Oresteia IV: Athenian Democracy

Like other Ionian poleis, early Attica was organized into tribes--Geleontes, Hopletes, Argadeis, and Aigikoreis.  These tribes had a formal existence--they had special religious cults and priests, and they were dominated by the noble families.  So were the phratriai (brotherhoods), perhaps  12 into which the tribes were divided. Because each phratry was a third of a tribe, its territory--inalienable--was called a trittys (third), and most phratry members would have lived within the trittys.

The phratries had religious functions, but they also were essential in giving Athenians their social and civic identity.  Even after the tribal system was transformed, the old phratries continued to function.  Within each phratria or brotherhood, there were a number of kin-groups (genos) which we will call clans.  The nobler clans controlled both the phratries and the tribes.  Although Aristotle later speaks of there being 360 gene, the real number in the early days was probably lower.  We know of 60 actual names.

Since Athens had never been conquered, she did not experience the ethnic tensions that characterized many Dorian cities.  In Attica, there was no class of subjugated serfs ever ready to rise up against the masters.  Nor did she fail, as Thebes failed, to dominate her region: Attica, about the same size as Boeotia, was dominated by a single state, though the local communities had broad powers of self-government.  Athens did not, however, escape the social problems that led to the rise of tyrannies.  Cylon, Olympic victor 640 had married daughter of Theagenes tyrant of Megara and about 632 attempted a coup.  The archon Megacles foiled the conspiracy and though Cylon and brother escaped, his followers took refuge in temple of Athena on Acropolis.  Persuaded by Megacles, who promised them a fair trial, they gave up only to be killed immediately.  Source of the curse on Megacles and his clan, the Alcmeonidae.

The political order in Attica was similar to that of other Ionian cities: monarchy had given way to a broader aristocracy who ruled through a council.  These upper-class clans were called the Eupatridae, those of noble fathers, and they dominated the political system.  Down to the late 7th century, the Eupatrid families would have been the arbiters of disputes and would have decided both civil and criminal cases according to their memory of tradition.  Not long after the Cylonian conspiracy, however, a formal legal code was drawn up by Draco--perhaps to avoid a second attempted coup.  We know little of any provisions of this law code, other than that it was proverbial for its harshness.
The executive was made up of annually chosen archons or “rulers”, one of whom, the archon basileus, inherited the functions of the king; another, the polemarch, was war-leader.  The Athenian Boule, originally met on the Areopagus and consisted exclusively of former archons.  Thus both the archonhips and the Council were controlled by the Eupatrid class.
The other classes were the Farmers, who typically belonged to the same phratries as the Eupatrid class, the Demiourgoi--a term meaning craftsmen but had broader implications. (The demiourgoi, perhaps,  did not typically belong to phratries or clans, which were the basis of Athenian social and political life.  They were allowed to form orgeones, societies organized around a religious cult, and these societies came to fulfill some of the same functions as the phratries.  This is a much-disputed topic.) At the bottom were the paid farm laborers, known at least in later times as Thetes.

Membership in the assembly was limited to what was later called the zeugitae class, that is, those who could afford a yoke of oxen, the hoplites.  They may have met only to pass on emergency measures, like going to war.

By the end of the 7th century, Athens had succeeded in consolidating her territory and in expelling the Megarians from Salamis.  Her military success on Salamis was due in part to the leadership of Solon, a statesman of noble family but only moderate wealth.  A political and economic crisis, however, threatened to tear apart the Athenians.  A similar crisis, remember, led to the installation of tyrants in Mytilene, Sicyon, and Corinth about the same time.  The political crisis was simple: the well-to-do farmers who served in the army as hoplites wanted more say in the government than they were allowed as the members of the passive Ekklesia.

Compounding this problem was the fact that many poorer Athenians had fallen into debt.  Perhaps the constant fighting over Salamis had forced the farmers to neglect their land and crops.  Like more modern farmers, Athenians first mortgaged their lands, but if they lost their lands through debt (or never had them) Athenians could mortgage themselves and their families, and when they failed to pay up they were sold into slavery, not only in Attica itself but also overseas.  This system of debt slavery must have been permitted by the laws of Draco, which would have been in force.  Apparently the sequence went something like this:  to get needed money or food, a farmer pledged one sixth of his produce to the creditor and became a hektemoros.  If he failed to pay he became a serf on what had been his own property.  In some cases he (along with his family) could be sold as a slave and sent out of Attica.

The crisis reached such proportions that many Athenians were calling for a cancellation of debts and perhaps a redistribution of property.  On the other side the Eupatridae stood firm and offered no concessions.  Enter Solon, who as archon was trusted with the solution.  As an honorable and comparatively poor man, he was trusted by the poor and disenfranchised, but as a eupatrid himself, he was trusted with the rich not to attempt a revolutionary solution.  Solon’s solution was to abolish the system that allowed people to mortgage land or persons for loans, and he cancelled the debts themselves, releasing the farmers from their serfdom and giving them back their farms.  He did not, however, introduce any agrarian reform, that is redistribution of land.

Solon also reformed the politeia, by basing participation in politics not on inherited social class but on economic status.  He drew up four classes according to the amount of wealth they produced and/or possessed.  At the top were the pentakosiomedimnoi (500 bushel men), who alone were eligible for the most office of Tamias, treasurer.  Next were the hippies, the knights, who, with 300-500 bushels of grain per year, could afford the horse and equipment for cavalry service (if they wanted).  The knights could serve as archons (though not as treasurer) and other high offices; next were the zeugitae, which had formerly been used to designate the farmers who could afford a yoke of oxen and fight as hoplites.  Now these citizen-hoplites were defined as men who produced 2-300 bushels of grain or the equivalent per year.  They could now serve in public offices but only the minor ones.  The archonships were still reserved to the two higher classes.

The thetes were still at the bottom, though they were now defined not only by their status as laborers but also as people who earned less than 200 bushels per year.  In Solon’s system, thetes could now sit in the ekklesia, though they were not admitted to the Council or to any public office.  Since the assembly elected the magistrates and now also assumed, under the name Heliaea, the important function of a law court, the thetes actually gained a great deal of potential power.

In Solon’s system the Council of the Areopagus remained a powerful body of ex-archons, who watched for violations of the law, directed the archons in their duties, and had broad powers over managing the affairs of the polis.  When the Areopagus Council issued a summary judgment against an Athenian, there was no recourse.  It retained one very important legal function: jurisdiction over cases of murder and treason.  But along side the Areopagus Council, there now stood the Council of 400--100 from each tribe--which prepared the business for the Ekklesia to vote on.  This important function (which included the right to withhold proposals forever) had belonged to the Old Areopagus Council.  Solon picked the first councilors who served for life.  We have, however, too little information to be able to say how the Council of 400 were chosen or how members were replaced as they died.  Solon retired satisfied from his work, though both sides were dissatisfied.  According to the Eupatrids, he had done far too much, but the poor had expected a tyrannos who would revolutionize the system.  The moderation of his solution and the attempt to find compromise is typical of Attic politics at its best and explains why, except for the crisis at the end of the Peloponesian War, the Athenian social classes could cooperate in comparative harmony.

According to legend he went on a 10-year sabbatical trip after making the Athenians promise not to change the laws until he returned.  He had taken a giant step toward solving the economic crisis, but the Eupatrid families were still in the saddle, and their rivalries and antagonisms opened the way for one of them to seize power.

Pisistratus.

Solon had done his job well, but the underlying tensions that were undermining aristocratic government everywhere could not be entirely eliminated by amending the system.  In the years following his reform 594, we hear of two years in which there were no archons, and in 588 the archon Damasias illegally retained power for a second year.  But quite apart from this tendency to anarchy, the very size of Attica made it difficult to govern.

Attica, though unified in one commonwealth, was divided geographically: the coastal strip (paralia) going up to Sunium, the hill-country (diakria) around Mt. Parnes and Mt. Pentelicus, and the flatlands around Athens and Eleusis.  Each of these divisions tended to be dominated by one or more aristocratic clans.  In the mid 6th century, Megacles, the leader of the Alcemonid clan, was preeminent in the coastal area, and Lycurgus, leader of the Eteobutadae dominated the plains, while the Philaidae were the dominant force in the hill-country.  So the divisions were both territorial and clan-based.  In each of the most important clans there were powerful families that aimed at dominating all of Attica.  Two of them eventually succeeded.
Smart money would have bet on Megacles the Alcmeonid, who like Cylon had married into the family of a wealthy tyrant.   Megacles’ grandfather of the same name had foiled the Cylonian conspiracy.  The Megacles we are dealing with, however, had founded the family’s fortunes by marrying Agariste, daughter of Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, when Hippoclides of the Philaid clan danced his bride away. However, the Alcmeonids, who dominated coastal region, were perhaps too ostentatious in their wealth and ambition and they still lay under a curse.  Their chief rivals were, according to Herodotus, who is very partial to the Alcmeonids, Lycurgus (probably of the Eteoboutadae), who held sway in the plains surrounding the city and Eleusis and Pisistratus, (perhaps of a lesser house of the Philaids,) whose power center was in the hills.  Aristotle interprets the power struggle as a clash of economic and political interests.  Lycurgus, the defender of the old order, was on the right; the Alcmeonids, who spoke out for the demos, were the left, and Pisistratus formed a party at the center.  There may be some truth to this description but it misses the obvious fact that the parties were named after the regions their clans controlled, and, furthermore, that all three social classes could be found all over Attica.

As the conflict intensified, Pisistratus,  a war hero as polemarch (565) in the struggles with Megara, had himself slashed up (561) and asked for a bodyguard to protect him from his enemies.  The ruse succeeded and Pisistratus seized power for the first time.  It did not last, however: he had not got his hands firmly on the levers of money and power, and the other two factions made up their differences and united against him.  All the sources say he behaved well in his first period of rule.

To return to power, Pisistratus made a deal with his enemy Megacles, and agreed to marry his daughter in return for Alcmeonid support. But Pisistratus had sons and did not want to produce a rival who would be allied with a family that was both powerful and laboring under a curse.  So he refused to have normal relations with his wife--sexual abnormality is a theme, by the way, that is common in the stories of people who rule extralegally, from Periander, accused of molesting his wife’s corpse to the lurid tales told of President William Jefferson Clinton.  Megacles was not amused, and rounded up sufficient opposition to oust Pisistratus from power a second time.  Pisistratus, his family and supporters, spent 10 years of exile, building a base in friendly Eretria (Euboea), which had trading colonies in Thrace.  Pisistratus got rich on Thracian silver, and amassed his war chest, with contributions from friendly cities like Thebes, then gathered a mercenary army sufficient to seize power in 546.  This time, there was to be no more fooling around with alliances and half-measures.  He sent the Alcmeonids packing and ruled as absolute dictator.
He was by all accounts a successful ruler.  Athens prospered, and he continued some of the administrative reforms initiated by Solon. He is said to have made Athens a more peaceful place by confiscating weapons.  Story of rounding up people, leaving armor behind, picked up.  Praised by some historians but story has a familiar ring.

Athenian pottery was now taking over the Mediterranean market and Pisistratus grew rich on the taxes he imposed on produce and (probably) on import/export tariffs. To his credit, he used some of the money to help poorer farmers. He drove the Mytileneans out of Sigeum in the Troad and installed his son as local tyrant.  On Naxos, he set up his ally Lygdamis as tyrant and sent all the trouble-making Athenians to Naxos for safe keeping.  The court of Pisistratus attracted a glittering array of artistic celebrities.  Anacreon.  And until his death in 528/7, he ruled over a prosperous and peaceful city with a firm hand.

His sons, as is often the case, were not up to the job they inherited from their father.  Hippias was the actual ruler, but his brother Hipparchus, until he was assassinated by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, behaved arrogantly.  After his brother’s murder, Hippias became more suspicious and adopted harsher measures, which only brought his regime into worse repute.  At home, the Pisistratids had to face not only their old rivals in the Eteoboutadae clan, but also members of their own clan the Philaidae.  Miltiades, was descended from a long line of great men, including (it would seem) Cypselus of Corinth. He had made himself ruler in Thrace, married a Thracian princess, and like other Greeks who settled in Thrace, had grown rich on the silver.  He and his family, more powerful than Pisistratus’, cooperated with their clansmen in the early days, but they were also envious of their power. According to Herodotus, the Pisistratids had this Miltiades murdered.

The Pisistratids wisely but vainly tried coopt their rivals by conferring high office.  Miltiades, nephew of the friend of Pisistratus,  served as archon in 524, before being sent up to Thrace to take over from his late uncle.  It was he who advised the Ionians to destroy the bridge on which Darius would return from his Scythian expedition.   The archonship office was also granted to Cleisthenes, the son of Megacles and grand-son of Cleisthenes the tyrant.  Meanwhile, the Alcmeonidae in exile in Delphi were working overtime to arrange their triumphant return to Athens and to political power.  The year after the murder of Hipparchus, they seized Leipsydrion under Mt. Parnes, but they were ejected.  Hippias sought foreign alliances to prop up his power, and he married his daughter to the tyrant of Lampsacus who had good connections with the Persians, who approved of Greek tyrants who were usually their all.  The Alcmeonidae, however, wisely sought help from the enemy of all tyrants, Sparta.  Herodotus tells story that the Alcmeonids bribed Delphi by rebuilding the temple on a more lavish scale than they had contracted for, and for that reason the oracle kept telling the Spartans to expel the Athenian tyrant

The first Spartan expedition led by Cleomenes in 511 was repulsed by the Thessallian cavalry the Pisistradis had rented. A second expedition, not long afterwards in 510, was more successful and the Spartans, by a stroke of good luck, got hold of the children of the Pisistratids, and the entire family agreed to go into exile to Sigeum in the Troad, which the Pisistratids had acquired for Athens, where they never ceased plotting with the Persians for their restoration.  Despite the harshness of Hippias’ later years, Pisistratid rule had been, overall, a good thing.  They had acquired Sigeum and Delos, added Plataea and Hysiae to their mainland territory, and become, once again, the Mother City of the Ionians.  A symbol of this was the transfer of the Mss. of Homeric poems to Athens, where a special edition was prepared.
It was during this period that the most important Athenian festival was reorganized, the Panathanaea.  Athen’s birthday, celebrated every four years in the month of Hecatombaeon (high summer) with a grand procession, sacrifices and barbecues, and athletic games, even a competitive regatta. Much of the competition was tribal. Torch race from acropolis to light sacred fire on altar in agora.

The procession was the high point, as different groups brought the fruits of the earth, especially olive oil (her gift to man) and, most important of all, the new woolen peplos for her sacred image.  Might have been small in early days, but when statue was large, big as ship’s sail so someone got idea to bring peplos as sail of ship on wheels.

The festival was reorganized by the archon of 556/5  , the very Hippoclides of the Philaidae, who had been so careless in his dancing.  This Hippoclides claimed to be the twelfth descendant from the hero Ajax.  This reorganization probably took place before Pisistratus took power, but he must have seen the great advantage of such a festival in fostering pride and a sense of unity in the Athenian people.  He added competitions for Homeric rhapsodes and thus collected mss. of poems.

As Cleomenes and his Spartans withdrew, he may have thought he was leaving Athens in the safe hands of his friend Isagoras, probably a member of the Philaid clan and no friend to radical democracy.  Isagoras, who would have wanted to restrict the full privileges of citizenship to the higher classes, was elected archon in 508.  The Alcmeonids naturally turned to the less privileged class, the demos.  Their leader now was Cleisthenes, the son of Megacles and grandfather of the tyrant of Megara, after whom he was named.
Alarmed by the growing power of the Alcmeonids, Isagoras turned once again to Cleomenes, who arrived with a force of only 7,000 men and proceeded to banish the trouble-makers and establish Isagoras as the president of a small oligarchic council of 300 and abolished the Council of the Areopagus.  The Areopagus resisted and Cleomenes and his men took refuge on the Acropolis. Cleomenes, with Isagoras in tow, left Athens under a safe conduct agreement, and many of the oligarchs were killed.  Cleisthenes and his clan were invited back.  During this difficult period, Athens sent ambassadors to the Great King, seeking his help against the Spartans, who were above all other Greeks the open enemy of the Persians.   Persia demanded the usual tokens of submission, and the ambassadors gave them, though Athens later repudiated the submission.  This alliance with the Persians and the shift in Athenian opinion may have caused Cleisthenes’ banishment, he certainly disappears from history.

Cleisthenes, upon returning to Athens, had a two-fold task:  First, he had to live up to the expectation that he would reform the politeia and grant greater political privileges to the lower classes and disenfranchised.  Second, he had to organize the polis in such a way as to maximize the power of his own clan and minimize the potential power of the rivals of the Alcmeonids.  Here is what he did.

Cleisthenes’ most fundamental change was in the structure of tribes, phratries, and clans on which the Athenian political and electoral system was based.  Powerful families had been able to monopolize power within the phratries, because each phratry’s territory--the trittys--was controlled by the dominant clans and not by the craftsmen who belonged only to the orgeones.  Thus a noble clan could control the phratry and through the phratries have great influence over an entire tribe.

Cleisthenes eliminated the old tribes, which had a territorial base, and substituted 10 tribes that were entirely abstract, though each of the tribes was a assigned a hero with a religious cult.  The new power base would not be the phratry but the deme, a kind of village or neighborhood organization.  Demes already existed, both in name and in fact, and he generalized the system by establishing about 170.  Where large demes were already in existence, such as Athens, he split them.  These demes replaced the old naucraries as the basic political unit.  Demes kept records of who belonged and who did not--thus they determined who was a citizen.  Although when they were established, demes were purely territorial, Cleisthenes made deme-membership hereditary (He probably had not choice, it was the way Greeks thought), and even if someone moved away, he still belonged to the original deme.

Attica was now divided up into the three sectors: the city, the coast, and the interior, each with roughly the same population.  The demes in each sector were put into 10 trittyes.  These trittyes were deliberately not territorial.  Then by drawing lots, he drew one trittys for each of the three sectors and those three trittyes now made up one of his new tribes.

For constituting the Boule, which now consisted of 500 members, the new system was also based on the demes.  Each deme, based on its population, elected a certain number of electors, who had to be members of the Zeugite class.  From this mass of electors, the each tribe selected 50 council members by drawing lots.  This indirect system was supposed to eliminate influence.  The Areopagus, made up of ex-Archons, who were still elected directly by the mass of citizens, continued to have much the same powers as before.  Later when the archons were chosen by lot, the Areopagus would lose prestige and its powers would be reduced.  The equalization of access and political rights went under the slogan of isonomia.

Freed from the Pisistratids, Athens gained new vigor and in 506, after Cleomenes invaded again only to withdraw, she defeated both a Theban invasion aimed at Eleusis and an attack by Chalcis.  She settled 4000 Athenians on the territory of the defeated Chalcidians--the fruits of empire are sweet in the early phase.

While both Hippias and Cleisthenes had been careful not to offend Persia, the Athenians now eagerly embraced the Ionian Revolt and sent both a fleet and soldiers. Miltiades, the Athenian tyrant of the Chersonese, took part in the fighting and as the Persians prepared to advance, he returned to Athens, where he became the leading political figure favoring resistane to Persia, though he was prosecuted for his Thracian tyranny by Xanthippus, who married Clisthtenes’ niece or daughter Agariste. The real motive for the prosecution may have had to do with Miltiades’ vigorous support for the Ionian Revolt and his hostility to Persia.  The Alcmeonids probably were continuing to oppose such policies, and as a Philaid nobleman, Miltiades posed a threat to their influence.

With the suppression of the Ionian revolt, it was only a matter of time before Darius and his son-in-law Mardonius, whom he had made military commander in 492, came for revenge.  This period saw a new face in Athenian politics: Themistocles, who was eponymous archon in 493.  Themistocles was made general of his tribe in 490 and began development and fortification of the port of Piraeus, located on a promontory 4 miles southwest of Athens.  The earlier harbor at Phalerum was open and unprotected.  The city of Piraeus was laid out in 450 by Hippodamus of Miletus, the town planner who invented the grid, and it was joined to Athens by long fortifying walls.

Athens was not prepared for war with Persia.  Her land rival and enemy Thebes was happy to ally with the Persians, while her island rival, Aegina was resisting the Spartans, who had tried to detach her from the Persian alliance.  While the Athenians were celebrating a festival of Poseidon on cape Sunium, the Aeginetans attacked and captured the sacred ship and kidnapped several Athenians.  This was a sacrilegious act that violated the accepted Greek understanding.  Athens was now justified in going on the attack and after failing to start a democratic uprising, she sent 70 ships to attack Aegina.  They defeated a larger Aeginetan fleet and withdrew losing only 4 ships.  This naval victory must have encouraged the anti-Persian forces in the city.

It was Themistocles and Miltiades, not the Alcmeonids who would lead Athens in the greatest crisis of her history.  Cleisthenes drops out of the picture entirely, though in one story he is the friend and benefactor of Aristides, the political enemy of Themistocles.  Another significant clue is a story, dismissed by Herodotus, that at Marathon in 490 the Alcmeonids had flashed a shield-signal to the Persians.  Perhaps this is propaganda from a rival clan or the usual paranoid story that goes round at such times, but it may well be true.  Herodotus’ only defense is that they hated tyranny and would not have wanted to restore the family of Pisistratus, but Megacles, father of Cleisthenes, had collaborated to put Pisistratus back in power, and for all we know the Alcmeonids may have only promised to allow the Pisistratids to return and recover their property, while reserving real power to the Alcmeonid clan.

We shall talk more about the evolution of the democratic system set up by Cleisthenes.  All in all, Cleisthenes’ complex system of tribes and demes seems as silly as our own electoral college.  But the changes had a purpose: first, to prevent the emergence of economic/ territorial coalitions, dominated by major clans,  that had produced the civil strife that enabled the Pisistratidae to take and hold power, and second, to eliminate any threat to the predominance of the Alcmeonidae, whose wealth and experience of exile made them a coherent political force under any imaginable system.  Perhaps the wisdom of

Cleisthenes’ project is shown in the fact that the Alcmeonidae in the next generations were led, not by a son of Cleisthenes but by his son-in-law or nephew-in-law Xanthippus and Xanthippus’ son Pericles and later by Pericles’ nephew Alcibiades.  The more conservative forces, on the other hand, were lead by by members of the Philaidae, Cimon the son of Miltiades and Thucydides son of Milesias and a relative of Thucydides the historian.  If you learn nothing else from this lecture, please take away the knowledge that Greek and Roman politics, even when it was about ideology and issues, always remained local and tribal.