, could afford now to demand the luxury of liberty;gradually, as the dictatorship grew harsher, the cry for freedom grew louder; and Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who had conspired for love and passion rather than for democracy,* were transformed by popular imagination into the martyrs of liberty. Off in Delphi the Alcmaeonids, who had been re-exiled by Peisistratus, saw their opportunity, raised an army, and marched upon Athens with the announced intention of deposing Hippias. At the same time they bribed the Pythian oracle to tell all Spartans who consulted her that Sparta must overthrow the tyranny at Athens. Hippias successfully resisted the forces of the Alcmaeonids; but when a Lacedaemonian army joined them he withdrew to the Areopagus. Seeking the security of his children in the event of his own death, he sent them secretly out of Athens; but they were captured by the invaders, and Hippias, as the price of their safety, consented to abdication and exile (510). The Alcmaeonids, led by the courageous Cleisthenes,† entered Athens in triumph; and on their heels came the banished aristocrats, prepared to celebrate the return of their property and their power.

In the election that ensued, Isagoras, representing the aristocracy, was chosen to be chief archon. Cleisthenes, one of the defeated candidates, aroused the people to revolt, overthrew Isagoras, and set up a popular dictatorship. The Spartans again invaded Athens, seeking to restore Isagoras; but the Athenians resisted so tenaciously that the Spartans retired, and Cleisthenes, the Alcmaeonid aristocrat, proceeded to establish democracy (507).

His first reform struck at the very framework of Attic aristocracy—those four tribes and 360 clans whose leadership, by centuries of tradition, was in the hands of the oldest and richest families. Cleisthenes abolished this kinship classification, and replaced it with a territorial division into ten tribes, each composed of a (varying) number of demes. To prevent the formation of geographical or occupational blocs, such as the old parties of Mountain, Shore, and Plain, each tribe was to be composed of an equal number of demes, or districts, from the city, from the coast, and from the interior. To offset the sanctity that religion had given to the old division, religious ceremonies were instituted for each new tribe or deme, and a famous ancient hero of the locality was made its deity or patron saint. Freemen of foreign origin, who had rarely been admitted to the franchise under the aristocratic determination of citizenship by descent, now automatically became citizens of the demes in which they lived. At one stroke the roll of voters was almost doubled, and democracy secured a new support and a broader base.

Each of the new tribes was entitled to name one of the ten stratégoi, or generals, who now joined the polemarch in command of the army; and each tribe elected fifty members of the new Council of 501 which now replaced Solon’s Council of Four Hundred and assumed the most vital powers of the Areopagus. These councilors were chosen for a year’s term, not by election but by lot, from the list of all citizens who had reached the age of thirty and had not already served two terms. In this strange inauguration of representative government both the aristocratic principle of birth and the plutocratic principle of wealth were overridden by the new device of the lot, which gave every citizen an equal chance not only to vote, but to hold office in the most influential branch of the government. For the Council so elected determined all matters and proposals to be submitted for approval or rejection to the Assembly, reserved to itself various judicial powers, exercised wide administrative functions, and supervised all officials of the state.

The Assembly was enlarged by the access of new citizens, so that a full meeting of its membership would have meant an attendance of approximately thirty thousand men. All these were eligible for service in the heliaea, or courts; but the fourth class, or thetes, were still, as under Solon, ineligible to individuaroffice. The powers of the Assembly were enlarged by the institution of ostracism, which Cleisthenes seems to have added as a protection for the young democracy. At any time, by a majority of votes written secretly upon potsherds (ostraka), the Assembly, in a quorum of six thousand members, might send into exile for ten years any man who in its judgment had become a danger to the state. In this way ambitious leaders would be stimulated to conduct themselves with circumspection and moderation, and men suspected of conspiracy could be disposed of without the law’s delay. The procedure required that the Assembly should be asked, “Is there any man among you whom you think vitally dangerous to the state? If so, whom?” The Assembly might then vote to ostracize any one citizen—not excepting the mover of the motion.* Such exile involved no confiscation of property, and no disgrace; it was merely democracy’s way of cutting off the “tallest ears of corn.”⁹² Nor did the Assembly abuse its power. In the ninety years between the introduction of ostracism and its disuse at Athens, only ten persons were banished by it from Attica.

One of these, we are told, was Cleisthenes himself. But in truth we do not know his later history; it was absorbed and lost in the brilliance of his work. Beginning with a thoroughly unconstitutional revolt, he had established, in the face of the most powerful families in Attica, a democratic constitution that continued in operation, with only minor changes, to the end of Athenian liberty. The democracy was not complete; it applied only to freemen, and still placed a modest property limitation upon eligibility to individual office.* But it gave all legislative, executive, and judicial power to an Assembly and a Court composed of the citizens, to magistrates appointed by and responsible to the Assembly, and to a Council for whose members all citizens might vote, and in whose supreme authority, by the operation of the lot, at least one third of them actually shared for at least a year of their lives. Never before had the world seen so liberal a franchise, or so wide a spread of political power.

The Athenians themselves were exhilarated by this adventure into sovereignty. They realized that they had undertaken a difficult enterprise, but they advanced to it with courage and pride, and, for a time, with unwonted self-restraint. From that moment they knew the zest of freedom in action, speech, and thought; and from that moment they began to lead all Greece in literature and art, even in statesmanship and war. They learned to respect anew a law that was their own considered will, and to love with unprecedented passion a state that was their unity, their power, and their fulfillment. When the greatest empire of the age decided to destroy these scattered cities called Greece, or to lay them under tribute to the Great King, it forgot that in Attica it would be opposed by men who owned the soil that they tilled, and who ruled the state that governed them. It was fortunate for Greece, and for Europe, that Cleisthenes completed his work, and Solon’s, twelve years before Marathon.