Chapter II—
Athenian Democracy
We shall be concerned, in this chapter, specifically and somewhat narrowly, with the establishment and extension of the Athenian democracy between 508/7 and c. 450 B.C.[1] This extraordinary development occurred, of course, within a larger social, economic, and political context, which a more ambitious study might well include as an indispensable preliminary to the great event. There is the special character of the population of Attica, ethnically homogenous and sharply divided from its neighbors.[2] The sense of community thereby engendered facilitated the eventual unification of Attica into a polis of unusually large dimensions and local diversity with its center lodged in the city of Athens, while, on the other hand, the practical isolation of the people would eventually give rise to a combination of ethnic pride and xenophobia. Then there is material progress, which had given economic power to a class of people whose wealth lay in merchandise and money, not in land, the traditional basis of membership in the political
[1] Our concern here is with institutional change, the process of transferral of political power from a narrow elite to the community of Athenian citizens. For a study of the wider implications of this change and, particularly, a comparison of the nature of the ancient Athenian demokratia with modern theories and contemporary forms of "democracy," see the interesting paper by M. H. Hansen, "Was Athens a Democracy?" Hist. Fil. Medd. 59 (Copenhagen, 1989), passim.
[2] The Boeotians to the north spoke Aeolic Greek; the Aeginetans in the Saronic Gulf to the west spoke Doric Greek; the Isthmus of Corinth, which connected Attica to the Dorian Peloponnesus, was likewise Dorian; see C. D. Buck, The Greek Dialects (Chicago, 1955), pp. 3ff.
community, ensuring its ultimate assimilation into the government at the side of the landed aristocracy. Moderns associate the establishment of the timocracy with Solon's reforms and connect with them the rise of Athens as a commercial city open to exotic and broadening influence.[3] Meanwhile, the invention and diffusion of the Greek alphabet fostered a higher level of literacy throughout Hellas than was achieved by any prior culture. By reducing the sounds of words to their phonetic elements, the alphabet permitted stored knowledge to become accessible to the community and special groups became superfluous as the repositories of sacral and legal traditions.[4] But these, and many other characteristics of Athenian archaic culture, are facilitating changes providing for the possibility of political change rather than predeterminants of the actual course on which Cleisthenes embarked. Since the introduction of democracy is susceptible to investigation as a coherent and independent problem in its own right, we shall focus directly on this subject without preamble.
The city of Athens was liberated from the tyranny of the Peisistratids in 511/10 by a force of Spartan soldiers, led by King Cleomenes, and a group of Athenian exiles who made common cause with them.[5] We know virtually nothing about the four years between the liberation and 508/7, the year of the archonship of Isagoras, the traditional date of the reform of Cleisthenes. Reconstruction of this brief, but important, period is open to a number of different hypotheses.[6] We take it as certain that the friends of Cleomenes installed an oligarchic government in 511/10, and that the Alcmeonids had no share in it because of their Peisistratid ties and, what may be the same thing, their ancestral opposition to the Athenian nobility. Nor does the Alcmeonid claim to the liberation of Athens bear on this matter. This was a vicarious contribution without effect on the actual leadership among the clans in exile or within the group of oligarchs preferred by Cleomenes, who had the power and, we may assume, the desire, to back his friends.[7] Since this
[3] Wade-Gery, Essays, pp. 86–115, Hignett, HAC, pp. 99–107, Rhodes, AP, pp. 136ff.
[4] L. H. Jeffery, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece (Oxford, 1961), pp. 1–42; E. A. Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton, 1982), pp. 82–88.
[5] Hdt. 5.64–65; Thuc. 6.54–59; Arist. Ath. Pol. 19; see Busolt, 2.396–99.
[6] E.g., Busolt, 2.400–405; Hignett, HAC, pp. 124–26; D. M. Lewis, "Cleisthenes and Attica," Historia 12 (1963), 36–40; Ostwald, Nomos, pp. 137ff.
[7] See ch. 1, p. 20. On the Alcmeonid claim, see Fornara, "The Cult of Harmodius and Aristogeiton," Philologus 114 (1970), 155–80; "Hellanicus and an Alcmeonid Tra-dition," Historia 17 (1968), 381–83; ibid., "The 'Tradition' about the Murder of Hipparchus," 400–424; Rhodes, AP, p. 190; on Herodotus and Alcmeonid claims in general, see ch. 1, n. 28.
was the government Cleisthenes destroyed in 508/7, it is a logical inference that he played no part in its leadership. Now Herodotus 5.66 records a "struggle" between Isagoras and Cleisthenes, in which Cleisthenes, succumbing to his "rival" took the people, hitherto "rejected," into partnership with himself, and on the strength of that combination overcame his enemies and commenced his reform, defined by Herodotus in 6.131 as the new tribal system and the democracy.[8]
Certain conclusions seem justified. Cleisthenes' opposition to the oligarchy and alliance with the people are consistent with the history of the family as we know it.[9] We can readily believe, therefore, that in a struggle for power in 508/7 Cleisthenes managed a coup d'état in a counterreaction against the post-Peisistratid government. The question we would like to answer is the extent to which he and his followers were animated by a positive political program as well as by the fervent desire to clear away a reactionary government. What did Cleisthenes offer the people when he inspired them to rebellion?[10] Was the revolution rationalized as the establishment of democracy and, if so, how was that idea understood? Or did he give power to the people as a means of ensuring his own predominance as their leader without either recognizing or intending to create a new form of government premised on "equality of the law"?
Whether democracy as a theoretical form of government antedated or postdated Cleisthenes' reform is a real and serious question. Since we are, apparently, witnesses to the origins of political institutions, we cannot blandly presume that theory is prior to practice. When Cleisthenes established the new government, its potentialities were as un-
[8] Cf. Arist. Ath. Pol. 20.1. Interpretations of this incident are as diverse as they are numerous; see, e.g., T. J. Cadoux, "The Athenian Archons from Kreon to Hypsichides," JHS 68 (1948), 114–16 n. 249, Fornara, "The Diapsephismos of Ath. Pol. 13.5," CP 65 (1970), 243–46, Ostwald, Nomos, pp. 142–45, Ostwald, Sovereignty, pp. 16–18; cf. D. J. McCargar, "Isagoras, Son of Teisandros, and Isagoras, Eponymous Archon of 508/7," Phoenix 28 (1974), 275–81. The assertion in Ath. Pol. 20.1–2 that Isagoras was both the friend of the tyrants and the guest-friend of Cleomenes can be only half true; Aristotle probably inferred that Isagoras, Cleisthenes' enemy, was a friend of the Peisistratids because Alcmeonids were in his opinion their inveterate foes. See Rhodes at Ath. Pol. 20.1.
[9] Ch. 1, pp. 14ff.
[10] Cf. Ostwald, Nomos, p. 149.
known as its "superstructure" was inchoate.[11] The movement to empower "the many" was initiated chiefly (one may suppose) out of aversion to the domination of "the few," and though it must have been clearly understood that "the People of the Athenians" intended to take ultimate responsibility for the conduct of political affairs, it was a newly charted course into unknown seas on which the Athenians set themselves. To what degree, then, does the historical record legitimate the inference (adopted by Aristotle and many moderns) that the motives of Cleisthenes' reforms may reasonably be conflated with the ideological ramifications "democracy" exhibited in the last half of the fifth century, when our evidence begins to accumulate?
The complete absence of any record of political debate, much less the philosophical analysis of Athenian democracy—or of democracy in the abstract—until the second half of the fifth century impedes our search for Cleisthenic intentions. This search is further complicated by our imperfect knowledge of the reforms themselves. Questions immediately arise. We know from Herodotus (6.131.1) that Cleisthenes was responsible for the great tribal reform and that he was credited with the establishment of the democracy. Democracy to Herodotus (3.80.6) meant "the rule of the many" in which the magistracies were apportioned by lot, the magistrates were accountable to the people, and the people as a whole made the final decisions in all public business.[12] Not least important, Herodotus characterized this form of government as one entitled to the epithet isonomia. By this he meant either "the equal distribution of the rights of citizenship" or the "equality of the law."[13] As to Cleisthenes, however, Herodotus, who was capable of anachronism in constitutional matters, hardly intended to vouch for more than that the Alcmeonid was the acknowledged founder of the regime now flourishing. Though it is possible that Herodotus assumed that the character of this regime, like "oligarchy" and "monarchy," was fixed from the time of its foundation, the assumption, if understandable, is demonstrably incorrect.[14] Indeed, if an argument from the silence of our sources can be regarded as final, Cleisthenes accomplished the tribal
[11] See Ostwald, Nomos, pp. 161–67, with ML 8 = Fornara 19 for conceivable precedents.
[12] Cf. Eur. Supp. 404–8 and Hansen, Hist. Fil. Medd. 59 (1989), 16–17.
[14] The Athenian democracy of the last half of the fifth century was significantly different in character from the politeia of 508/7. Plutarch notes the distinction obliquely in Per. 3.2; see ch. 1, pp. 25ff., and pp. 61ff. below.
reform and installed a new boule but nothing more; and even if we persist in labeling the immediately subsequent legislation (Ath. Pol. 22) as "Cleisthenic" little is gained in our effort to comprehend the direction of his legislative aims. These measures—the introduction of the bouleutic oath and the institution of the board of the ten generals—were no more than concomitants of the same tribal reform. The point is not trivial. Cleisthenes' shadowy position impedes our interpretation of the character of the reform. Since we possess no biographical information about Cleisthenes useful in this connection, it is obvious that we have only his work as a guide to his intentions. On the other hand, our inability to connect him firmly with legislation other than the tribal change and (at best) strictly associated measures drastically limits our ability to estimate his constitutional goals.
Another means of identifying the intended character of the revolution would be to determine the name by which it was called. The term employed should connote something of its purpose. Here the absence of contemporary evidence poses an insuperable difficulty. We cannot bridge the gap between the last half of the fifth century and Cleisthenes' epoch except by inference, since the relevant literary and epigraphical tradition does not commence until the middle of the century and, obviously, there is no guarantee that a word applied to Athenian democracy at a later time was in place earlier as well. And here the stakes are high. The danger is not merely that inference cannot be conclusive in a problem of this type; if pressed, nomenclature by inference has the potential of becoming misinformation by establishing the "character" of the regime on the "evidence" of the name we would like to give it.
Modern scholars, in their search for the original name, "label," or "banner" of the early democracy, have generally expressed a preference for "isonomia," though "demokratia" also remains on the field as an obvious candidate.[15] That demokratia was the term initially employed is
[15] Demokratia has the best claim, a posteriori; see M. H. Hansen, "The Origin of the Term demokratia, " LCM 11 (1986), 35–36. Most scholars opt for isonomia: Wilamowitz, AuA, 2.319; J. A. O. Larsen, "Cleisthenes and the Development of the Theory of Democracy at Athens," in Essays in Political Theory Presented to G. H. Sabine (Ithaca, N.Y., 1948), pp. 1–16, esp. p. 6; R. Sealey, "The Origins of Demokratia, " CSCA 6 (1974), 253–95; M. I. Finley, "The Freedom of the Citizen in the Greek World," Talanta 7 (1976), 10; K. Raaflaub, "Zum Freiheitsbegriff der Griechen," in Soziale Typenbegriffe im alten Griechenland und ihr Fortleben in den Sprachen der Welt, vol. 4 (Berlin, 1981), pp. 266–67, with n. 694; Rhodes, AP, p. 261. V. Ehrenberg, "Origins of Democracy," Historia 1 (1950), 535, recognized that isonomia was not a form of government, and G. Vlastos, "Isonomia politiké," in J. Mau and E. G. Schmidt, eds., Isonomia: Studien zurGleichheitvorstellung im griechischen Denken (Berlin, 1964), p. 8, considered the term "more a banner than a label," an idea developed by Ostwald, Nomos, pp. 97, 112–13, who sees it as the "principle of political equality"; cf. Fornara, Philologus 114 (1970), 155–80, and H. W. Pleket, "Isonomia and Kleisthenes: A Note," Talanta 4 (1972), 63–81.
suggested by the fact that this word was used as the invariable appellation of the Athenian government, without substitution or exception, in the second half of the fifth century, whenever the institutional character of the government was defined.[16] Other indications exist attesting to the knowledge and use of this term perhaps as early as the 470s. One disadvantage of the word demokratia (if it is a disadvantage) is that the term is rather more expressive of factional supremacy (the power, kratos, of the people, demos ) than of political egalitarianism,[17] and this may help to account (we suppose) for the predilection of some scholars for the other term, isonomia, which radiates in the most positive way one of the most impressive qualities of the mature democracy, "equality of the law"—if that, in fact, is the meaning of the term.
The possibility that isonomia, meaning "equality of rights and power,"[18] served either as the "slogan" of democracy or, less credibly, as its official designation arises from a set of somewhat complex considerations. The point of departure of this hypothesis is Herodotus's reference to isonomia in 3.80.6. Here, the "rule of the many" is stated by Otanes (in the "Great Debate" of the Persian nobles just before Darius's ascension of the throne) to possess "the most beautiful of names, isonomia. " The use of this term, therefore, as the predicate of democracy[19] guarantees its intimate and special association with democracy in the latter half of the fifth century. However, the likelihood that the term may have been older still seems supported by its appearance in an Attic drinking song (skolion ) celebrating the act of tyrannicide committed by Harmodius and Aristogeiton in 514 against Hipparchus son of Peisistratus.[20] Hipparchus was the younger brother of Hippias, the tyrant of
[16] Demokratia is first attested in Ps.-Xen. 1.4 and passim. For his date (the 440s), see n. 86 below. On the putative evidence of Aesch. Supp. 604, Antiphon 6.45, and IG i 37, see Hansen, LCM 11 (1986), 35–36; cf. also Davies, pp. 359f. It should be noted that the Athenians referred to themselves in decrees as "the multitude" and "the demos. " For the poor attestation of the term isonomia in classical Athens, see Fornara, Philologus 114 (1970), 175–76; Hansen, Hist. Fil. Medd. 59 (1989), 23–24.
[17] See R. Sealey, "The Origin of Demokratia," CSCA 6 (1973), 274–83. On the ambiguity of the term kratos, see, e.g., Ar. Frogs 1138ff.
[18] Ostwald, Nomos, p. 154.
[19] See, chiefly, ibid., pp. 98ff.
[20] Four versions of the song appear in Athenaeus 15.695ab (skolia nos. 10–13 = Fornara 39). The first and fourth state that the tyrannicides achieved isonomia in Athens.
Athens and head of the family, and his assassination made Harmodius and Aristogeiton national heroes almost instantly. Now in one of the four versions of the song as it is recorded by Athenaeus (15.695ab), the words are as follows:
I shall bear my sword in a branch of myrtle
Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton
When they killed the tyrant
And achieved isonomia in Athens.
The skolion does not exactly bear its meaning on its sleeve. The tyrannicides were slain in 514, having accomplished the assassination of Hipparchus, not the establishment of isonomia in the sense imputed to it by Herodotus and claimed for it by some moderns. If isonomia is properly used in this drinking song, its meaning must be figurative, suggesting, perhaps, that Harmodius and Aristogeiton established the "equality of the law" by applying this principle to the removal of a tyrant by his assassination.[21]In vacuo, this meaning is perfectly acceptable. We need not quibble (like Thucydides in 6.53.3, 55, 59.2) about the fact that Hippias, not Hipparchus, was the tyrant par excellence, and continued to rule, above the law, for a few years more. It is enough that the Athenians early regarded Harmodius and Aristogeiton as "the tyrannicides," dedicating a statue to them glorifying the deed in this character shortly after Hippias's expulsion.[22] The difficulty attaching to this view is simply the close association of the word isonomia in Herodotus with political democracy as a governmental form.[23] But the logical
[21] See Fornara, Philologus 114 (1970), 170–80.
[22] The statues were erected soon after the expulsion of the Peisistratids; see Pliny NH 34.17; Paus. 1.8.5; Arist. Rhet. 1368a. Cf. C. Robert RE 1.2 (1892), s.v. "Antenor," cols. 2353–54, and Fornara, Philologus 114 (1970), 155. Thucydides' assertion in 6.53.3 to the effect that the Athenians well knew that the tyranny had been ended not by Harmodius and Aristogeiton but by the Spartans really proves the point, for this remark can only be explained on the assumption that they had recently been placed in possession of the true facts (otherwise Thucydides' remark would be pointless). Thucydides is probably alluding to Herodotus's account of these events, another sign (see Fornara, "Evidence for the Date of Herodotus' Publication,"JHS 91 [1971], 25–34, and "Herodotus' Knowledge of the Archidamian War," Hermes 109 [1981], 149–56) of the publication of his work well after 431. Cf. Fornara, Historia 17 (1968), 400–424, Jacoby, Atthis, pp. 158ff.
[23] See Fornara, Philologus 114 (1970), 171–72, with n. 68, and 176–80, on the potentially aristocratic origin of this term; though we now provide an alternative explanation of the date of the skolion, the arguments raised by Fornara do not, in our opinion, seem to have lost their force. But neither solution is free from difficulty; cf. Hansen, Hist. Fil. Medd. 59 (1989), 23–24, and see below.
alternative (as it appears) is no less devoid of difficulty. On that view, isonomia in the drinking song contains the same meaning it is given by Herodotus in 3.80.6. In that case it would follow that the tyrannicides were credited in the skolion not only with the assassination-liberation but with the establishment of the democracy as well.[24] In that case,. however, as proponents of this view agree, the only possible explanation is that Cleisthenes and his circle, as the interested parties, attempted disingenuously to associate the Athenian national heroes with the new regime by blending together the heroic exploit with the "watchword" of Cleisthenes' new government.
The dilemma is interesting. Either we believe that Herodotus's attribute of democracy was originally an aristocratic war cry that then, somehow, in the course of generations, abetted by its etymological possibilities, acquired a new frame of reference and extended meaning, or we suppose that Cleisthenes assimilated the aristocratic heroes of the war of liberation into the democracy he called isonomia by imputing the establishment of isonomia = democracy to them. Surely the first view is preferable and consistent with what we know in general about the ability of words to take on new meaning as circumstances change. The emphasis in the word isonomia, if it originally meant "peer equality," was placed on the concept of "equality," not on the notion of "peer"; a broader definition of "equality," as in "equality for all citizens," would naturally attach to the word when its original but narrower meaning became conceptually unsuitable. Furthermore, it seems intrinsically unlikely that even democrats of the late sixth century (assuming their existence) could have brought themselves to sing so contrived a manifesto—one crediting Harmodius and Aristogeiton with their reform—as they engaged in convivial drinking parties. The credibility of this hypothesis, moreover, is not enhanced by the fact that its sole support is Herodotean usage in the last half of the fifth century.[25] The usual rules of evidence seem to have been reversed. If we knew that isonomia was the slogan of Cleisthenes' regime, any theory, however contrived, would become tenable because it provided explanation of an unequivocal anomaly. It is not customary, however, to contrive an anomaly in order to argue that a given word was politically significant in a special sense.
Another way out of the impasse, however, suggests itself, which
[24] Ehrenberg, Historia 1 (1950), 533f., and Ostwald, Nomos, pp. 131–36; cf. G. Vlastos, "Isonomia," AJP 74 (1953), 337–47, Fornara, Philologus 114 (1970), 170–80.
[25] Cf. Hansen, LCM 11 (1986), 35–36.
would obviate these difficulties and some others still to be mentioned. Since Wilamowitz, if not before, the skolion has been taken as a matter of course to be an authentic piece of archaic poetry composed soon after the event it celebrates.[26] Now this skolion (No. 10) is one of four (Nos. 10–13) preserved by Athenaeus (15.695ab) that celebrate the deed of the tyrannicides. These in turn form part of a larger collection of twenty-five skolia designated by Athenaeus as "Attic drinking songs." Athenaeus wrote c. 200 A.D. and in all probability derived this collection from a single source.[27] We do not know the name or the date of the original compilator, or the method he used to collect the songs. These skolia must therefore be dated individually by the internal evidence they supply, an endeavor that even those who have engaged in the process will readily admit is fraught with uncertainty.[28] The easy part of the work, comparatively, is to determine the terminus post quem —that is, the date after which the poems must have been composed. The skolia celebrating Harmodius and Aristogeiton present no difficulty, for we know the date of the assassination of Hipparchus. Comparable indications in the other drinking songs have enabled modern scholars to conclude that Athenaeus's twenty-five skolia fall into three categories, corresponding to three different periods of Athenian history—the tyranny, opposition to the tyranny, and the Persian Wars.
As the preceding discussion of proposed explanations of isonomia in the drinking song makes clear, modern students of this question take for granted that the terminus post quem is in effect also the approximate time of composition. The assumption is reasonable, since ephemeral songs of this type are best explained as having been composed soon after the events inspiring them. But something more remains to be considered: an important step in the process of the transmission of these songs seems to have been overlooked. What justifies the assumption that the versions we possess are identical with the songs as they originally were composed? These songs could not have been collected (on any view of the compilator) before the end of the fifth century, or perhaps later still.[29] As recorded, they are at best authentic copies of skolia
[26] Wilamowitz, AuA, 2.319.
[27] R. Reitzenstein, Epigramm und Skolion (Giessen, 1893), pp. 13–14; Wilamowitz, AuA, 2.316–22; C. M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry (Oxford, 1961), pp. 375–76; Ostwald, Nomos, p. 126. But see n. 29.
[28] Ostwald, Nomos, pp. 126–27. On the classification of the skolia, see id., p. 130.
[29] Reitzenstein, Epigramm und Skolion, pp. 13–24, dates the collection to the mid fifth century; Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry, pp. 375–97, puts it earlier still, c. 510 or c. 477for the "Harmodius" songs, nos. 10–13 (pp. 394–96). He infers that the collection Athenaeus quotes also originated in this period since it formed "the whole or part of a song-book intended for those participants at feasts who felt that they could not improvise songs" (p. 375, citing Wilamowitz, AuA, 2.316–22), and since skolia flourished in the late sixth and early fifth centuries but were an aristocratic art form "not ideally suited to democratic conditions" (p. 397). One may legitimately object to guesses of this kind, the chief purpose of which seems to be the alignment of the termini post and ante of these products. Bowra's assumptions about "democratic society" in the fifth century are not persuasive. We know something about the aristocratic society of the late fifth century (and beyond) that flourished in Athens from the dialogues of Plato; the idea that well-bred Athenians needed a song-book to remember (and elaborate) these simple refrains is unfortunate. Compilations of notabilia begin in the last third of the fifth century at the earliest (see Fornara, Nature of History, pp. 190–91), and this collection is most reasonably explained as one of the type.
sung by the Athenians in the last half of the fifth century. In view of the nature of the genre—drinking songs—the most elementary grasp of how oral poetry is transmitted should be enough to persuade us of the likelihood that the songs underwent modification as they were sung in rotation at parties day after day for generations. Would liberties not have been taken with the text, extemporizations and "improvements" not have been attempted from time to time? The tacit assumption, in other words, that the skolia preserved their integrity without alteration or transformation over the course of (say) a century is not inherently a likely one. Even that (slim) probability is in this case substantially reduced by our possession of at least four different versions of the Harmodius song.[30]
It becomes methodologically incumbent on us, therefore, to keep open the possibility that these songs have a history of their own. We must examine the skolia to see whether they show signs of later rather than earlier date—anachronisms that might betray their evolution from an "archetype" to their present form. Viewed in this light, the songs exhibit peculiar characteristics that may best be explained by anachronistic embellishment. Thus the idea, reflected in the skolion, that Hipparchus was "the tyrant," perhaps inconceivable in 511/10–508/7, was a historical mistake made by subsequent generations, as we know from Thucydides, who notes it particularly in 1.20.1 (cf. 6.53.3):
Having now given the results of my inquiries into early times, I grant that there will be a difficulty in believing every particular detail. The way that most men
[30] Clearly Harmodius and Aristogeiton were a favorite topic in songs of this kind, and one can well imagine that in the continuous ebb and flow of recitation these four versions merely represent some of the permutations extant when the skolia were collected. Other versions undoubtedly existed in the fifth century; see Ar. Acharn. 980, 1093 with schol., Wasps 1222–26, and cf. Ostwald's discussion, Nomos, pp. 123–25, with nn.
deal with traditions, even traditions of their own country, is to receive them all alike as they are delivered, without applying any critical test whatever. The general Athenian public fancy that Hipparchus was tyrant when he fell by the hands of Harmodius and Aristogeiton; not knowing that Hippias, the eldest of the sons of Pisistratus, was really supreme. (trans. Crawley)
Thucydides therefore demonstrates the prevalence of this misconception in the last third of the fifth century, and in this light, the appearance of the word isonomia in the skolion casts a notably different shadow. For what has been postulated by some as a progagandistic tour de force in 508/7 finds easy and natural explanation in the later period as the poetic statement of a popular legend anachronistically framed.
We may infer that after sufficient time had passed, the tyrannicide, liberation, and foundation of democracy were telescoped, so that this group of events became regarded as one matrix of epochal change. From a later perspective, the sequence initiated by the tyrannicides could be regarded, not illegitimately, as a set of connected events, of which the establishment of democracy was the natural culmination. Since our tradition makes it clear by its silence that the Cleisthenic origin of the democracy was a point not even Cleisthenes' family and adherents chose to emphasize, and that the Athenian people similarly neglected to glorify as the individual accomplishment of its founder, credit for the establishment of the new government could, after the passage of time, be conferred naturally and plausibly on the Athenian national heroes. Guided by tact, sensibility and, probably, general recollection of the actual fact of the matter, the Athenians chose a word in this hymn to the heroes, isonomia, that implied the reform but suggested an accomplishment transcending its formal institutional basis.
Isonomia, on this hypothesis, may be accorded its full force as an anachronism in the skolion at approximately the time Herodotus guarantees its currency as a "democratic" word and the "political equality" of which it seems to speak became the predicate of Periclean democracy (Thuc. 2.37.1, quoted below). Thus the skolion becomes an intelligible document principally celebrating, as was its intention, not the democracy but the tyrannicides, whose cult demonstrably grew by accretion. The heroic legend began with the tyrannicide, eventually assimilated the liberation (Hdt. 6.123.3) and ended by incorporating the democracy and isonomia.[31] Such a magnification of the accomplishment of the Athenian national heroes seems economically to explain the much-
[31] See Fornara, Philologus 114 (1970), 155–80.
disputed skolion, even if it removes isonomia from the list of names some scholars would like to use to define the spirit of Cleisthenic democracy.
We may turn now to the consideration of demokratia as the word with the best title to be judged the early name of the Athenian democracy, though whether the term was applied (if it was applied at all) prospectively by Cleisthenes or retrospectively a generation or so later is a question that can be deferred for the time being. It will prove more useful here to uncover, if we can, the meaning of the term demokratia as it would have been understood at the time of its earliest application to the government of the Athenians.
The first part of the compound, demos, meant to Homer "district" or "locality"—for example, "the fertile demos of Lycia" (Iliad 16.437). By easy extension, the same term could apply in Homer to the inhabitants of a locality—for example, "the city [polis ] and all the people [demos ]" (Iliad 3.50). By yet further extension, since the people who inhabited a locality generally stood in implicit contrast to leaders of the people, the aristocracy, the term could designate, still in Homer, the "common people" (Iliad 2.98). After Homer, the word demos continued to be applied in all of these different senses, depending of course on the intentions of the writer and the scope of his subject. In political poetry, as it is known to us from Theognis, Solon, and others, the meaning of demos shifts from "people as a whole" to "the common people" in alignment with the comparisons, explicit or implicit, in the mind of the poet. Theognis, for example, likes to deride the "empty-headed [common] people [kenophron demos ]" in 1.233, 847; and Theognis's repetition of the phrase may suggest that it already had become a stock epithet in certain quarters.
Solon, who does not share Theognis's contemptuous attitude, and has no sympathy for pejorative adjectives, has the same understanding of the term—for example, in 4.7, 6.1, 36.22 (ed. West). He expresses it most clearly in 5.1 (cf. No. 37 in West's collection): "I gave to the people [demos ] as much privilege [
: Aristotle; 
: Plut.] as suffices," in comparison, as he further states, with the other social element of the city, "those who were powerful and were admirable for their wealth" (5.3). These too suffered no injury: "I stood fast, having thrown my strong shield over both groups, / And did not allow either group to defeat the other unjustly." It is important to observe, however, that this particular sense of demos was neither fixed nor invariable (like a technical term). Rather, like the chameleon, it derived its coloration from the locality in which it was placed. In a context suggesting di-
chotomy between rich and poor, demos expressed the notion of "the common people." But in other contexts, where the point of emphasis was "the people" of a city or a district, demos quite as automatically shifted in nuance in order to embrace the notion of "the people as a whole" without any suggestion of exclusion. That meaning applies in Theognis 1.1005 and Solon 4.23, 9.4, 36.2. In Alcman, who flourished in the second half of the seventh century, the broader meaning is probable in 3.174 (ed. Page) and certain in No. 119; Alcman used the word in the other sense in 17.7. The slightly younger contemporary of Solon, Alcaeus of Mytilene, who used the word only twice in the extant poetry, also denoted by demos the "people as a whole" (D12.12, G1.10, ed. Page).[32] Assuming for the moment, then, that demokratia became the early name of the government instituted by Cleisthenes, the question arises whether the kratos, the power, conveyed to the demos in the revolution gave over the sovereignty to the "people as a whole," or instead rather brutally expressed the triumph of "the common people" over their adversaries, so that this word, too (like isonomia, according to exponents of that view), rang out as a kind of slogan, though a slogan, unlike isonomia, expressive of factional triumph.
There can be no doubt about the ruling interpretation of this word among the Athenians of the last third of the fifth century. It is defined for us in the exclusive and implicitly brutal sense not only by the "Old Oligarch" (see below), an opponent of the regime, but by its most idealistic expounder, Pericles, in words attributed to him by Thucydides in the great funeral oration (2.37.1):
We live according to a constitution that does not emulate the laws of our neighbors, but we are rather a model to some than the imitators of others. Although in name it is called a democracy [demokratia ] because it is disposed in the interests not of a few but of the majority, equality is shared by all in private disputes in accordance with the laws, and honor is apportioned in accordance with worth.
Apart from the all-important definition given by Pericles-Thucydides, the formulation of the sentence itself seems significant. By uniting a limitative definition of the regime with other principles that mitigate it—equality for all, honor, and so on—the impression is conveyed that Periclean democracy represents a humane and civilized achievement
[32] See D. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford, 1955), p. 177. For the occurrences of demos in ancient literature, see E. C. Welskopf, ed., Soziale Typenbegriffe im alten Griechenland und ihr Fortleben in den Sprachen der Welt, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1981), cols. 552–57.
that transcends the definition of the form—an improved version, as it were, of the democracy defined for us by Herodotus in 3.80.6. In that light, we might be tempted to read this sentence as if it were a condensed statement of the evolution of the democracy from factional government in the hands of the "common people" to a more broadly encompassing government of all the people achieved during Pericles' tenure of power. But although this inference may have a certain appeal because the evolutionary process it suggests possesses historical verisimilitude, we must bear in mind that the course of Athenian democratic development from 508/7 to 430 involved a good deal more than (as Aristotle might have phrased it) the realization of the potentialities of the Cleisthenic politeia .
Factional struggle demarcates the century, for in 462/1 the great Ephialtean reform took place, which, among other things, resulted in the repudiation of the leadership of the aristocracy. If we are right, therefore, in sensing that Pericles-Thucydides' intellectual appeal to the finest aspect of democracy, isonomia, constitutes an expansion of democratic vision and the evolution of the theoretical foundations of the government, the implicit contrast may well be with the government of Ephialtes, where the triumph of faction unquestionably altered its political character. To retroject the "narrow" meaning of demokratia into a period some eighty years earlier, although we know that the reform of Ephialtes not only intervened but unquestionably sharpened the antithesis between "the people" and the aristocracy, is open to the same objection as that raised against a similar retrojection of the concept of isonomia. Perhaps we can learn more by considering directly the implications of Cleisthenes' great tribal reform. These indirect routes, although they seem promising, prove ultimately to be circular.
The essence of the tribal change, as is well known, was the establishment of ten new tribes into which all of the demes contained within Attica were distributed on an equal basis (Ath. Pol. 21). Here Cleisthenes adopted a radical new principle. He separated all of the demes—demoi meaning localities such as villages that were scattered throughout Attica and served as reasonable subdivisions of the people as a whole—into three distinct geographical categories: the coast (paralia ), the city (astu ), and the interior (mesogeion ). Then he subdivided each of these territorially circumscribed blocks of demes into ten parts, making a total of thirty groups of demes, ten from the coast, ten from the city, and ten from the interior. Cleisthenes now established the ten tribes (as purely artificial units) by making every single tribe an amalgamation of
one of the (ten) coast groups, one of the (ten) city groups, and one of the (ten) interior groups. Hence the term trittyes, "thirds," since each tribe equally consisted of portions drawn from the three local divisions. The result was to fuse together three disparate localities in each of the ten tribes so that the tribe became a microcosm of the entire land of Attica, with every trittys in the territory formally equal to every other.[33]
It has often been held that Cleisthenes' reform was directly aimed at the power of locally entrenched dynasts, aristocrats, whose control of the surrounding countryside ensured their disproportionate importance in the body politic.[34] Indeed, that is the latent premise underlying the notion that demokratia is a brutal, restrictive word emphasizing the seizure of power by the "common people." This inference, however, attractive though it appears in principle, really arises from assumptions extraneous to the tribal reform. If baronial control or clan dominion was the problem addressed,[35] Cleisthenes met it with singular obliquity. Reallocation of the dependants of the great families into new abstract units would not strike off their chains, since the demes in which they were clustered remained individually untouched by the reform.[36] The tribes may have been formally changed, but the people and their loyalties remained the same.[37] It was old wine in new bottles. Business would proceed as usual; power would continue to be striven for by the "city men," the "men of the coast," and the "men of the plain." For these people, residents of the localities, ready access to Athens remained
[33] For more technical treatments, see C. W. J. Eliot, Coastal Demes of Attika: A Study of the Policy of Kleisthenes, Phoenix Suppl. 5 (1962); W. E. Thompson, "The Deme in Kleisthenes' Reforms," SO 46 (1971), 72–79; J. S. Traill, The Political Organization of Attica, Hesperia Suppl. 14 (Princeton, 1975); P. Siewert, Die Trittyen Attikas und die Heeresreform des Kleisthenes, Vestigia 33 (Munich, 1982), with D. Lewis's review, Gnomon 55 (1983), 431–36; G. R. Stanton, "The Tribal Reform of Kleisthenes the Alkmeonid," Chiron 14 (1984), 1–14; M. K. Langdon, "The Territorial Basis of the Attic Demes," SO 60 (1985), 5–15; D. Whitehead, The Attic Demes, 508/7–ca. 250 B.C. (Princeton, 1986); and J. S. Traill, Demos and Trittys (Toronto, 1986).
[34] E.g., by E. M. Walker, CAH, 4.147–48; D. M. Lewis, "Cleisthenes and Attica," Historia 12 (1963), esp. pp. 26–37; P. Lévêque and P. Vidal-Naquet, Clisthène l'Athénien (Paris, 1964), pp. 17–18; Sealey, Essays, pp. 27–28, and id., History, pp. 153–55.
[35] Ostwald, Nomos, p. 152.
[36] In other words, competition within each tribe would have reflected precisely the same tensions that were manifest in large scale before the reform, presumably with similar results.
[37] This is not to deny that by fracturing the ancestral mold, greater individual liberty might have been encouraged because of the establishment of a novel routine in which inhibiting influences, if felt, might, perhaps, be more easily resisted. If such was the reasoning guiding Cleisthenes to make this reform, the subtlety of his mind can have been exceeded only by his political incompetence.
as before. If they were mixed up in new tribal groups, their proportional numerical superiority in their particular trittys (guaranteed by their proximity to Athens) would continue to swing the tribal vote and thus validate the preferences of the dynasts to whom they were obligated. It would be a rare occasion, and not one easily conceived, that could galvanize the electorate to march on Athens from the outlying areas, and even in such a case as this, representation of the most distant trittys would be thinner than that of the other two. Surely Cleisthenes was aware of this, and no doubt approved, for in the alternative he would have abolished the power of his own family.[38] To put it somewhat differently, the standard theory is incompatible with the practical realities defining rural Attica in 508/7. To work properly, the theory requires the conditions that developed in 431, when the boundaries of the city-state and the boundaries of the city became, perforce, the same. But there is no need to belabor this point: the history of Athens continues to be the history of the great clans at least until Ephialtes' reform.
Perhaps, therefore, analysis of the tribal change has been over subtle and rather more concerned with possible ramifications of the epochal development than with its most important and salient feature—namely, the registration of every Athenian male in Attica as a citizen of one of the ten tribes. The propriety or desirability of such legislation is the cardinal fact investigation is required to explain, but seems to have been secondary in interest to the pursuit of seemingly more momentous possibilities.[39]
We begin with a simple question. At what point in the historical development of Athens did "the demos of the Athenians" acquire its conventional fifth-century significance and character? When, in other words, did the demos first legally comprise the male population of a certain age, born of Athenian parents, who dwelt anywhere within the borders of Attica? And whenever this occurred, how could it have been achieved except by a political revolution exactly of the type we know Cleisthenes to have initiated?
Every student of archaic Athens is aware that we are compelled to tolerate certain ambiguities because tradition fails to provide the infor-
[38] For the view that Cleisthenes sought to enhance the power of his family or clan, see D. M. Lewis, Historia 12 (1963), 37, 39–40; Bicknell, pp. 1–45; and G. R. Stanton, Chiron 14 (1984), 1–14. Cf. J. Martin, "Von Kleisthenes zu Ephialtes," Chiron 4 (1974), 12–18, and Rhodes, Boule, pp. 209–11.
[39] E.g., isonomia, the suppression of clan power, gerrymandering. In Die Trittyen Attikas (esp. pt. 3), Siewert argues that the reform was designed to expedite mobilization of the army; contra Stanton, Chiron 14 (1984), 3–7; Rhodes, JHS 103 (1983), 204.
mation necessary to resolve them. We do not know when the consolidation of Attica occurred, and we are equally ignorant of the political relationship between the city of Athens and the surrounding territory. Ancient tradition, even Thucydides, accepted as fact the "synoecism" of Attica by Theseus, although we well know that not long before the time of Solon, Athens waged war with Eleusis (Thuc. 2.15.1–2; cf. Hdt. 1.30.5). We should recognize, therefore, that as far as this question is concerned, the ancient tradition is without value because it was unconsciously anachronistic and capable, therefore, of seriously misleading us. Consider, for example, how our primary authority, Herodotus in 1.59.4–6, describes an event occurring in 561/60. Here he tells us of the manner in which Peisistratus acquired his bodyguard.
[Peisistratus] wounded himself,[40] and drove his chariot into the agora, alleging that he had escaped his enemies who (of all things!) had wished to kill him as he was driving out to his farm. He begged the demos to get some kind of guard for his defense. . . . The demos of the Athenians [
] was thoroughly fooled and, having made a selection from the city residents [astoi ], gave him those men who became not his "spear-bearers,"[41] but his "club-bearers."
Peisistratus then took the acropolis. "From that time Peisistratus ruled over the Athenians [
]"
From Herodotus's description of the operation of the demos we observe that it was habitual for him to register "sovereign" decisions, "decisions of state," in accordance with contemporary usage.[42] But there is no reason to believe, and every reason to deny, that his language correctly represents the actual political relationships. Herodotus's "demos of the Athenians," which Peisistratus so thoroughly fooled, can have been no other than the residents of the city, the astoi, from whom Peisistratus also received his club-bearers. If a decree were required (a remote possibility), it was passed as a purely local decision made without reference to the outlying districts of Attica or, for that matter, the districts lying close to the city (the paralia and the pedion ). Peisistratus's warrant as tyrant came from the city of Athens, not from "the demos of the Athenians" as Herodotus, in the fifth century, understood this term.
What of earlier events? Solon, assuredly, was empowered as diallaktes
[40] See Busolt, 2.311, for judicious analysis of this episode, which is sometimes rejected hypercritically.
[41] The popular allegation and one that, notably, stands in Thucydides, 6.56.2, 57.1.
[42] Moderns invariably do the same.
of the city by no other group than its residents; indeed, it was stasis in the city that animated his concern and explains his elevation. All this is clear from the words Solon used in his great Eunomia (4 West). "Our city will never be destroyed" by the will of the gods; "but the astoi desire to destroy our great city in their foolishness because they are persuaded by wealth [i.e., desirous of obtaining it], and the leaders of the people have unjust intentions because they are prepared to suffer many evils incited by great hybris" (1–8). These ills (and others) "have now invaded the entire city" (17), threatening stasis. "Soon will the lovely city be consumed" (21). "These are the evils encircling our people [
], and many of the very poor arrive in foreign country, having been sold and bound in disgraceful chains" (23–25). No one (he continues) will escape this calamity even if they hide in their houses. "This my spirit bids me to teach the Athenians, how Civil Disorder subjects the city to the greatest evils" (30f).[43]
The idea of the "sovereignty of the demos, " not to say the "sovereignty of all the people of Attica," postdates by many years the era of Solon and, of course, the period 561/60–511/10 in which Peisistratus and his sons held the tyranny. It is almost redundant to observe that the tyrant's treatment of the people of Attica was that of a patron to his clients (Ath. Pol. 16.3). Aristotle notes that Peisistratus tried to keep people out of the city and in the country "so that in moderate comfort and occupied with their private affairs they would neither desire nor have the leisure to involve themselves with public affairs" (Ath. Pol. 16.3). The anachronistic assumption notwithstanding, the implication of these words is acceptable—viz., that the city government represented by its tyrant ruled the surrounding country while the expression "people of the Athenians," when it did not mean the city men, was, legally, a vox nihili, merely serving as a symbol of the larger community, as in the poems of Alcman, Alcaeus, and others. That Peisistratus attempted to compensate for the imbalance between town and country at least in the administration of justice (Ath. Pol. 16.5) by establishing "district judges" is noteworthy if true: the need for such an institution is a sign of swelling discontent in Attica, which Peisistratus attempted
to allay. It is poetic that the end of the harmonious relationship between Peisistratus (and his family) and the city, which was recalled by the Athenians (= "men of the city") as "life (as) in the time of Cronus" (Ath. Pol. 16.7), was precipitated by an act of hybris committed by Hipparchus against a pair of lovers, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, of whom the latter, at least, was a "city man" (Thuc. 6.54.2).[44] Even in 511/10, however, the people of the city of Athens only reluctantly abandoned their tyrant.[45]
After the rejection of the oligarchs by Cleisthenes in 508/7, the great tribal reform was put in place. The evidence conjoins with likelihood to indicate that its purpose was to reorganize the entire land of Attica as a city-state comprising one whole. Athens now became a direct democracy and the concept of citizenship in the polis by virtue of local origin in any of the demes of Attica was born. Athens became a "modern" city-state;[46] and the ecclesia of Athens by law became open to every qualified inhabitant of Attica. In their collective name, the decrees of the city-state (psephismata probably begin at this time) are now introduced with the formula: "Resolved by the boule and the demos. " In fact, the decree concerning Salamis,[47] our oldest preserved decree, suggests that initially, at least, the Athenian demos indulged in a certain prideful supererogation, for that decree simply reads: "Resolved by the demos. "
[44] See Davies, pp. 472–74.
[45] Cf. Ostwald, Nomos, pp. 147ff.
[46] On the lack of "political importance" of the demes and deme membership in Attica before Cleisthenes, see Whitehead, Attic Demes, ch. 1. Cf. H. Schaefer, Probleme der alten Geschichte (Göttingen, 1963), p. 139. Why Cleisthenes needed to create a new and artificial structure could be better understood if we knew enough about the original four Ionian tribes and the function they served in the archaic state. These tribes were primarily religious associations based on ancient tribal divisions of the original population, and had been formed prior to the settlement of Ionia in the diaspora associated with the Dorian invasion. It is significant that Cleisthenes left this ancient system essentially undisturbed (Arist. Ath. Pol. 21.6), for it confirms our assumption (inevitable in any case) that the new tribal organization was created to serve purely secular and political ends irrelevant to the old tribal structure. Aristotle's assumption in Politics 1275b37 (cf. 1319b20) that tribal reorganization was a means of augmenting the citizen body is certainly correct, though perhaps not in the sense he intended. See Fornara, CP 65 (1970), 243–46. For his inference that it supplied a means of enrolling foreigners and slaves (which may well have occurred in 508/7) expresses a fourth-century political theorem, not the essential reality; cf. J. H. Oliver, "Reforms of Kleisthenes," Historia 9 (1960), 503–7, and D. Kagan, "The Enfranchisement of Aliens by Cleisthenes," Historia 12 (1963), 41–46. On tribes, see RE 20.1, s.v. "phyle," cols. 1000–1001. It may be relevant that the word pandemos does not appear before Aeschylus; cf. Aristotle, F 389 Rose; Pollux 8.16 is also suggestive.
[47] IG i 1 = ML 14 = Fornara 44B; SEG 31.1. Reference to the boule is possible but not certain in the last line of the inscription.
Without a doubt, legally and in fact, the kratos of the city-state was taken in possession by its citizenry, the demos.[48] Thus demokratia, in this sense of the word, but not in the sense of "the triumph of the common people," is fully in keeping with the spirit of the Cleisthenic reform; demokratia in this sense is conceivable as the "original name" of the new government.[49]
The more precise nature of Cleisthenes' tribal reform and the circumstances surrounding it escape us, and neither are we comfortable with the numerous conjectural reconstructions promoted by scholars from Aristotle to the present.[50] The evidence is simply too thin to make them compelling. Herodotus is our only safe guide; he stood in close proximity to the living tradition and, not less important, his narrative intentions did not require him to engage in inferential amplification of the rudimentary historical record. On that basis it becomes reasonable to assume that Cleisthenes' tribal reform was enacted and a democratic boule was formed in a revolution that commenced either in 508/7 or shortly thereafter.[51] That boule disavowed Cleisthenes when, on his return from temporary exile (after his expulsion by Cleomenes), he signified his willingness to compromise the new government by subordinating Athens to Persian authority and, presumably, to the Peisistratids. Hence the surprising obscurity of Cleisthenes' name in antiquity.[52]
Nevertheless, the political genius of Cleisthenes is manifest in the single revolutionary act with which his name is connected, and the importance of his action is such that it can no more be overstated than it needs belaboring. The conveyance of sovereign power to the united demos by Cleisthenes is the hallmark of his reform, underrated because taken for granted by modern scholars, whose preconceptions have been
[48] From a later perspective, the statement made in the text might seem extravagant. The great houses continued to govern the city-state, the timocracy was left untouched, and in spite of the "sovereignty" imputed to the demos, Athens's "hoplite government" can legitimately be regarded as an oligarchic politeia. None of this invalidates the principle asserted by the demos, or undercuts this establishment of a government in which all the citizenry become the validating body of the government by way of the ecclesia and the tribal elections.
[49] For the possible relevance of isonomia to the reform, see Appendix 5.
[50] See Busolt, 2.405–40; Hignett, HAC, pp. 124ff.; D. M. Lewis, "Cleisthenes and Attica," Historia 12 (1963), 21–40; Ostwald, Nomos, pp. 137ff.; Bicknell, pp. 1–53; J. Martin, Chiron 4 (1974), 5–42, esp. 40–42; and see nn. 33, 38 above.
[51] See Appendix 6 for the chronology; cf. on the boule, D. J. McCargar, "New Evidence for the Kleisthenic boule, " CP 71 (1976), 248–52.
[52] See the (few) references in J. Kirchner, Prosopographia Attica (Berlin, 1901), 8526; cf. ch. 1, p. 22.
guided by the false premise that Cleisthenes' reforms contemplated the elimination of privilege, the "political monopoly which birth and wealth had enjoyed so far"[53] —in spite of the inability of its advocates to sustain this contention with reference to the actual legislation passed.[54] Indeed, proponents of this view have little to offer except their own insistence that isonomia aptly labels the reform. In fact, property qualifications for the magistracies were left undisturbed.[55] Save for the consolidation of the demos and the transfer of formal sovereignty to it, those institutions of the archaic state relevant to the possession of birth and wealth remained intact as the prerogatives of the well-born and the rich. De facto control of the city-state remained aristocratic as before; the implications of the reform (though unintended), when realized, would indeed arrive at the concept of political egalitarianism, but that development came well after Cleisthenes. To compare things Roman, the analogy is Rome's incorporation of Latium, not, for instance, the Gracchan reforms.
As for Cleisthenes himself, and the intentions that may have motivated him, the historical evidence, though limited, suggests a less edifying set of developments than those woven around the fact that democracy was established by his agency. In 508/7 Cleisthenes followed family tradition as the ultimate "outsider." He separated himself from his peers in birth and station by attempting to attain a predominant political position by forging an alliance with the enemies of his enemies, the people hitherto protected under the banner of the tyrants. This repetition of the Megacles II affair suggests rather more than the operation of coincidence. Indeed, the association of the Alcmeonids with the house of Peisistratus is a red thread running continuously through the fabric of archaic and fifth-century Athenian history—viz., Megacles' marriage, Cleisthenes' archonship, Cleisthenes' embassy to Persia, the shield signal at Marathon, even the tradition that Pericles and Peisistratus looked alike. It is pertinent to repeat, moreover, that Cleisthenes' "clients" in 508/7 were, at least in the city, the former constituents of Peisistratus and his sons.[56] The inference that Cleisthenes in 508/7 tapped a vast reservoir of resentment against the aristocracy
[53] Ostwald, Nomos, p. 154.
[54] Cf. Ostwald, Nomos, p. 150, whose own explanation, pp. 154ff., even if granted, seems incommensurate with the substantial claims that are made on behalf of Cleisthenes' reforms.
[55] Hignett, HAC, pp. 142ff. and 174.
[56] See Hignett, HAC, pp. 125–26, 146, Ostwald, Nomos, p. 139, and pp. 38f. above.
percolating in the city and in the country in order to prevail over his ancestral enemies and, in all probability, the enemies of his friends, is at least a hypothesis guided by the facts of our tradition. When the dam burst, the flood took Cleisthenes with it and the democracy proceeded on its independent course.
Over the next twenty years (Ath. Pol. 22–25), the new democracy attempted to preserve itself against the threat it perceived, realistically or not, from would-be tyrants. Hence the law about ostracism, of disputed date, which provided a surprisingly moderate avenue by which to expel potentially dangerous men from the city-state without imposing exile and confiscating property.[57] In 487/6 the nine archons ceased to be elected directly, now owing their appointment in part to use of the lot.[58] It is significant that this measure was adopted at the same time that a rash of ostracisms occurred, just as it is revealing that the ostracisms connect with charges against friends of the Peisistratids and the suspicion of an attempted betrayal of the regime at Marathon.[59] The people wished to bar these high offices, especially, perhaps, the polemarchy, to well-known and influential men. Use of the lot after procrisis, the prior election of a larger group of candidates, naturally broadened the base of possibilities and proportionately reduced the odds of the election of a dangerously ambitious and powerful individual without violating the traditional principle that eligible men (i.e., those of the highest census class) could vie for the office.
No quarrel need be undertaken with Aristotle, consequently, because of his belief that measures of this kind represented the development of the potentialities of the Cleisthenic state, which was essentially systematizing its constitution by ridding itself of anomalies. The attack on the Areopagus in 462/1 should not, however, be viewed in the same light, as if this too were "entailed" by the reforms of 508/7. For it came in a
[58] Ath. Pol. 22.5, with Sandys and Rhodes ad loc. For the effect of this change on the strategia, see Fornara, Generals, pp. 11ff.
[59] See ch. 1, pp. 18ff.
great explosion punctuating the most radical departure taken by fifth-century Athenians in ideology and foreign policy at one and the same time. Within the span of a mere four years (462–459) there occurred the embarrassment of Cimon at Sparta, the rise of Pericles to power, and the first Peloponnesian War.[60]
The great issue of the day, producing the series of dramatic developments, was foreign policy. Relations with Sparta cannot have been easy from the time the Athenians established the so-called Delian League in 478/7. The demos remembered Cleomenes' intrusion into Athenian affairs, and because of it not implausibly regarded Greece's leading aristocratic state as a natural enemy. That Themistocles, the founder of the Athenian navy and hero of the Persian War, incorporated and exacerbated anti-Spartan sentiment even in the seventies follows from three considerations: the ostracism of 471 (or somewhat earlier);[61] Themistocles' residence thereafter in Argos, Sparta's enemy, whence he conducted apparently anti-Spartan political activities (Thuc. 1.135.3); and the incomparable praise accorded him by Thucydides (1.138.3) for his prescience in that part of his narrative detailing the development of Spartan-Athenian enmity. The last two considerations speak for themselves; as to the first, we infer the temporary resolution of a serious dispute about foreign policy, in which Cimon carried the day against Themistocles. Like most of the cosmopolitan aristocrats of the time, Cimon, who named his sons Lacedaemonius, Eleius, and Thessalus, was an admirer of the Lacedaemonians by tradition, education and ethos. It does not, therefore, seem adventurous to infer that a split had already developed among the Athenians, with some wishing to complicate Sparta's problems in the Peloponnesus and others bent on imperial expansion, attempting harmony with Sparta while acknowledging its age-old claims to supremacy in Greece.[62]
Cimon was a member of one of the great Athenian clans whose sway
[60] See chs. 1, 3, 4.
[61] On the date, see E. Badian, "Towards a Chronology of the Pentakontaetia down to the Renewal of the Peace of Callias," EMC 23, n.s., 7 (1988), 302–3, who places the ostracism in 471/70 (as Fornara, Historia 15 [1966], 271), and Frost, Them., pp. 188–91, at Plut. Them. 22.4 (472 ± 1), following R. Lenardon, "The Chronology of Themistokles' Ostracism and Exile," Historia 8 (1959), 23–48; but cf. P. J. Rhodes, "Thucydides on Pausanias and Themistocles," Historia 19 (1970), 395–400 (between 478 and 465). E. Bayer and J. Heideking, Die Chronologie des perikleischen Zeitalter (Darmstadt, 1975), pp. 109–10, provide references to ancient and modern literature. See ch. 4, n. 35, below.
[62] Thuc. 1.102.4; see G. Busolt, Die Lakedaimonier (Leipzig, 1878), pp. 394–97, and U. Kahrstedt, Griechisches Staatsrecht (Göttingen, 1922), 1.27, 183.
in Athens had been unimpaired by the Cleisthenic revolution.[63] His father, Miltiades, had won fame at Marathon (and disgrace at Paros) after losing a tyranny in the Chersonese. The ancients speak of Cimon's patrician liberality and great wealth,[64] but a better explanation of his commanding prestige is the enormous increase of power and prosperity that the empire, of which he was the chief architect, had brought to Athens and its citizenry. Unfortunately for Cimon, his very success created conditions adverse to his policies. The Athenians had come to conceive a new and higher opinion of themselves, boding no good for the Spartans. We admire its vitality and optimism in the plays of Aeschylus; it is implied in the beautification of the city begun by Cimon, and in the custom initiated by the Athenians in the seventies of burying their war dead, as heroes, outside the city gate instead of on the battle-field, as had been the invariable tradition.[65] It was proudly symbolized in the return of Theseus's bones to Athens after the conquest of Scyros; and it was epitomized by the famous painting in the Stoa Poikile, of about 460, depicting the battle of Marathon.
National pride, moreover, had intensified with the astonishing increase of Athenian power in the Hellenic world. The Athenians had seized the acknowledged leadership of the Ionians; and their control over the "allies" was in process of becoming rigid (Thuc. 1.99).[66] The administration of the empire, the political management of the allies and the prosecution of military activities imparted experience of the world and self-importance to a comparatively large segment of the population. Athens, of course, was now a sea power, and this meant that the demos, as rowers and sailors, came to constitute a preponderance in the armed forces, unlike in traditional city-states, where hoplites, men of property, possessed the greatest weight.[67] It is self-evident that this influence of the demos was brought to bear on the ten Athenian generals,
[63] For the family, see Davies, pp. 293ff., esp. 301ff. For Miltiades, Cimon's father (Hdt. 6.40–41, 103–4, 132, 136), see Wade-Gery, Essays, pp. 155–70 (highly speculative).
[64] See below, pp. 68f.
[65] See F. Jacoby, JHS 64 (1944), 37ff., after Meyer, 3.505, and Meyer, Forsch. 2.219f. The objections raised by Gomme, HCT, 2.94ff., are insubstantial.
[66] See ch. 3.
by now politicized as the executives of the city-state for foreign affairs. As elected representatives,[68] they were sensitive to the demands and expectations of this newly empowered class of people. In Athens itself, meanwhile, the assembly (ecclesia ) necessarily took an increasingly active role in the settlement of public questions, ratifying the multitudinous proposals affecting the conduct of foreign affairs, the range of which had by now so greatly expanded.[69] In all these circumstances, Athenian public opinion was not easily reconcilable with Cimon's deference to the Lacedaemonians, in spite of Themistocles' reverse; dissatisfaction with philo-Laconism, with Cimon and the class of Athenians he represented, reached a head when Cimon risked his reputation to go to the assistance of the Lacedaemonians when their civil order was endangered by the Messenian Revolt.[70] Like the renunciation of the Panhellenic alliance against the Persians (Thuc. 1.103.4) and the ostracism of Cimon in 461, the attack on the Areopagus (Ath. Pol. 25) amounted to a repudiation of the leadership of the ruling elite and of the political principles of the Cleisthenic politeia.[ 71]
Our knowledge of the details is surprisingly inadequate considering the importance of the constitutional change and the comparatively late date at which it was effected. The nearly contemporaneous historians Herodotus and Thucydides did not include legislative history in their definition of "memorable events,"[72] and by the fourth century, when independent interest in such matters developed, the tradition had become confused and imprecise. Even Aristotle has little to tell us. In Politics 1274a7 he asserts that the boule of the Areopagus was "curtailed," while in Ath. Pol. 25.2 he observes that Ephialtes stripped away
[68] See Fornara, Generals, pp. lff., and ch. 1, n. 71.
[69] For the ecclesia, see Hignett, HAC, p. 233, who, however, emphasizes its power after the reforms of Ephialtes.
[70] One is reminded of a remark of Creon's in Sophocles' Antigone 178–83, a play performed sometime in the late forties (though cf. R. G. Lewis, "An Alternative Date for Sophocles' Antigone, " GRBS 29 [1988], 35–50), approximately when the Old Oligarch had produced his treatise (see n. 86 below):
The man who rules the entire city
And fails to attach himself to the best counsels,
But keeps his mouth firmly closed because of fear,
Has ever and always seemed to me to be the basest of men;
That man too, who regards his friend as more important than his very own fatherland,
Him I regard as of no worth whatever.
[71] For the chronology, see Beloch, 2.2.194–98.
[72] See Fornara, Nature of History, pp. 63, 96–97.
"all of the acquired powers [epitheta ]" of the Areopagus "through which it had become the guardian of the constitution, and he gave them to the boule of Five Hundred, the people (in assembly) and the law courts [dikasteria ]."[73]
Of this attack on the Areopagus it is possible to speak only in general terms. The council consisted of ex-archons, men selected from the two highest census classes, whose experience as supreme magistrates and whose lifelong tenure in the Areopagus rendered them both influential and unaccountable to the people.[74] It is an open question, therefore, whether the attack on the institution was not also in part an attack on a tight-knit group of people representative of the more conservative and aristocratic element in the city. But the attack on the institution itself[75] was, in any case, epoch-making, and served to convince subsequent generations that the "ancestral constitution" had been disestablished (Diod. 11.77.6, Plut. Cim. 15.2). Nor may we regard rhetoric of this type as the fanciful exaggeration of a later century, when the "ancestral constitution" became an object of speculation, debate and fulsome praise (Isocrates, in the Areopagiticus ). The significance of this cataclysm is underscored by Aeschylus in the Eumenides (verses 681–90, 861–66), produced in 459/8,[76] and, most important, by the Thirty Tyrants in their "moderate stage" (Ath. Pol. 35.2), who specifically tried to undo the laws about the Areopagus passed by Ephialtes and Archestratus.
Various explanations of the specifics of the reform have been advanced by students of the question. Wade-Gery argued that the archons were deprived of their authority to give verdicts in the law courts, so that the popular courts acquired direct responsibility for their decisions without the intrusion or control of a higher magistrate.[77] Sealey objects, however, that such a measure would have served to diminish the
[74] See Hignett, HAC, pp. 89–91, 147–48, 194–213; Sealey, Essays, pp. 46ff., and "Ephialtes, Eisangelia, and the Council," in McGregor Studies, pp. 125–34 (responding to Rhodes, Boule, pp. 144ff., esp. pp. 201–7); R. W. Wallace, "Ephialtes and the Areopagus," GRBS 15 (1974), 259–69; Ruschenbusch, pp. 57–61; and Ostwald, Sovereignty, pp. 28ff., 70–73.
[75] See Ostwald, Sovereignty, pp. 47–77, with nn.; see also below, with nn. 77–79.
[76] See V. Ehrenberg, From Solon to Socrates (London, 1973), p. 212f.
[77] Wade-Gery, Essays, pp. 180–200.
power of the nine archons, and that it was not, therefore, properly an attack against the Areopagus as a corporation possessing powers in its own right, although it is of this that the tradition speaks.[78] Sealey's own view is that the Areopagus was deprived of the authority to call retiring magistrates to account (a procedure called euthynai ) on the expiration of their term of office, and that this authority was now transferred to the popular courts. Rhodes accepts the hypothesis about the transferral of the euthynai, but supposes also that certain cases involving fines not more than 500 drachmas were assigned to the Council of Five Hundred.[79]
A related question, no less obscure, is the degree to which Ephialtes' reform was comprehensive. One result of the transferral of power from the Areopagus to the dicasteries was the proliferation of the law courts, which took up the slack, and we would like to know how quickly they were put in place. To what extent did Ephialtes supplement his attack on the powers of the Areopagus (which was left its initial function of trial over blood-guilt) with a positive and detailed program distributing the erstwhile functions of this council among the other institutions of government, especially the dicasteries? Aristotle, to be sure, seems to supply the answer with the succinct sentence in Ath. Pol. 25.2 already quoted. But Aristotle is giving an abbreviated account uniting the negative feature of the reform (abolition of the major powers of the Areopagus) with its positive consequences, and his sentence should therefore not be pressed as if it were formulated carefully to define more than the operation of cause and effect. But although the decision of principle made by Ephialtes to remove judicial oversight from the Areopagus could have been done in a stroke,[80] the distribution of these powers, especially to the dicasteries, is better understood as proceeding gradually as the impact of this measure raised practical difficulties solved by the invention of new procedures and the opportunity of exploiting latent possibilities was appreciated and grasped. For these reasons, admittedly slim, we infer that the proliferation of the dicasteries was not a single act but developed from a set of enactments in the late sixties and early fifties.[81]
[78] Sealey, Essays, pp. 46–52.
[79] Rhodes, Boule, pp. 168–69, 204, with n. 1.
[80] See Busolt-Swoboda, p. 894 n. 5, for the modus operandi .
[81] Hignett, HAC, pp. 216–19, supposed that the expansion of the courts (including pay for jurors) followed quickly. More recently scholars prefer a more gradual development, e.g., Rhodes, Boule, p. 168; cf. Ostwald, Sovereignty, pp. 66–67.
A great stride had nonetheless been taken, in a positive no less than a negative sense. The removal of judicial power from a timocratic body to the purview of Athenian citizens generally was not conceptually implicit in the Cleisthenic constitution.[82] The government had been decidedly hoplite in character, if not elitist and "traditional" in its allocation of the political offices according to the possession of property, and we may safely infer that this was the universal rule for democracies elsewhere as well as for the other forms of government prevailing in Greece at that time. And just as it was bound into the very nature of things, until the time of Ephialtes, that the condition of service in political office was the possession of property, nowhere was the requirement more embedded in ancestral tradition, at Athens as elsewhere, than in the adjudication of civil disputes, which ordinarily required judges to be property-holders. Ephialtes' transferral of jurisdiction to the generality of Athenians by distributing the powers of the Areopagus to the Boule of Five Hundred, the people in assembly, and the dicasteries was an extraordinary and unpredictable political act, which presupposes, by its novelty and daring departure from tacitly accepted premises, the adumbration of a new theory of citizenship or, rather, a new theory of popular sovereignty.[83]
The rationale behind this reform, as the ancients inferred, is the same as that which produced the break with Sparta:[84] the rejection of an aristocratic polis and its replacement with a democracy that, as Pericles-Thucydides acknowledged, frankly was disposed in the interests of the many—demokratia as the "power of the common people," in contrast with its initial sense as the sovereignty of the consolidated demos as the validating body of the city-state. This proposition is presented in its unvarnished state by Pseudo-Xenophon, the writer whom we designate, hyperbolically, as the Old Oligarch.[85] The work (transmitted to us in the corpus of Xenophon's writings) probably saw the light of day
[82] See Hignett, HAC, pp. 153–55 for the older Heliaia, which apparently allowed the assembly to sit as a court of appeals in certain matters. Cf. M. H. Hansen, "The Athenian Heliaia from Solon to Aristotle," C&M 33 (1981–82), 27–39.
[83] See Ostwald, Sovereignty, pp. 47–77, for discussion and bibliography, and n. 73 above.
[84] The correlation is implied by Plut. Cim. 10.8, 15.3; the repudiation of the policies of Cimon by Ephialtes at home and abroad is clear from the simultaneity of these events. Naturally, the precise form of Ephialtes' attack on the Areopagus was dictated by considerations independent of Athenian foreign policy except insofar as it too reflected anti-aristocratic bias.
[85] R. Sealey, "The Origins of Demokratia, " CSCA 6 (1973), 261–62, takes the view that the "Old Oligarch" was probably a young convert to the oligarchic party.
in the late forties of the fifth century,[86] so that it is not only the earliest piece of political analysis we possess but also stands comparatively close in time to the events we are considering here. The approach of the writer, who was an Athenian (1.12) and probably an exile (2.20), may therefore legitimately be explained by his impression of political discourse in Athens in the aftermath of the reform of 462/1 and Pericles' further radicalization of the government in the fifties.
The beginning of the work is sufficiently illuminating to deserve translation:
Concerning the Athenian constitution, I do not praise them as to their selection of this kind of constitution for this reason: by choosing it they have chosen to favor the low element [poneroi ] rather than the best element [chrestoi ]. . . . But since they have made this decision, I shall demonstrate how they are preserving their constitution and [successfully] managing everything else, which they appear to all other Greeks to do wrongly.
The author of the treatise then makes the following point: "the poor and the demos " deserve to have the advantage of the well-born and the rich because the demos runs the navy and is responsible for the city's power (1.2)—not the hoplites, the well-born and the best element. "For this reason it seems just that the magistracies be shared by all the people both by lot and by election." The bulk of this essay is devoted to the enumeration of the many ways the demos enhances its position at the expense of the "better element."
The analysis provided by the Old Oligarch is susceptible to two interpretations. He may be conveying to us in the spirit of a cynical theorist a self-consistent interpretation of the implicit biases of the demokratia instituted in 462. In this case, a certain intellectual distance would separate his identification and exposition of the inner character of the government from the political rhetoric of the time. Alternately, the Old Oligarch is rather quoting the Athenians against themselves, repeating and theoretically justifying (in accordance with the "sophistic" purpose of the essay) a rationale the Athenians themselves promoted. The first alternative can be dismissed out of hand. The Old Oligarch never conveys the sense that he is piercing a veil on the
[86] G. W. Bowersock, "Pseudo-Xenophon" HSCP 71 (1966), 33–38; a later date has been defended by D. M. MacDowell, "An Expansion of the Athenian Navy," CR 15 (1965), 260, and D. Lewis, CR 19 (1969), 45–47; cf. Ostwald, Sovereignty, p. 183 n. 23 (before 424, c. 429); Sealey, "Origins of Demokratia, " 257–60, places the work between c. 443 and 431. Bowersock's view remains compelling in view of the limitation of the historical examples contained in the work to the mid fifth century.
strength of his superior insight and, in fact, only once presents a conclusion as if it were an extrapolation of his own.[87] Throughout the essay he is telling us what the demos or the demotikoi think or believe or have resolved. The Old Oligarch's contribution to the debate is not the premise of demokratia but the accumulation of detail illustrating how the principle of helping the worst element and harming the best (1.4) is subserved.
The result of Ephialtes' reform of 462/1, like the rhetoric of the Old Oligarch, leaves no room for doubt that its purpose was to convey power (kratos ) to the demos and to eviscerate the aristocratic establishment. Its kratos is most manifest in the proliferation of the dicasteries, in which civil litigation was decided by Athenian juries for the propertied, resident aliens, and imperial subjects. At the same time, the control of the demos over the Athenian magistrates was assured by its authority to scrutinize their credentials before entering office and to subject them to a rendering of accounts after leaving it (cf. Ps.-Xen. 3.2, 4).[88] That the demos helped its friends and harmed its enemies, which the Old Oligarch took as a matter of course, and, indeed, was universally regarded as a principle of sound ethical conduct, was as much the purpose of the newly established demokratia as an effect of the legislation. The political history of Athens is no less instructive than it is fascinating. Democracy did not grow from a seed planted by Solon; nor did Cleisthenes foresee a day when the "common people" of Athens would, in a premeditated spirit, take the reins of government into their own hands. The confrontation between the demos and the upper class in 462/1 is different from stasis only because blood did not flow, though, indeed, Ephialtes fell victim to an assassin and the threat of counterrevolution turned serious.[89] This triumph of demokratia signals the transmutation of a government in which, since Cleisthenes, the demos had been united as the sovereign de iure to one in which it now intended to exercise control for its own sake. It was the political victory of a self-constituted faction, not an anticipation of Periclean isonomia.
[88] Cimon was tried in 463 (see Appendix 2) probably under a different dispensation (cf. J. Lipsius, Das Attische Recht und Rechtsverfahren [Hildesheim, 1966; repr. ed.], 2.296f., Busolt-Swoboda, p. 884 n. 1, and Ostwald, Sovereignty, pp. 40–41, on the possible participation of the Areopagos), which may be why he escaped conviction.
[89] On the conspiracy at Tanagra, see ch. 4, p. 136.
Of the measures subsequently taken by the demos to bring the city-state into new balance, as it were, the lowering of the property requirement for the archonship effected in 458/7 (Ath. Pol. 26.2)[90] needs no special explanation, for it obviously democratized the office, partially fulfilling the requirement (Ps.-Xen. 2.1) "that the magistracies be shared by all the people both by lot and by election." In addition to the two highest census classes (the Pentakosiomedimnoi and the Hippeis), the Zeugitai, whose census implied the relative wealth enjoyed by the hoplite class, were now allowed to vie for the office. Only the Thetes, who possessed no property, were excluded. Needless to say, to have included them in this reform would have been tantamount to degrading the magistracy.
Far and away the most important piece of legislation to follow Ephialtes' reform was that which, on the proposal of Pericles, introduced jury payments. The decision was truly epochal, for it opened up the coffers of the state to the citizenry at large and registered the fact that henceforth the possession of Athenian citizenship would entitle its holder to payment for public service in one of the most critical areas of public policy, and this without education, qualification, or, indeed, even the serious expenditure of mental or physical energy—unless vicarious participation in oratorical display (cf. Plato Rep. 492b) qualifies as such. No measure passed by the Athenians in the mid fifth century rivals this Periclean enactment in its narrow[91] and more extended significance, and the date of its passage, as well as its relationship to the reform of Ephialtes, is a question of singular interest.
Unfortunately, the extant literature fails to provide a firm date for the passage of this measure and, what is worse, uses language to describe it that is susceptible to more than one interpretation. Thus Wade-Gery infers that Pericles introduced this bill before Ephialtes' assault on the Areopagus in 462/1,[92] and although a consensus[93] is presently united in rejecting Wade-Gery, and places the legislation in the fifties,
[90] Cf. Hignett, HAC, p. 225, with n. 2, Rhodes, AP, ad loc. (p. 330), and Ruschenbusch, pp. 66–72.
[91] See Hignett, HAC, pp. 219–21, Ostwald, Sovereignty, pp. 82–83, 182–83.
[92] Wade-Gery, Essays, pp. 235–38, esp. p. 237; followed by Badian, JHS 107 (1987), 9.
[93] The conventional view places the measure shortly after Ephialtes' reform: see Busolt, 3.1.263–64, Hignett, HAC, pp. 219, 342–43; Ostwald, Sovereignty, pp. 182–83, is more cautious; Walker, CAH, 5.101, set the measure in the late fifties; Jacoby, at FGrHist 328 F 33 (IIIb 1, p. 319), declared that the payment of the jurymen "cannot have been introduced until 449/8 B.C. " His entire commentary on this fragment of Philochorus deserves close study.
modern scholars continue divided as to its more precise date, some dating the introduction of pay to juries to the early fifties, others preferring a time very late in the decade, if not early in the forties.
The problem centers on two important texts, Arist. Ath. Pol. 27 and Plut. Per. 9.1–5, both of which, for the sake of the argument, require quotation in their entirety:
Ath. Pol. 27: After this [i.e., legislation culminating in the citizenship law of 451/50], Pericles proceeded to leadership of the people [
], first having won fame when he prosecuted Cimon at the rendering of his accounts as general, and he was a young man; and it happened that the politeia became still more democratic. For he took away some of the powers of the Areopagus and, above all, impelled the city to acquire its naval power, from the acquisition of which it happened that the many increasingly brought the politeia under their control. [2] In the 49th year after the sea battle of Salamis in the archonship of Pythodorus [432/1], the war against the Peloponnesians commenced. The demos was enclosed in the city and became accustomed to being paid on the campaigns, and partly willingly, partly unwillingly, it decided to administer the politeia itself. [3] Pericles was the first to provide payment to the juries in the dicasteries, using demagoguery in opposition to the wealth of Cimon. For Cimon, since he possessed wealth characteristic of a tyrant, in the first place conducted his public liturgies in splendid fashion, secondly, he supported many of his fellow-demesmen. Any member of the deme Lakiadai who wished was able to come to him daily and receive a reasonable sustenance. Furthermore, his lands were unfenced, so that it was possible, for anyone who wished, to enjoy the benefit of his produce. [4] Since in comparison with this wealth Pericles fell short in respect to his own, Damonides [ = Damon] of Oa, who was reputedly Pericles' adviser for most of his legislation, which is why they later ostracized him, advised Pericles to give the many what was their own, since he could not compete with [Cimon's] private fortune. [Thus] Pericles arranged payment for the juries. As a consequence of these [measures], some blame him to the effect that the dikasteria became worse since it was not the respectable sort of man but random types who took care to have themselves allotted to the juries. [5] Bribery started after this, Anytus having introduced the practice after his strategia [of 410] in Pylus. . . .
Plut. Per. 9.1–5: Since Thucydides describes the politeia of Pericles as an aristocratic one, "theoretically a democracy but in fact rule by the first man," but many others say that the demos was first introduced by him to cleruchies, theorika and the distribution of pay, acquiring a corrupt character, and becoming spendthrift and undisciplined because of the legislation passed at that time, instead of moderate and self-sufficing, the reason for this change is to be sought in the historical circumstances. [2] In the beginning, as stated, ranging himself against the repute of Cimon, he tried to ingratiate himself with the demos. Falling short in wealth and possessions, which Cimon used to raise up the poor, providing a daily meal to any Athenian in need of it, clothing the elderly, and removing the fences from his properties, so that those who wished could
gather his produce, Pericles applied demagoguery against this liberality. He turned to the distribution of the public resources, Damonides [ = Damon] of Oa having advised him, as Aristotle has related. [3] He speedily managed to bribe the many with theorika and jury pay and other payments and expenditures, and used this against the boule of the Areopagus, of which he was not a member. . . . [5] Thus, having acquired greater influence among the demos, he attacked the boule [of the Areopagus] so as to secure the removal of most of its juridical business through the agency of Ephialtes and got Cimon ostracized as a philo-Lacon and enemy of democracy. Yet Cimon fell short neither in wealth nor in family position, and had won the most splendid victories against the barbarians and had filled the city with much wealth and many spoils. . . . So great was the power of Pericles among the demos .
A careful comparison of the passage in Plutarch with Ath. Pol. 27 will convince the reader that Plutarch has closely followed Aristotle. For example, it is evident that the narrative sequence is closely parallel, the same error is committed about Damon's name, and the general thrust of these passages is identical. At the same time, Plutarch's loose paraphrase includes slight alterations (Aristotle's reference to the removal of some authority from Areopagites has become a general attack on the Areopagites [i.e., Ephialtes' assault]) and he also expands on Aristotle by speaking generally of a variety of measures, "the theorika . . . . and other payments and expenditures" instead of the jury payment bill alone, and assigns all of them to the period before 462/1. Now whether this obvious misstatement of fact (some of these bills were passed no earlier than the fifties) arose because Plutarch misunderstood Ath. Pol. 27 or for some other reason need not exercise us; the relevant point is that it is methodologically improper to combine the two accounts (as Wade-Gery attempts to do) as if each possessed independent authority. Since Plutarch relied on Aristotle, the question reduces itself to whether or not Plutarch's interpretation of Aristotle is correct.
Aristotle's chapter 27 is devoted to two interrelated subjects, the fruit of Pericles' demagoguery and the motivation ascribed to him for proceeding on this path. But if Aristotle alleges that Pericles passed this legislation because of his inability to follow Cimon's practice of bribing the public with his private wealth, he simultaneously sets the introduction of misthos into a narrative context of which the terminus post quem is the citizenship law of 451/50. The motivation ascribed to Pericles is logically subordinate to this account of Pericles' activities just after the citizenship law was passed, and the notion that it is all a flashback and that Aristotle went backwards in time to a period before 462/1 is supported neither by Aristotle's explanatory allusion to Pericles' first attack
on Cimon (Ath. Pol. 27.1) nor, more important, by the indications of the narrative method he follows in this section of the Ath. Pol.
Aristotle pursues a chronological thread in chapters 25–28, discussing events of major interest in temporal order. Chapter 23 centers on the political situation after Xerxes' invasion and deals with the organization of the Athenian empire. The benefits of the empire to the Athenian people are discussed topically and prospectively in chapter 24, where Aristotle speaks of the ultimate employment of more than 20,000 Athenian citizens in various ways, including their payment as jurors. The chronological framework is resumed in chapter 25, where Ephialtes' attack on the Areopagus, dated by Aristotle to 462/1, forms the main subject. This leads to chapter 26, the burden of which is the post-Ephialtean expansion of the democracy. Three measures are selected for special notice, the alteration in the property requirements for the archonship (458/7), the establishment of thirty itinerant judges in 453/2 and, two years later, Pericles' citizenship law. Chapter 27, quoted above, devotes itself to the entire period of Pericles' tenure of power, and though Pericles' introduction of jury pay is explained somewhat intricately, with Damon[ides], whose activity apparently fell in the forties,[94] given the role of adviser and Cimon's philanthropy cited as the precedent, this legislation forms Aristotle's centerpiece on the subject of the extension of democracy by Pericles. The logic of this narrative does not suggest that Aristotle intended to convey the idea that this reform occurred immediately after (much less before)[95] the destruction of the Areopagus. On the contrary, obscure as the temporal connections are in this chapter, we have more reason to date this legislation to a period after 451/50 than before it—between his rise to power and his death in 429; and if it be objected that Aristotle also implies direct competition between Pericles and Cimon, the solution to this dilemma may be sought along the lines adumbrated by E. M. Walker.[96] When Cimon returned from ostracism in 452, his liberality unquestionably recommenced and the appearance of direct rivalry can have been blown into a topos thus reflected in the Aristotelian tradition.
Nevertheless, many scholars insist that the Periclean measure providing pay to juries is logically most suitable to the early fifties. Thus the claim is often made that the removal of judicial authority from the Areopagus to the courts required that Pericles provide pay for juries to
[94] See Appendix 3.
[95] See ch. 1, p. 27, above.
[96] Walker, CAH, 5.101.
enable ordinary individuals to participate, and not merely those "of the better element" who possessed the wealth and leisure to act as jurors without economic inconvenience. In other words, this question is capable of being viewed in two different ways: either the measure was in response to a problem created by Ephialtes' reform—namely, an inadequate supply of Athenian jurors—or it represents an innovation by Pericles intending to bestow a benefit on Athenian citizens by sharing the wealth of the state with them.
General probability does not suggest that Ephialtes' transferral of the judicial powers of the Areopagus would suddenly have created a problem of such dimensions that money would have been required to entice Athenians to serve on juries; nor is that the implication of the tradition as we find it in Aristotle and Plutarch. The plain fact is that we do not know that the "proliferation" occurred before Pericles' introduction of misthos, and it seems at least as reasonable to conjecture that the jury system radically expanded only when it was pecuniarily desirable for as many Athenians as possible to include themselves in the operation. The reform of Ephialtes destroyed one institution; it does not follow that it simultaneously created what eventually turned into a judicial bureaucracy. The void was probably filled gradually, by a series of decrees in the fifties; but the watershed, not improbably, was the very introduction of jury pay, which rendered jury service desirable because it was remunerative, and thereby created a constituency that pressed for an increase in judicial activity.
If the case for early passage is not very strong, what is the case for later passage? The fact that Ath. Pol. 27 places this measure after the citizenship law should perhaps not be pressed unduly, since some students of the material will prefer other interpretations of the passage. Yet some things should be beyond dispute. First,
[97] Plato Gorgias 515e, Arist. Pol. 1317b35ff.
hood. It is possible, of course, that the ancients misconceived the pattern, inferring Pericles' radicalism from the effects of a bill less extraordinary than they supposed, but it is at least as likely that moderns have been drawn to make this assumption for the reverse reason—the desire to extenuate Periclean demagoguery. "He did not bribe the people; he ensured that the courts would run efficiently."
The net result of this curious state of affairs is that Pericles, who bears the credit and the responsibility for having introduced radical democracy, is virtually deprived of any credit for the legislation that accounted for his fame in the fifth century and thereafter. Except for the building program and the citizenship law, Pericles, as viewed through modern eyes, becomes a rather ordinary but highly respectable politician. This probably would have amused him. However that may be, the real question we must consider is whether the introduction by Pericles of misthos for juries was an isolated piece of legislation (entailed by the fall of the Areopagus) or part of a set of proposals in which the principle of public pay was implemented in a variety of different areas as a new departure in public policy. That the latter alternative is the correct one seems difficult to deny, at least if we are prepared to follow the indications, slight as they are, of the ancient evidence.
In Per. 9.1–3, Plutarch twice mentions Pericles' demagogic legislation, and in both cases the list is the same: "the theorika, dicastic pay, other pay for public service, and the choregiai. " Since the order of this list was not dictated by the relative importance of the items in the string, for in that case jury pay must have come first, we may infer that Plutarch is reproducing this set of measures in its chronological order. If so, since the theoric fund was probably not instituted until the early forties,[98] pay for juries can have been introduced no sooner. And even if the inference about chronological order is disallowed, the general implication remains the same: Aristotle and Plutarch regarded this measure as one of a set of transfer payments devoted to the people; the implicit charge leveled against Pericles is the institution of new public policy incarnated in the jury-payment bill.
If we now consider the appropriate time for these enactments taken
[98] For the theoricon, which provided payments to the Athenians to permit them to attend the major festivals, see Busolt-Swoboda, pp. 899–900, with n. 5. Disagreement exists as to the Periclean origin of the theoricon, since the fund is unattested epigraphically for the fifth century. See the discussion of Rhodes, AP, pp. 514–16. Rhodes prefers a date for its institution in the mid fourth century, while we follow Jacoby, FGrHist 328 (Philochorus) F 33, who, on general considerations, is inclined to date this fund to the early forties (IIIb, p. 319).
as a whole, other evidence becomes relevant. The most important testimony is Aristotle's (topical) review in Ath. Pol. 24.3, which establishes the connection between receipt of imperial revenues and the creation of the enmisthos polis: "For it resulted that more than 20,000 men were sustained by the tribute and the taxes and the allies. There were 6,000 jurors, 1,600 toxotai; in addition there were 1,200 cavalry, 500 members of the boule, 500 guards of the shipyards, etc."
Aristotle's inference or knowledge that the empire provided the revenues necessary to maintain the jurors seems not only acceptable but mandatory. Vast sums were involved, jury pay alone amounting to a theoretical maximum of just under 122 talents annually.[99] Such a maximum is undoubtedly unrealistic, though the juries were already busy (Ps.-Xen. 3.6–7) in the forties and Aristophanes, in 422, estimated that the dicasts (from a quorum of 6,000) served for an average of 300 days in the year (Wasps 661f.) But we must add the other expenses—the theorika, public payment for the navy and army, the boule, and so on.[100] The aggregate sum must have been larger than the annual expenditures allocated for public buildings,[101] and the source of this money can only have been the tribute. Whatever the actual expense, it is apparent that Pericles' commitment was open-ended, and that a flow of money into the city therefore needed to be assured. For this reason, a date after 454 gives the upper terminus, independently of the arguments already deduced from Ath. Pol. 27,[102] which suggest a slightly later date.
Since, therefore, the evidence points to the introduction of jury pay by Pericles no earlier than the late fifties, it follows that his legislation should be regarded as part of a sweeping policy allowing the Athenians to participate in all aspects of their government at state expense. The logic driving this legislation is identical with that Pericles used to justify his building program, commenced at approximately the same time
[99] I.e., 365 days × 6,000 jurors at two obols daily.
[100] See Hignett, HAC, pp. 216ff.
[101] On this subject, see Beloch, 2.2.335f., and ML, pp. 164–65, with literature cited there. We take it as certain that the imperial funds were used to this end.
[102] It is worth noting that Ar. Eccl. 303–6 has the chorus assert that no one would have considered taking pay for public service in the time of Myronides. Myronides' last known action occurred c. 457, just after Tanagra, at Oenophyta (Thuc. 1.108.2). Busolt, 3.1.267 n. 2, it is true, observed that "Aristophanes has essentially in view the ecclesiastic pay." But as Busolt's own qualifying word (wesentlich ) indicates, his limitation of the remark to pay for members of the ecclesia is somewhat constrained. The choral statement suggests epochal division (no pay / state pay) rather more than the introduction of one type of misthos (for the ecclesia ) after another (for juries) had already been effectuated. Thus a time after 457 becomes a binding theoretical terminus post quem.
(Plut. Per. 12), which also was premised on the concept of public compensation. Thus Pericles realized the goal of conveying to the demos the resources of the state. The Athenians acquired high privilege thanks to their empire: the Spartans had their helots, the Athenians their subjectallies. In neither case should the egocentric and expropriative basis of the prosperity of a relative few be left unnoticed.
On this view of the date and purpose of Pericles' introduction of misthos, the motivation of the citizenship law of 451/50 (Ath. Pol. 26.4) becomes something less of a mystery. According to its terms, which were hardly retroactive, only those born of Athenians on both sides of the family were entitled to the franchise. Many explanations of this measure have been proposed,[103] but its primary intention should now be manifest. The decision to support the many by means of the revenues of the empire made it crucial to limit this benefit to "true Athenians." It might be argued that the measure could only achieve its purpose some twenty years thereafter, since only the newborn fell under its restrictions. But the counterargument is persuasive: was Pericles to attempt no limitations, and not look to the future, because the nature of the case precluded retroactive exclusion? We are reminded of Plato, who conceded that though the "noble lie" might be detected by the first generation of members of the ideal state, the idea would work for a second generation. So here something had to be done, and this measure, with its corollary, the diapsephismos of 445 (Philochorus, FGrHist 328 F 119),[104] attempted to anticipate the future in an orderly manner by putting a stop to undesirable marriages.
Thus the citizenship law is strictly in keeping with the spirit of demokratia as it by then had developed. It was incumbent on the demos to preserve itself intact and secure the privileged position that it had won by insistence on the monopoly of birth. No doubt other considerations combined to make the law attractive—repugnance at intermixture with the sons and daughters of metics, with all the inevitable complications of inheritance laws; fear of intermarriage with Ionians, especially in the cleruchies, but a serious possibility for the many Athenians domiciled or stationed abroad. One can readily imagine that "foreign marriages"
[103] See Hignett, HAC, pp. 343–47; Humphreys, "The Nothoi of Kynosarges," JHS 94 (1974), 93–94; J. K. Davies, "Athenian Citizenship: The Descent Group and the Alternatives," CJ 73 (1977–78), 105–21; Ruschenbusch, pp. 83–87; C. Patterson, Pericles' Citizenship Law of 451–450 B.C. (New York, 1981); Rhodes, AP, pp. 331–35; Badian, JHS 107 (1987), 11–12; and Busolt, 3.1.337–39.
[104] Cf. Plut. Per. 37.2; see Hignett, HAC, pp. 343–47, F. E. Adcock, CAH, 5.167–68, and the preceding note.
might be regarded, from a strictly Athenian point of view, as a corrupting influence on the mores and single-minded loyalty of representatives of the demos.[ 105] But all such considerations reduce to an unwillingness to dilute the demos now that the principle was established that possession of citizenship entailed tremendous and hitherto undreamed of economic advantages. Athenian public policy became the mirror-image of Athens's reduction of its allies to subjects, thus generating the paradox that the perfect democracy of the ancient world required the subservience of others in order to succeed.
[105] The scurrilous gossip about Aspasia (see Appendix 4) is probably at least in part connected with this prejudice.