The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. John Bagnell Bury
to leave Sparta. He went forth to seek his fortune in lands beyond the sea; having attempted to plant a settlement in Libya, he led an expedition of adventure to the west; he took part in a war of Croton with Sybaris, and then fared to Sicily, with the design of founding a new city in the south-west country, yet he did not bring his purpose to pass, for he fell in a battle against the Carthaginians and their Elymian allies. It must also be told that after the birth of Dorieus his mother brought Anaxandridas two other sons, Leonidas and
After the expulsion of the tyrant, the Athenians had to deal with the political problems, whose solution, fifty years before, had been postponed by the tyranny. The main problem was to modify the constitution of Solon in such a way as to render it practicable. The old evils which had hindered the realisation of Solon’s democracy reared their heads again as soon as Hippias had been driven out and the Spartans had departed. The strife of factions, led by noble and influential families, broke out; and the Coast and Plain seem to have risen again in the parties of the Alcmaeonid Cleisthenes and his rival Isagoras. As Cleisthenes had been the most active promoter of the revolution, Isagoras was naturally supported by the secret adherents of the tyrant’s house. The struggle at first turned in favour of Isagoras, who was elected to the chief magistracy; but it was only for a moment. Cleisthenes won the upper hand by enlisting on his side superior numbers. He rallied to his cause a host of poor men who were outside the pale of citizenship, by promising to make them citizens. Thus the victory of Cleisthenes—and the victory of Cleisthenes was the victory of reform—was won by the threat of physical force; and in the year of his rival’s archonship he introduced new democratic measures of law. Isagoras was so far outnumbered that he had no recourse but appeal to Sparta. At his instance the Lacedaemonians, who looked with disfavour on democracy, demanded that the Alcmaeonids, as a clan under a curse, should be expelled from Attica; and Cleisthenes, without attempting resistance, left the country. But this was not enough. King Cleomenes entered Attica for the second time; he expelled 700 families pointed out by Isagoras, and attempted to dissolve the new constitution and to set up an oligarchy. But the whole people rose in arms; Cleomenes, who had only a small band of soldiers with him, was blockaded with Isagoras in the Acropolis, and was forced to the capitulate on the third day “in spite of his Spartan spirit.” Cleisthenes could now return with all the other exiles and complete his work. The event was a check for Lacedaemon. It was the first, but it was not the last, time that Athenian oligarchs sought Spartan intervention and Spartan men-at-arms held the hill of Athena.
SECT. 6. REFORM OF CLEISTHENES
Solon created the institutions, and constructed the machinery, of the Athenian democracy. We have seen why this machinery would not work. The fatal obstacle to its success was the political strength of the clans; and Solon, by retaining the old Ionic tribes, had therewith retained the clan organisation as a base of his constitution. In order therefore to make democracy a reality, it was indispensable to deprive the clans of political significance and substitute a new organisation. Another grave evil during the past century had been the growth of local parties; Attica had been split up into political sections. The memorable achievement of Cleisthenes was the invention of a totally new organisation, a truly brilliant and, as the event proved, practical scheme, which did away with the Ionic tribes, abolished the political influence of the phratries and clans, and superseded the system of the Naucraries; thus removing the danger of the undue preponderance of social influence or local parties, and securing to the whole body of citizens a decisive and permanent part in the conduct of public affairs.
Taking the map of Attica as he found it, consisting of between one and two hundred demes or small districts, Cleisthenes distinguished three regions: the region of the city, the region of the coast, and the inland. In each of these regions he divided the demes into ten groups called trittyes, so that there were thirty such trittyes in all, and each trittys was named after the chief deme which was included in it. Out of the thirty trittyes he then formed ten groups of three, in such a way that no group contained two trittyes from the same region. Each of these groups constituted a tribe, and the citizens of all the demes contained in its three trittyes were fellow-tribesmen. Thus Kydathenaion, a trittys of the city region, was combined with Paeania, a trittys of the inland, and Myrrhinus, a trittys of the coast, to form the tribe of Pandionis. The ten new tribes thus obtained were called after eponymous heroes chosen by the Delphic priestess. The heroes had their priests and sanctuaries, and their statues stood in front of the senate-house in the Agora.
Both the tribes and the demes were corporations with officers, assemblies, and corporate property. The demarch or president of the deme kept the burgess list of the place, in which was solemnly entered the name of each citizen when he reached the age of seventeen. The organisation of the army depended on the tribes, each of which contributed a regiment of hoplites and a squadron of horse. The trittys had no independent constitution of this kind, no corporate existence, and consequently it appears little in official documents. But it was the scarce visible pivot on which the system revolved, the link between the demes and the tribes. By its means a number of groups of people in various parts of Attica, without community of local interest, were brought together at Athens, and had to act in common. The old parties of Plain, Hill, and Coast were thus done away with; there was no longer a means of local political action. Thus an organisation created for a purely political purpose was substituted for an organisation which was originally social and had been adapted to political needs. The ten new tribes, based on artificial geography, took the place of the four old tribes, based on birth. The incorporate trittys, which had no independent existence, but merely represented the relation between the tribe and the deme, took the place of the independent and active phratry. And the deme, a local unit, replaced the social unit of the clan. This scheme of Cleisthenes, with the artificial trittys and the artificially formed tribe, might seem almost too artificial to last. The secret of its permanence lay in the fact that the demes, the units on which it was built up, were natural divisions, which he did not attempt to reduce to a round number.
It must have taken some time to bring this reform into full working order. The first list of demesmen on the new system decided the deme of all their descendants. A man might change his home and reside in another deme, but he still remained a member of the deme to which he originally belonged. Henceforward in official documents men were distinguished by their demes instead of, as heretofore, by their fathers’ names. All Attica was included in this system except Eleutherae and Oropus on the frontier, which were treated as subject districts and belonged to no tribe.
The political purpose and significance of this reorganisation, which entitles its author to be called the second founder of democracy, lay in its connexion with a reformed Council. As the existing Council of Four Hundred had been based on the four tribes, Cleisthenes devised a Council of Five Hundred based on his ten new tribes. Each tribe contributed fifty members, of which each deme returned a fixed number, according to its size. They were probably appointed by lot from a number of candidates chosen by each deme; but the preliminary election was afterwards abolished, and and forty years later they were appointed entirely by lot. All those on whom the lot fell were proved, as to the integrity of their private and public life, by the outgoing Council, which had the right of rejecting the unfit. They took an oath when they entered upon office that they would “advise what is best for the city”; and they were responsible for their acts, when they laid it down.
This Council, in which every part of Attica was represented, was the supreme administrative authority in the state. “In conjunction with the various magistrates it managed most of the public affairs.” An effective control was exerted on the archons and other magistrates, who were obliged to present reports to the Council and receive the Council’s orders. All the finances of the state were practically in its hands, and ten new finance officers called apodektai (one from each tribe) acted under its direction. It seems, moreover, from the very first to have been invested with judicial powers in matters concerning the public finance, and with the right of fining officials. Further, the Council acted as a ministry of public works, and even as a ministry of war. It may also be regarded as the ministry of foreign affairs, for it conducted negotiations with foreign states, and received their envoys. It had no powers of declaring war or concluding a treaty; these powers resided solely in the sovereign Assembly. But the Council was not only an administrative body, it was a deliberative assembly, and had the initiation in all legislation. No