Chapter XIV: Democracy Established at Athens (1)

Pisistratus left three legitimate sons--Hippias, Hipparchus, and Thessalus: the general belief at Athens among the contemporaries of Thucydides was, that Hipparchus was the eldest of the three and had succeeded him; but the historian emphatically pronounces this to be a mistake, and certifies, upon his own responsibility, that Hippias was both eldest son and successor. Such an assurance from him, fortified by certain reasons in themselves not very conclusive, is sufficient ground for our belief, the more so as Herodotus countenances the same version. But we are surprised at such a degree of historical carelessness in the Athenian public, and seemingly even in Plato, about a matter both interesting and comparatively recent. In order to abate this surprise, and to explain how the name of Hipparchus came to supplant that of Hippias in the popular talk, Thucydides recounts the memorable story of Harmodius and Aristogiton.

Of these two Athenian citizens, both belonging to the ancient _gens_ called Gephyræi, the former was a beautiful youth, attached to the latter by a mutual friendship and devoted intimacy which Grecian manners did not condemn. Hipparchus made repeated propositions to Harmodius, which were repelled, but which, on becoming known to Aristogiton, excited both his jealousy and his fears lest the disappointed suitor should employ force--fears justified by the proceedings not unusual with Grecian despots, and by the absence of all legal protection against outrage from such a quarter. Under these feelings, he began to look about, in the best way that he could, for some means of putting down the despotism. Meanwhile Hipparchus, though not entertaining any designs of violence, was so incensed at the refusal of Harmodius, that he could not be satisfied without doing something to insult or humiliate him. In order to conceal the motive from which the insult really proceeded, he offered it, not directly to Harmodius, but to his sister. He caused this young maiden to be one day summoned to take her station in a religious procession as one of the _canephoræ_, or basket-carriers, according to the practice usual at Athens; but when she arrived at the place where her fellow-maidens were assembled, she was dismissed with scorn as unworthy of so respectable a function, and the summons addressed to her was disavowed. An insult thus publicly offered filled Harmodius with indignation, and still further exasperated the feelings of Aristogiton: both of them, resolving at all hazards to put an end to the despotism, concerted means for aggression with a few select associates. They awaited the festival of the Great Panathenæa, wherein the body of the citizens were accustomed to march up in armed procession, with spear and shield, to the Acropolis; this being the only day on which an armed body could come together without suspicion. The conspirators appeared armed like the rest of the citizens, but carrying concealed daggers besides. Harmodius and Aristogiton undertook with their own hands to kill the two Pisistratidæ, while the rest promised to stand forward immediately for their protection against the foreign mercenaries; and though the whole number of persons engaged was small, they counted upon the spontaneous sympathies of the armed bystanders in an effort to regain their liberties, so soon as the blow should once be struck. The day of the festival having arrived, Hippias, with his foreign bodyguard around him, was marshalling the armed citizens for procession, in the Ceramicus without the gates, when Harmodius and Aristogiton approached with concealed daggers to execute their purpose. On coming near, they were thunder-struck to behold one of their own fellow-conspirators talking familiarly with Hippias, who was of easy access to every man; and they immediately concluded that the plot was betrayed. Expecting to be seized, and wrought up to a state of desperation, they resolved at least not to die without having revenged themselves on Hipparchus, whom they found within the city gates near the chapel called the Leocorion, and immediately slew him. His attendant guards killed Harmodius on the spot; while Aristogiton, rescued for the moment by the surrounding crowd, was afterwards taken, and perished in the tortures applied to make him disclose his accomplices.

The news flew quickly to Hippias in the Ceramicus, who heard it earlier than the armed citizens near him, awaiting his order for the commencement of the procession. With extraordinary self-command, he took advantage of this precious instant of foreknowledge, and advanced towards them, commanding them to drop their arms for a short time, and assemble on an adjoining ground. They unsuspectingly obeyed, and he immediately directed his guards to take possession of the vacant arms. He was now undisputed master, and enabled to seize the persons of all those citizens whom he mistrusted, especially all those who had daggers about them, which it was not the practice to carry in the Panathenaic procession.

Such is the memorable narrative of Harmodius and Aristogiton, peculiarly valuable inasmuch as it all comes from Thucydides. To possess great power, to be above legal restraint, to inspire extraordinary fear, is a privilege so much coveted by the giants among mankind, that we may well take notice of those cases in which it brings misfortune even upon themselves. The fear inspired by Hipparchus--of designs which he did not really entertain, but was likely to entertain, and competent to execute without hindrance--was here the grand cause of his destruction.

[Sidenote: [514-510 B.C.]]

The conspiracy here detailed happened in 514 B.C., during the thirteenth year of the reign of Hippias, which lasted four years longer, until 510 B.C. And these last four years, in the belief of the Athenian public, counted for his whole reign; nay, many of them made the still greater historical mistake of eliding these last four years altogether, and of supposing that the conspiracy of Harmodius and Aristogiton had deposed the Pisistratid government and liberated Athens. Both poets and philosophers shared this faith, which is distinctly put forth in the beautiful and popular _scolion_ or song on the subject: the two friends are there celebrated as the authors of liberty at Athens--“they slew the despot and gave to Athens equal laws.” So inestimable a present was alone sufficient to enshrine in the minds of the subsequent democracy those who had sold their lives to purchase it: and we must further recollect that the intimate connection between the two, so repugnant to the modern reader, was regarded at Athens with sympathy, so that the story took hold of the Athenian mind by the vein of romance conjointly with that of patriotism. Harmodius and Aristogiton were afterwards commemorated both as the winners and as the protomartyrs of Athenian liberty. Statues were erected in their honour shortly after the final expulsion of the Pisistratidæ; immunity from taxes and public burdens was granted to the descendants of their families; and the speaker who proposed the abolition of such immunities, at a time when the number had been abusively multiplied, made his only special exception in favour of this respected lineage. And since the name of Hipparchus was universally notorious as the person slain, we discover how it was that he came to be considered by an uncritical public as the predominant member of the Pisistratid family,--the eldest son and successor of Pisistratus, the reigning despot,--to the comparative neglect of Hippias. The same public probably cherished many other anecdotes, not the less eagerly believed because they could not be authenticated, respecting this eventful period.

Whatever may have been the moderation of Hippias before, indignation at the death of his brother and fear for his own safety, now induced him to drop it altogether. It is attested both by Thucydides and Herodotus, and admits of no doubt, that his power was now employed harshly and cruelly--that he put to death a considerable number of citizens. We find also a statement, noway improbable in itself, and affirmed both in Pausanias and in Plutarch,--inferior authorities, yet still in this case sufficiently credible,--that he caused Leæna, the mistress of Aristogiton, to be tortured to death, in order to extort from her a knowledge of the secrets and accomplices of the latter. But as he could not but be sensible that this system of terrorism was full of peril to himself, so he looked out for shelter and support in case of being expelled from Athens; and with this view he sought to connect himself with Darius, king of Persia--a connection full of consequences to be hereafter developed. Æantides, son of Hippoclus the despot of Lampsacus on the Hellespont, stood high at this time in the favour of the Persian monarch, which induced Hippias to give him his daughter Archedice in marriage; no small honour to the Lampsacene, in the estimation of Thucydides. To explain how Hippias came to fix upon this town, however, it is necessary to say a few words on the foreign policy of the Pisistratidæ.

[Sidenote: [537-515 B.C.]]

The expedition of Miltiades to the Chersonesus, as described in the previous chapter, must have occurred early after the first usurpation of Pisistratus, since even his imprisonment by the Lampsacenes happened before the ruin of Crœsus (546 B.C.). But it was not till much later,--probably during the third and most powerful period of Pisistratus,--that the latter undertook his expedition against Sigeum in the Troad. This place appears to have fallen into the hands of the Mytileneans: Pisistratus retook it, and placed there his illegitimate son Hegesistratus as despot. The Mytileneans may have been enfeebled at this time (somewhere between 537-527 B.C.), not only by the strides of Persian conquest on the mainland, but also by the ruinous defeat which they suffered from Polycrates and the Samians. Hegesistratus maintained the place against various hostile attempts, throughout all the reign of Hippias, so that the Athenian possessions in those regions comprehended at this period both the Chersonesus and Sigeum. To the former of the two, Hippias sent out Miltiades, nephew of the first _œcist_, as governor, after the death of his brother Stesagoras. The new governor found much discontent in the peninsula, but succeeded in subduing it by entrapping and imprisoning the principal men in each town. He further took into his pay a regiment of five hundred mercenaries, and married Hegesipyle, daughter of the Thracian king Olorus. It appears to have been about 515 B.C. that this second Miltiades went out to the Chersonesus. He seems to have been obliged to quit it for a time, after the Scythian expedition of Darius, in consequence of having incurred the hostility of the Persians; but he was there from the beginning of the Ionic revolt until about 493 B.C., or two or three years before the battle of Marathon, on which occasion we shall find him acting-commander of the Athenian army.

Both the Chersonesus and Sigeum, though Athenian possessions, were, however, now tributary and dependent on Persia. And it was to this quarter that Hippias, during his last years of alarm, looked for support in the event of being expelled from Athens: he calculated upon Sigeum as a shelter, and upon Æantides, as well as Darius, as an ally. Neither the one nor the other failed him.

The same circumstances which alarmed Hippias, and rendered his dominion in Attica at once more oppressive and more odious, tended of course to raise the hopes of his enemies, the Athenian exiles, with the powerful Alcmæonidæ at their head. Believing the favourable moment to be come, they even ventured upon an invasion of Attica, and occupied a post called Leipsydrion in the mountain range of Parnes, which separates Attica from Bœotia. But their schemes altogether failed: Hippias defeated and drove them out of the country. His dominion now seemed confirmed, for the Lacedæmonians were on terms of intimate friendship with him; and Amyntas, king of Macedon, as well as the Thessalians were his allies. Yet the exiles whom he had beaten in the open field succeeded in an unexpected manœuvre, which, favoured by circumstances, proved his ruin.

[Sidenote: [548-514 B.C.]]

By an accident which had occurred in the year 548 B.C., the Delphian Temple was set on fire and burnt. To repair this grave loss was an object of solicitude to all Greece; but the outlay required was exceedingly heavy, and it appears to have been long before the money could be collected. The Amphictyons decreed that one-fourth of the cost should be borne by the Delphians themselves, who found themselves so heavily taxed by this assessment, that they sent envoys throughout all Greece to collect subscriptions in aid, and received, among other donations, from the Greek settlers in Egypt twenty minæ, besides a large present of alum from the Egyptian king Amasis [Aahmes II]: their munificent benefactor Crœsus fell a victim to the Persians in 546 B.C., so that his treasure was no longer open to them. The total sum required was three hundred talents, equal probably to about £115,000 sterling [or $575,000],--a prodigious amount to be collected from the dispersed Grecian cities, who acknowledged no common sovereign authority, and among whom the proportion reasonable to ask from each was so difficult to determine with satisfaction to all parties. At length, however, the money was collected, and the Amphictyons were in a situation to make a contract for the building of the temple. The Alcmæonidæ, who had been in exile ever since the third and final acquisition of power by Pisistratus, took the contract; and in executing it, they not only performed the work in the best manner, but even went much beyond the terms stipulated; employing Parian marble for the frontage, where the material prescribed to them was coarse stone. As was before remarked in the case of Pisistratus when he was in banishment, we are surprised to find exiles whose property had been confiscated so amply furnished with money--unless we are to suppose that Clisthenes the Alcmæonid, grandson of the Sicyonian Clisthenes, inherited through his mother wealth independent of Attica, and deposited it in the temple of the Samian Hera.

[Sidenote: [514-510 B.C.]]

To the Delphians, especially, the rebuilding of their temple on so superior a scale was the most essential of all services, and their gratitude towards the Alcmæonidæ was proportionally great. Partly through such a feeling, partly through pecuniary presents, Clisthenes was thus enabled to work the oracle for political purposes, and to call forth the powerful arm of Sparta against Hippias. Whenever any Spartan presented himself to consult the oracle, either on private or public business, the answer of the priestess was always in one strain, “Athens must be liberated.” The constant repetition of this mandate at length extorted from the piety of the Lacedæmonians a reluctant compliance. Reverence for the god overcame their strong feeling of friendship towards the Pisistratidæ, and Anchimolius son of Aster was despatched by sea to Athens, at the head of a Spartan force, to expel them. On landing at Phalerum, however, he found them already forewarned and prepared, as well as farther strengthened by one thousand horse specially demanded from their allies in Thessaly. Upon the plain of Phalerum, this latter force was found peculiarly effective, so that the division of Anchimolius was driven back to their ships with great loss and he himself slain. The defeated armament had probably been small, and its repulse only provoked the Lacedæmonians to send a larger, under the command of their king Cleomenes in person, who on this occasion marched into Attica by land. On reaching the plain of Athens, he was assailed by the Thessalian horse, but repelled them in so gallant a style, that they at once rode off and returned to their native country; abandoning their allies with a faithlessness not unfrequent in the Thessalian character. Cleomenes marched on to Athens without further resistance, and found himself, together with the Alcmæonids and the malcontent Athenians generally, in possession of the town. At that time there was no fortification except around the Acropolis, into which Hippias retired with his mercenaries and the citizens most faithful to him; having taken care to provision it well beforehand, so that it was not less secure against famine than against assault. He might have defied the besieging force, which was noway prepared for a long blockade; but, not altogether confiding in his position, he tried to send his children by stealth out of the country; and in this proceeding the children were taken prisoners. To procure their restoration, Hippias consented to all that was demanded of him, and withdrew from Attica to Sigeum in the Troad within the space of five days.

Thus fell the Pisistratid dynasty in 510 B.C., fifty years after the first usurpation of its founder. It was put down through the aid of foreigners, and those foreigners, too, wishing well to it in their hearts, though hostile from a mistaken feeling of divine injunction. Yet both the circumstances of its fall, and the course of events which followed, conspire to show that it possessed few attached friends in the country, and that the expulsion of Hippias was welcomed unanimously by the vast majority of Athenians. His family and chief partisans would accompany him into exile,--probably as a matter of course, without requiring any formal sentence of condemnation; and an altar was erected in the Acropolis, with a column hard by, commemorating both the past iniquity of the dethroned dynasty, and the names of all its members.

[Sidenote: [510-507 B.C.]]

With Hippias disappeared the mercenary Thracian garrison, upon which he and his father before him had leaned for defence as well as for enforcement of authority; and Cleomenes with his Lacedæmonian forces retired also, after staying only long enough to establish a personal friendship, productive subsequently of important consequences, between the Spartan king and the Athenian Isagoras. The Athenians were thus left to themselves, without any foreign interference to constrain them in their political arrangements.

It has been mentioned that the Pisistratidæ had for the most part respected the forms of the Solonian Constitution: the nine archons, and the probouleutic or preconsidering Senate of Four Hundred (both annually changed), still continued to subsist, together with occasional meetings of the people--or rather of such portion of the people as was comprised in the gentes, phratries, and four Ionic tribes. The timocratic classification of Solon (or quadruple scale of income and admeasurement of political franchises according to it) also continued to subsist--but all within the tether and subservient to the purposes of the ruling family, who always kept one of their number as real master, among the chief administrators, and always retained possession of the Acropolis as well as of the mercenary force.

That overawing pressure being now removed by the expulsion of Hippias, the enslaved forms became at once endued with freedom and reality. There appeared again what Attica had not known for thirty years, declared political parties, and pronounced opposition between two men as leaders,--on one side, Isagoras, son of Tisander, a person of illustrious descent,--on the other, Clisthenes the Alcmæonid, not less illustrious, and possessing at this moment a claim on the gratitude of his countrymen as the most persevering as well as the most effective foe of the dethroned despots. In what manner such opposition was carried on we are not told. It would seem to have been not altogether pacific; but at any rate, Clisthenes had the worst of it, and in consequence of this defeat, says the historian, “he took into partnership the people, who had been before excluded from everything.” His partnership with the people gave birth to the Athenian democracy: it was a real and important revolution.

GROTE’S ESTIMATE OF CLISTHENES THE REFORMER

[Sidenote: [507 B.C.]]

The political franchise, or the character of an Athenian citizen, both before and since Solon, had been confined to the primitive four Ionic tribes, each of which was an aggregate of so many close corporations or quasi-families--the gentes and the phratries. None of the residents in Attica, therefore, except those included in some gens or phratry, had any part in the political franchise. Such non-privileged residents were probably at all times numerous, and became more and more so by means of fresh settlers: moreover, they tended most to multiply in Athens and Piræus, where emigrants would commonly establish themselves. Clisthenes broke down the existing wall of privilege, and imparted the political franchise to the excluded mass. But this could not be done by enrolling them in new gentes or phratries, created in addition to the old; for the gentile tie was founded upon old faith and feeling, which, in the existing state of the Greek mind, could not be suddenly conjured up as a bond of union for comparative strangers: it could only be done by disconnecting the franchise altogether from the Ionic tribes as well as from the gentes which constituted them, and by redistributing the population into new tribes with a character and purpose exclusively political. Accordingly, Clisthenes abolished the four Ionic tribes, and created in their place ten new tribes founded upon a different principle, independent of the gentes and phratries. Each of his new tribes comprised a certain number of demes or cantons, with the enrolled proprietors and residents in each of them. The demes taken altogether included the entire surface of Attica, so that the Clisthenean Constitution admitted to the political franchise all the free native Athenians; and not merely these, but also many metics, and even some of the superior order of slaves. Putting out of sight the general body of slaves, and regarding only the free inhabitants, it was in point of fact a scheme approaching to universal suffrage, both political and judicial.

The slight and cursory manner in which Herodotus announces this memorable revolution tends to make us overlook its real importance. He dwells chiefly on the alteration in the number and names of the tribes: Clisthenes, he says, despised the Ionians so much, that he would not tolerate the continuance in Attica of the four tribes which prevailed in the Ionic cities, deriving their names from the four sons of Ion--just as his grandfather, the Sicyonian Clisthenes, hating the Dorians, had degraded and nicknamed the three Dorian tribes at Sicyon. Such is the representation of Herodotus, who seems himself to have entertained some contempt for the Ionians, and therefore to have suspected a similar feeling where it had no real existence. But the scope of Clisthenes was something far more extensive: he abolished the four ancient tribes, not because they were Ionic, but because they had become incommensurate with the existing condition of the Attic people, and because such abolition procured both for himself and for his political scheme new as well as hearty allies.

As soon as Hippias was expelled, the senate and the public assembly regained their efficiency. But had they been continued on the old footing, including none except members of the four tribes, these tribes would have been reinvested with a privilege which in reality they had so long lost, that its revival would have seemed an odious novelty, and the remaining population would probably not have submitted to it. If, in addition, we consider the political excitement of the moment, the restoration of one body of men from exile, and the departure of another body into exile, the outpouring of long-suppressed hatred, partly against these very forms, by the corruption of which the despot had reigned, we shall see that prudence as well as patriotism dictated the adoption of an enlarged scheme of government. Clisthenes had learned some wisdom during his long exile; and as he probably continued, for some time after the introduction of his new constitution, to be the chief adviser of his countrymen, we may consider their extraordinary success as a testimony to his prudence and skill not less than to their courage and unanimity. For, necessary as the change had become, it was not the less a shock to ancient Attic ideas. It radically altered the very idea of a tribe, which now became an aggregation of demes, not of gentes; and it thus broke up those associations, religious, social, and political, between the whole and the parts of the old system, which operated powerfully on the mind of every old-fashioned Athenian. The patricians at Rome, who composed the gentes and curiæ, and the plebs, who had no part in these corporations, formed for a long time two separate and opposing factions in the same city, each with its own separate organisation. It was only by slow degrees that the plebs gained ground.

So too in the Italian and German cities of the Middle Ages, the patrician families refused to part with their own separate political identity, when the guilds grew up by the side of them; even though forced to renounce a portion of their power, they continued to be a separate fraternity, and would not submit to be regimented anew, under an altered category and denomination, along with the traders who had grown into wealth and importance. But the reform of Clisthenes effected this change all at once, both as to the name and as to the reality. In some cases, indeed, that which had been the name of a gens was retained as the name of a deme, but even then the old gentiles were ranked indiscriminately among the remaining demots; and the Athenian people, politically considered, thus became one homogeneous whole, distributed for convenience into parts, numerically, locally, and politically equal. It is, however, to be remembered, that while the four Ionic tribes were abolished, the gentes and phratries which compose them were left untouched, and continued to subsist as family and religious associations, though carrying with them no political privilege.

The ten newly created tribes, arranged in an established order of precedence, were called: Erechtheis, Ægeis, Pandionis, Leontis, Acamantis, Œneis, Cecropis, Hippothoöntis, Æantis, Antiochis--names borrowed chiefly from the respected heroes of Attic legend. This number remained unaltered until the year 305 B.C., when it was increased to twelve by the addition of two new tribes, Antigonias and Demetrias, afterwards designated anew by the names of Ptolemais and Attalis. The mere names of these last two, borrowed from living kings and not from legendary heroes, betray the change from freedom to subservience at Athens. Each tribe comprised a certain number of demes--cantons, parishes, or townships--in Attica. But the total number of these demes is not distinctly ascertained.

There is another point, however, which is at once more certain, and more important to notice. The demes which Clisthenes assigned to each tribe were in no case all adjacent to each other; and therefore, the tribe, as a whole, did not correspond with any continuous portion of the territory, nor could it have any peculiar local interest, separate from the entire community. Such systematic avoidance of the factions arising out of neighbourhood will appear to have been more especially necessary, when we recollect that the quarrels of the Paralii, the Diacrii, the Pedieis, during the preceding century, had all been generated from local feud, though doubtless artfully fomented by individual ambition. Moreover, it was only by this same precaution that the local predominance of the city, and the formation of a city-interest distinct from that of the country, was obviated; which could hardly have failed to arise had the city by itself constituted either one deme or one tribe. Clisthenes distributed the city (or found it already distributed) into several demes, and those demes among several tribes; while Piræus and Phalerum, each constituting a separate deme, were also assigned to different tribes; so that there were no local advantages either to bestow predominance, or to create a struggle for predominance, of one tribe over the rest. Each deme had its own local interests to watch over; but the tribe was a mere aggregate of demes for political, military, and religious purposes, with no separate hopes or fears apart from the whole state. Each tribe had a chapel, sacred rites and festivals, and a common fund for such meetings, in honour of its eponymous hero, administered by members of its own choice; and the statues of all the ten eponymous heroes, fraternal patrons of the democracy, were planted in the most conspicuous part of the agora of Athens. In the future working of the Athenian government we shall trace no symptom of disquieting local factions--a capital amendment compared with the disputes of the preceding century, and traceable, in part, to the absence of border-relations between demes of the same tribe.

The deme now became the primitive constituent element of the commonwealth, both as to persons and as to property. It had its own demarch, its register of enrolled citizens, its collective property, its public meetings and religious ceremonies, its taxes levied and administered by itself. The register of qualified citizens was kept by the demarch, and the inscription of new citizens took place at the assembly of the demots, whose legitimate sons were enrolled on attaining the age of eighteen, and their adopted sons at any time when presented and sworn to by the adopting citizen. The citizenship could only be granted by a public vote of the people, but wealthy non-freemen were enabled sometimes to evade this law and purchase admission upon the register of some poor deme, probably by means of a fictitious adoption. At the meetings of the demots, the register was called over, and it sometimes happened that some names were expunged--in which case the party thus disfranchised had an appeal to the popular judicature. So great was the local administrative power, however, of these demes, that they are described as the substitute, under the Clisthenean system, for the naucraries under the Solonian and anti-Solonian. The trittyes and naucraries, though nominally preserved, and the latter (as some affirm) augmented in number from forty-eight to fifty, appear henceforward as of little public importance.

Clisthenes preserved, but at the same time modified and expanded, all the main features of Solon’s political constitution; the public assembly, or ecclesia,--the preconsidering senate, composed of members from all the tribes,--and the habit of annual election, as well as annual responsibility of magistrates, by and to the ecclesia. The full value must now have been felt of possessing such pre-existing institutions to build upon, at a moment of perplexity and dissension. But the Clisthenean ecclesia acquired new strength, and almost a new character, from the great increase of the number of citizens qualified to attend it; while the annually changed senate, instead of being composed of four hundred members taken in equal proportion from each of the old four tribes, was enlarged to five hundred, taken equally from each of the new ten tribes. It now comes before us, under the name of Senate of Five Hundred, as an active and indispensable body throughout the whole Athenian democracy: and the practice now seems to have begun (though the period of commencement cannot be decisively proved), of determining the names of the senators by lot. Both the senate thus constituted, and the public assembly, were far more popular and vigorous than they had been under the original arrangement of Solon.

The new constitution of the tribes, as it led to a change in the annual senate, so it transformed, no less directly, the military arrangements of the state, both as to soldiers and as to officers. The citizens called upon to serve in arms were now marshalled according to tribes--each tribe having its own taxiarchs as officers for the hoplites, and its own phylarch at the head of the horsemen. Moreover, there were now created for the first time ten strategi, or generals, one from each tribe; and two hipparchs, for the supreme command of the horsemen. Under the prior Athenian constitution it appears that the command of the military force had been vested in the third archon, or polemarch, no strategi then existing; and even after the latter had been created, under the Clisthenean constitution, the polemarch still retained a joint right of command along with them--as we are told at the battle of Marathon, where Callimachus the polemarch not only enjoyed an equal vote in the council of war along with the ten strategi, but even occupied the post of honour on the right wing. The ten generals, annually changed, are thus (like the ten tribes) a fruit of the Clisthenean constitution, which was at the same time powerfully strengthened and protected by such remodelling of the military force. The functions of the generals becoming more extensive as the democracy advanced, they seem to have acquired gradually not merely the direction of military and naval affairs, but also that of the foreign relations of the city generally,--while the nine archons, including the polemarch, were by degrees lowered down from that full executive and judicial competence which they had once enjoyed, to the simple ministry of police and preparatory justice. Encroached upon by the strategi on one side, they were also restricted in efficiency by the rise of the popular dicasteries or numerous jury-courts, on the other. We may be very sure that these popular dicasteries had not been permitted to meet or to act under the despotism of the Pisistratidæ, and that the judicial business of the city must then have been conducted partly by the senate of Areopagus, partly by the archons; perhaps with a nominal responsibility of the latter at the end of their year of office to an acquiescent ecclesia. And if we even assume it to be true, as some writers contend, that the habit of direct popular judicature, over and above this annual trial of responsibility, had been partially introduced by Solon, it must have been discontinued during the long coercion exercised by the supervening dynasty. But the outburst of popular spirit, which lent force to Clisthenes, doubtless carried the people into direct action as jurors in the aggregate heliæa, not less than as voters in the ecclesia; and the change was thus begun which contributed to degrade the archons from their primitive character as judges, into the lower function of preliminary examiners and presidents of a jury. Such convocation of numerous juries, beginning first with the aggregate body of sworn citizens above thirty years of age, and subsequently dividing them into separate bodies or panels, for trying particular causes, became gradually more frequent and more systematised: until at length, in the time of Pericles, it was made to carry a small pay, and stood out as one of the most prominent features of Athenian life.

The financial affairs of the city underwent at this epoch as complete a change as the military: in fact, the appointment of magistrates and officers by tens, one from each tribe, seems to have become the ordinary practice. From this time forward, the senate of Five Hundred steps far beyond its original duty of preparing matters for the discussion of the ecclesia: it embraces, besides, a large circle of administrative and general superintendence, which hardly admits of any definition. Its sittings become constant, with the exception of special holidays, and the year is distributed into ten portions called prytanies--the fifty senators of each tribe taking by turns the duty of constant attendance during one prytany, and receiving during that time the title of the Prytanes: the order of precedence among the tribes in these duties was annually determined by lot.

During those later times known to us through the great orators, the ecclesia, or formal assembly of the citizens, was convoked four times regularly during each prytany, or oftener if necessity required--usually by the senate, though the strategi had also the power of convoking it by their own authority. How often the ancient ecclesia had been convoked during the interval between Solon and Pisistratus, we cannot exactly say--probably but seldom during the year. But under the Pisistratidæ, its convocation had dwindled down into an inoperative formality; and the re-establishment of it by Clisthenes, not merely with plenary determining powers, but also under full notice and preparation of matters beforehand, together with the best securities for orderly procedure, was in itself a revolution impressive to the mind of every Athenian citizen. To render the ecclesia efficient, it was indispensable that its meetings should be both frequent and free. Men thus became trained to the duty both of speakers and hearers, and each man, while he felt that he exercised his share of influence on the decision, identified his own safety and happiness with the vote of the majority, and became familiarised with the notion of a sovereign authority which he neither could nor ought to resist. This is an idea new to the Athenian bosom; and with it came the feelings sanctifying free speech and equal law--words which no Athenian citizen ever afterwards heard unmoved: together with that sentiment of the entire commonwealth as one and indivisible, which always overruled, though it did not supplant, the local and cantonal specialties. It is not too much to say that these patriotic and ennobling impulses were a new product in the Athenian mind, to which nothing analogous occurs even in the time of Solon. They were kindled in part doubtless by the strong reaction against the Pisistratidæ, but still more by the fact that the opposing leader, Clisthenes, turned that transitory feeling to the best possible account, and gave to it a vigorous perpetuity, as well as a well-defined positive object, by the popular elements conspicuous in his constitution. His name makes less figure in history than we should expect, because he passed for the mere renovator of Solon’s scheme of government after it had been overthrown by Pisistratus. Probably he himself professed this object, since it would facilitate the success of his propositions: and if we confine ourselves to the letter of the case, the fact is in a great measure true, since the annual senate and the ecclesia are both Solonian--but both of them under his reform were clothed in totally new circumstances, and swelled into gigantic proportions. How vigorous was the burst of Athenian enthusiasm, altering instantaneously the position of Athens among the powers of Greece, we shall hear presently.

But it was not only the people formally installed in their ecclesia, who received from Clisthenes the real attributes of sovereignty; it was by him also that the people were first called into direct action as dicasts, or jurors. This custom may be said, in a certain limited sense, to have begun in the time of Solon, since that lawgiver invested the popular assembly with the power of pronouncing the judgment of accountability upon the archons after their year of office. Here, again, the building, afterwards so spacious and stately, was erected on a Solonian foundation, though it was not itself Solonian. That the popular dicasteries, in the elaborate forms in which they existed from Pericles downward, were introduced all at once by Clisthenes, it is impossible to believe; yet the steps by which they were gradually wrought out are not distinctly discoverable. It would rather seem, that at first only the aggregate body of citizens above thirty years of age exercised judicial functions, being specially convoked and sworn to try persons accused of public crimes, and when so employed bearing the name of the heliæa, or heliasts; private offences and disputes between man and man being still determined by individual magistrates in the city, and a considerable judicial power still residing in the senate of Areopagus. There is reason to believe that this was the state of things established by Clisthenes, and which afterwards came to be altered by the greater extent of judicial duty gradually accruing to the heliasts, so that it was necessary to subdivide the collective heliæa. According to the subdivision, as practised in the times best known, six thousand citizens above thirty years of age were annually selected by lot out of the whole number, six hundred from each of the ten tribes: five thousand of these citizens were arranged in ten panels or decuries of five hundred each, the remaining one thousand being reserved to fill up vacancies in case of death or absence among the former. The whole six thousand took a prescribed oath, couched in very striking words, and every man received a ticket inscribed with his own name as well as with a letter designating his decury. When there were causes or crimes ripe for trial, the _thesmothets_ or six inferior archons, determined by lot, first, which decuries should sit, according to the number wanted--next, in which court, or under the presidency of what magistrate, the decury B or E should sit, so that it could not be known beforehand in what cause each would be judge. Each of these decuries sitting in judicature was called the heliæa, a name which belongs properly to the collective assembly of the people; this collective assembly having been itself the original judicature. We conceive that the practice of distributing this collective assembly, or heliæa, into sections of jurors for judicial duty, may have begun under one form or another soon after the reform of Clisthenes, since the direct interference of the people in public affairs tended more and more to increase. But it could only have been matured by degrees into that constant and systematic service which the pay of Pericles called forth at last in completeness. Under the last mentioned system the judicial competence of the archons was annulled, and the third archon, or polemarch, withdrawn from all military functions. Still, this had not been yet done at the time of the battle of Marathon, in which Callimachus the polemarch not only commanded along with the strategi, but enjoyed a sort of pre-eminence over them: nor had it been done during the year after the battle of Marathon, in which Aristides was archon--for the magisterial decisions of Aristides formed one of the principal foundations of his honourable surname, the Just.

With this question, as to the comparative extent of judicial power vested by Clisthenes in the popular dicastery and the archons, are in reality connected two others in Athenian constitutional law; relating, first, to the admissibility of all citizens for the post of archon--next, to the choosing of archons by lot. It is well known that, in the time of Pericles, the archons, and various other individual functionaries, had come to be chosen by lot--moreover, all citizens were legally admissible, and might give in their names to be drawn for by lot, subject to what was called the docimasy, or legal examination into their status of citizen, and into various moral and religious qualifications, before they took office; while at the same time the function of the archon had become nothing higher than preliminary examination of parties and witnesses for the dicastery, and presidence over it when afterwards assembled, together with the power of imposing by authority a fine of small amount upon inferior offenders.

Now all these three political arrangements hang essentially together. The great value of the lot, according to Grecian democratical ideas, was that it equalised the chance of office between rich and poor. But so long as the poor citizens were legally inadmissible, choice by lot could have no recommendation either to the rich or to the poor; in fact, it would be less democratical than election by the general mass of citizens, because the poor citizen would under the latter system enjoy an important right of interference by means of his suffrage, though he could not be elected himself. Again, choice by lot could never under any circumstances be applied to those posts where special competence, and a certain measure of attributes possessed only by a few, could not be dispensed with without obvious peril; nor was it ever applied, throughout the whole history of democratical Athens, to the strategi, or generals, who were always elected by show of hands of the assembled citizens. Accordingly, we may regard it as certain that, at the time when the archons first came to be chosen by lot, the superior and responsible duties once attached to that office had been, or were in course of being, detached from it, and transferred either to the popular dicasts or to the ten elected strategi: so that there remained to these archons only a routine of police and administration, important indeed to the state, yet such as could be executed by any citizen of average probity, diligence, and capacity. At least there was no obvious absurdity in thinking so; and the docimasy excluded from the office men of notoriously discreditable life, even after they might have drawn the successful lot. Pericles, though chosen strategus, year after year successively, was never archon; and it may even be doubted whether men of first-rate talents and ambition often gave in their names for the office. To those of smaller aspirations it was doubtless a source of importance, but it imposed troublesome labour, gave no pay, and entailed a certain degree of peril upon any archon who might have given offence to powerful men, when he came to pass through the trial of accountability which followed immediately upon his year of office. There was little to make the office acceptable either to very poor men, or to very rich and ambitious men; and between the middling persons who gave in their names, any one might be taken without great practical mischief, always assuming the two guarantees of the docimasy before, and accountability after, office. This was the conclusion--in our opinion a mistaken conclusion, and such as would find no favour at present--to which the democrats of Athens were conducted by their strenuous desire to equalise the chances of office for rich and poor. But their sentiment seems to have been satisfied by a partial enforcement of the lot to the choice of some offices,--especially the archons, as the primitive chief magistrates of the state,--without applying it to all, or to the most responsible and difficult. Nor would they have applied it to the archons, if it had been indispensably necessary that these magistrates should retain their original very serious duty of judging disputes and condemning offenders.

Now in regard to the eligibility of all Athenians indiscriminately to the office of archon, we find a clear and positive testimony as to the time when it was first introduced. Plutarch tells us that the oligarchical, but high-principled Aristides, was himself the proposer of this constitutional change--shortly after the battle of Platæa, with the consequent expulsion of the Persians from Greece, and the return of the refugee Athenians to their ruined city. Seldom has it happened in the history of mankind, that rich and poor have been so completely equalised as among the population of Athens in that memorable expatriation and heroic struggle. Nor are we at all surprised to hear that the mass of citizens, coming back with freshly kindled patriotism as well as with the consciousness that their country had only been recovered by the equal efforts of all, would no longer submit to be legally disqualified from any office of state. It was on this occasion that the constitution was first made really “common” to all, and that the archons, strategi, and all functionaries, first began to be chosen from all Athenians without any difference of legal eligibility. No mention is made of the lot in this important statement of Plutarch, which appears in every way worthy of credit, and which teaches us that, down to the invasion of Xerxes not only had the exclusive principle of the Solonian law of qualification continued in force (whereby the first three classes on the census were alone admitted to all individual offices, and the fourth or thetic class excluded), but also the archons had hitherto been elected by the citizens--not taken by lot.

Now for financial purposes, the quadruple census of Solon was retained long after this period, even beyond the Peloponnesian War and the oligarchy of Thirty. But we thus learn that Clisthenes in his constitution retained it for political purposes also, in part at least: he recognised the exclusion of the great mass of the citizens from all individual offices--such as the archon, the strategus, etc. In his time, probably, no complaints were raised on the subject. His constitution gave to the collective bodies--senate, ecclesia, and heliæa, or dicastery--a degree of power and importance such as they had never before known or imagined: and we may well suppose that the Athenian people of that day had no objection even to the proclaimed system and theory of being exclusively governed by men of wealth and station as individual magistrates--especially since many of the newly enfranchised citizens had been previously metics and slaves. Indeed, it is to be added that, even under the full democracy of later Athens, though the people had then become passionately attached to the theory of equal admissibility of all citizens to office, yet, in practice, poor men seldom obtained offices which were elected by the general vote, as will appear more fully in the course of this history.[17]

The choice of the strategi remained ever afterwards upon the footing on which Aristides thus placed it. But the present is not the time to enter into the modifications which Athens underwent during the generation after the battle of Platæa. They have been here briefly noticed for the purpose of reasoning back, in the absence of direct evidence, to Athens as it stood in the generation before that memorable battle, after the reform of Clisthenes. His reform, though highly democratical, stopped short of the mature democracy which prevailed from Pericles to Demosthenes, in three ways especially, among various others; and it is therefore sometimes considered by the later writers as an aristocratical constitution: (1) It still recognised the archons as judges to a considerable extent, and the third archon, or polemarch, as joint military commander along with the strategi. (2) It retained them as elected annually by the body of citizens, not as chosen by lot. (3) It still excluded the fourth class of the Solonian census from all individual office, the archonship among the rest. The Solonian law of exclusion, however, though retained in principle, was mitigated in practice thus far--that whereas Solon had rendered none but members of the highest class on the census (_the pentakosiomedimni_) eligible to the archonship, Clisthenes opened that dignity to all the first three classes, shutting out only the fourth. That he did this may be inferred from the fact that Aristides, assuredly not a rich man, became archon.

We are also inclined to believe that the senate of Five Hundred, as constituted by Clisthenes, was taken, not by election, but by lot, from the ten tribes, and that every citizen became eligible to it. Election for this purpose--that is, the privilege of annually electing a batch of fifty senators, all at once, by each tribe--would probably be thought more troublesome than valuable; nor do we hear of separate meetings of each tribe for purposes of election. Moreover, the office of senator was a collective, not an individual office; the shock, therefore, to the feelings of semi-democratised Athens, from the unpleasant idea of a poor man sitting among the fifty prytanes, would be less than if they conceived him as polemarch at the head of the right wing of the army, or as an archon administering justice.

A further difference between the constitution of Solon and that of Clisthenes is to be found in the position of the senate of Areopagus. Under the former, that senate had been the principal body in the state, and he had even enlarged its powers; under the latter, it must have been treated at first as an enemy, and kept down. For as it was composed only of all the past archons, and as, during the preceding thirty years, every archon had been a creature of the Pisistratidæ, the Areopagites collectively must have been both hostile and odious to Clisthenes and his partisans, perhaps a fraction of its members might even retire into exile with Hippias. Its influence must have been sensibly lessened by the change of party, until it came to be gradually filled by fresh archons springing from the bosom of the Clisthenean constitution. But during this important interval, the new-modelled senate of Five Hundred, and the popular assembly, stepped into that ascendency which they never afterwards lost. From the time of Clisthenes forward, the Areopagites cease to be the chief and prominent power in the state: yet they are still considerable; and when the second fill of the democratical tide took place, after the battle of Platæa, they became the focus of that which was then considered as the party of oligarchical resistance. We have already remarked that the archons, during the intermediate time (about 509-477 B.C.), were all elected by the ecclesia, not chosen by lot, and that the fourth (or poorest and most numerous) class on the census were by law then ineligible; while election at Athens, even when every citizen without exception was an elector and eligible, had a natural tendency to fall upon men of wealth and station. We thus see how it happened that the past archons, when united in the Senate of Areopagus, infused into that body the sympathies, prejudices, and interests of the richer classes. It was this which brought them into conflict with the more democratical party headed by Pericles and Ephialtes, in times when portions of the Clisthenean constitution had come to be discredited as too much imbued with oligarchy.

One other remarkable institution, distinctly ascribed to Clisthenes, yet remains to be noticed--the Ostracism. It is hardly too much to say that, without this protective process, none of the other institutions would have reached maturity.

OSTRACISM