Aspects of Greek History (750–323BC)

by Terry Buckley

  The deme and tribal reforms of Cleisthenes

  The deme

  Local government had previously been under the control of the phratries (brotherhoods) which were dominated by the aristocratic clans (gene) for the reasons outlined above. The ‘phratry’ system emphasized and reinforced the power of the aristocracy because its structure was by nature hierarchical: all national directives from central government, such as on matters of taxation or military service, would be passed to the phratry leader who would be responsible for the organization and supervision of all that was required from the local community. This leadership of the phratry was hereditary and therefore undemocratic, as it was neither accountable nor open to re-election. This control of the phratries also gave to the aristocratic clans the undisputed right to decide who were and who were not legitimate Athenian citizens, since membership of the phratry was the sole formal criterion for citizenship before Cleisthenes – a power that was used with dire consequences for the new citizens after the fall of Hippias (Ath. Pol. 13.5 – see above). Although Aristotle emphasizes the incorporation of these new citizens into the body politic as a primary motive for Cleisthenes’ deme reform, he also strongly implies that it was aimed at breaking the aristocratic monopoly of power at local level (Ath. Pol. 21.2–4).

  Thus the reform of local government was one of the major objectives of Cleisthenes. He removed all political functions from the phratries, allowing them to continue in a purely social and religious capacity (Ath. Pol. 21.6). In its place he established the deme as the main political institution of local government. The demes were local communities of different sizes, similar to villages, which had probably existed in rural Attica from the seventh century (699–600), but which in the city and its suburbs had to be established for the first time by Cleisthenes; there was a total of 139 or 140 demes throughout the whole of Attica. The definitive difference between the deme and the phratry was its democratic constitution. The new leader of the deme was the ‘demarch’, now in all probability elected for one year by his fellow demesmen. Furthermore, all the issues that affected the deme were decided upon by the deme-assemblies, which every Athenian citizen of eighteen years or over was entitled to attend in his own deme. Each deme would also be responsible for the maintenance of its own property, of an up-to-date register of its membership and of its own cults and shrines, which were established (as well as the new tribal cults) as a new focus of loyalty for demesmen in competition with the aristocratic-dominated phratry cults.

  Cleisthenes ensured that membership of a deme would not only constitute Athenian citizenship but also conceal the identity of the new citizens:

  He made those, who lived in each of the demes, fellow demesmen of each other so that they would not reveal the new citizens by calling them by their father’s name, but by their deme name; this is the reason why the Athenians call themselves by their deme names.

  (Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 21.4)

  Thus equality of status within the deme was made a major feature of the reform. It was also effective in weakening the local kinship organization by giving the name of a clan to the new deme with its new citizens. A good example of this is the allocation of the aristocratic name ‘Boutad’ to a deme, since every demesman, however humble or foreign his origins, would from now on share this name with the actual descendants of the aristocrat Boutas. So effective was this that later in the fourth century the clan of the ‘Boutadai’ felt the need to rename themselves the ‘Eteoboutadai’ (‘the real descendants of Boutas’) in an attempt to preserve some degree of distinctiveness. Deme membership became hereditary from the time of registration under Cleisthenes, and all future descendants retained membership of that particular deme wherever they resided in future generations.

  In this way, the deme became the centre of social life but, more importantly, of political life. The deme assembly was a miniature of the Ecclesia (Assembly), and supplied the perfect training-ground for those who wished to take an active role in the decision-making of the state at a national level. In addition, membership of the deme was a pre-requisite for the position of councillor in the Boule of 500 (see below), for each deme was represented on the national council by a fixed quota of councillors in proportion to its size in 508/7. The deme was essential for the development of ‘radical’ democracy in the later fifth century. The experience of participating in the deme assemblies, of serving as a demarch, as a councillor in the Boule and in the courts, gradually engendered among the ordinary citizens the self-confidence and self-belief in their ability to make an effective contribution to the government of Athens. Later, as a result of this experience, came the desire to undertake the total and direct control of the government of the state by themselves.

  The tribes

  Cleisthenes divided the whole of Attica into three geographical areas: the ‘Coast’ (‘Paralia’), the ‘Inland’ (‘Mesogeia’) and the ‘City’ (‘Astu’). Each of these three areas had ten sub-divisions called trittyes (sing. ‘trittys’)or ‘thirds’, namely ten trittyes in each area, thirty in all. A trittys consisted of a number of demes, ranging from as few as one to as many as nine demes, which were usually close together geographically but not always (see below; see Map 3). Then one trittys from the Coast, one trittys from the Inland and one trittys from the City were selected and put together to form one of Cleisthenes’ ten new tribes; this process was repeated for the other nine tribes – thus the 139 or 140 demes were divided among the 30 trittyes which, in turn, were divided among the ten tribes (Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 21.2–4).

  Aristotle states that the selection of the three trittyes for each tribe was carried out by the drawing of lots (Ath. Pol. 24.1), but archaeological evidence concerning the size of the trittyes and the location of some of the trittyes in certain tribes (to the advantage of the Alcmaeonids – see above) suggest that a deliberate manipulation of the selection process was undertaken. Fourth-century inscriptional evidence has revealed the quota of councillors that most of the demes sent to the Boule of 500 and, although there are difficulties in assigning all the demes to their correct Coast, Inland and City trittyes, it is still clear that there was a substantial difference in the number of councillors that each trittys sent to the Boule of 500. For example, the inscription (IG II2 1750), which recorded the award of a crown for excellence to the 50 councillors of Tribe 10 (Antiochis) in 334/3, lists the quota of councillors from each of the tribe’s demes; thus the quota from each of the three trittyes can be deduced with some reliability: 27 from the Coast, 13 from the Inland and 10 from the City. Most scholars agree that the ten tribes needed to be approximately equal in size, since they provided the framework for the ‘hoplite’ army, divided into ten tribal regiments, and for the Boule of 500, consisting of 50 councillors from each of the ten tribes. Unless all the 30 trittyes or all the trittyes in each of the three geographical areas were equal in size, selection of the trittyes by the drawing of lots would have resulted in a wide variation in the size of the tribes. This would have disrupted the effectiveness of the army due to under-strength

  Map 3 Cleisthenes’ tribal reforms

  regiments, and limited the ability of small tribes to provide sufficient councillors owing to the rule that no councillor could serve more than twice in his lifetime. Therefore, either Aristotle was mistaken, possibly because he was influenced by the widespread use of lot in fifth- and fourth-century democracy and assumed that it must have been used in the most fundamental of Cleisthenes’ democratic reforms, or Cleisthenes claimed to be using the drawing of lots, while secretly manipulating the allocation of the trittyes.

  Aristotle supports the view that Cleisthenes’ tribal reforms were motivated by his desire to advance the cause of democracy:

  (21.2) He first divided everyone into ten tribes instead of the old four tribes, wanting to mix them up so that more citizens would have a share in the running of the state (‘politeia’). … (21.3) The reason why he did not arrange the citizens into twelve tribes was to avoid
using the existing trittyes (for the four tribes had twelve trittyes) which would have prevented the mixing up of the common people.

  (Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 21.2–3)

  Although the Greek word ‘politeia’ can mean ‘citizenship’, and therefore the above quotation could be read as ‘so that more citizens would have a share in the citizenship’ and be referring to his support of the recently disfranchised citizens, the chosen translation in the quotation seems more convincing as it reinforces the statement of Aristotle in his previous chapter that Cleisthenes won the backing of the people by his promise to ‘hand over the control of the state to the common people’ (Ath. Pol. 20.2). If this is correct, then Aristotle believed that Cleisthenes made the ‘mixing-up’ of the population the central element of his reforms to ensure greater democracy in Athens.

  There is much to commend Aristotle’s belief. The sixth-century rivalry and feuding between the factions had been caused by the ambitions of a few aristocratic families or clans who were able to use their dominance of certain regions of Attica as a political weapon. Cleisthenes realized that these regional power blocs, with their aristocratic leaders sustained in power by their friends and dependants through the traditional network of old loyalties and allegiances, were the greatest obstacle to political stability. Consequently, there had to be a radical reorganization of the citizen body, and therefore of the four Ionic tribes, on the grounds that the political dependence of the common people could only be broken by political separation from their aristocratic leaders. It was for this reason that Cleisthenes embarked on such a complex and artificial reform of the tribes, deliberately rejecting a much easier tribal reform programme that was at hand. He could have stopped after the reform of local government, where the emphasis on the democratic demes at the expense of aristocratic-led phratries would have led to a gradual, slower but less effective democratization of the state. He could have made use of the existing twelve trittyes of the four Ionic tribes as the basis for twelve new tribes or, alternatively, formed each of his ten new tribes by combining three trittyes from the same region. These options were ruled out, because they would have left intact the regional power of the aristocratic families and clans. Only the artificial creation of ten new tribes, virtually a re-founding of Athens, could provide the necessary fragmentation of the aristocrats’ former power-base. At the same time, the ‘mixing-up’ of three different areas of Attica within each tribe brought a greater cohesion between different groups of Athenians, and continued the process, begun by the Peisistratids, of the unification of the state.

  The creation of these new trittyes and the evidence of their distribution among the tribes add plausibility to the belief that Cleisthenes desired to separate some people and to bring together others. Control of local religious cult centres was one of the effective means by which the aristocratic families exerted their power over their dependants. Therefore it is not surprising that the deme of Hecale, a local cult centre in the home district of Isagoras, was attached to four distant demes to make the Inland trittys of Tribe 4, when its inclusion in the closer Inland trittys of Tribe 10 would have been a more natural geographical arrangement (see Map 3). In the same way, the non-allocation of the deme of Probalinthos to the Coastal trittys of either Tribe 9 or Tribe 2 reveals political manipulation, designed to split and undermine an aristocratic regional power-base. Not only did Probalinthos form the old cult-organization of the Tetrapolis with Marathon, Oenoe and Tricorynthus, but also provided the geographical link between the plain of Marathon and the plain of Brauron, the coastal trittyes of Tribe 9 and Tribe 2, respectively, which were situated in the territory from where the Peisistratids drew their strongest support. Cleisthenes’ removal of Probalinthos from this Peisistratid stronghold and his allocation of it to the distant Coastal trittys of Tribe 3 served two purposes: first, it weakened the Tetrapolis by taking away one of its key constituents and, even more so, by adding Rhamnous in its place which had its own very different local cult and traditions; and second, it inserted a politically separate enclave between these two politically aligned districts (see Map 3). The introduction and encouragement of cults and sacrifices within the trittyes and the tribes offered further competition to the old phratry cults.

  However, this deliberate separation and fragmentation of the regional power blocs of the aristocrats, which did so much to set Athens on the path of full democracy, were not motivated purely by altruism. As stated earlier, Cleisthenes appears to have consolidated the dominance of his own family, the Alcmaeonids, in their strongholds by his assignment of trittyes in Tribes 1, 7 and 10. Tribe 10 (Antiochis) provides a good example of this. The City trittys consisted of only one deme which, as archaeological evidence shows, was the city headquarters of the Alcmaeonids. In addition, the Coastal trittys on the south-west coast of Attica was probably their original home district and the centre of the Alcmaeonid-led faction of the Paralia (The Coast) in the first half of the sixth century (599–550): Aristotle specifically states that the three former factions took their name from the area in which they farmed (Ath. Pol. 13.5). Although the Alcmaeonids were the predominant political force in the City and Coastal trittyes of Tribe 10, Cleisthenes still manipulated the Inland trittys to his family’s advantage by creating a long thin trittys, stretching from the borders of the City to the north-east of Attica with Mount Pendeli dividing the trittys geographically into two. The inhabitants of this trittys had very little previous experience or knowledge of each other, would experience problems in organizing themselves and, far more importantly, would find it difficult to attend tribal assemblies in Athens: such a disparate and divided trittys would offer little threat to the Alcmaeonids in tribal elections and business. Thus Cleisthenes’ tribal reforms were a major, if not the most important, factor in the development of Athenian democracy, but were also a means of improving the political standing of the Alcmaeonids at the expense of their opponents.

  The development of democracy

  Herodotus was in no doubt that Cleisthenes was the founder of Athenian democracy, even though he was the grandson of a tyrant:

  and thus the name of the Alcmaeonids was spread throughout Greece. From this marriage [i.e. Megacles and Agariste] there was born Cleisthenes who established the tribes and the democracy for the Athenians.

  (Herodotus 6.131.1)

  However, as Herodotus was writing in the third quarter of the fifth century (449–425) when ‘radical’ democracy had become established in the years after Ephialtes’ reforms in 462/1 (see Chapter 13), his judgement about Cleisthenes is anachronistic since he has confused results with motive. The influential events of 511/0 to 508/7 which culminated in his reform programme reveal that he was motivated, not by a deeply held and long-standing political principle that the government of Athens should be placed fully in the hands of the common people, but by the desire to eliminate the root causes of aristocratic-led factionalism which had produced the tyranny and had provoked his clash with Isagoras. His task was to find a way of destroying this destabilizing political power of the factions, but without overthrowing the political leadership of the aristocracy (including his family), whose expertise was essential for the conduct of public affairs and the army.

  His solution was twofold: to ‘mix up’ the people so that the old aristocratic families and clans lost control over their dependants; and to establish a balanced constitution in which the increased power of the people in the Ecclesia (Assembly) and the Boule of 500 would act as a check and counterbalance to the upper-class public officials, such as the nine archons, and the council of the Areopagus. The ‘mixing-up’ policy, based upon the reform of the tribes and the demes, underpinned his institutional reforms. The replacement of the four (allegedly) kinship tribes by ten artificial tribes, of the twelve old trittyes by thirty new ones, of the phratries by the demes as the main unit of local government, and of kinship by locality as the criterion for citizenship, had far-reaching political and social consequences because they undermined the regional
power-bases and the consequent political dominance of the aristocratic clans. However, his creation of the City as one of the three regional areas with ten trittyes, where the top aristocratic families had their headquarters, guaranteed that aristocratic influence in all ten tribes would be strong, but not overwhelming, since it would be limited by other tribal members from two different regions of Attica except, of course, in the case of his own family.

  His reform of the political institutions, blending aristocratic and democratic elements in the government of the state, produced a moderate democracy in which power was shared between the aristocracy and the common people. High office was still the preserve of the upper classes, the economic elite, since he did not abolish the Solonian property qualifications. In addition, he did not reduce the power of the archonship, which had been restored to its former level of importance upon the fall of the tyranny, and whose authority and prestige were further enhanced by the restoration of direct election by the people and the removal of interference by the tyrants (Thucydides 6.54.6). The eponymous (chief) archon was still the most powerful public official in the management of civil affairs; the ‘polemarch’ still held the position of commander-in-chief of the army; the ‘basileus’ was still in charge of state religion; and all nine archons presumably regained the judicial powers that had been given to them by Solon. All archons, after their year of office, became life-long members of the council of the Areopagus whose religious and judicial powers (see Chapter 13) appear to have been untouched by Cleisthenes – hardly surprising as he was a member of that powerful body.