IN SEARCH OF POPULAR GOVERNMENTIN SEARCH OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT ... de–mokratia became a matter of...

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IN SEARCH OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT

If the unification of attica was ultimately a more complex and prob-lematic process than is usually recognized, the Athenians themselves preferredto gloss over any untidy or inconvenient details. The tradition of the Theseansynoecism reduced the process to a straightforward bureaucratic act in the dis-tant past, and no one, it seems, ever saw the need to challenge this version ofevents. By contrast, there was not always such easy unanimity about that othermomentous chapter in Athenian political history, the evolution of democracy.

While it was generally accepted that de–mokratia was the “traditional modeof government” (patrios politeia) in Athens, the precise nature of the originalde–mokratia became a matter of heated dispute at certain points in the classicalperiod. If deµned in its most basic sense as “the collective control of the stateby the demos, or people,” the idea was of course open to some breadth of in-terpretation according to how the notions of control and demos were deµned.And as rival groups competed to establish their own particular political visionsas the true descendant of “ancestral” democracy, more than one account of theorigins of de–mokratia in the state inevitably emerged.

Needless to say, memory of constitutional developments, like any otherform of collective memory in classical Athens, was all too easily manipulatedto µt the needs of the present. It is therefore essential to allow for this instabil-ity of constitutional memory when we confront ancient opinions about therole played by Cleisthenes’ reforms in the story of Athenian democracy. After

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The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508-490 B.C. Greg Anderson http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=17798 The University of Michigan Press

all, even the earliest of these opinions (that of Herodotus) was recorded at leastseventy or eighty years after the event. And we should remember that the re-forms themselves were passed at a time when Greek historiography was stillsome way short of its infancy, and at a time when it was still not yet standardpractice to keep permanent records of the business transacted by the Athenianstate.1 So most if not all of our literary testimony for the political changes of/ derives ultimately from an oral tradition that was less than reliable. Re-garding the speciµc details of the tribal reform, discussed in the previous chap-ter, our sources’ dependence on oral material probably had little effect on thequality of their testimony, since it would have been easy for authors to ×eshout their accounts with inferences from contemporary practice. But on largerquestions, such as the overall historical signiµcance of Cleisthenes’ measuresand their impact on the development of democracy, ancient authors are likelyto be less helpful. An informed judgment on such issues will have required notonly a clear understanding of what transpired in / but also a sound work-ing knowledge of political arrangements in even earlier eras, a level of knowl-edge that was perhaps already unattainable by the time that the likes of Hero-dotus and Thucydides began work on their texts.

Turning, then, to our own inquiry into the contribution of Cleisthenes’ re-forms to the history of popular government in Athens, it seems appropriate tobegin by looking in a little more detail at the problems presented by our pri-mary sources. Here, we should try in particular to get a sense of the differentoral accounts of Athenian constitutional history that were circulating in thelater µfth and fourth centuries, accounts that may well have in×uenced howcontemporary writers chose to characterize Cleisthenes’ achievement.

DEMOCRACY AND MEMORY

Among the relatively small number of ancient authors who refer to Cleisthenes,there appears to be a general consensus on both the content and the larger his-torical signiµcance of his reforms: they were associated in some way with de-velopment of democracy in Athens; and their most important provision wasfor the creation of the intricate system of demes, trittyes, and tribes that wasto become such a familiar feature of Athenian public life. As a rule, scholarshave been inclined to accept both of these claims at face value and have thenattempted to identify some kind of causal relationship between the two. Manybelieve that we can µnd anticipations of popular rule in earlier times. But thegeneral consensus, found in most textbooks, is that Cleisthenes’ measures infact marked the effective birth of democracy in Athens, and that the main ev-

44 � the athenian experiment


http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=17798

idence for this conclusion is to be found somewhere in the details of the newtribal system. The conclusion itself may well be correct, but this use of thesources is problematic, for at least two reasons.

To begin with, even our most informative sources—Herodotus andAP—are disappointingly vague on the question of how exactly Cleisthenes’tribal system made Athens more democratic. And it must be admitted thatthe nature of any such causal relationship remains less than self-evident.2

Granted, as two of our sources (AP.–; Arist. Pol. b–) maintain,the system involved some “mixing up” of rich and poor in the demes andtribes. In the demes in particular, political life does seem to have been some-what egalitarian from the very beginning, with even the very poorest citizensentitled to the same rights and privileges as any of their more distinguishedbrethren.3 But the primary purpose of this mixing seems to have been togenerate a stronger sense of common interest and purpose within the citizencommunity as a whole. And here, as we saw in chapter , the simple need toovercome physical distances between citizens was at least as urgent as theneed to soften distinctions of wealth and status. In any case, it is hard to seehow the presence of different socioeconomic groups within each tribe willhave made the political process in Athens itself more democratic. Mixingmay have left some mark on the composition of the Council of , but itwill have had no direct, tangible impact on any other organ of the centralgovernment.

Alternatively, some modern authorities believe it is possible to detect abroadly democratic sensibility in the geography of Cleisthenes’ tribal system.By distributing the members of powerful families or local cult organizationsamong the trittyes of different tribes, the new order, it is held, will have di-minished the ability of the elite to exploit these traditional sources of supportin the national political arena, or at least in the new Council of .4 Theremay be a measure of truth to this claim, though we know of too few certaininstances of such manipulation to conclude that the tribal system as a wholewas inherently “democratic,” even in this very limited sense. Besides, we mightreasonably expect any democratic reforms worthy of the name to be more con-cerned with raising the level of political rights and opportunities for poorer cit-izens than with simply trimming back those previously held only by the rich.Certainly citizens of the hoplite class were an integral part of the new order.Yet, as noted in the previous chapter, it is highly unlikely that those of the theteclass would have had any part to play in either the Council of or the citi-zen army, the very institutions whose organizational basis the new tribes wereexpressly designed to provide.

In Search of Popular Government � 45


In short, the tribal reform would seem to be a strangely oblique way of re-alizing democracy in the Athenian state. This cannot have been its larger pur-pose. We may be able to identify some degree of leveling in the new system,even a trace of egalitarianism. But this would not have made the reform dem-ocratic as such, unless we maintain a rather loose deµnition of the termde–mokratia. We shall return to this question of deµnition shortly.

In the meantime, our sources present another serious problem for thosewho contend that Cleisthenes instituted democracy through the tribal reform.For a mountain of impressive inferences and suppositions cannot hide the factthat only one ancient author, in a single statement, comes close to claimingthat Cleisthenes actually was the founder of Athenian democracy. This authoris Herodotus, and the statement (..), surprisingly, does not come at thepoint in his text where the tribal reform is explicitly discussed. Instead, we µndit tucked away near the end of the following book after the colorful account ofthe events that led to the marriage of Cleisthenes’ parents, Megacles II andAgariste of Sikyon. In the standard translation, it reads as follows.

Of this union was born Cleisthenes, the man who established the tribesand the democracy for the Athenians [ho tas phulas kai te–n de–mokratie–nAthe–naioisi kataste–sas], and who was named after his maternal grand-father, [Cleisthenes] the Sikyonian [tyrant].

At µrst sight, the statement seems straightforward enough. The only prob-lem is that even this testimony may not be saying quite what we would like itto say. The difµculty comes with the all-important verb form [kataste–sas],which could mean “established (from scratch),” but could also mean simply“set in order,” or even “reestablished,” implying that democracy had alreadyexisted in some form in Athens at some earlier time. And regarding the otherobject governed by this verb (“the tribes”), these alternative translations wouldcertainly be more appropriate, since Herodotus makes it clear elsewhere(..) that he saw Cleisthenes’ ten phylai as a reorganization of the existing-tribe system, not as something entirely new. Sadly, what we do not µnd else-where is a deµnitive statement about the kind of political arrangements, whichthe author believed had prevailed in Athens before the Peisistratid tyranny. Inthe absence of such conµrmation, Herodotus’ intent in .. must for nowremain unclear. We will be in a better position to clarify his meaning at the endof chapter , when evidence adduced during the course of this study shouldhelp us to settle the issue with some µnality.



So if Cleisthenes was not widely seen by the ancients as the founder ofAthenian democracy, who did they think was responsible? Two different claimsabout the origins of popular government in Athens seem to have been currentin the classical period.

The more tendentious of the two probably entered circulation in the late µfthcentury, emerging during the period of domestic turmoil that followed the dis-astrous demise of the Athenian campaign in Sicily in . It seems to have beena product of an ongoing debate over the nature of the “traditional mode of gov-ernment” (patrios politeia) in Athens. This was a debate waged initially betweensupporters of the current, radical democratic (“demotic”) regime and the fol-lowers of Theramenes, who sought to replace it with what amounted to a mod-erate form of oligarchy. The latter group brie×y prevailed, and in Cleitophon’srider to the decree of Pythodorus that established the short-lived regime of theFour Hundred in B.C. (AP .), we µnd an injunction to seek out as guid-ance “the traditional laws” [tous patrious nomous] drafted by Cleisthenes when,again in the standard translation, “he established the democracy” [kathiste– te–nde–mokratian]. According to AP, the rationale here was that this democratic con-stitution associated with Cleisthenes was “not radical” [ou de–motike–n] but “sim-ilar to that of Solon” [paraple–sian . . . te–i Solo–nos]. If this statement re×ects ar-guments that were actually made at the time of the decree, it would constituteour earliest—albeit oblique—evidence, for the claim that the poet-lawgiverSolon was actually the author of some form of democracy, since he is not ex-plicitly characterized as a constitutional reformer in any source written beforethis time.5 As for Cleisthenes’ role in this scheme, it is clear enough from thecontext that he was seen not as the original founder of democracy but merely asthe man who restored it after the Peisistratid tyranny. Hence, we should proba-bly emend the standard translation of the text of Cleitophon’s rider in AP ..In this instance, the verb kathiste–, a form of the very same verb (kathiste–mi) usedearlier by Herodotus to describe Cleisthenes’ contribution to Athenian democ-racy, must mean “reestablished” not “established (from scratch).”

The claim that Solon was in some sense the founder of Athenian democ-racy would prove to be extremely durable. In an effort to counter the force ofthis new historical charter for the constitution preferred by the Therameneans,supporters of radical democracy ultimately devised a very similar precedent fortheir very own version of de–mokratia. Following the restoration of this “de-motic” democracy after the fall of the Thirty Tyrants in , it was resolved ina decree proposed by Teisamenos (see Andoc. .–) that inter alia the polisbe governed “according to traditional precedent” [kata ta patria], and be sub-



ject to the “laws” [nomoi] of Solon, with some role even foreseen for the “or-dinances” [thesmoi] of Draco. Thus, whatever the actual historical achieve-ment of Cleisthenes, it was Solon who came to be celebrated as the preeminentdemocratic reformer and Athenian history’s µrst true “champion of thepeople.”6

But assuming that Solon was not cast in this role until the later µfth cen-tury, how were the origins of democracy in Athens understood before this time?According to the earliest unambiguous testimony for a founder µgure, theAthenians apparently believed that the µrst steps toward popular governmenthad been taken long before the times of Solon and Cleisthenes, back duringthe reign of the legendary king Theseus. Perhaps nurtured in the less partisan,more “imaginary” realm of state funeral orations, the beginnings of this tradi-tion are very hard to pin down. But it was certainly current by the s, whenit is µrst visible to us in the Suppliants of Euripides (esp. –). Thereafter,it is attested more frequently, appearing implicitly or explicitly in a number offourth-century sources, and it seems even to have in×uenced Thucydides’ con-ception of the early Athenian state.7

How then did the Athenians of the fourth-century reconcile memories ofthree different moments of political rupture—those associated with Theseus,Solon, and Cleisthenes—and organize them into a single coherent narrative?The best-attested reconstructions of early Athenian constitutional history fromthis time are found in AP and in the works of the reactionary pamphleteerIsocrates.

In the µrst part of AP (.–.) we µnd a highly nuanced, if not always ac-curate or consistent overview of Athenian political developments down to

B.C., concluding (.) with a summary of eleven successive changes of govern-ment [metabolai] identiµed by the author. The second of these is characterizedas “shifting slightly away from absolute monarchy” [mikron parenklinousa te–sbasilike–s] under Theseus, though the eventual abolition of the monarchy is notincluded in the scheme. What then follows represents something of a compro-mise between the “demotic” and oligarchic versions of constitutional history.

Thus, after a probable interpolation concerning the supposed constitutionof Draco, the third change comes when Solon lays down the “foundation ofdemocracy” [arkhe– de–mokratias]. However, we learn from elsewhere in the text(.) that this development involved only limited gains for ordinary citizens,the “most demotic” [de–motiko–tata] reforms being a ban on taking loans on thesecurity of the body, the right for anyone who so wished to seek legal redress,and the right to appeal a legal decision in a dikaste–rion. Meanwhile, in the µfthchange it is left to Cleisthenes to revive the democracy after the fall of the Pei-



sistratid tyranny and give it a much more radical character (cf. .). Althoughfurther steps in this direction would be taken by Aristides and Ephialtes in theseventh change in the sequence, the author of AP clearly felt (.) that the de-cisive shift towards radical democracy had already occurred decades earlier,when Cleisthenes “won over the demos by handing over control of the state tothe people” [prose–gageto ton de–mon, apodidous to–i ple–thei te–n politeian].8

An altogether less nuanced and more partisan synthesis of constitutionalhistory is found among the copious writings of Isocrates. More concerned toin×uence contemporary affairs than the author of AP, Isocrates was inspired bya nostalgic longing for what he thought was the traditional constitution of thepast, arguing throughout his career for its revival and the abandonment of thedegenerate constitution of his own day. Though his preferred regime is re-peatedly described as “democracy,” it in fact resembles nothing more than thekind of moderate oligarchy once favored by the Therameneans.

As for the history of this avowedly “aristocratic” version of democracy, heimagined it had been µrst introduced to Athens “not less than a thousandyears” earlier at the time of Theseus (cf. ., ). But the real hero of thestory for Isocrates seems to have been Solon, described as a “champion of thepeople,” whom he credits with µnally writing this constitution into law. Cleis-thenes, too, is presented in a very positive light. However, unlike in AP, he isnot seen as any kind of innovator, his achievement being rather to restore theSolonian regime after liberating Athens from the Peisistratid tyrants. ForIsocrates, therefore, it was not until well after the reforms of / that the con-stitution µrst began to be tainted by “demotic” elements, the ultimate resultbeing the debased form of popular government all too familiar to his fourth-century contemporaries.9

Whatever the differences of detail between these two reconstructions, theoverall scheme in each is similar. In both, it is Theseus who makes the µrstsigniµcant move toward popular government, but Solon who makes this com-mitment essentially irrevocable by writing democracy into law. Both chartertraditions were thus accommodated into a single satisfying narrative. As forCleisthenes, his role was simply to restore Solon’s political arrangements aftertheir abandonment by the Peisistratids. Dispute remained only on the ques-tion of whether he gave democracy a more radical ×avor in the process.

We should of course like to know better what others in the fourth centurycame to believe about Athenian constitutional history, especially Atthidogra-phers like Cleidemus and Androtion. But in so far as we can recover an“ofµcial” version of events, it does not seem to have diverged signiµcantly fromthe overall pattern found in Isocrates and AP.10 While, for obvious reasons, the



state may have placed more emphasis on the achievements of Theseus than onthose of Solon, the contributions of both were deemed worthy of public cele-bration. Thus, extant fourth-century funeral orations routinely appeal to the“ancestral” democracy of the heroic past, and there was probably an allusion tothe foundational moment of this democracy in a mural executed in ca. byEuphranor in the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios. Here, in the µrst known monumen-tal commemoration of an event in the earliest, formative phase of Athenian con-stitutional history, the artist conspicuously juxtaposed a Theseus µgure with per-soniµed images of Demos and Demokratia. But equally conspicuously, when, atsome point before the early s, a decision was made to memorialize the achieve-ments of a more recent constitutional reformer, it was Solon who was honoredwith a free-standing bronze statue in front of the Stoa Poikile in the Agora.11

There was then, it seems, a broad consensus about the outlines of Athen-ian constitutional history by the fourth century, with individual writers gen-erally echoing the ofµcial line, namely that democracy was no recent, progres-sive innovation but an almost timeless feature of the Athenian culturallandscape. The achievements of Cleisthenes, meanwhile, were now seen as nomore than a footnote in the larger story of the Athenian state. His decisive rolein the political uniµcation of Attica was eclipsed by the synoecism tradition,and his contribution to the cause of popular government was judged to be amore or less straightforward revival of practices initiated by others. And sinceCleisthenes was never accorded the kind of permanent public recognition thatwas lavished so freely upon Theseus and Solon in the classical era, interest inthe Alcmeonid declined appreciably thereafter.12 Apparently the only monu-ment to him still visible when Pausanias came to record the sights of Athensin the second century A.D. was a grave memorial in the state cemetery in theKerameikos. The travel writer (..) passes over it in about half a sentence,noting merely that Cleisthenes was the man responsible for “the presentarrangement of the tribes.” And it comes as no surprise when Pausanias im-plies elsewhere in his text that even this limited achievement would no longerhave been common knowledge among his readers.13

We shall have more to say in due course about the formation of a sharedconstitutional memory in Athens (see especially chapter ). For now it isenough to observe that the vagaries of this memory in the classical period, al-luded to above, make it extremely difµcult to assess the historical contributionof Cleisthenes’ reforms to democracy in Athens. Even the earliest and most re-liable of our ancient guides were forced to depend to a great extent on an oraltradition that was all too vulnerable to the in×uence of political expediency andpatriotic fancy. Most if not all of them may therefore have made assumptions



and inferences that are fundamentally ×awed, requiring us to exercise unusuallevels of caution and skepticism when handling their accounts. Perhaps the an-cients were correct in their view that Cleisthenes did little more than reassem-ble an older order dismantled by the Peisistratids, though we cannot assumethat they were. Whatever the case, our sources understandably show greater in-terest in the more illustrious achievements of Theseus and Solon. And their rel-ative lack of interest in the Alcmeonid raises a further problem that is bothmore straightforward and far harder to overcome, namely, the paltry quantityof information that has come down to us about the career of Cleisthenes, thecontent of his reforms, and their historical context.

Still, these problems need not be insurmountable. As I hope to show in theremainder of this chapter, there are other kinds of evidence on which we candraw to compensate for the shortcomings of our main literary sources andcomplete our picture of Cleisthenes’ reforms. But µrst, we should clarify animportant semantic issue raised earlier.

What exactly did de–mokratia mean in the Athenian context? To speak ofthe term as if it referred to a single, monolithic idea seems unhelpful, not tomention unrealistic. Ancient and modern authors use the word with such lat-itude that it is probably preferable to think of a continuum of meaning alongwhich at some point we must locate the contribution of Cleisthenes’ reforms.At one extreme, we have the regime described in AP and elsewhere as “de-motic” democracy, with its sovereign citizen Assembly (ekkle–sia), powerfulmass-jury courts (dikaste–ria), routine public scrutiny and review of all stateofµcials, payment for jurors and magistrates, and use of the lottery in the se-lection of most ofµceholders. Under this radically egalitarian system, almost alldistinctions in privilege between rich and poor would, in theory at least, beeliminated. But what were the bare minimum requirements for democracy? Inother words, where does the continuum begin?

This question continues to be the object of an ongoing and vigorous de-bate, since the way we choose to answer it determines, in large part, where welocate the decisive break in the evolutionary progression from an older, morearistocratic form of government toward a genuinely popular regime in Athens.While some are content to equate the emergence of democracy with the µrstsigns that nonelite citizens are playing a meaningful role in the political process,others insist that a regime cannot truly be described as democratic until it fea-tures at least some of the more obviously egalitarian practices mentioned above,such as the selection of ofµceholders by lottery.14

Of these two points of discontinuity, the former is clearly the more histori-cally signiµcant, marking the moment of irreversible shift from a state in which



the deliberative process is conducted largely by elites in camera to one in whichnonelite citizens µrst begin to contribute to major political decisions on a reg-ular basis. Deµning this moment in the Athenian context requires the fulµll-ment of two conditions: the Assembly must have acquired ultimate authorityover key matters of policy and legislation from the institutions that hithertodominated the state, the archons and the Areopagus; and all citizens must beallowed to attend, speak, and vote in meetings of the Assembly, so that its res-olutions can be deemed to represent the will of the entire demos, regardless ofthe numbers and class identity of those actually in attendance on any given oc-casion. Whether or not these conditions match all of our own criteria for“democracy,” they would seem to fulµll the minimum requirements forde–mokratia, that is, the claim that the demos collectively ruled in Athens. How-ever, to avoid confusion and contention, I will refer to this scenario by the lessloaded term “popular government.”

DEMOS AND ASSEMBLY UNDER THE NEW ORDER

Is there then any evidence to associate Cleisthenes’ reforms with the elevationof the Assembly to supremacy in the state? Though the accounts of Herodotusand AP contain no explicit notice of any overall change in the powers and com-petence of the ekkle–sia with respect to those of other institutions, there are sev-eral hints in these sources that the Assembly did assume a far more prominentposition in Athenian political life after the reforms and that this was part of agreater emphasis on collective (over individual) authority in the new order.15

First, there are the circumstances of the introduction of the reforms them-selves. It seems beyond doubt that Cleisthenes, in his capacity as a private citi-zen, proposed the measures in the form of a pse–phisma (resolution to be voted on)presented for ratiµcation in the Assembly. Both sources emphasize the critical roleplayed by the support of the demos in the passage of the reforms, and it is hardto imagine how this support could have had any meaningful political impact un-less it was expressed institutionally, in the ekkle–sia. Since Herodotus elsewhereuses the word de–mos in effect as a synonym for the Athenian ekkle–sia (e.g.,..–, ..), he may be alluding to this speciµc procedure when he tells us,in the crucial phrase, that Cleisthenes “won the de–mos over to his side” [tonde–mon prosetairizetai] (..). In any case, it seems likely that ratiµcation in theAssembly was thereafter required to make binding any new item of legislation.16

But was this the µrst time that the ekkle–sia had provided the ultimate sanc-tion for a resolution of such far-reaching signiµcance? We cannot know the an-



swer to this question for sure and shortly will look at evidence for its role un-der earlier regimes in Athens.

Second, our sources mention another Cleisthenic innovation that seems tohint at a greater role in the new order for ordinary citizens and for the Assem-bly in particular: the introduction of the practice of ostracism (see AP ., ),whereby one political leader a year could be expelled from Attica without lossof citizen’s rights for a period of ten years.17 Whatever the original stated pur-pose of the procedure, it clearly would have helped to ensure the accountabil-ity of leaders to the citizen body as a whole, since the right to call a vote onwhether to hold an ostracism was reserved exclusively for the Assembly and sincea quorum of six thousand citizens was required for the procedure to be initiatedin any given year. Even if ostracism was not actually used for the µrst time un-til some twenty years later, the very existence of such a mechanism strongly sug-gests that the collective will of the demos was now held to take precedence, atleast nominally, over the will of any particular individual, however in×uential.18

Third, possible evidence that citizens of all social backgrounds were nowactively encouraged to participate in the deliberations of the Assembly comesin another passage of Herodotus (.). Having just described the sudden upturn in Athenian fortunes on the battleµeld that followed soon after Cleis-thenes’ reform of the state, the historian directly associates this newfound military prowess with the political transformation, in particular with ise–goria—literally, the equal right of all citizens to address the Assembly. While, in thecontext of this passage, the meaning of the term is clearly generalized to sug-gest a broader idea of “equality” or “freedom” (i.e., from the rule of a tyrant),some have concluded that Herodotus is also using ise–goria in its narrower sensehere, as one of the signature innovations of the new order.19 If so, this concernto make the ekkle–sia more representative of the entire citizen body can be takenas a further sign of a new emphasis on collective (over individual) responsibil-ity for decision making in the Athenian state as a whole.

Finally, we have the creation of the boule–, or Council of (see AP .)—at µrst sight, perhaps the best available evidence for the Assembly’s enhancedrole under the new order. Though, in its earliest phase, the council was prob-ably limited in function to probouleusis (the drafting of motions for delibera-tion in the ekkle–sia), that there was even a need for such a body, let alone oneof this size, is obviously indicative of the large volume and signiµcance of thebusiness that was now to be transacted in the Assembly.

But here we run into another problem confronted by those who wouldtrace the rise of popular government in Athens to the transformation of /.



For there is some evidence that a very similar kind of probouleutic council hadbeen operating in Athens since the time of Solon, which suggests that theekkle–sia had already acquired a prominent, if not dominant, position in thestate more than eighty years before Cleisthenes µrst proposed his reforms.Again, this evidence will be examined more closely in due course, when wecome to look at earlier political arrangements in the city.

In the meantime, if we turn our attention away from the accounts of Hero-dotus and AP and look further aµeld, we µnd a range of other testimony fromthe time of the reforms and the years immediately following that seems to cor-roborate our µndings so far. In the µrst place, it can hardly be a coincidencethat spacious new quarters for both the Assembly and Council were con-structed in ca. B.C. As we shall see in chapter , these structures were toform the centerpieces of a new civic center created at this time in the area ofthe Agora. While the Council was to be housed in a handsome columnar build-ing in the Agora itself, the ekkle–sia would henceforth meet in a specially mod-eled theatral area located on the nearby Pnyx hill. This site, containing spacesufµcient to seat around µve thousand citizens even in its earliest phase, clearlypresupposes a deliberative process in which mass participation would be a keyingredient. It is unfortunate, but perhaps also revealing, that not a single mem-ory or physical trace survives of any predecessor to either structure.

The practice of recording the decrees of the Assembly in permanent form,a sure index of this body’s growing stature within the state, may also have beenintroduced in the immediate aftermath of Cleisthenes’ reforms. Not a singledocument of this kind survives among the large number of Athenian inscrip-tions we have from earlier times, nor is there any reference in our writtensources to decrees that will have been published before /. Probably the ear-liest known instance is a fragmentary decree recovered from the Acropolis (IGI3 ) that appears to include instructions to the “governor” [arkho–n] of Salamison the administration of Athenian settlers, or cleruchs, on the island. The let-ter forms on the document allow a date anywhere between and , andsome would place it toward the lower end of this time frame. But if, as Meiggsand Lewis (, –) have suggested, it in fact belongs to the brief periodbetween Cleisthenes’ reforms and the Athenian defeat of the Chalcidians in ca., we would have good reason to see the publication of Assembly decrees asan innovation of the new order.

The content of the Salamis decree is also revealing. Like all future docu-ments of this kind, it describes itself as a resolution not of the ekkle–sia but ofthe de–mos itself. Thus, whatever the reality of the numbers and backgroundsof those present on the Pnyx on this or any future occasion, each deliberative



outcome is now ofµcially claimed to embody the will of the citizen body as awhole, again suggesting a new concern to present the political process inAthens as a collective undertaking and to assert the Assembly’s role as its pri-mary conduit.20 Some indication of the extent of the powers enjoyed by theekkle–sia can also be seen in the subject matter of this and another early decree(IG I3 ), a set of regulations from / that concerns the management of theHekatompedon precinct on the Acropolis. Evidently, if an Assembly vote wasnow routinely required to ratify legislation on matters as diverse as the settle-ment of cleruchs and the conduct of ofµcials and citizens at a major cult site,its competence was extremely wide-ranging. But perhaps most important ofall, as Ostwald (, ) notes, the two decrees reveal that “[t]he people as awhole, nobles and commoners, now gave directions to magistrates.”

Meanwhile, evidence for a more fundamental revaluation of the authorityof the Assembly within the state may be visible in a fragmentary inscriptionfrom the late µfth century (IG I3 ) that is widely believed to be a republi-cation of measures enacted sometime during the period between the reformsof Cleisthenes and those of Ephialtes in /. What survives appears to be adocument deµning the powers of the Council of relative to those of theekkle–sia, including a list of matters of state where no µnal action can be taken“without [ratiµcation by] a full meeting of the demos of the Athenians.”21 Thedocument appears to describe how the Assembly holds ultimate jurisdictionover such critical areas as the declaration of war and the conclusion of peace(–), as well as (perhaps sitting as the Heliaia) the imposition of the deathpenalty in certain circumstances () and of tho–ai, µnes for offenses whose na-ture remains unclear (–). If we combine this evidence with the testimonyof literary sources, a case can be made that at least two of these powers wereexercised by the demos as early as the s.

First, it emerges that the right of the demos (whether as ekkle–sia or Heliaia)to in×ict the death penalty may have been exercised in conjunction with abroader authority over serious crimes against the state. The case has been ar-gued in some detail by Ostwald (, –), who examines the evidence forsix political trials concerning µve prominent individuals, from that of the trage-dian Phrynichus in / to that of Cimon in . In each instance, it appearsthat the µnal verdict was delivered by a popular body, described variously as“the demos,” “the Athenians,” or “a law court” (dikaste–rion). Presumably, thisbody deliberated after an initial hearing before the Areopagus, since the latterhad apparently been given exclusive jurisdiction over trials of this kind bySolon (see AP .). Ostwald (, –) concludes that a new stipulation,whereby any crime against the state that would incur a serious penalty had to



be referred for µnal consideration before a mass tribunal believed to embodythe collective will of the demos, was introduced “either by Cleisthenes himselfor soon after his reforms.”22

Second, we have good evidence that as early as B.C., the Assembly wasalready playing a decisive role in declarations of war and the determination ofwhat we would consider “foreign policy.” When, at that time, Artaphernes, thePersian satrap at Sardis, demanded that the Athenians take back Hippias or facethe consequences, “it was resolved” [ededokto] by “the Athenians,” says Hero-dotus (..), “to become open enemies of the Persians.” And when, shortly af-terward, Aristagoras of Miletus came to persuade the Athenians to join the Ion-ian revolt against Persia, Herodotus (.) explicitly states that he made hisappeal “to the demos” [epi ton de–mon]. Dispelling any doubt that the mentionof the “demos” in this instance refers to the Assembly, Herodotus then tells howthe Milesian, upon securing the support he sought, playfully remarked howmuch more successful his entreaty had been with thirty thousand Atheniansthan it had with one single Spartan, King Cleomenes, on an earlier occasion.Herodotus concludes the episode by noting that it was “the Athenians” [hoiAthe–naioi] who “voted” [epse–phisanto] to send the fateful twenty ships to Ionia,thus conµrming that the ekkle–sia was now ultimately responsible not only for re-ceiving the appeals of foreign emissaries and making declarations of war but alsofor determining the details of the military response to any given situation.

As a µnal indication of a general shift toward collective popular rule underthe new order, we might brie×y note a contemporary change in nomenclature.Ostwald (, –) has traced to the late sixth century the displacementof the term thesmos by nomos as the word for “statute” in ofµcial parlance, andhe suggests that this change re×ects a fundamental reconceptualization of thelegislative process in Athens, whereby laws were seen no longer as “imposed”from above but as “accepted” by common consent. As Ostwald puts it else-where (, ),

Just as the law on ostracism was contrived to let the people as a wholedecide which of two major policies was to be adopted by temporarilybanishing from the political scene the most prominent spokesman ofone of them, so the disappearance of thesmos from the ofµcial vocabu-lary of the new constitution indicates that imposition of laws by a rul-ing class was to give way to laws ratiµed by popular acceptance.

In sum, there are many indications in the historical record for the late sixthcentury that the signiµcance of the citizen Assembly within the Athenian state



was substantially increased in / and the years immediately following. Theauthors of our main literary sources do not talk about this transformation inas many words. Indeed, it seems that they were largely unaware of any suchchange. But hints in their texts, along with a variety of circumstantial evidencefrom elsewhere, do suggest that a fundamental shift of political gravity awayfrom the archons and Areopagus and toward the Assembly took place at thistime. As part of a broader emphasis on collective (over individual) responsi-bility in the management of the state, resolutions on most if not all major itemsof policy and legislation now required ratiµcation in the ekkle–sia. And whilethis far-reaching competence would be extended still further in the years tocome, especially after the reforms of Ephialtes in /, it looks very much likethe Assembly had already become the primary arena of political engagementin Athens by the end of the sixth century. Henceforth, all aspiring politicianswould have to defend their programs and agendas before an audience of thou-sands on the Pnyx, and henceforth their success would be measured in popu-lar votes. With politicians thus accountable to their fellow citizens on an al-most continual basis, and with all resolutions of the Assembly deemed torepresent the will of the entire demos, it seems that popular government nowheld sway in Athens.23

But just how sudden or dramatic was this elevation of the Assembly to su-premacy in the state? Much of the evidence I have discussed suggests that thiswas indeed a wholly new departure and that nonelite citizens before /played little part in the political process. But many modern authorities believethat some form of popular government predated the reforms of Cleisthenes,and some, notably Wallace (), have argued that de–mokratia itself was al-ready in place more than eighty years earlier, seeing it as a direct outcome ofmeasures introduced by Solon. To reach a more informed judgment on the his-torical signiµcance of the developments of the late sixth century, we clearlyneed to examine these claims and look in more detail at earlier politicalarrangements in Athens.

THE SOLONIAN STATE

The problems in our sources for Solonian interventions in the political domainare again formidable. Aside from what he tells us in his own poems, almosteverything we know about Solon as a political and legal reformer comes fromthe fourth century or later. By this time, any items of legislation passed beforethe republications of the late µfth century were referred to generically as “lawsof Solon,” making it hard for our sources to distinguish the authentic from the



inauthentic Solonian measures.24 Moreover, if, as we noted earlier, he was notwidely viewed as a signiµcant agent of political change until ca. B.C., wemight have further cause to suspect the authenticity of the various constitu-tional reforms with which he is later credited.25 That said, for the purposes ofdiscussion, we should grant our sources some beneµt of the doubt and assumethat at least some of the “laws” they describe were genuinely Solonian, whetherderiving ultimately from the wooden axones in the Prytaneion (see Paus. ..;Plut. Sol. .–), the stone kurbeis in the Stoa Basileios (see AP .), Nico-machus’s republications in the late µfth century, or from some other publicdocument.

We might start by noting two developments of very broad signiµcance forthe evolution of Athenian political life that Solon almost certainly did en-courage. First, if even a very small portion of the individual laws credited tohim are correctly assigned, it seems fair to associate Solon with an increasingwillingness on the part of the state to intervene in areas previously consideredprivate. For example, his laws regulating marriage and the begetting of chil-dren (see Manville , n. ), his economic prescriptions concerning ex-ports (see Plut. Sol. .) and weights and measures (see AP ), and his formalinstructions for the conduct of religious ceremonies suggest an overall concernwith deµning what we would consider a public domain. Nevertheless, as a salu-tary reminder that this process of deµnition was still very much in its infancy,it is worth pointing out that not a single extant documentary inscription frombefore B.C. records an item of business enacted in the name of the “theAthenians,” let alone “the demos of the Athenians.”26 Even the Acropolis ded-ications from ca. that are generally associated with the administration ofthe Great Panathenaia (see Raubitschek , nos. –), the most impor-tant single occasion in Athenian public life, appear to have been offered by pri-vate individuals in their own names.

Second, as Manville (, esp. –) has shown persuasively, a range ofSolonian measures imply the establishment of some kind of criteria for deter-mining who was and who was not an Athenian citizen.27 Here too, however,we should not suppose that the procedures involved were necessarily as com-prehensive and systematic as they would become after /. Very little isknown about the administration of citizenship before the reforms of Cleis-thenes, and for reasons outlined in chapter , it seems unlikely that individu-als who lived beyond the plain of Athens were yet routinely enrolled into theAthenian citizen community.28 But our chief interest here is in the politicalcontent of citizenship at this time. What role, if any, did nonelite citizens playin the political process?



Our primary accounts of Solonian constitutional arrangements are foundin AP (–), Aristotle’s Politics (b–a), and Plutarch’s Life of Solon(–), the µrst and last of which credit Solon with a range of political inno-vations, introduced presumably around the time of his archonship, /.29

Unfortunately for our purposes, neither AP nor Plutarch says anything aboutthe competence of the citizen Assembly at this time, while Aristotle tells us thatits functions were merely “to choose magistrates and call them to account” [tasarkhas haireisthai kai euthunein].30 We do, however, learn that Solon intro-duced a “Council of , [made up of ] a hundred from each [Ionian] tribe”(AP .; cf. ., .), whose function was to prepare the business of the As-sembly (Plut. Sol. .–). Since the very need for such a body implies that theAssembly met regularly and played a meaningful role in the conduct of statebusiness, these reports, if accurate, would constitute very strong evidence thata form of popular government was in operation in Athens long before the re-forms of Cleisthenes.

In the absence of any other straightforward evidence, the veracity of thesereports comes to assume considerable importance. Most observers, it seems,are content to accept them at face value and suppose that a predecessor of theCleisthenic ekkle–sia/boule– complex in×uenced the deliberative process inAthens as far back as the early sixth century, perhaps serving as a kind of coun-terweight to the archons and Areopagus, which were still exclusive preserves ofthe elite. Others remain more skeptical, and though their arguments are oftendismissed as “extreme,” the overall case actually has considerable merit.31

To begin with, it must be admitted that there is a strange reticence aboutthis institution in our sources. Aristotle discusses Solonian constitutionalarrangements in some detail, giving particular attention to the claim that Solonfounded the “traditional democracy” [de–mokratian . . . te–n patrion] in Athens(Pol. b–); yet the probouleutic council, an institution central to somany modern interpretations of Solon’s reforms, does not appear once in thediscussion. Meanwhile, in AP and Plutarch, the only details we hear about thiscouncil, spare statements of its function (probouleusis) and composition (bytribal contingent), could simply be inferences drawn from knowledge of thelater Council of . Even if the powers of the Assembly at this time did in-clude the rights “to choose magistrates and hold them to account,” one is en-titled to wonder why an effective standing committee of four hundred coun-cillors was required to facilitate the execution of such modest functions.However we choose to resolve this problem, it is truly astonishing that the au-thor of AP fails to include the creation of a new probouleutic council in his list(.) of “the three most radical features” of the “Solonian constitution” [te–s



Solo–nos politeias tria . . . ta de–motiko–tata]. Why was the signiµcance of this de-velopment, self-evident to modern observers, so lost on a highly informed an-cient student of Athenian political history?

It is tempting to conclude that the author’s sources for Solonian constitu-tional arrangements were considerably less informative about the Council of than they were about, say, the Areopagus or the selection and duties ofmagistrates. The incidental, almost evasive manner in which he refers to theinstitution, along with his complete failure to integrate this council into hisbroader picture of the state apparatus in the Solonian era, suggests a distinctlack of self-assurance on the subject. This vagueness, along with the absence ofany explicit evidence for the activities of a popular council in Athens between/ and /, has understandably raised suspicions in some quarters aboutthe institution’s historicity, especially since it is quite easy to pinpoint a par-ticular moment in later Athenian history when a tradition of the SolonianCouncil of might conveniently have been invented.32

As Hignett (, ) pointed out many years ago, such a moment camewith the introduction of what AP (.) describes as the “interim constitution”[politeian en to–i paronti] formulated by oligarchic forces in B.C. Accordingto the new arrangement, a Council of , established “in accordance with tra-ditional practice” [kata ta patria], was to be installed with broad competenceover the constitution, the laws, and the appointment of magistrates. To legit-imize this new institution by representing it as the reestablishment of a “tradi-tional” body, its designers, Hignett contends, invented the precedent of theSolonian Council of .33

To this reconstruction, it may be objected that such a µction would hardlyhave been in the oligarchs’ best interests; while the number four hundred, asan easy multiple of four, suggested authentic origins in the pre-Cleisthenictribal system, why would they make the number so “democratically” large ifthey were free to use any multiple of four they chose?34 To answer this ques-tion, I think we have to envisage the physical space in which this supposedlySolonian council was imagined to have convened. This surely was the struc-ture occupied at that time by the Council of , the so-called Old Bouleu-terion in the Agora, a building we now know to have been erected in ca.

B.C. But from evidence elsewhere, it seems safe to suppose that this and otherearlier structures in the Agora area were thought by later Athenians to be some-what older than they actually were. If, then, the Old Bouleuterion could plau-sibly be claimed to have housed a Solonian council by , the oligarchs clearlyhad to come up with a multiple of four large enough to make this “original”



council a credible occupant of a building that was actually designed to ac-commodate µve hundred men.35

Defenders of the Solonian Council of typically resort to three items ofindependent evidence to bolster the slim testimony in Plutarch and AP, thoughnone of these is decisive. First, in response to the claim that a popular councilcould not have coexisted alongside a more aristocratic body like the Areopa-gus in the early sixth century, defenders point to an inscription from ca.– found on Chios that appears to attest to precisely such an arrangement.But, to quote Sealey (a, ), “Athens was not Chios,” and the feasibilityof the arrangement elsewhere hardly proves that it was actually implementedin Athens by Solon.36 Second, there is the somewhat more compelling sug-gestion that the coexistence of the two councils in Athens may in any case havebeen alluded to in one of Solon’s poems. Certainly Plutarch’s statement (.)that Solon intended the pair to function as the “twin anchors” of the state couldre×ect a metaphor used by the poet himself, but it need not do so. Again, thisis hardly formidable evidence.37

The µnal claim in the case for the Council of derives from our twoaccounts of the troubled events in Athens following Cleisthenes’ ratiµcationof his reforms in the Assembly. Herodotus (..) and AP (.) both tell usthat Cleomenes tried unsuccessfully to dissolve “the council” before leadinghis forces to storm the Acropolis. Neither author speciµes whether this wasthe Council of , the Council of , or, for that matter, the Areopagus.Clearly, it makes most sense in this context that the body concerned was theCouncil of , the embodiment of the new order that had prompted Isago-ras’s appeal to Cleomenes in the µrst place. While we may wonder if there wassufµcient time to install the new council before the king’s intervention, it isnot hard to imagine that a pro tempore version of the boule– might alreadyhave been convened by this point. Since the argument for seeing this episodeas evidence for the existence of the Council of consists solely of elimi-nating the other two possibilities, we must again conclude that the case is lessthan compelling.38

A neutral observer of this debate about the Solonian council would prob-ably pronounce it inconclusive. The evidence in favor of the council’s existenceis not negligible but is too riddled with problems to be even moderately per-suasive in itself. Unfortunately, the issue cannot simply be ignored, since ourunderstanding of the evolution of the archaic Athenian state depends to a con-siderable extent on how we choose to resolve it. The choice is a stark one. Theintroduction of such a council by Solon presupposes an abrupt, even radical



shift toward popular government, with an energetic citizen Assembly playing asigniµcant role in the political process; without such a council, our picture ofthe state apparatus in the early sixth century looks dramatically different, stilldominated most likely by the archons and Areopagus, with little room for anymeaningful participation by nonelite citizens. With evidence for the council be-ing so problematic and evidence for the activities of the Assembly at this timebeing almost non-existent, our next step must be to look at what our sourcestell us of Solon’s other political reforms for clues about his overall aims.

By any objective reckoning, Solon’s innovations in the political domain, thecouncil aside, suggest that he was in general concerned more with standardizingreceived institutional practice, curbing abuses of power, and quelling tensionswithin the elite than with radically transforming the state. Hence, the system ofthe four tele–, or wealth classes, which he either introduced or reµned, providedlegally enforceable criteria for ofµce holding. Leading magistrates, such as thearchons and the treasurers, were henceforth to be chosen only from the top twoclasses, while members of the lowest class, the thetes, were still excluded from allforms of political participation except attendance in the Assembly.39

Indeed, Solon seems to have been less interested in empowering ordinaryAthenians than in simply protecting them from elite malfeasance. Aside fromhis well-known cancellation of debts and ban on taking loans on the securityof the body, he is also credited with an important procedural innovation thatprovided some form of legal recourse in the event of abuses of power fromabove. This was the mechanism known as ephesis, whereby it was possible toappeal against a magistrate’s decision by having the case referred to a popularcourt—at this point, presumably the Heliaia. However, the larger claim—ex-pressly stated in Aristotle’s Politics (b–a)—that Solon establisheda system of “jury courts composed of all citizens” and thus “founded democ-racy” [eoike . . . ton . . . de–mon kataste–nai ta dikaste–ria poie–sas ek panto–n] isprobably anachronistic, re×ecting the distinctive concerns of fourth-centuryspeculation about Athenian constitutional history.40

As for the distribution of prerogatives between the various organs of thestate apparatus, Solon seems to have effected little, if any, change to the exist-ing system, perhaps merely standardizing established practice. As before, theeponymous archon served as the ofµcial head of state (see AP .). But moresigniµcantly, the Areopagus, according to AP (.), was responsible not onlyfor general oversight of the laws and constitution (nomophulakia) but also for“most of the greatest matters of state” [ta pleista kai megista to–n politiko–n], justas it had been in earlier times (see AP .).41 Since the actual production ofpolicy and legislation in the Solonian state is nowhere explicitly discussed in



AP, perhaps the author simply assumed that these all-important functions fellultimately within the wide-ranging compass of the archons and Areopagus.

If so, it would seem there is little room left here for any role to be playedby the citizen Assembly beyond holding the elections and possibly the per-formance reviews (euthunai) speciµed in the Politics (a–). Solon’s over-all concern with standardization, stability, and continuity would not lead us toexpect otherwise. If the Assembly was not yet routinely involved in the pro-duction and ratiµcation of policy and legislation, it is extremely hard to visu-alize a meaningful role for any kind of probouleusis in the political process atthis time, let alone for a standing committee of four hundred councillors. Per-haps it was also hard for the author of AP to visualize the role played by theCouncil of in Solonian Athens, thus explaining his apparent reluctance todraw attention to its signiµcance and tell us more about it.

That said, the evidence for the “Solonian constitution” is problematic, of-ten ambiguous at best, and interpretation is all too easily in×uenced by pre-supposition. Both those who defend and those who oppose the idea of Solonas a major political reformer adduce passages from his own poems in supportof their claims. And even if the poems provide no concrete information aboutany constitutional change, their authenticity, at least, is rarely questioned.

Of most immediate interest are the verses referring to the acute social un-rest of this period, which was prompted, it seems, by the increasingly unre-strained abuse and exploitation of poor smallholders and agricultural laborersby members of the landed elite. Solon’s own attempts to resolve this situationin his capacity as diallakte–s, or specially appointed mediator (AP .; Plut. Sol..), are described only in rather general and allusive terms. For our purposes,the value of the poems therefore lies less in their factual content than in whatthey reveal of their author’s broader cultural assumptions—especially con-cerning the “common people” (de–mos)—and thus of his likely attitude towardthe idea of radical political reform.42

As Wallace (, ) has emphasized, Solon is at times sharply critical ofthe conduct of the elite in his poems, chastising them for their arrogance, theirgreed and their disregard for justice (e.g., .–, c.–). But Wallace’s con-clusion that Solon was part of a “popular revolutionary movement” is not easyto sustain. Elsewhere, the poet makes it clear that he remained staunchly un-aligned in the con×ict and sought only to restore equilibrium in Athens. Thisposition is expressed unambiguously in poem (lines –):

dhvmwi me;n ga;r e[dwka tovson gevra~ o{son ejparkei`n,timh~ ou[t¾ ajfelw;n ou[t¾ ejporexavmeno~:



oi} d¾ ei\con duvnamin kai; crhvmasin h\san ajghtoiv,kai; toi`~ ejfrasavmhn mhde;n ajeike;~ e[cein:

e[sthn d¾ ajmfibalw;n kratero;n savko~ ajmfotevroisi,nikan d¾ oujk ei[as¾ oujdetevrou~ ajdivkw~.

[For I gave to the common people as much privilege as is sufµcient fortheir purposes, neither adding to nor detracting from their dignity. Andas for those who held power and were distinguished for their wealth, Idecided they too should have nothing disgraceful. I stood with mystrong shield cast around both groups, and suffered neither side to gainan unjust victory.]43

What exactly did the two sides “deserve”? What was “just” here? As far aswe can tell, in Solon’s poems, as elsewhere in archaic Greek thought, “justice”(dike–) means little more than the “established order,” the divinely ordained dis-pensation of hallowed tradition.44 Thus, in poem (lines –; cf. , ),Solon asserts his belief that wealth is an inalienable gift from the gods that onlypasses from one man to another when “persuaded by unjust deeds” [adikoisergmasi peithomenos], and even then does not go “willingly” [ouk ethelo–n].So, too, in political life, the demos should be followers, not leaders (.–);given the innately inadequate intelligence of the demos, the alternative wouldresult only in chaos:

dhmo~ d¾ w|d¾ a]n a[rista su;n hJgemovnessin e{poito,mhvte livan ajneqei;~ mhvte biazovmeno~:

tivktei ga;r kovro~ u{brin, o{tan polu;~ o[lbo~ e{phtaiajnqrwvpoi~ oJpovsoi~ mh; novo~ a[rtio~ h\/i.

[The common people will best follow their leaders thus, if neither too much unleashed nor too restrained. For excess breeds insubordi-nation whenever great prosperity comes upon men whose minds areunsound.]

Far from identifying with any popular cause, Solon takes credit in poem (lines –) precisely for not being the kind of leader who would have encour-aged deµance in the “common people” and thus deprived society’s “milk” of its“cream.”45 And far from empathizing with the aggrieved masses, Solon seemsto think of them collectively as being a kind of unruly transport animal thatneeded “restraint” (see .–, .–). This metaphor is articulated more ex-plicitly in poem , where he makes the much quoted claim that he wrote “or-



dinances for lowly and noble alike” [thesmous . . . homoio–s to–i kako–i te k’a-gatho–i] (line ). Less often quoted are lines that follow soon afterwards (–):

kevntron d¾ a[llo~ wJ~ ejgw; labwvn,kakofradhv~ te kai; filokthvmwn ajnhvr,oujk a]n kavtesce dh`mon:

[But if another man, one of evil intentions and greed, had taken up thegoad like I did, he would not have restrained the common people.]

A man who speaks of having to “goad” the “common people” into abeyanceand preserve the “cream” of society, and who clearly saw his task as the defenseof the established economic and political order against pressures from bothabove and below is not likely to have abruptly entrusted the destiny of the stateto popular institutions.46

To judge from the evidence of his poems, Solon was less interested inradical change than in simply restoring equilibrium and stability to a polisin turmoil. His slogan, if he had one, was not “revolution” but the alto-gether less radical idea of eunomia, or “good order,” famously celebrated at.–:

tauta didavxai qumo;~ ÆAqhnaivou~ me keleuvei,wJ~ kaka; plei`sta povlei Dusnomivh parevcei:

Eujnomivh d¾ eu[kosma kai; a[rtia pavnt¾ ajpofaivnei,kai; qama; toi`~ ajdivkoi~ ajmfitivqhsi pevda~:

traceva leiaivnei, pauvei kovron, u{brin ajmauroi`,auJaivnei d¾ a[th~ a[nqea fuovmena,

eujquvnei de; divka~ skoliav~, uJperhvfanav t¾ e[rgaprau?nei: pauvei d¾ e[rga dicostasivh~,

pauvei d¾ ajrgalevh~ e[rido~ covlon, e[sti d¾ uJp¾ aujth~pavnta kat¾ ajnqrwvpou~ a[rtia kai; pinutav.

[My heart bids me teach the Athenians how Disorder brings most illsupon a polis, while Good Order renders all things decorous andagreeable, and frequently binds the unjust in fetters. It makes what isharsh smooth, checks excess, blunts arrogance, and parches the budding×owers of destructive madness; it makes crooked judgments straight,tames overweening deeds, halts the works of faction and puts to rest theanger of grievous strife. As a result of Good Order are all things amongmen made perfect and wise.]



The consistently conservative tone of the sentiments expressed in poem and elsewhere in Solon’s verse broadly bears out the conclusions reached ear-lier. We can easily believe that the author of these words might have introducedbasic legal protections and minimal political rights for ordinary citizens. Buthe was primarily interested in preserving, not overturning, the established or-der, and thus is not likely to have sanctioned any kind of signiµcant shift to-ward popular government in Athens.

Is there any further way to corroborate this conclusion? Discussions of theSolonian state tend to focus almost exclusively on his poems and on ancientaccounts of the reforms themselves, though most scholars would acknowledgethe limitations of both forms of evidence. To date, modern observers havebeen surprisingly reluctant to pursue what would seem to be a plausible routeout of this impasse, namely, to gauge the nature and signiµcance of Solon’sreforms by looking for signs of their impact on the actual conduct of politicsin subsequent years. If the reforms were even moderately progressive, wemight expect to µnd evidence for a discernible shift toward a more inclusivepolitical culture. If no such shift is apparent, we have further reason to believethat the signiµcance of the reforms has been overstated, either because theywere somehow ineffective or because they were less progressive than was laterclaimed.

In the following section, I pursue this line of inquiry by looking in somedetail at the broader political culture in Athens during the decades after thes. Since no lasting constitutional changes seem to have been made betweenthe s and /, Solonian political arrangements presumably prevailed in Athens for more than eighty years, a period long enough, one would think,to be a valuable source of evidence for how these arrangements might haveworked out in practice.

This approach does, of course, have its problems. The latter part of thetime frame in question, from ca. / to /, was dominated by the Pei-sistratid family, and though they apparently refrained from any constitu-tional change, it seems safer, for the purposes of analysis, to exclude thisperiod from the inquiry. As for the earlier part of the time frame, from themid-s to the later s, apart from a few anecdotes referring to domesticpolitical turmoil and Athenian relations with Megara, we know too little tobe of much service. But excluding these periods still leaves a window of someµfteen years, from ca. / to ca. /, the one extended stretch of time for which we do have something resembling a sequential narrative in oursources.47



POLITICAL CULTURE IN THE MID–SIXTH CENTURY

We can begin by dismissing as µction the impression conveyed by both of ourmain sources (AP .–.; Hdt. ..–.) that these µfteen years saw Atticaengulfed by a trilateral regionwide stasis. As we saw in chapter , power inAthens was keenly contested during these years by three leading families, theBoutads, the Alcmeonids, and the Peisistratids, but they almost certainly didnot represent “parties” from the “plain,” the “coast,” and the “hills.” Nor isthere any reason to believe that the machinery of government was suspendedat any point during this period. Archons continued to be elected, and asidefrom Peisistratus’s recourse to force in / and to the threat of force in /,there seem to have been no major constitutional irregularities.48

At the beginning of this period, in /, Lycurgus and Peisistratus were inAthens, while Megacles and his family, as I argued in chapter , were living farto the south, in the Anaphlystos area, where they had spent some four decadesin exile. If, as I also argued, the polis proper did not yet extend much beyondthe plain of Athens itself, the tradition that placed Lycurgus at the head of the“party” from this “plain” presumably contains some recollection of his histor-ical role as de facto leader of the Athenian state at this time.

We have no way of knowing when or how Lycurgus and the Boutadai µrstacquired this level of authority. But a surprising wealth of independent testi-mony allows us to conµrm his family’s preeminence and trace it back at leastto the earlier s. I refer here to the substantial body of evidence that broadlycorroborates the ancient tradition that the Great Panathenaia, the most im-portant single public occasion in the Athenian calendar, was founded in ca.

B.C. Since the Boutadai controlled the cult of Athena Polias, the goddess hon-ored at the festival, it takes no great leap of faith to suppose that they played adecisive role in bringing the new quadrennial celebration into existence, andso were probably a dominant force in Athenian politics for at least half a decadebefore Peisistratus’s “µrst tyranny” in /.49

The extent of Lycurgus’s in×uence at this time is further suggested by themanner in which Peisistratus µrst took power. As we also saw in chapter , Pei-sistratus was certainly not an outsider in city politics and does not appear tohave drawn once on the support of any “party” from the “hills.” But despitebeing from a well-established Athenian family, he evidently lacked the politi-cal capital necessary to gain wide support among his peers and supplant Ly-curgus by conventional means, and so was forced to resort to an armed occu-pation of the Acropolis.



Our main sources tell us only two things about Peisistratus’s “µrst tyranny”:it was unsuccessful, being short-lived and without deep foundation; and it wasconducted wholly within the constitutional constraints of the day. In the wordsof AP (.), Peisistratus governed the state “in a civil fashion” [politiko–s],rather than “in the manner of a tyrant” [tyranniko–s]. The truth of the mattertherefore seems to be that this distinctly ephemeral event was no tyranny wor-thy of the name but merely a brief coup. It certainly began with a display offorce, but the style of leadership employed by Peisistratus thereafter was prob-ably no different from the highly personalized, but essentially legitimate, formof de facto authority hitherto exercised by Lycurgus. Only in retrospect did itseem like an ominous anticipation of later tyranny.50

At all events, this short-lived coup ended when Lycurgus appealed to thebanished Megacles and offered to restore the Alcmeonids to Athens in ex-change for whatever kind of support was necessary to oust Peisistratus. Unfor-tunately, we have no idea what form this support took; both sources tell us onlythat the Boutads, the Alcmeonids, and their allies expelled him (exelaunousimin, Hdt. ..; exebalon auton, AP .). Evidently, this was not a particu-larly dramatic or violent event. If, as seems likely, Peisistratus actually withdrewvoluntarily from Athens when he saw his political position was no longer ten-able, the ease of his capitulation would further conµrm the tenuousness of hisauthority in the city at this time. Whatever the case, he seems to have departedfor a safe haven in the Attic periphery (see Hdt. ..), perhaps in the Brau-ron area, where a period of residence-in-exile would help to explain his laterassociations with that locale.

Back in Athens, the Boutads could now resume their hegemonic position,with the Alcmeonids serving presumably as junior partners. Thus, when apower struggle broke out between the two some four or µve years later (see AP.; Hdt. ..), it must have taken the form of a challenge to Lycurgus’sleadership by Megacles. It is against this background that we should view theextraordinary incident that soon followed.

Peisistratus’s return to Athens in / is one of the relatively few events inarchaic Athenian history for which we have some detailed information. Ap-parently, an exceptionally tall and beautiful young woman named Phye wasµrst dressed up in the warrior garb of Athena and then driven in a chariot byPeisistratus through the streets of Athens and up to the Acropolis. The Athen-ian onlookers were, by all accounts, genuinely awestruck, believing themselvesto be in the presence of true divinity. What was the purpose of such a charade?

Those who accept the historicity of this intriguing event have exercised con-siderable critical ingenuity in teasing out its meanings and nuances. Some have



suggested analogies with ancient kingship rituals or “sacred marriage” cere-monies, while others have supposed that Peisistratus sought merely to suggestthat he enjoyed some kind of special favor with Athena, much as Heracles andOdysseus had done before him. But common to almost all interpretations aretwo assumptions: that Peisistratus orchestrated the whole stunt and that hehimself was the ultimate focus of the ceremony, with the presence of “Athena”serving, in the end, only to provide a kind of public sanction for what is usu-ally seen as his “second tyranny.” Both assumptions are shared by our two mainancient sources. But the details they describe seem to tell a rather differentstory.51

First, it is abundantly clear, from the information provided by both Hero-dotus and AP, that Megacles, not Peisistratus, orchestrated the spectacle. Theformer was maneuvering to supplant Lycurgus as the dominant µgure inAthenian politics, while the latter, still in exile from the city, was hardly in aposition of strength. It appears that Megacles offered Peisistratus the task ofdriving “Athena” in the chariot as a condition of his safe return to Athens. Sinceit is very hard to believe that the ambitious Alcmeonid wanted to restore hiserstwhile rival to power at his own expense, we can only conclude that Peisis-tratus was here serving Megacles’ purposes rather than his own.52

The suggestion that Megacles was in control of the whole situation seemsto be conµrmed by the other condition of Peisistratus’s return, namely, a mar-riage alliance with the Alcmeonids. Given that this alliance would have re-quired Peisistratus to divest himself of his recent, second marriage to Timo-nassa of Argos and would have damaged his potentially signiµcant relationswith that state in the process, the arrangement was not necessarily to the fu-ture tyrant’s political advantage. Further conµrming Megacles’ control is thedissolution of his third marriage immediately after the Phye ceremony, on thegrounds of nonconsummation, along with Peisistratus’s apparent powerless-ness to prevent his own subsequent return into exile. It makes little sense to be-lieve that he might have entered into the marriage without actually intendingto produce children by his new wife (as our sources imply) and thus willinglygave himself no choice but to depart again into exile. Clearly, we must inferthat he was no more responsible for sundering the alliance than he was for ini-tiating it in the µrst place. In the circumstances, the claim of nonconsumma-tion, supported by a more lurid charge of “unnatural” intercourse (see Hdt...–), looks a lot like an Alcmeonid pretext for getting rid of Peisistratusonce he had somehow outlived his usefulness.53

But what are we to make of the Athena ceremony itself, with its apparentattempt to convey divine favor enjoyed by Peisistratus? Here we come to the



second false premise behind the standard accounts. For according to the cul-tural logic of the ceremony described, it was Athena, not Peisistratus, who wasin fact being restored to Athens. After all, it is the goddess, not the mortal, whobelongs on the Acropolis, and as more than one source reveals (AP .; Clei-demus, FGrH F), Peisistratus was merely the humble driver of the char-iot. The armed “Athena,” meanwhile, like an Iliadic hero borne off to battle,played the starring role of warrior-passenger, or paraibate–s (cf., e.g., Il. .).54

As Connor (, ) notes in his now classic discussion of the episode, “Peisi-stratus is not seizing the kingship but serving as . . . Athena’s attendant, a bravebut subordinate charioteer.” Nor should we ignore the other participant in theceremony, whose presence is usually overlooked in discussions of the episode:though Megacles is later airbrushed out of the µnal tableau, both major sourcesindicate that he actually led the procession in person, either riding ahead or asa fellow passenger in the chariot.55

Why did Athena need to be restored to the Acropolis? How did this ap-parent hoax serve the interests of Megacles? The answers to these questionsmust lie in the contemporary political situation and in Megacles’ bid to chal-lenge Lycurgus for de facto leadership of the state. It seems safe to assumethat Lycurgus’s authority drew much of its force and legitimacy from his fam-ily’s control of the cult of Athena Polias and that his special association withthe goddess would only have been reinforced in the years since the foundingof the Great Panathenaia in ca. . Clearly, for Megacles to supplant his ri-val, he had to µnd some means of countering this powerful alliance of god-dess and mortal. I therefore propose that we see in the Phye ceremony a highlyelaborate attempt by the Alcmeonids to undermine this alliance by suggest-ing that Athena had deserted the Acropolis some time ago and thereforeneeded to be restored in appropriate style. Megacles, it seems, was only toohappy to oblige.

But where exactly on the Acropolis was the goddess restored to? Obvi-ously not to the cult site of Athena Polias on the north side of the citadel,which was controlled by the Boutadai, and which at this point was probablyoccupied by a very modest seventh-century temple. But archaeologists havelong suspected that a second Athena temple, considerably grander than theµrst, may have been erected somewhere on the Acropolis in ca. B.C.Sometimes known as the “Bluebeard temple” from a µgure found among sur-viving pedimental sculptures, it is thought by some to have replaced the smallseventh-century structure on the north side, only to be itself replaced by theso-called Old Athena Temple later in the sixth century. If this were indeedthe case, we would be able to associate the “Bluebeard temple” fairly closely



with the establishment of the Great Panathenaia and to see it probably as aninitiative of the Boutadai.56

But as others, notably Dinsmoor (), have pointed out, the µt betweenwhat is known of temple and the surviving northside foundations is not exact, raising the possibility that the temple may in fact have been locatedelsewhere on the Acropolis, presumably on the south side, on the site lateroccupied by the Parthenon. Debate continues, though Dinsmoor’s argumentseems to be µnally winning the day.57 Still missing from the picture, how-ever, is any satisfactory explanation for the sudden appearance here of thissecond, far larger Athena temple in ca. . I tentatively propose that we see it as an Alcmeonid initiative, built to accommodate Athena in suitablygrand style after her supposed restoration to the city by Megacles. After all,if the logic of the Phye ceremony suggested that the patron deity had previ-ously deserted the more humble precinct administered by the Boutadai, italso required alternative accommodations on the Acropolis to which shemight be willing to return. The “Bluebeard temple” will have µlled this needadmirably.

Seen in this new perspective, the ceremony as a whole was not, in the end,the elaborate hoax described in our sources; it did have a serious ritual pur-pose. But the ritual pattern to which it conforms closest has nothing to dowith sacred marriages or kingship. Rather, the ceremony recalls nothing morethan those processions at festivals where a mortal would don the garb of thecelebrated divinity with no intent to dupe onlookers into believing that thegod or goddess was now literally present among them. Megacles, I suggest,simply adapted this style of procession to create his own ritual of restoration.Only in retrospect, once Peisistratus’s posthumous reputation as a proverbialtyrant-trickster had been secured, did this event come to assume very differ-ent implications.58

Overall, this reading of the ceremony as an attempt by Megacles to counterLycurgus’s politically proµtable association with Athena allows us to abandoncompletely the idea that the event was in any sense a preamble to a “secondtyranny” of Peisistratus. Far from being a powerful insurgent making an os-tentatious bid to take control of the city, Peisistratus was here little more than a pawn in a larger contest for hegemony between the Boutads and the Alcmeonids. His roles in the Athena ceremony and the marriage alliance sug-gest that his support was of some value in this contest. But having served hispurpose, he was powerless to resist a humiliating exit back into exile. If thetradition of Peisistratus’s “µrst tyranny” has little in the way of historical sub-stance to commend it, the tradition of his “second tyranny” has no substance



whatsoever. Again, hindsight lent events a signiµcance that they did not at thetime possess.

It would be ten more years before Peisistratus would attempt to come backto Athens. Apparently, he spent much of this time cultivating important con-nections elsewhere, repairing his relations with Argos, and building up militaryresources, recognizing that a return on his own terms would now require force.Sadly, our sources tell us almost nothing of the Alcmeonids and Boutads dur-ing these years, though both Herodotus (..) and AP (.) imply that theyreconciled soon after the Phye ceremony. Whatever the case, the presence of theAlcmeonids at the battle of Pallene and their subsequent return to their resi-dence-in-exile in the paralia after their defeat by Peisistratus suggest that theyretained a dominant position in the state throughout this ten-year period.59

Thus, the overall impression conveyed by our sources that the years ca./–/ were a time of turbulent stasis punctuated by “tyrannies” does notstand up well to close scrutiny. Once we remove from these accounts the thickinterpretive overlay imposed by later interests and presuppositions, we are leftwith a rather different picture, one of a vigorous, but for the most part con-ventional, competition between two families for de facto leadership of theAthenian state. The Boutadai appear to have been dominant from at least theearlier s, only to be challenged and perhaps displaced in the mid-s bythe Alcmeonids, who clearly remained a powerful force in the city for the nextten years or so, down to the battle of Pallene.

Peisistratus, meanwhile, was probably in Athens for little more than a yearof the µfteen-year period in question, spending the rest of the time in exile inrural Attica and elsewhere. He surely was not an insigniµcant µgure, as his Ar-give marriage and other foreign connections attest. But his coup in /, hisshort-lived later alliance with Megacles, and his ultimate recourse to violencesuggest that he as yet lacked sufµcient support among his peers at home to chal-lenge the hegemony of the Boutads and Alcmeonids by conventional means.The ominous shadow that he appears to cast over events in the µfteen years be-fore Pallene is more imagined than real.

The idea that this µfteen-year period was a time of robust political compe-tition rather than one of lawless stasis is also borne out by the contemporarymaterial record. The Acropolis, in particular, experiences a dramatic increasein building and votive activity during these years. In the words of Hurwit(, –):

Between and , the Acropolis, which had been for so long themodest sanctuary of a provincial polis, became a grandiose spectacle of



the µrst order, the visible expression of a city that was now entering theµrst rank in Greece . . . The picture we can draw of the Acropolis in the s and s . . . is of a suddenly busy and increasingly rich place,acquiring the accoutrements of a major sanctuary, with Athenians . . .beginning to compete with one another for the gods’ (and their fellowAthenians’) attention through the wealth of their dedications.

One might guess that this wholly unprecedented ×urry of activity was stimu-lated above all by the establishment of the Great Panathenaia. It seems rea-sonable to suppose that the major developments associated with the festival,such as the erection of a massive ramp some eighty meters in length up to theentrance of the citadel and the possible remodeling of the entranceway, wereoverseen by the Boutadai. Meanwhile, for reasons I have discussed in this sec-tion, it makes good sense to see the new “Bluebeard temple,” the µrst monu-mental stone temple to be installed on the Acropolis, as an Alcmeonid responseto their rivals’ bold attempts to advertise their links with Athena.

But the site was not the exclusive preserve of these two families. No doubtinspired by the sudden transformation of the citadel into one of Greece’s moreimpressive urban sanctuaries, a relatively large number of their peers also chosenow to lavish wealth on expensive dedications. Votives from this period are nu-merous and assume a wide variety of forms, from life-size marble statues, suchas the well-known Moschophoros and the earliest korai, to several marble reliefpanels, a bronze Palladion, and high-quality vases painted by the likes of Sophi-los and Cleitias. Of course, few of these items can be assigned with conµdenceto known families or individuals. But it is clear enough that a signiµcant pro-portion of the Athenian elite were willing and able to embrace the opportuni-ties for public self-advertisement now presented by the Acropolis, with some pre-sumably motivated by the political capital that might accrue from such display.The scale of their investment, along with the open, self-regulating, and essen-tially peaceful nature of this form of competition, surely presupposes a stable andwell-ordered political environment. Despite all its obvious material inequalities,this was not a society that was being torn apart by endemic civil strife.60

Putting all this together, it therefore seems safe to infer that, the coup of/ aside, there was nothing particularly anomalous or “extraconstitutional”about political behavior in Athens during the µfteen or twenty years before thebattle of Pallene. To later writers, who clearly misunderstood the style of ar-chaic Athenian politics, it may have seemed like there were no rules. But thiswas in fact politics as usual, played, we must assume, according to the arrange-ments laid down by Solon a generation earlier. What, then, does the record of



the mid–sixth century reveal of these arrangements and, in particular, of therole played by ordinary citizens in everyday government?

While our ancient accounts for the years /–/ are hardly exhaustive,the general impression they convey is that there were distinctly few enforceableconstraints on the political behavior of leaders at this time. The archons mayhave been the most important individual ofµcials in the state (see AP .), butthe power wielded by these annually elected magistrates was of signiµcantly lessconsequence than the ongoing de facto authority exercised by the likes ofMegacles and Lycurgus. We can certainly imagine that this particular form ofauthority would have depended to some extent on a leader’s performancewithin the conµnes of state institutions—for example, on his ability to securemagistracies for his own associates or to persuade archons and Areopagites tofollow particular courses of action. But the political culture was hardly limitedto the institutional arena, and much of the business of politics was evidentlyconducted elsewhere.

As far as we can tell, leadership was contested and legitimized primarilythrough a combination of private negotiation and public display. Majorsources of political capital included alliances with in×uential families at homeand abroad, equestrian victories, and the sponsorship of lavish buildings, mon-uments, festivals, and other spectacles—activities that clearly lay outside whatwe would consider to be the constitutional domain. And while de facto lead-ership must have required the consent and support of other leading families,it appears that there were as yet no regular institutional channels through whichsuch authority could be safely challenged or even held to account. The stakesin the political game were thus formidably high. For those—such as Peisistra-tus in /—who tried and failed to supplant an established leader, the onlyremaining options were to resort to arms or to withdraw from the state entirely.

As for nonelite citizens, they can hardly have been much more than spec-tators in the theater of archaic Athenian politics. Whatever their political sym-pathies, they had no visible role to play in major developments, such as the re-call of the Alcmeonids from exile in the late s or the banishment ofPeisistratus in / and /. The sum total of evidence we have for measuresactually passed in the Assembly before the reforms of Cleisthenes are the ac-counts of how Peisistratus duped the ekkle–sia into decreeing him an armedbodyguard, which he promptly put to service as a private army when mount-ing his µrst coup in / (see AP .; Hdt. ..–; Plut. Sol. .).

Despite the extraordinary nature of this decree, some would see in the an-ecdote a suggestion of wider powers enjoyed by the Assembly at this time. Butsurely the more interesting implication of the story (if it is true) is precisely the



minimal signiµcance of popular support in the politics of the era. Like Cleis-thenes later in the century, Peisistratus confronted a situation where he lackedsufµcient backing among his social peers to challenge the position of his rivalby conventional means. But unlike Cleisthenes, Peisistratus evidently saw lit-tle point in trying to outmaneuver his opponent by appealing to nonelite con-stituencies for support. Thus, instead of courting its favor, he merely deceivedthe Assembly into supplying him with the means necessary to pursue an alto-gether more dangerous course of action. It would be left to Cleisthenes to breakthe mold of Athenian politics more than µfty years later.

Otherwise, the only major public interaction between elite and nonelite wehear about from this time comes during the Phye ceremony, and it is equallyrevealing. Far from suggesting the “closeness” or “rapport” between leader andpeople seen here by Connor (, ), this very public attempt by Megaclesto assert his family’s special association with Athena precisely illustrates theyawning ideological gulf that still separated the two. And as long as the elitewere perceived to enjoy a privileged, almost mystical relationship with thestate’s presiding deities, a similar distance would continue to separate the po-litical culture of this era from its classical successor.

Nonelite Athenians in the mid–sixth century were thus still a long way froma time when they might confront a Megacles or a Lycurgus on the ×oor of theAssembly or law courts as even nominal political equals. The ekkle–sia may haveelected the archons and other magistrates each year, but it is hard to believethat it would have strongly opposed candidates favored by the de facto leadersof the moment. And these leaders will have remained essentially unaccount-able to the demos as long as the Assembly had no role in the production of pol-icy and legislation. If a probouleutic Council of did exist at this time, itwould have been little more than an irrelevance. The real business of politicstook place elsewhere, much of it conducted far from the gaze of ordinary citi-zens, in the private realm of the wealthy. Whatever their actual content, Solon’sreforms, it seems, had little radical or lasting impact on the realities of Athen-ian political life.61

As noted earlier, ancient accounts are unanimous that institutional arrange-ments in Athens remained essentially unchanged through the Peisistratidperiod (ca. /–/). In fact, aside from the upheavals of the battle of Pal-lene and its aftermath and the reported autocracy of Hippias at the very endof the period, we hear very little to suggest that the family’s leadership wasqualitatively very different from the kind of authority exercised earlier by Ly-curgus and Megacles:62 it was simply more enduring and successful. In theearly years, their hegemonic position was no doubt helped when major rivals



withdrew from Athens, voluntarily or otherwise, after Pallene. But the ar-chon list for the years immediately following Peisistratus’s death in /,which includes the names of the Alcmeonid Cleisthenes and the Philaid Mil-tiades, shows conclusively that the Peisistratids had by now established abroad-based coalition of supporters that included their former rivals. Clearly,the family did make some effort to abide by existing institutional arrange-ments. Equally clearly, these arrangements were not, in the end, capable ofpreventing an unusually effective group or individual from dominating theAthenian state for a period of several decades or more, accountable only totheir peers.

To regard the regime of the Peisistratids as a wholly anomalous tyranny istherefore to overestimate the capacity of the prevailing Solonian constitutionalprovisions to constrain their in×uence. The rules of the political game, it seems,were still relatively loose.

THE MAKING OF MASS POLITICS

Even after the reforms of Cleisthenes, a peculiarly successful elite politician,like a Pericles or a Cimon, could exercise a decisive de facto in×uence over thedirection of the state for a decade or longer. To be sure, this in×uence wouldstill have depended to some extent on the support of privately assembled coali-tions of peers and on lavish public displays of various kinds, albeit displays thatnow emphasized a politician’s public-spirited muniµcence rather than simplyhis elite credentials. But the critical difference between politics before and af-ter / is in the contribution made by nonelite citizens. After this point, asI showed earlier in the chapter, there arose an entirely new emphasis on col-lective (over individual) decision making in the conduct of government, al-lowing ordinary citizens not only to expel a political leader of their choosingeach year through the procedure of ostracism but also to vote on the highestaffairs of state, as the Assembly and new Council of increasingly assumedcontrol over the production of policy and legislation.63

As a result, with the overall direction of the polis now a matter for open,public deliberation, ambitious elites were forced to compete with one anotherfor the minds and votes of their more lowly fellows if they wished to exercisein×uence over political outcomes. And as individual success in politics cameincreasingly to be measured in terms of popular appeal, so elite politicians be-came more directly accountable to nonelite citizens than ever before.64 Mean-ingful participation by ordinary Athenians in the day-to-day running of the



state was thus for the µrst time an institutional reality, and the elite strangle-hold on the political process had µnally been broken. In its place, a new era ofmass politics and popular government had just begun.

But it would be a mistake to believe that the beneµts of the new style ofpolitics were all one-way; the position of the aspiring political leader was nowconsiderably more secure than it had been in the past. As I noted earlier in thischapter, under the high-stakes, almost zero-sum conditions of the old system,those who tried and failed to supplant a dominant µgure like Lycurgus orMegacles, were faced with the stark alternatives of either resorting to force ordeparting from the state altogether until a leader emerged who might sanctiontheir return. After the reforms of Cleisthenes, by contrast, as the ongoing contest for de facto leadership came increasingly to be determined by votingpatterns in the citizen Assembly, it became possible for opponents to challengeestablished leaders within the relatively safe and regulated conµnes of an insti-tutional arena without fear of serious repercussion. For the unsuccessful chal-lenger who stayed within the law, the most serious consequence he could ex-pect was now ostracism, a temporary expulsion from the state without loss ofproperty or rights.

Indeed, this new procedure is probably best understood as part of a largerdesign to replace the high-stakes politics of the past with a lower-risk and alto-gether less wasteful alternative. In the short term at least, the practical politicaloutcome was the same: the strengthening of established leaders by the elimina-tion of rivals. But the expulsion process was now subject to the kind of institu-tional constraints that were sorely lacking in the past, with only one such ex-pulsion allowed per year and with the loser’s fate determined not by the whimof a small group of his social peers but by the collective will of thousands of fel-low citizens. Even if victories in the game of politics were now less absolute thanthey once might have been, and though winners were now accountable to alarger segment of the population than ever before, a political career was a far lessrisky undertaking than it had been earlier in the sixth century.65

Exactly how and when was the new mass politics inaugurated in Athens?Pinning down the precise moment of the shift is not easy. As noted earlier inthis chapter, our main sources for Cleisthenes’ reforms do not include in theiraccounts any explicit mention of a formal change in the competence of the As-sembly. At the same time, such innovations as ostracism and the new councilclearly presuppose a strong ekkle–sia. And as we also saw earlier, within a fewyears, the Assembly was playing a decisive role in such key areas as the regula-tion of cleruch settlements, military deployment, and foreign policy. This raises



two possibilities. Perhaps the elevation of the Assembly was indeed an item inCleisthenes’ original “reform bill” proposed in /, but the detail has simplybeen omitted from our sources. Alternatively, there may for some reason havebeen no formal enactment deµning the new role; conceivably, Cleisthenes him-self irreversibly reordered the political process in Athens when he chose to rat-ify his transformation of the state in the Assembly, in effect setting the proce-dural precedent for the passage of all future legislation. Either way, a change ofsuch magnitude will certainly have required some form of justiµcation, and anexplanation for how this critical innovation might have been presented in/ will emerge during the course of the coming chapters.

Did the new emphasis on collective responsibility in government amountto de–mokratia? We can be fairly sure that it was not advertised as such, sincethe term itself had probably not yet been invented. If there was a single con-cept, principle, or banner associated with the new regime, it was more prob-ably isonomia (equality before the law, equality of political participation),though even this cannot be proved. That said, with the Assembly now as-suming direct control over state policy and legislation, the cornerstone oflater de–mokratia was effectively laid, whether de jure or de facto, by Cleis-thenes’ reforms, raising the possibility that the new regime was indeed essentially democratic, even if it could not yet be described as such by con-temporaries.66

Some, most notably Ober, would go further than this. In a pair of papers(, ), Ober has argued not only that a genuinely “demotic” form ofde–mokratia was inaugurated in Athens in / but that it was also in effect in-stalled by the people en masse when they successfully resisted the interventionsof Isagoras and Cleomenes. This act of resistance he reads as a spontaneous,“leaderless riot,” even a “revolution,” which was driven and shaped not by eliteleaders but by ordinary Athenians armed with a distinctively “demotic visionof a new society” (, –).

Ober thus emphasizes the role played here by citizens below the hopliteclass, while at the same time “decentering” the µgure of Cleisthenes in our nar-rative of change, seeing him less as a primary agent of reform than as a mere“interpreter” of the will of the masses (, ). In this view, the institutionalinnovations of / did not so much effect a change as re×ect a more pro-found transformation that had essentially already occurred. This transforma-tion he describes (, ) as an “epistemic shift,” meaning a fundamentalchange “in the ways that people think, speak, and behave towards one an-other.” Though long in the making, this shift, he believes, was “crystallized” in



the “leaderless riot” of the masses. Ober (, ) therefore concludes thatdemocracy in Athens “was not a gift from a benevolent elite to a passive demos,but was the product of collective decision, action, and self-deµnition on thepart of the demos itself.”

These papers offer a forthright reminder of the crucial part played in theevents of / by nonelite citizens, and as such their arguments are importantand well taken. But Ober’s attempt to go further and see the political trans-formation as the direct outcome of a popular “revolution” is more problem-atic, for at least three reasons.67

To begin with, Ober shows surprisingly little interest in the actual contentof the political reforms introduced at this time, taking it largely as fact that theybrought about immediate “democracy” and must therefore have been animatedabove all by the kind of egalitarian impulse one would expect to µnd behind arevolutionary popular agenda. But this chain of assumption is hardly secure. Tobe sure, members of the lowest, thete class were entitled to enroll as citizens inthe new demes and were presumably not actively prevented from attending pro-ceedings at the Assembly’s new site on the Pnyx hill. However, as noted above,they probably would have had no role to play in the new council or citizen armyand would still have been excluded from the archonships and Areopagus, how-ever diminished the stature of these institutions had now become. It is thus hardto see how sub-hoplite Athenians were yet considered full members of the po-litical community. In short, there are still too many sources of inequality in thenew system for egalitarianism to have been the dominant impulse behind it, orfor any fully “demotic” form of democracy to have been the practical result.68

Second, it is one thing to claim that there was a general will for politicalchange among nonelite citizens at this time, but it is quite another to suggestthat this will effectively shaped and drove the transformation itself. The evi-dence Ober produces for his “demotic vision of a new society,” into whichCleisthenes was supposedly “absorbed,” is tenuous at best.69 How, in any case,might such a vision have arisen in the µrst place? To judge from the evidencediscussed so far in this study, the little we do know of Athenian political cul-ture in earlier times hardly encourages us to believe that, as Ober suggests(, ), ordinary citizens could have organized themselves enough to de-velop their own independent political agenda distinct from that of any leader“during the course of the sixth century.”70

Nor when we look closely at the reforms themselves do we see the obviousimprint of any revolutionary, “bottom-up” movement for change. Inequalitieswould persist, while the deme/trittys/tribe reform, the very fundament of the



new order, was not in itself an egalitarian measure but an initiative designed,as we saw in the last chapter, to furnish the kind of institutional apparatus nec-essary to bring about the political uniµcation of Attica. Whether we assign re-sponsibility for this particular initiative to a single leader or to several, we donot have to subscribe to some outmoded “Great Man” view of history to seehere all the hallmarks of centralized and essentially “top-down” planning.71

Third, if the Acropolis siege was in fact, as Ober (, ) claims, the “sig-nal moment in the history of democracy,” why do the Athenians themselvesappear not to have remembered it as such? In all of extant Athenian oratory,including funeral orations, there is not a single reference to the incident, letalone to any armed democratic “revolution.” And the only classical sourceother than Herodotus and AP that does mention the siege, written less thana century after the event, treats it as a straightforward military action devoidof any “revolutionary” political signiµcance.72 If, moreover, the demos in/ was fully capable of “collective decision, action and self-deµnition” in-dependent of their political leaders (Ober , ), it is surely extraordinarythat they overlooked the chance to commemorate publicly in some way theirown contribution to the shift from “tyranny” to “democracy,” preferring in-stead to monumentalize an act of limited historical signiµcance by a pair ofotherwise unremarkable aristocrats (see chap. ). Perhaps the masses had lit-tle control over the public memory banks at this time, but this only begs thequestion.73

We should probably then agree with Raa×aub (, a, b), who, asOber’s primary opponent in recent debate on the issue, argues with equal vigorthat democracy “in the fullest sense of the word” was not realized in Athens un-til after the reforms of Ephialtes in /. Only from this point on can we de-tect traces of the more radical egalitarianism we associate with “mature” Athen-ian democracy, implicit in such practices as the widespread use of lottery in theselection of magistrates and the payment of jurors and ofµceholders. By com-parison, the Cleisthenic polity is perhaps better seen, to borrow Raa×aub’sphrase (, ), as a kind of “republic of hoplites and farmers.”74

That said, to consider Cleisthenes’ reforms purely in terms of their contri-bution to the cause of political equality would be to miss their larger histori-cal signiµcance and to misapprehend their overall intent. While Ephialtes’ goalin / was merely to eradicate inequalities still lingering in the national po-litical community, the reforms of / were responsible for deµning thatcommunity in the µrst place and for establishing the institutional foundationsfor its operation as a cohesive political unit. The shift toward democracy at the



end of the sixth century was an essential part of this larger project but was notan end in itself. For this reason, of the two sets of reforms, those of Cleistheneswere by far the more momentous. Before the playing µeld could be leveled, thegame itself had to be invented.

The new order was not shaped by some utopian vision of an egalitarian so-ciety, only to fall some way short of realizing this imagining. The reforms wereno more the product of an enlightened idealism than they were a vehicle forshameless gerrymandering. The guiding vision here was of the state as a col-lective enterprise, and the goal was to create channels through which citizensfrom all over the region could contribute to the common cause, regardless ofwhether some contributions were more signiµcant than others.

We might see the result as a reaction not so much against the shameless in-equities of the past as against the rampant, sometimes destructive individual-ism of archaic Athenian political culture. The state would no longer be simplythe arena for an exclusive contest among competing private interests, its di-rection resting in the largely unfettered hands of a Megacles or a Peisistratus.Henceforth, it would be a forum for the negotiation of a single collective in-terest, and its destiny would now be the responsibility of the community as awhole. We do indeed see here the seeds—the ideological predicates—ofde–mokratia in Athens. But before “mature” democracy could be realized, thevery idea of the “demos,” the collectivity of all citizens in Attica from the lowli-est thete to Cleisthenes himself, had to assume concrete, institutional form.This was the work of Cleisthenes’ reforms.

In sum, the measures introduced in / were not just a set of narrow, con-stitutional prescriptions or merely the latest in a series of steps along a path thatled gradually, but inexorably, toward democracy in Athens. They mark instead,as Ober (, esp. –) has urged, the decisive “point of rupture” in Athen-ian political history, the critical moment of discontinuity between the archaicand the classical state. But the new order was not the spontaneous creation ofa popular revolutionary fervor, however much the support of nonelite citizensmight have been crucial to its success. Rather, it should be seen as a massive,ingenious, and artfully self-conscious exercise in social engineering—the prod-uct, in short, of a vision from above, not from below.

But exactly whose vision was it? Unfortunately, we know the name only ofCleisthenes himself, though he was surely helped in the design and imple-mentation of his program by a group of associates, which presumably includedhis kinsman Alcmeon, archon in /. Of course, these were not free-×oatingindividuals acting outside history. All were products of the very speciµc envi-



ronment they sought to change, and their actions were no doubt at once en-couraged and constrained by longer-term structural conditions and processesof which they may or may not have been aware. Clearly, there was at this timea growing demand for change among nonelite sections of Athenian society, andthere are signs elsewhere in the Greek world, especially in Ionia, of an increas-ing willingness among elites to involve their lesser fellows in government, a de-velopment that may itself have been encouraged by an emerging egalitarianstrain in elite values.75

Yet it would be wrong to see the radical changes of / as the inevitable—even predictable—outcome of some impersonal structural logic. In the µnalreckoning, environmental forces, however signiµcant, cannot account for theprecise timing and speciµc content of the transformation in Athens. We mustacknowledge the role played by the conscious designs and decisions of inter-ested, in×uential individuals, creatively responding to the circumstances inwhich they found themselves. What immediately prompted the decision topush for change was the political self-interest of Cleisthenes himself and theneed to garner the support of the Assembly in his struggle with Isagoras. How-ever, once presented with a popular mandate to reform the state, it seems thatCleisthenes and his associates saw a historic opportunity to author a series ofinitiatives that would not merely reward their nonelite supporters but help toresolve perhaps the two most fundamental and intractable problems that facedthe Athenians at this time: chronic military vulnerability and recurring polit-ical turmoil.

Their solution to these two related problems radically changed the shapeand fortunes of the polis almost overnight. A city-state that had for genera-tions been a somewhat timid and marginal player on the wider Panhellenicstage was abruptly transformed into a very different kind of polity, one thatcould harness the human potential of an entire region in its efforts to be-come a more secure and assertive force in the interstate politics of the day.The social and geographical distances that had for so long separated the elitefrom the nonelite and the urban from the rural were now bridged by a se-ries of highly artiµcial, but binding, institutional ties, laying the foundationsfor a formidable citizen army and an integrated political community thatwas quite unlike any other in Hellenic experience. Henceforth, individualsof widely divergent backgrounds would enroll in the same demes, serve inthe same tribal regiments, convene in the same national council, and vote inthe same national assembly, as partners in an improbable, regionwide ex-periment in collective self-rule. The in×uence of this experiment on the



course of Athenian and Greek history in the decades to come would be mostprofound.

The preceding reading of the content and signiµcance of Cleisthenes’ reformsdoes of course beg a number of further questions. Of these, three would seemto be especially important. First, if this reconstruction is broadly accurate, whydid so little memory of this massive discontinuity survive into later times? Whyare so many key details omitted from our sources, and why, in particular, is nomention made of any change to the Assembly? Second, for all the wide con-sent apparently enjoyed by the new order, how were its designers able to legit-imize so dramatic a departure from past practice and allay deep-seated culturalsuspicions of “revolution” (neo–tera pragmata, neo–terismos)?

Finally, and perhaps most fundamental of all, how could a national com-munity so abruptly and artiµcially contrived ever acquire authenticity in theeyes of its own constituents? Citizenship could be legislated, but loyalty, fel-lowship, and a sense of belonging could not. In practice, the new institutionsmight help to break down social and spatial distances between citizens and per-haps even to bridge the almost mystical ideological distance that had for solong separated elite from nonelite. But it is hard to see how this bold experi-ment in political community would succeed without a more fundamentalchange “in the ways that people think, speak, and behave towards one an-other.” Collective self-rule could only thrive if rooted in values, assumptions,and expectations that were shared by all members of the citizen body in all partsof Attica. As we have seen, evidence that this particular “epistemic shift” hadalready occurred in the region before / is at least questionable. How, then,could a shared identity, a shared sense of mission and of commonality, be con-structed around the bare bones of the new institutional apparatus? How, inshort, could this become a community that was “imagined” as well as lived?Our answer to this question should also help us to resolve the previous issue,since the legitimacy of a given political community depends precisely on thecapacity of its members to feel a common bond of identity.

All of these questions require us to consider a larger issue that has all toorarely been raised in this context, namely, the contemporary response to polit-ical change. If we are even to begin to answer them, we must shift our atten-tion away from objective realities to the more elusive realm of mentalité andtry to understand how the new order might have appeared to Athenian menand women at the time of its inception. In the absence of eyewitness accounts,we can of course only speculate about popular perceptions of change. How-



ever, we are in a good position to assess how the new order was µrst representedto its constituents. It is now increasingly clear that the reverberations of insti-tutional change were felt in many other areas of public life. A surge of culturalenergy, unprecedented in the city’s history, produced a host of new buildings,ceremonies, commemorative practices, and mythical traditions over the courseof the next two decades. Close study of the design of these many artifacts ofchange affords invaluable insights not only into the contents of the new orderbut also into its overall style. This issue of style and representation will be a re-curring concern in the chapters to come, as we broaden our focus beyond thestrict conµnes of state institutions and explore innovations introduced else-where in Athenian public life during the years –.



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