by Oswyn Murray
Megakles head of the Alkmeonidai had been involved in the rise of Peisistratos; but his descendants liked to claim that they had been in exile during the whole of the tyranny (Herodotus 6.123). A fragment of the official Athenian list of annual archons reveals a different picture; it reads:
On]eto[rides
H]ippia[s
K]leisthen[es
M]iltiades
(524/3)
Ka]lliades
Peisi]strat[os
(Greek Historical Inscriptions no. 6=23F)
Miltiades is known to have been archon in 524/3, so we can date these names and reconstruct the political background. Peisistratos died in 528/7; the first entry presumably records a man appointed before his death; in 526/5 the new tyrant Hippias was archon, and in the next two years the heads of Alkmeonid and Philaid families. Kalliades is a name too common to identify, and the last name is probably that of the new tyrant’s son. Clearly Hippias followed a policy of conciliation of the other noble families immediately after his accession to power.
At some time the atmosphere changed. Kimon the Olympic victor was murdered, his son Miltiades went to the Chersonese; and Kleisthenes and the Alkmeonidai went into exile. In 514 two members of the aristocratic family of the Gephyraioi, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, were killed in a plot against the tyranny (p. 217). The Alkmeonidai and others tried to overthrow the tyranny from a fort at Leipsydrion on Mount Parnes:
Alas Leipsydrion betrayer of comrades,
what men you destroyed good at fighting
and born of noble family,
who showed then of what fathers they were bred.
(Page, Poetae Melici Graeci no. 907)
The Attic skolion or drinking song shows the aristocratic nature of the struggle against the tyrants.
The Peisistratidai were finally overthrown with Spartan help in 510 (p. 265). The eunomia that replaced the tyranny was initially merely freedom for aristocratic faction; but when in 508 Isagoras was elected archon against the wishes of Kleisthenes the Alkmeonid, Kleisthenes ‘took the people into his party’ (Herodotus 5.66; the word used is a compound of the old hetairos, ‘companion’): he proposed major reforms, expelled Isagoras, and in the next few years held off the attempts of the Spartans and their allies to intervene.
In these actions there is no doubt that Kleisthenes had won popular support, but it is not easy to see how. His reforms consisted primarily of a complicated revision of the tribal structure of Athens, which may well have taken some time to put into effect; their purpose and actual consequences are obscure. In place of the four Ionian tribes (phylai) he established ten new tribes, whose names and cults were authorized by Delphi. Each tribe comprised three groups of dēmoi (‘villages’), one group from ‘the city’, one from ‘the inland’, and one from ‘the coast’; these groups were called trittyes (‘units of three’). ‘The city’ included both the Piraeus area and the whole central plain between Mt. Aigaleos and Mt. Hymettos. On the probable assumption that the system remained unchanged into the classical period, we can assert that there were 139 dēmoi, or constitutionally recognized villages; they supplied different but fixed quotas of councillors for the central council, implying that they were of different sizes; their distribution among the tribes is known, the smallest number in a tribe being 6, the largest 21. From this it is clear that the dēmoi were based on existing villages in the countryside, though they may have been rather more artificial divisions within the city; on the other hand the new tribes were the basis of military organization and had central political functions which should imply rough equality in numbers.
Any interpretation of this new organization is controversial; in the following account I take the trittyes as merely a mode of distributing dēmoi among the tribes. Certainly the dēmoi were assigned the functions of local government: there were local deme-assemblies with officials called dēmarchoi; these were responsible for local order and for carrying out the instructions of the central government. They also kept the official citizen lists, admitting new male citizens at the age of 18, and hearing cases of disputed citizenship in the first instance. Deme membership was hereditary (so that what was originally a group based on domicile gradually became one based on descent), and the name of his deme was now part of an Athenian’s official designation: ‘Megakles son of Hippokrates from Alopekē’ to quote an ostrakon of a few years later. This aspect of Kleisthenes’ reform was clearly intended to introduce democracy at a local level. But I believe that the most important effect was the replacement of the old aristocratic phratry organization (p. 54), and especially the removal of its control over the right to citizenship.
It is doubtful whether a complete citizen list existed under the Solonian constitution, which strictly required only lists of the top three property classes for political and military purposes. The first certain citizen list was produced in the short period of aristocratic rule after the tyranny: it is characterized as an operation which deprived a large number of people of the citizenship they claimed (Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 21). This may well have been not so much a purging of foreigners and Peisistratid supporters, but rather a wider attempt to exclude from the citizenship all those who were not in a phratry organization, and not therefore bound to the aristocratic families. I would argue that it is this large and rightly aggrieved group which provided Kleisthenes’ main support, and enabled him to find an overwhelming majority in his favour only a month or so after his candidate had lost the archonship election: that election may well have been effectively confined to phratry members. A law of uncertain date can be fitted into this interpretation: it makes ‘the phratries receive under compulsion both the orgeōnes and the homogalaktoi (men who drink the same milk) whom we call gennētai’ (Philochoros F.G.H. 328 Frag. 35). The implication is that the phratries have been refusing to admit any but those who were members of an aristocratic genos (homogalaktoi or gennētai). The orgeōnes are presumably a group who had previously been outside the phratry system. Kleisthenes had extended citizenship rights by removing their connection with the phratry; under this later law all citizens were winning entry to the old institutions, which had remained as social and religious groups after they had lost their political and institutional functions. The effect of Kleisthenes’ reforms at local level was to free the people from control by the aristocratic phratry system. At the same time or soon after the whole religious character of the phratries was transformed; their rituals were standardised and universalised, so that every phratry performed the same rituals on the same days to the same gods, Zeus Phratrios and Athena Phratria. Thus the old cult associations were transformed into groups dedicated to giving a religious meaning to the rites of passage from birth to manhood and marriage of the Athenian male citizen. In a later period, when citizenship is challenged in the lawcourts, a man is likely to appeal in the last resort to the witness of his fellow phratores.
The trittys was a more artificial unit, which may or may not have existed earlier in a different form. It consisted of a group of dēmoi, usually but not always close to each other. If there was an attempt to bolster or destroy existing territorial allegiances by manipulating boundaries, it must have been at trittys level. There are conspicuous examples of dēmoi geographically separated, but grouped into the same trittys: for instance the coastal trittys of tribes 3 and 4 are separated into two blocks, and some of the dēmoi of the inland trittys in tribe 10 are roughly 25 kilometres apart across Mt Pentelicon, north of the Marathon plain. On the other hand some trittyes of coast and plain groups were territorially contiguous in the same tribe (for instance tribes 2, 3 and 5): unless their deme composition was very carefully determined, this could have led to a territorial block. The most striking example of such a block is in tribe 9, where two contiguous trittyes cover the plain of Marathon, the old centre of Peisistratid power – perhaps another sign that Alkmeonidai and Peisistratidai were not fundamentally opposed to each other. But the question of political manipulation of trittys composit
ion in favour or against the interests of particular aristocratic groups has been much discussed, without leading to any clear conclusions.
Equally puzzling is the fact that the trittyes differed in size, both territorially and in population. This causes a difficulty because the most obvious function of the trittyes would be to provide a means of mixing up and distributing 139 unequal dēmoi among ten equal tribes; and Aristotle says that his distribution was done by lot (Constitution of the Athenians 21.4). If his statement is correct, this could have led to variations of size between tribes of up to 42% larger and 32% smaller than the norm. It may be that the trittyes were created before the new citizen lists had been drawn up, or perhaps the lot was restricted in some way to ensure equal tribes. But the difference in trittys sizes might suggest some attention to natural geographical groupings, and therefore perhaps some intended function apart from the merely distributive.
The ten new tribes provided the basic military structure of the state; they also had an effect on Kleisthenes’ reform of the central government. The Solonian council of 400 was reconstituted as a body of 500, and was given a more effective organization. The ten tribes each produced 50 councillors chosen by lot, who met in council to prepare and execute assembly business. Later at least the fifty members of each tribe were on permanent duty in turn for one tenth of the year, providing from their number a president who served for 24 hours. A permanent council-house was built about this time, and the Peisistratid buildings nearby were remodelled, which at least suggests the new importance of the council, even if some of its detailed organization may be later.
Kleisthenes created the essentials of the Athenian government system as it existed for the next two hundred years – the most democratic type of government yet devised. The efficient running of a direct non-representational mass assembly required a body to prepare business, execute decisions, and increasingly later to oversee the magistrates. The Kleisthenic council, based on the new tribes, was designed to be as democratic as the assembly, a random cross-section chosen by lot, allowed to hold office only twice in a lifetime, and governed by the lot in all their appointments including the choice of daily president. Such institutions effectively prevented the growth of parties or political interest groups, and ensured that the will of the majority prevailed. However much of this is later development, the marked contrast between the aristocratic and regional factionalism of early Athens and her subsequent political development shows that Kleisthenes successfully broke the power of the phratries and laid the basis for the unimpeded development of democracy.
The most striking aspect of Kleisthenes’ reforms is their sophistication – the use of a complex new set of political institutions to effect radical social change. In one sense the method was traditional: Herodotus points out that he derived his idea of changing the tribal structure from the activities of his maternal grandfather Kleisthenes of Sicyon (5.66; p. 154); and other reformers had acted similarly, for instance Demonax at Cyrene (p. 122). But the machinery for ensuring that no institution of the central government could represent any particular natural group, and for combining this with local democracy, is of a quite different character from these earlier examples: the introduction of ‘decimal democracy’ has an intellectual coherence which demonstrates for the first time the systematic application of reason to the creation of a constitution. And in so far as Kleisthenes used older institutions as elements in his reforms, these became an expression of that typically Greek mode of thought which I have called ‘archaic rationality’, the ability to rethink in a fundamental manner the basic elements in society, and to organise them into a new rational order, whose continuity with the past is expressed only in the continued use of an older social vocabulary which serves to disguise the radical nature of the changes.
Solon’s reforms had been concerned with the creation of a lawcode and the proper ordering of a civic society. The basis of the Kleisthenic reforms was the concept of citizenship. Previously it had not seemed necessary to define the members of the polis and their rights: now every Athenian male was aware of his position as a member of the polis, a polites. Of course definition of membership involves defining also the boundaries of membership, and therefore the exclusions from the body politic. Nevertheless since in all Greek associations membership implies equality, this was an essential step in the creation of a democratic system; and modern historians like therefore to proclaim that 1993 is the 2500th anniversary of the creation of democracy – a harmless enough fantasy, as long as it is recognised that no modern state qualifies as a democracy in the Greek sense of being directly ruled by its citizens.
How far the detailed consequences of this reform could be understood by the Athenian people is dubious; there must have been a certain gap in communication. It is in this context that the appearance of a new political concept may be significant. About this time the old political ideal of eunomia, which had sufficed for Hesiod, Solon and the Spartans, acquired a competitor, isonomia: in contrast to ‘good order’ there was now also ‘equal order’; the new word was the original word for democracy, supplanted only later by the more aggressive dēmokratia, ‘people’s power’. It is hard not to connect the new concept with the struggle in Athens between the Spartan-backed aristocrats and the newly democratic Kleisthenes, for isonomia is clearly a word formulated by analogy with the older eunomia, and perhaps in opposition to it. A similar development can be seen in the attitude to law: the old Solonian word thesmos, ‘ordinance’ fixed by an authority, gave way to the word nomas, law in the sense of custom imposed on the community by its own decision.
The intellectual coherence of Kleisthenes’ reforms and the formulation of this new political ideal suggest that he had a conscious democratic aim, though he need not have envisaged the full consequences of his changes. I find it difficult to understand those who interpret his reforms merely as a series of political manoeuvres to the advantage of himself and the Alkmeonidai. If this was his intention his failure was complete. He himself is not heard of after his reforms: he may have died, or been disgraced over an embassy which went to Persia in the crisis of the invasion by Sparta, Chalcis and Boeotia after the reforms, and was disowned because it gave earth and water to the Great King. By 490 his family was in deep disfavour; the alternative claim that it was Harmodios and Aristogeiton, not the Alkmeonidai, who had overthrown the tyranny was already the official state version; for the public statue of the two tyrannicides carved by Antenor must be dated before 500. And even Kleisthenes’ isonomia was appropriated to them in the drinking song:
Their fame shall live for ever on earth,
dearest Harmodios and Aristogeiton,
because they killed the tyrant
and gave the Athenians equal order (isonomous).
(Page no. 895)
In contrast the period from 508 to 480 reveals a succession of democratic changes in the spirit of the Kleisthenic reforms. In 501/0 a councillors’ oath was introduced, demonstrating the importance now placed on the council; the later versions of this oath show that it concerned the performance of the council’s functions, ‘to take counsel according to the laws’, ‘to act as councillor in the interests of the Athenians’, and also perhaps contained safeguards against abuse of power such as arbitrary imprisonments. In the same year a board of ten equal generals, one from each tribe, was elected; their function was initially to advise the aristocratic polemarchos, though by 480 they were themselves the supreme military commanders of the state. As such they were the only important officials to be elected rather than chosen by lot, and to be allowed to stand for office as often as they wished.
The progress to democracy was punctuated and assisted by the first Persian attack of 490. From the Persian side, there is something to be said for Robert Graves’ analysis:
Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
the trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
(The Persian Version)
The battle was an episode in the continuing advance that
had been decided on by Darius after the Ionian revolt was effectively ended in 494. His nephew and son-in-law Mardonios had taken control of western operations in 492; he established ‘democracies’ in Ionia, and extended Persian power around the north Aegean coast as far as Macedonia and Thasos. In 491 came the demand for earth and water, acceded to by all the islands and many mainland states apart from Sparta and Athens. Special horse transports were built, and a large fleet was assembled; it sailed under Datis and Artaphrenes in 490 through the Aegean islands past Naxos and Delos; the Persians landed on Euboea and took the island, plundering Eretria in punishment for her part in the burning of Sardis, and carrying off the inhabitants to be settled in the eastern Persian empire near Susa, where Herodotus found them, still speaking Greek among the Iranian oil-wells (6.119). The Persians had brought with them Athens’ old tyrant Hippias, now nearly eighty, obviously intending to reinstate him. They disembarked at his former stronghold, the Marathon plain, which was the most suitable terrain for cavalry action and also close to their forward base at Eretria.