Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood
lords and peasants had decisively come to the fore. Although Aristotle, in his account of the Solonian reforms, is no doubt exaggerating when he says that, at the time, all the poor were serfs to the wealthy few, there can be little doubt that dependence of one kind or another was very common. There was widespread unrest, which the aristocracy was in no position to quell by sheer force. Instead, there was an effort to settle the conflict between peasants and lords by means of a new political dispensation.
Whatever Solon’s motivations may have been, the significant point for us here is how he sought to placate the unruly peasantry. He eliminated various forms of dependence which allowed Attic peasants to be exploited by their aristocratic compatriots. He abolished debt-bondage and prohibited loans on the security of the person, which could issue in slavery in case of default; and, by instituting his famous seisachtheia, the ‘shaking off of burdens’, he abolished the status of the hektemoroi, peasants whose land, and some portion of their labour, was held in bondage to landlords.4 In other words, he eliminated various forms of ‘extra-economic’ appropriation through the medium of political power or personal dependence.
The effects of these reforms, liberating the peasantry from dependence and extra-economic exploitation, were enhanced by strengthening the civic community, extending political rights and elevating the individual citizen at the expense of traditional principles of kinship, birth and blood. Although citizens would still be classified into stratified categories, the old division among artisans, farmers and the aristocracy of well-born clans would no longer be politically significant and would be replaced by more quantitative criteria of wealth, based on an already existing system of military classification. While the former governing council, the Areopagus, was still confined to the two richest classes, the third class was given access to a new Council of 400, to act as a counterweight. The poorest military category, the thetes, was apparently admitted for the first time to the assembly, which became increasingly important as the power of the aristocratic council declined.
Solon also reformed the judicial system, creating a new people’s court, to which all citizens had access. Any citizen could have his case transferred to this court, taking it out of the reach of aristocratic judgment and weakening the aristocracy’s monopoly of jurisdiction. Traditionally, kinship groups had always had the initiative in avenging crimes against their members, according to age-old customs of blood vengeance. Now, any citizen could bring charges against anyone else on behalf of any member of the community. Crime was now defined as a wrong committed against a member of the civic community, not necessarily a kinsman; and the individual Athenian had the initiative as citizen, while the civic community, in the form of citizens’ courts, had jurisdiction.
In various ways, then, Solon weakened the political role of noble birth and blood, kinship and clan, while strengthening the community of citizens. It is too much to say that his reforms were democratic; but they did have the effect of weakening the aristocracy, which was increasingly incorporated into the civic community and subject to the jurisdiction of the polis. Impersonal principles of law and citizenship were taking precedence over the personal rule of kings or lords. The new civic relationship between aristocracy and peasants, together with other labouring citizens, meant that the Athenians had moved decisively away from the old division between rulers and producers. The state, in the form of the polis, was becoming not a primary means of appropriation from direct producers but, on the contrary, a means of protecting citizen producers from appropriating classes.
The polis also created a new arena for aristocratic rivalries. Solon’s reforms certainly did not end the influence of noble families, nor did they diminish the ferocity of intra-class rivalry. Athens would long continue to be plagued by aristocratic infighting, even to the point of virtual civil war, sometimes with help from Sparta for one or another of the contenders. But it was becoming harder for landlords to contend for power just among themselves. They now had to conduct their competition within the community of citizens, and this meant that they could advance their positions by gaining support from the common people, the demos. The paradoxical effect was that the civic community and the political principle were further strengthened by aristocratic rivalry. Although there has been much dispute about the ‘tyrants’ who followed Solon, who they were and what they represented, the most likely explanation is that they were a product of just such competition among Athenian aristocrats;5 and the general tendency of their regime was, again, to strengthen the polis against traditional principles – for instance, building on what might be called ‘national’ as against local loyalties, by such means as a national coinage, festivals and cults, including the cult of the goddess Athena, patron of the polis.
After the expulsion of the last tyrant by Sparta, there followed, in 510–508 BC, a period of particularly violent struggle, in which the principal contenders were Isagoras and Cleisthenes, both representing noble families. When Cleisthenes prevailed, at least temporarily, he instituted reforms that would later be regarded as the true foundation of democracy. In a sense, he was simply following the logic established by Solon and the tyrants. His reforms, in 508(?) BC, further weakened the traditional authority of the aristocracy, their power over their own neighbourhoods and over smaller farmers in their area. Like his predecessors, he accomplished this by elevating the polis and the whole community of citizens over old forms of authority and old loyalties, submitting local and regional power to the all-embracing authority of the polis.
But what was most distinctive about this moment in the history of Athens was that the demos had become a truly central factor in the political struggle. By now, the people were a conscious and vocal political force. Cleisthenes did not create this force, but he had the strategic sense to mobilize it in his favour. Whether he was himself a true democrat or simply another scion of a noble clan seeking to enhance the position of his own aristocratic family, his appeal to the demos was direct and unambiguous. Herodotus writes that, when Cleisthenes found himself weaker than Isagoras, he made the demos his hetairoi – a word difficult to translate but suggesting comrades or partners. It also suggests the associations, friendship groups or clubs, the hetaireiai, which formed the power base of the aristocrat in Athens.6 The demos, in other words, had replaced friends and kin of aristocrats as the source of political power. When Cleisthenes’s enemy, Isagoras, drove him out, with the help of Sparta under its leader, Cleomenes, the demos rose in revolt, erupting into the political arena in an unprecedented way, as a conscious political force acting in its own right and in defence of its own interests.
Whatever his intentions, the result of Cleisthenes’s reforms was the establishment of an institutional framework that was to govern Athenian democracy from then on, with only a few modifications. He changed the whole organization of the polis by removing the political functions of the four tribes, dominated by the aristocracy, which had been the traditional basis of political organization – for instance, in the conduct of elections – and replaced them with ten new tribes based on complex and artificial geographic criteria. More significantly, he subdivided the tribes into demes, generally (but perhaps not always) based on existing villages, and made them the foundation of the democracy, its fundamental constituent unit and the locale of citizenship. The new divisions cut across tribal and class ties and elevated locality over kinship, establishing and strengthening new bonds, new loyalties specific to the polis, the community of citizens.
Cleisthenes also effected other major reforms, introducing measures designed to create some kind of counterbalance to institutions still dominated by the aristocracy, such as the Areopagus, which continued to have a monopoly of jurisdiction in crimes against the state and in controlling magistrates. In particular, he gave the Assembly a new legislative role. But it was the institution of the demes perhaps more than any other institutional reform that vested power in the demos. It was in the deme that the peasant-citizen was truly born. Democratic politics began in the deme, where ordinary citizens dealt with the immediate and local matters that most directly affected their daily lives, and the democratic polis at the centre was constructed on this foundation. It was here that the traditional barrier between producing peasant village and appropriating central state was most completely broken down; and the new relation between producing classes and the state extended to other labouring citizens too.
Nothing symbolizes more neatly the effect of Cleisthenes’s reforms than the fact that Athenian citizens were thereafter to be identified