The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. John Bagnell Bury
come before the Ecclesia unless it had already been proposed and considered in the Council. Every law passed in the Ecclesia was first sent down from the Council in the form of a probuleuma, and, on receiving a majority of votes in the Ecclesia, became a psephisma. Again, the Council had some general as well as some special judicial functions. It formed a court before which impeachments could be brought, as well as before the Assembly, and in these cases it could either pass sentence itself or hand them over to another court.
It is obvious that the administrative duties could not be conveniently conducted by a body of five hundred constantly sitting. Accordingly the year of 360 days was divided into ten parts, and the councillors of each tribe took it in turn to act as a committee for carrying on public business during a tenth of the year. In this capacity, as members of the acting committee of fifty, the councillors were called Prytaneis or presidents, the tribe to which they belonged was said to be the presiding, and the divisions of this artificial year were called prytanies. It was incumbent on the chairman, along with one trittys, of the committee, to live permanently during his prytany in the Tholos, a round building, where the presidents met and dined at the public expense. The Tholos or Skias was on the south side of the Agora, close to the Council-hall. The old prytaneion still remained in use as the office of the archon and the hearth of the city.
Cleisthenes invented an ingenious arrangement for bringing his official year into general harmony with the civil year, so that the beginning of the one should not diverge too far from the beginning of the other. The civil year was supposed to begin as nearly as possible to the first new moon after the summer solstice; and the difference between the lunar twelvemonth and the solar revolution was provided for by a cycle of eight years, in the first, third, and sixth of which additional months were intercalated. The ordinary year consisted of 354, the intercalated of 384 days. Cleisthenes, taking 360 as the number of days in his official year, was also obliged to intercalate, but not so often. He adopted a cycle of five years, and once in each cycle an intercalary month of 30 days was introduced. But this month was not always inserted in the same year of the cycle. It was here that Cleisthenes brought his quinquennial into line with the octennial system. The extraordinary official month was intercalated in the first year of the official cycle that coincided with an intercalary year of the civil cycle. The new institution of Cleisthenes began to work in 503-2 BC—the first year of an octennial cycle. The first Cleisthenic year began on the 1st of Hecatombaeon, the first month of the civil calendar; it would not begin on that day again till forty years hence.
In opening the citizenship to a large number of people who had hitherto been excluded, Cleisthenes was only progressing along the path of Solon. He seems to have retained the Solonian restrictions on eligibility for the higher offices of state. It is just possible that he may have set the knights, in this respect, on a level with the Pentacosiomedimni; but the two lower classes were still excluded from the archonship; the third class remained ineligible for another half-century. But this conservatism of Cleisthenes might be easily misjudged. We must remember that since the days of Solon time itself had been doing the work of a democratic reformer. The money value of five hundred medimni was a much lower rating at the end than it had been at the beginning of the sixth century. Trade had increased and people had grown richer.
The new tribes of Cleisthenes led to a change in the military organisation. Each of the ten tribes was required to supply a regiment of hoplites and a squadron of horsemen; and the hoplites were commanded by ten generals whom the people elected from each tribe. The office of general was destined hereafter to become the most important in the state; but at first he was merely the commander of the tribal regiment.
The Athenian Council instituted by Cleisthenes shows that Greek statesmen understood the principle of representative government That Council is an excellent example of representation with a careful distribution of seats according to the size of the electorates; and it was practically the governing body of the state. But though Greek statesmen understood the principle, they always hesitated to entrust to a representative assembly sovereign powers of legislation The reason mainly lay in the fact that, owing to the small size of the city-state, an Assembly which every citizen who chose could attend was a practicable institution; and the fundamental principle, that supreme legislative power is exercised by the people itself, could be literally applied. But while we remember that the Council could not legislate, although its co-operation was indispensable to the making of laws, we may say that its function will be misunderstood if it be either conceived as a sort of Second Chamber or compared to a body like the Roman Senate. It was a popular representative assembly, and from it were taken (though on a totally different principle) committees which performed in part the administrative functions of our “Government”. It had a decisive influence on legislation; and here the influence of the Council on the Ecclesia must be rather compared to the influence of the Government on our House of Commons. But the ratification given by the Assembly to the proposals sent down by the Council was often as purely formal as the ratification by the Crown of bills passed in Parliament.
SECT. 7. FIRST VICTORIES OF THE DEMOCRACY
The Athenian republic had now become a democracy in the fullest sense, and the new government was hardly established before it was called upon to prove its capacity. King Cleomenes, who was the greatest man in Greece at the time, could not rest without attempting to avenge the humiliation which he had recently endured at the hands of the Athenian people. The man who had pulled down one tyrant now proposed to set up another. Isagoras, who had hitherto aimed at establishing an oligarchy, now, it would seem, came forward as an aspirant to the tyrannis. Cleomenes arranged with the Boeotians and the Chalcidians a joint attack upon Attica. While the Lacedaemonians and their allies invaded from the south, the Boeotians were to come down from Mount Cithaeron, and the men of Chalcis were to cross the Euripus; the land was to be assailed on three sides at the same moment.
The Peloponnesian host under the two kings, Cleomenes and Demaratus, passed the isthmus and occupied Eleusis; and the Athenians marched to the Eleusinian plain. But the peril on this side passed away without a blow. The Corinthians, on second thoughts, disapproved of the expedition, as unjust, and returned to Corinth. At this time Aegina was the most formidable commercial rival of Corinth, and it therefore suited Corinthian interests to encourage the rising power of Aegina’s enemy. This action of the Corinthians disconcerted the whole army, and the situation was aggravated by the discord between the Spartan leaders, Cleomenes and Demaratus. In the end the army broke up, and there was nothing left for Cleomenes but to return home. His attempt to thrust a tyranny had been as unsuccessful as his previous attempt to thrust an oligarchy upon Athens. For the second time the Athenian democracy had been saved from Spartan coercion. A hundred years hence, indeed, that coercion was to befall her; Cleomenes is the forerunner of Lysander, who will amply avenge him.
The Theban leaders of Boeotia had readily concurred in the Spartan plan, for they had a recent cause of offence against Athens. The town of Plataea, on the Boeotian slope of Mount Cithaeron, was determined to retain her independence and hold aloof from the Boeotian league, which was under the supremacy of Thebes. The Plataeans applied in the first instance to Sparta; but as Sparta was unwilling to interfere, they sought and obtained the help of Athens. This was the beginning of a long friendship between Athens and Plataea, based on mutual interest. Plataea depended on the support of Athens to maintain her independence in Boeotia; while it suited Athens to have a small friendly power on the other side of Cithaeron—a sort of watch-tower against Thebes. The Athenians went to the protection of Plataea, but the threatened conflict was averted by the intervention of Corinth. The Corinthian arbitration ruled that Boeotian cities which did not wish to join the league must not be coerced. But, as they were departing, the Athenians were treacherously attacked by the Thebans, and, winning a victory, they fixed the river Asopus as the southern boundary of the territory of Thebes. The Athenians acquired, by this expedition, a post in Boeotia itself—the town of Hysiae, on the northern slope of Cithaeron.
On the approach of the Peloponnesian army, the Boeotians had seized Hysiae, and crossing the pass of Cithaeron above it had taken Oenoe on the upper Attic slopes. When Cleomenes and the Peloponnesians retreated, the Athenian army marched northward to check the knights of Chalcis who were ravaging the northern demes of Attica. The Boeotian forces then withdrew into their own land and moved northwards too, in order to join the Chalcidians.